tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19990894651991502172024-03-12T23:21:14.724-05:00High ConceptsThe arts, entertainment, cultureDaniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.comBlogger118125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-82978155897663762372012-03-19T20:06:00.001-05:002012-03-19T20:07:21.446-05:00"They Moved My Blog Without Telling Me!"<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjllsdv40FXrea1DZ6VmVJCrsA200QNm5P9H2J0Z1_6PThf2yasouJASC1v4-T85DpUmY8Yb534ofb2EERPh8lEHrqMyB2TMdeUStT6WKS6fWCnhb6u77hbF5tuGoGdPM502k4wVIpnHBc/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjllsdv40FXrea1DZ6VmVJCrsA200QNm5P9H2J0Z1_6PThf2yasouJASC1v4-T85DpUmY8Yb534ofb2EERPh8lEHrqMyB2TMdeUStT6WKS6fWCnhb6u77hbF5tuGoGdPM502k4wVIpnHBc/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">For those of you devoted souls who have been coming to <i>High Concepts</i> in the last few weeks ravenous for some fresh material, I have some good news and some bad news.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The bad news is, I have decided to close the book on <i>High Concepts</i>, which I have enjoyed writing in this space since October 2010. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">However, the good news is, you can find me blogging on the arts, entertainment and media over at <a href="http://catholicexchange.com/category/blogs/crafting-culture/">my new virtual digs on Catholic Exchange</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">And for those of you interested in children’s middle grade literature, you can follow <a href="http://kingdomofpatria.com/blog/?author=6">my blog at the Kingdom of Patria website</a>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Thank you <i>High Concepts</i> readers! I look forward to talking with you over at my other blogs soon.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Daniel McInerny<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-69745791405223611672012-02-21T16:51:00.000-06:002012-02-21T16:51:20.303-06:00On Popular Fictions, Or How I Learned to Relax and Enjoy Downton Abbey<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpVIxU8vFj-5JiGj8Ay7S7tLocYw7sF8x5nwJOt_ZopW8su7eE4-FGNAJR2Yr008P33V6fIQnfbfTqq8GxqZPLOOw9zB9H5JYziicGs_k4lEvz6mO9DK1WB1Zu2fNsYj7vY0Znuqpkm9c/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjpVIxU8vFj-5JiGj8Ay7S7tLocYw7sF8x5nwJOt_ZopW8su7eE4-FGNAJR2Yr008P33V6fIQnfbfTqq8GxqZPLOOw9zB9H5JYziicGs_k4lEvz6mO9DK1WB1Zu2fNsYj7vY0Znuqpkm9c/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">A friend of mine wrote on Facebook about <i><a href="http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/masterpiece/downtonabbey/">Downton Abbey</a></i>: “take away the English accents, the bucolic setting, the period costumes, and the antiquated moral code, and you’re left with <i>Days of Our Lives</i>.</span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">So true, I thought at first. <i>Downton Abbey</i> often suffers from severe melodramatic fits. </span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Such as: the illicit lover who ends up dying <i>in flagrante delicto</i>...the spine-injured war-hero who suddenly and miraculously walks again...the lovers kept apart by social class...the dying fiancée who importunes her betrothed to marry the woman she knows he really loves...the odious newspaper magnate who coerces a young woman into marriage on pains of exposing her awful secret... </span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Pretty fruity stuff, as Bertie Wooster would say. But how different, really, from plot elements that might be found in Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Trollope, or <i>The Great Gatsby</i>?</span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Speaking of Dickens and Wilkie Collins. T.S. Eliot (that’s <i>Thomas Stearns</i> Eliot, high-priest of high culture) once wrote an essay called “Wilkie Collins and Dickens.” In this essay about two pre-eminent practitioners of the Victorian potboiler Eliot wrote:</span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">You cannot define Drama and Melodrama so that they shall be reciprocally exclusive; great drama has something melodramatic in it, and the best melodrama partakes of the greatness of drama….It is possible that the artist can be too conscious of his “art.”…We cannot afford to forget that the first—and not one of the least difficult—requirements of either prose or verse is that it should be interesting.</span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px; min-height: 17.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">Eliot’s point is that what we enjoy in the best melodramas are qualities inherent to great storytelling itself. </span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">To want one’s nerves rattled, to want one’s comedy laugh-out-loud, to want one’s love stories full of pain and anguish but still, by series end, to culminate in a marriage—these are the natural wants of the human being seeking a story, not the low, vulgar tastes of the great soap-opera watching unwashed who don’t know any better.</span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">G.K. Chesterton echoes the theme in his <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Charles-Dickens-Chestertons-Biographies-Chesterton/dp/1842329863">magnificent book on Dickens</a> (whose <a href="http://www.dickens2012.org/">200th birthday</a>, by the way, we celebrate this month). Writing on Dickens’s immense popularity in the mid 19th century, Chesterton first feels a need to address the charge that Dickens’s work is admirable <i>even though he was widely admired</i>. As if being a hugely popular novelist is an automatic strike (or two) against a writer’s literary merit. But for this kind of pretentious bushwah Chesterton holds no truck.</span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">[Dickens’s] power...lay in the fact that he expressed with an energy and brilliancy quite uncommon the things close to the common mind. </span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">But isn’t Chesterton admitting here that Dickens’s work is “common” in the sense of vulgar, addressed to “the mind of the mere mob”? Not at all:</span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">[The] common mind means the mind of all the artists and heroes; or else it would not be common. Plato had the common mind; Dante had the common mind; or that mind was not common. Commonness means the quality common to the saint and the sinner, to the philosopher and the fool; and it was this that Dickens grasped and developed. In everybody there is a certain thing that loves babies, that fears death, that likes sunlight: that thing enjoys Dickens. And everybody does not mean uneducated crowds; everybody means everybody...” </span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"> </span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">There is a great democratic impulse in Dickens’s devotion to the common mind. As Chesterton puts it, “Dickens never talked down to the people. He talked up to the people.” It is not so much that Dickens wrote what people wanted, but that “Dickens wanted what the people wanted.” And what he wanted were the simple, but not simplistic, truths that reveal our common humanity. </span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">I heard Julian Fellowes, the screenwriter of <i>Downton Abbey</i> (<a href="http://www.indcatholicnews.com/news.php?viewStory=19523">and a Catholic</a>), remark in one of the “extras” that one of the things that most interests him in the story is the way in which it reveals people both “upstairs” and “downstairs” as equals. High birth and money may separate us accidentally, <i>Downton Abbey</i> urges us to see, but life’s dramas will always expose these superficial differences and reveal the common truth that we are all human beings before we are anything else. </span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 17.0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></span></div><div style="font: 14.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="letter-spacing: 0px;"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-size: large;">And this is what <i>Downton Abbey</i> does at its best: reveal truths common to the saint and the sinner, the philosopher and the fool. Sure, it sometimes sacrifices character and plot development to the quick emotional payoff. But often enough it tells a compelling melodramatic story that Dickens himself might well have enjoyed.</span></span></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-75010484139849260382012-02-15T19:34:00.001-06:002012-02-15T19:36:57.020-06:00Can This Be the Catholic Moment in the Arts?<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi28mRKpEdIZzZvGT6YwhSLJUEpNpw6J8JXTqgI6qn3Zl9cQIcMHFLLpmtt889jaBjpi4ZuQdhjAUxLlvTN9hjufkl-Fn74FGhj9O8uJK2ETLihj2h_GHtO5XR8n790oqNnhJlZOFk6hc0/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi28mRKpEdIZzZvGT6YwhSLJUEpNpw6J8JXTqgI6qn3Zl9cQIcMHFLLpmtt889jaBjpi4ZuQdhjAUxLlvTN9hjufkl-Fn74FGhj9O8uJK2ETLihj2h_GHtO5XR8n790oqNnhJlZOFk6hc0/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">“Irish poets, learn your trade.”</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">So W.B. Yeats admonished his fellow Irish poets in his celebrated poem, “Under Ben Bulben.” With a slight amendment, it’s an admonition that could well apply to our Catholic artists. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">The other day Emily Stimpson, a blogger over at CatholicVote.org, wrote an inspired piece called <a href="http://www.catholicvote.org/discuss/index.php?p=26462">“Telling the Catholic Story.”</a> In it she laments, after noting certain admirable exceptions, the current state of Catholic art, in particular our storytelling in the media of film, television and literature. Her lament pointed up the question: why aren’t Catholics today known for creating artistic masterpieces, or at least compelling works of art? Stimpson herself has difficulties zeroing in on the reason:</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">So again, why? Why can’t we match in quality and skill the media being made by our secular counterparts?</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">I’ve put that question to a lot of smart people over the last couple weeks and the answers they gave were plentiful: a dearth of excellent training programs at faithful Catholic schools, a reluctance and/or inability to invest substantially in high quality media, poor understanding of the medium of media itself, a distrust of Hollywood and the tools of social media, and the misguided belief that what we have to say is so compelling that we don’t need to worry about how we say it.</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">Those are all good answers. They’re true answers. But I don’t find them entirely satisfying. They explain why the media we’re making now is not up to snuff, but they don’t explain how the Church of the Sistine Chapel and Mozart’s Requiem became the Church of Therese and There Be Dragons.</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 36.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">Catholics once financed and made the greatest works of art the world has ever known. We used the primary mediums of the day—painting, sculpture, literature, and music—to express the beauty and glory of God, the truth about the human person, and the pathos of the human condition. We understood the power of beauty and the power of story, and for centuries, creating art that reflected that understanding came as naturally to Catholic artists as breathing.</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">Stimpson is right that the various answers she received to her question were all good and true. The diagnosis must certainly be a complex one. Catholic education, the American reception to Vatican II, scorn of Hollywood and the entertainment industry generally, lack of money--all of these are contributing factors to the current Catholic malaise in the arts. I would add that the political culture wars of the last forty years, as crucially important as those have been, have tempted Catholics to neglect the power of art to shape culture. They have led to the distrust of the entertainment industry that Stimpson mentions in her piece. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">But there is one other reason for the malaise in Catholic art that I would like to identify, one that I think lies even closer to the nub of the problem: </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"><i>The absence of a devotion to craft</i>.</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">I choose the word “devotion” here carefully. Devotion indicates love, passion, total commitment. For the Catholic artist, his or her work must be inspired, first and foremost, by devotion to God. But this is not enough to make a beautiful and powerful work of art. The devotion to God must “spill over” into a devotion to craft. And here I choose the word “craft” carefully. For anyone who writes a novel or poem or screenplay will admit to “loving” what he is doing. But there is far more to a craft than this. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">To be devoted to a craft means to submit oneself to a discipline existing outside one’s thoughts and feelings. And such disciplines do not arise out of nowhere. They come into being and flourish within traditions of thought and practice, traditions that often stretch centuries into the past.</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">In recent decades Catholic artists seem to have forgotten this sense of devotion to a craft tradition. But when one looks to past examples of great Catholic artists, such devotion is everywhere in evidence. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">Consider Dante. To be a poet, in Dante’s mind, was to submit oneself to the great minds and works of Greece, Rome, and Christian Europe. Thus The Divine Comedy reflects Dante’s passionate study of Aristotle, Virgil, and St. Thomas Aquinas.</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">Or consider, to take a somewhat more contemporary example, Flannery O’Connor. O'Connor did not shy away from serving her apprenticeship at the very mainstream secular, but artistically pre-eminent, Iowa Writer's Workshop. She knew that this was where she had to be in order to become excellent at her craft. And the result of her efforts was a strikingly counter-cultural and singular contribution to literature in the 20th century. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">What we learn from Dante, O’Connor, and other great Catholic artists is that devotion to craft means disciplining oneself to learning from the best minds that have worked in that craft tradition. Which means seeking out those mentors, and becoming part of those institutions, which embody that tradition in the present-day--not all of which (as we learn from O’Connor’s experience at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop) will be Catholic. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">Many Catholic individuals and institutions have recognized this truth. Barbara Nicolosi and her efforts in founding <a href="http://www.actoneprogram.com/2012/">Act One</a>, and <a href="http://www.jpcatholic.com/">John Paul the Great Catholic University</a> and its mission to educate students in the arts and new media, are just two examples that readily come to mind.</span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">But so many more devoted artists are needed. </span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; min-height: 14.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;"></span></div><div style="font: 12.0px 'American Typewriter'; margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px;"><span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">Catholic artists, learn your trade.</span><br />
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<span style="font-size: large; letter-spacing: 0px;">* The photograph at the top is of Flannery O'Connor's writing desk at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia</span></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com8tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-83645867836833388412012-01-28T20:28:00.000-06:002012-01-28T20:28:15.748-06:00Ralph McInerny, Sonnet 71<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie8nl0Hy66puDTE-jqsR_MjQ7VhycrNyRo8pMjHhTW-5b5cECzY236czYrtdMuN6zfVKoCMFsiEHoGocJHIKVwGLDFx8Vdo9uBfkEMRl5uvZjKWhjEd8kyzRsc37nsfIl3l01W6MKBgaw/s1600/16mcinerny_CA0-popup.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="214" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEie8nl0Hy66puDTE-jqsR_MjQ7VhycrNyRo8pMjHhTW-5b5cECzY236czYrtdMuN6zfVKoCMFsiEHoGocJHIKVwGLDFx8Vdo9uBfkEMRl5uvZjKWhjEd8kyzRsc37nsfIl3l01W6MKBgaw/s320/16mcinerny_CA0-popup.jpg" width="320" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">My father, <a href="http://www.thecatholicthing.org/columns/2010/ralph-mcinerny-1929-2010.html">Ralph McInerny</a>, died two years today, January 29, 2010. Below is his poem, Sonnet 71, from his collection, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.staugustine.net/shakespeareanvariations.html">Shakespearean Variations</a></i> (St. Augustine’s Press 2001), a series of poems in which he ingeniously takes the first line and end rhymes from each of Shakespeare’s 154 sonnets and from there composes a wholly new sonnet. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">No longer mourn for me when I am dead<o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Nor dirges play nor toll the dismal bell,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">For when in earth I’m laid at last to bed<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">My spirit will in a better country dwell,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Where then what is will be as if it’s not,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">And what is not will be again. ‘Tis so,<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">For there is that which cannot be forgot<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">But rises out of reach of tearful woe.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Why would the poet seek to catch in verse<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Our deeds if we were only drying clay<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">And did not in our lives by acts rehearse<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">A drama that resists mortal decay?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> Our going would elicit only moan<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> If we were wholly gone when we are gone.<o:p></o:p></span></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-25360888634118793122012-01-26T15:37:00.001-06:002012-01-26T15:38:23.558-06:00Trojan Tub Newsletter Ready to Set Sail...<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizEz-RepO5Ec4ZT_kb9z7C6aaD4vzuC04YIW4a5L3DofbgvRWZg-TQTHfnIkAGjUJ9FvZySDQhRTXeNlKvZ1HECj5ZPFO3rX9v_qo9aRqH1bstcpXlce6ULkvQawYUyfIH0CE40eyMl38/s1600/trojantub_logo_300dpi.png" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEizEz-RepO5Ec4ZT_kb9z7C6aaD4vzuC04YIW4a5L3DofbgvRWZg-TQTHfnIkAGjUJ9FvZySDQhRTXeNlKvZ1HECj5ZPFO3rX9v_qo9aRqH1bstcpXlce6ULkvQawYUyfIH0CE40eyMl38/s320/trojantub_logo_300dpi.png" width="312" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">If you’d like to follow events at my company, Trojan Tub Entertainment, then sign up for the new Trojan Tub electronic newsletter! <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The inaugural edition is ready to go. To get on the list, just send your name and email address to <b>info@kingdomofpatria.com</b>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">What’s Trojan Tub Entertainment? Click <a href="http://kingdomofpatria.com/contact.cfm">here</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">You can also follow Trojan Tub at the company <a href="https://www.facebook.com/trojantubentertainment">Facebook page</a>, and on <a href="https://twitter.com/#!/kingdomofpatria">Twitter</a>.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Thanks for coming aboard!</span></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-90430670906199225262012-01-24T19:47:00.001-06:002012-01-24T19:48:47.190-06:006 Insights from Pope Benedict on Authentic Communication<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAyAEFb2xZejtlocnyt15h-NlkE0APs0lSs5HXt2q1qasDU9m77CoLGJNDOrB6YBXhLbjO2skFIPtNt7W_5mGbG8SUy64DV33-N3utyUFloDj3YV99Ul5Gwk0y4HYxU4L_7BYRUGtybDc/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhAyAEFb2xZejtlocnyt15h-NlkE0APs0lSs5HXt2q1qasDU9m77CoLGJNDOrB6YBXhLbjO2skFIPtNt7W_5mGbG8SUy64DV33-N3utyUFloDj3YV99Ul5Gwk0y4HYxU4L_7BYRUGtybDc/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Today, the Feast of St. Francis de Sales, patron saint of writers and journalists, Pope Benedict XVI released, as is traditional, his <a href="http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/benedict_xvi/messages/communications/documents/hf_ben-xvi_mes_20120124_46th-world-communications-day_en.html">Message for the 46<sup>th</sup> Annual World Communications Day</a> (which actually takes place on May 20, 2012). These annual messages are an invaluable gift from the Holy Father, as he gives us a chance to learn from his great wisdom about how to make good use of the various means of social communication that so dominate modern culture. Last year’s message was on the theme of authenticity in social communications. This year, the Holy Father takes up the theme of the interplay of “silence and word.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Here are the key insights I gleaned from Pope Benedict’s remarks:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">1.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">True communication between human persons involves an interplay of word and silence</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">. When one of these is missing, communication breaks down.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">2.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">In the absence of silence, words rich in context cannot exist</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">. “In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth; we understand with greater clarity what it is we want to say and what we expect from others; and we choose how to express ourselves. By remaining silent we allow the other person to speak, to express him or herself; and we avoid being tied simply to our own words and ideas without them being adequately tested. In this way, space is created for mutual listening, and deeper human relationships become possible.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">3.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Silence is the more necessary amid the “surcharge of stimuli” from modern electronic media</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">. “Deeper reflection [in silence] helps us to discover the links between events that at first sight seem unconnected, to make evaluations, to analyze messages; this makes it possible to share thoughtful and relevant opinions, giving rise to an authentic body of shared knowledge. For this to happen, it is necessary to develop an appropriate environment, a kind of ‘eco-system’ that maintains a just equilibrium between silence, words, images and sounds.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">4.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The environment of social communications today is characterized by questioning, thus reflecting the restless hearts of human beings hungry for answers to the ultimate questions</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">. Quoting his own message from the year before, Pope Benedict stresses: “When people exchange information, they are already sharing themselves, their view of the world, their hopes, their ideals.” Amid all this questioning, silence is necessary in order to discern what questions are relevant and what their most appropriate answers might be. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">5.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Many types of websites, applications, and social networks can be amenable to authentic questioning and the silence that must accompany it</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">. How positive a view this is of the Internet’s potential! “In concise phrases, often no longer than a verse from the Bible, profound thoughts can be communicated, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">as long as those taking part in the conversation do not neglect to cultivate their own inner lives</i>” (emphasis added).<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">6.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The richest fruit of silence is the contemplative encounter with God, who often speaks to us in stillness, especially in the silent figure of Christ on the Cross</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">. The peace and friendship that we find in this encounter with Christ is the ultimate goal of all social communications. “Silent contemplation immerses us in the source of that Love who directs us towards our neighbours so that we may feel their suffering and offer them the light of Christ, his message of life and his saving gift of the fullness of love.”<o:p></o:p></span></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-72124083232523541252012-01-22T15:57:00.001-06:002012-01-22T16:10:06.255-06:00The Obama Policy's Reasons of Force<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiizCjsxWO9-Y9JUoFzux5b78bJS2JyiGP6zDag9CxUllqY_9FL1hm8Hl_yUssZCRbfvAsQb4rbuKRZvN7yxcoxXw5VnA9lLywrLgGV2yfCseGGn3znRFnp13u_yWK7HjbmZWZJQsNsClo/s1600/Unknown-1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiizCjsxWO9-Y9JUoFzux5b78bJS2JyiGP6zDag9CxUllqY_9FL1hm8Hl_yUssZCRbfvAsQb4rbuKRZvN7yxcoxXw5VnA9lLywrLgGV2yfCseGGn3znRFnp13u_yWK7HjbmZWZJQsNsClo/s1600/Unknown-1.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #262626; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Still riffing on themes from <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Iron Lady</i> and Pope John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Centesimus Annus</i>… And one of the themes I touched on last time, the inherent connection between freedom and truth, is very much in play in current mischief from the Obama administration.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #262626; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">On January 20 Health and Human Services Secretary Katheleen Sebelius (a Catholic, no less), announced that non-profit employers will have one year to comply with the Obama administration’s mandate that they provide, in their employee health-care plans, sterilization and contraceptives, including some abortion-inducing drugs. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #262626; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">About this outrage, the Archbishop and Cardinal-designate of New York, Timothy Dolan, commented:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="color: #262626; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Never before has the federal government forced individuals and organizations to go out into the marketplace and buy a product that violates their conscience. This shouldn’t happen in a land where free exercise of religion ranks first in the Bill of Rights….<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #262626; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">“In effect,” added Archbishop Dolan, “the president is saying we have a year to figure out how to violate our consciences.” (For His Excellency's full comment click <a href="http://www.usccb.org/media/video/?bcpid=911432717001&bckey=AQ~~,AAAAdgye3dk~,p0Zv3iru3vKntdSZldOI6IpJ_Ro3rVN6&bclid=987951266001&bctid=1404872889001">here</a>.)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #262626; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">This is a pure power play on the part of the Obama administration. As Archbishop Dolan says, it shows a blatant disregard for religious liberty, and certainly makes the cultural battle lines clear as on Monday pro-life defenders throughout the country prepare to recall, in both prayer and protest, the grim anniversary of Roe v. Wade. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">To use a pair of terms from another encyclical by Pope John Paul II, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Evangelium Vitae</i>, in the Obama administration’s attack upon the consciences of American citizens, it is replacing the “force of reason” with the “reasons of force.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #262626; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">For the Obama administration’s policy threatens to substantially weaken our polity’s sense of freedom’s intrinsic relationship to truth: on the one hand, the truth about freedom’s relationship to conscience; and on the other hand, the truth about human sexuality’s natural ordering to the goods of family life. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">If Obama is still in the White House a year from now, it will be reckoning time for Catholic non-profits—hospitals, schools, charities, etc. They will have to decide whether or not to take a stand against the Obama policy. They will have to decide whether they will fight for a freedom that respects the true dignity of human persons, or acquiesce to a bald-faced assertion of power by the federal government.</span> <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjjmDOBcHJqdin72Wc8ZDsk9EUdafGCC3-L4ZkqgeBmXOl3sIx4Fdow8g-VGDm0A33DPmtu5N3G_-z3io9K4gAgeQ7g1-hCRC7f7rvJVUsY-Zqm2are7VHOTY4-BLlUkrUO4kGU2QzHTU/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjjjmDOBcHJqdin72Wc8ZDsk9EUdafGCC3-L4ZkqgeBmXOl3sIx4Fdow8g-VGDm0A33DPmtu5N3G_-z3io9K4gAgeQ7g1-hCRC7f7rvJVUsY-Zqm2are7VHOTY4-BLlUkrUO4kGU2QzHTU/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
</span>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-4433884656155390352012-01-20T16:25:00.000-06:002012-01-20T16:25:40.945-06:00GarageBand for Philosophy<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivQ9NfyaX3zH4csLCR6ohx59T6kbYyoHy_g55wDsXCIdpEcxdEFF8piArLFptD_Z-t5fgoXip3r0lJkT77O1_ja7UFys8t3DiZ0srp0hMzfRPPHNS6TmxqNF4VDkdBjmaujPR8gQA80q0/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEivQ9NfyaX3zH4csLCR6ohx59T6kbYyoHy_g55wDsXCIdpEcxdEFF8piArLFptD_Z-t5fgoXip3r0lJkT77O1_ja7UFys8t3DiZ0srp0hMzfRPPHNS6TmxqNF4VDkdBjmaujPR8gQA80q0/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The <a href="http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2012/01/engage-apple-books-ipad/">introduction by Apple yesterday</a> of iBooks 2 and its companion (and free) application, iBooks Author, will almost surely accelerate the pace at which education at all levels follows the way of music, book publishing, and electronic technology generally. One of the chief purposes of these two applications is to revolutionize the educational textbook industry, inviting more and more authors to create electronic textbooks specifically designed for the engaging functionality of the iPad. The greater presence of the iPad in classrooms, or in the hands of individuals exploring some avenue of knowledge, seems inevitable.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I think about this announcement in juxtaposition with <a href="http://www.bywayofbeauty.com/">this post</a> by Matthew over at <i>By</i><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> Way of Beauty</i>, which worries (for good reason) that our culture is drowning in “information” while losing its sense of “wisdom.” In making his point Matthew draws upon the thought of Marshall McLuhan, especially his adage that “the medium is the message”:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">McLuhan's idea was this: all media—whether it has content (Internet, books, movies, etc.) or not (cars, light bulbs, etc.)—“amplifies or accelerates existing processes” and can introduce a "change of scale or pace or shape or pattern into human association, affairs, and action", resulting in “psychic, and social consequences.” This, not the content of the medium, is the real "meaning or message.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="mso-layout-grid-align: none; mso-pagination: none; text-autospace: none;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">For example, the changes in the <i>way we exist</i> brought about by the internet are the real “message” of a medium, not its actual content (what we <i>read</i> through the medium—</span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">say, Wikipedia entries, news articles, etc.).</span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">If McLuhan is right, then innovations such as iBooks2 and iBooks Author will have profound “psychic and social consequences.” They will help advance an age (already well underway) in which education (like music and publishing) becomes more diffuse, more heterogeneous, more disconnected, more ubiquitous, more democratized, more image-based in its rhetorical presentation, more focused on material explanation. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">But the “medium” of the new educational technology is not the only challenge the future holds. As content proliferates, the challenge of distinguishing wisdom from information will become all the greater as well. The digital sea is only going to get deeper and more tumultuous, even as the question of how to navigate it remains.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Still, I believe there is an educational opportunity here with the new Apple apps, an opportunity for individuals and enclaves devoted to the tradition of the liberal arts to create new forums of teaching and learning, and thus pass by the desiccated institutions which comprise so much of our educational system here in the United States, at every level, both public and private.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter'; font-size: 19px;"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Just think of it as GarageBand for philosophy. </span></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-95898507442266742012-01-18T19:06:00.001-06:002012-01-18T19:07:13.087-06:00The Iron Lady and the Pope, Part 2<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8TF6x5n8fAf3ES_Ra1_uxeOpwdCUqU4SSr4ShTzDUynj7mx3GoYagTJurtPlIsubWYbf82di9ZBMs5Xipbh2l3bPSUn6yYkogfMHDzBfYOCu76prQIyvFmtN1ZVsbCO8EzIbsxWV2LuY/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi8TF6x5n8fAf3ES_Ra1_uxeOpwdCUqU4SSr4ShTzDUynj7mx3GoYagTJurtPlIsubWYbf82di9ZBMs5Xipbh2l3bPSUn6yYkogfMHDzBfYOCu76prQIyvFmtN1ZVsbCO8EzIbsxWV2LuY/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Over at <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Standpoint</i> there is <a href="http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/4278">a perceptive review</a> of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Iron Lady</i> by Peter Whittle. The Thatcher years in England, Whittle observes, “</span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">allowed one a feeling of heady relief; one could believe for the first time that the national game was not necessarily up, that decline wasn't the only option open to us, that we should celebrate this, and the fact that there was somebody who instinctively thought and felt the same as us residing in Downing Street.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Here in the United States, in the run-up to the 2012 presidential election, many of us would love a shot of such “heady relief.” The Obama presidency has produced in a large segment of the citizenry the sense that, on the present course, decline is the only option open to us. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Iron Lady</i>’s portrayal of the life and career of Margaret Thatcher invites the thought that it is a conservative, perhaps even libertarian, understanding of individual liberties and personal responsibility—the very opposite of the soft socialism of Western democratic liberalism—that is most needed to help us out of the current <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">malaise</i> (this, no doubt in spite of the filmmakers’ own political propensities—which is a credit to their art). <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I want to pursue this question by bringing Pope John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus_en.html">Centesimus Annus</a></i>, into conversation with the views both of Thatcherite conservatism and its liberal antagonists. My results will take the form of an outline of principles and ideas—a set of notes. Whether they are useful to more than just myself I invite you to let me know. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Caveat</span></i><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">: this is not a review essay of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Centesimus Annus</i>. For something more along those lines, see <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">a.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">George Weigel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Witness-Hope-Biography-Pope-John/dp/006018793X">Witness to Hope</a></i>, pp. 612ff.; <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">b.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> <a href="http://www.blogger.com/goog_1035877543"> </a></span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><a href="http://www.firstthings.com/onthesquare/2011/06/the-enduring-importance-of-centesimus-annus">this revisiting of the encyclical</a> by Weigel last summer in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">First Things</i>;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .75in; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">c.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">and <a href="http://distributistreview.com/mag/2010/09/centesimus-annus-part-one/">this series of articles</a> by Thomas Storck over at <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Distributist Review</i>.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">1.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">There is an essential bond between freedom and truth</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">CA</i> no. 4): freedom that refuses to be bound to truth falls </span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">into arbitrariness and ends up submitting itself to the vilest of passions, to the point of self-destruction. Political freedom, economic freedom, must be grounded, above all, in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the truth about the human person</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">2.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Socialism mistakes the truth about the human person; its error is fundamentally “anthropological.”</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> With socialism </span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">the individual person is regarded “simply as an element, a molecule within the social organism, so that the good of the individual is completely subordinated to the functioning of the socio-economic mechanism. Socialism likewise maintains that the good of the individual can be realized without reference to his free choice, to the unique and exclusive responsibility which he exercises in the face of good or evil” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">CA</i> no. 13).<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">3.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">There is an inherent dignity to the worker and to work.</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> As Leo XIII affirmed, work is “personal,” </span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">inasmuch as the energy expended is bound up with the personality and is the exclusive property of him who acts, and, furthermore, was given to him for his advantage” (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">CA</i> no. 6).</span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> </span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; mso-list: l1 level1 lfo2; text-indent: -.25in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">4.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Human persons have a right to private property—though this is not an absolute right</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">. It must harmonize with its complementary principle: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">the universal destination of the earth’s goods</i>. </span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">To be continued…<o:p></o:p></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibxE3rq_2BzPp470CCGaEwj39Nyh6Sq8kLZDMEs3-Ik64tv_aN_Ta9_-UIQod0ShPoDD6qfsVkGEUhycyPBZqO0uKUlnxW9SlZrgbbzmYMRd-eSRh_YXR3iW_4GOj_0aTHFYM1Xm9lkYA/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEibxE3rq_2BzPp470CCGaEwj39Nyh6Sq8kLZDMEs3-Ik64tv_aN_Ta9_-UIQod0ShPoDD6qfsVkGEUhycyPBZqO0uKUlnxW9SlZrgbbzmYMRd-eSRh_YXR3iW_4GOj_0aTHFYM1Xm9lkYA/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
</span></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-60092544760647563952012-01-17T19:01:00.000-06:002012-01-17T19:01:48.216-06:00Peter Jackson, The Hobbit, and Tolkien's Noble Heroes<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_wJVoNbrrH8RgwhHcdhA2lBrc10HNM4kduHSfTI5mxyJMasEZ06FHtZo2DswsX6PTLPhvDGBusMfoNa0j6tCxiGCN8M9DBm8w6trQG7K_Wy1hGYfkQF6p2W3ICi9N0LH7neoSqjSQ2so/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEj_wJVoNbrrH8RgwhHcdhA2lBrc10HNM4kduHSfTI5mxyJMasEZ06FHtZo2DswsX6PTLPhvDGBusMfoNa0j6tCxiGCN8M9DBm8w6trQG7K_Wy1hGYfkQF6p2W3ICi9N0LH7neoSqjSQ2so/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
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<span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I want to insert here between discussions of <i>The Iron Lady</i> and Pope John Paul II’s <i>Centesimus Annus</i> <a href="http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2012/01/hobbit-trailer/">this fine piece</a> by Erik Wecks, one of the GeekDads over at <i>Wired</i>, on Peter Jackson’s approaches to his films of Tolkien’s works. For those who love Jackson’s films but who also have regrets about the ways in which he departs from Tolkien’s own approach to his heroes, this is a must read. And it’s not the only nice piece on <i>Wired</i> about Tolkien. See also <a href="http://www.wired.com/geekdad/2011/10/the-hobbit-as-tolkien-saw-it/">here</a>.</span> <br />
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<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn1q_CBliBV2TO5mGQi5X1mUmyU_n3AaXQanr3q6qzg3UtD_2N5U1AblzklOBRFARB-wCLPRIsfIW9bkWDRCQQIbzQrUNkw_jDsszQ8L4-2xnYmXY7t8MpVHe8BdtaDddN-iMGY3zTSHw/s1600/images-1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhn1q_CBliBV2TO5mGQi5X1mUmyU_n3AaXQanr3q6qzg3UtD_2N5U1AblzklOBRFARB-wCLPRIsfIW9bkWDRCQQIbzQrUNkw_jDsszQ8L4-2xnYmXY7t8MpVHe8BdtaDddN-iMGY3zTSHw/s1600/images-1.jpeg" /></a></div><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
</span>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-71350839142431764792012-01-16T21:09:00.000-06:002012-01-16T21:09:58.790-06:00The Iron Lady and the Pope, Part 1<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid2SEkQGB4ulVqsq9yzp1rW0psh8HR8Yf3cRGendOJ5W9X-7y_x60Xy4Rt8f2J5Ns0-XR4h_Li7p4M50fxNUY-DZ4OcyBWYpkT-YVV6p0kk9gcOE_NvzlrlQrucny6ip9IXZHPCE3IBTI/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEid2SEkQGB4ulVqsq9yzp1rW0psh8HR8Yf3cRGendOJ5W9X-7y_x60Xy4Rt8f2J5Ns0-XR4h_Li7p4M50fxNUY-DZ4OcyBWYpkT-YVV6p0kk9gcOE_NvzlrlQrucny6ip9IXZHPCE3IBTI/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I came out of the theater with a twinge of disappointment after seeing <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Iron Lady</i>, Phyllida Lloyd’s biopic of Margaret Thatcher. Not because <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Iron Lady</i> isn’t a terrific film. It is—and for more than one reason. Meryl Streep’s magnificent rendering of Mrs. Thatcher is a masterpiece, and she is well-deserving of the <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/16/movies/awardsseason/feisty-host-and-feisty-winners-on-golden-globes.html?hpw">Golden Globe</a> she won last night for her performance (a performance turned in with the aid of the best geriatric make-up I have ever seen—if Billy Crystal’s old man get-up in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Mr. Saturday Night</i> is a 1, Meryl Streep’s aged Mrs. Thatcher is at least a 13). And the narrative structure of the film is extremely compelling. It takes Mrs. Thatcher’s slide into dimentia in the present day as an impetus for excursions back in time to various episodes in her personal life and political career. In his <a href="http://movies.nytimes.com/2011/12/30/movies/the-iron-lady-about-margaret-thatcher-review.html?scp=1&sq=The%20Iron%20Lady&st=cse">New York <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Times</i> review</a> A.O. Scott wonders whether Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan aren’t trying to have their cake and eat it too by making a film that, at once, tries to </span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">“celebrate their heroine as a feminist pioneer while showing her to be tragically unfulfilled according to traditional standards of feminine accomplishment.” I don’t see this as <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Lloyd and Morgan</i> trying to have it both ways. The complexities of their <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">subject</i> demanded that their attention be pulled in both these directions, and it seems to me a brilliant stroke that they didn’t merely focus on Mrs. Thatcher as the lioness of Britain, but also tried to see her as a (not always very successful) wife, mother and widow.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Mrs. Thatcher is portrayed in the film as passionate about ideas, about “doing things” rather than “being somebody.” Scott, however, doesn’t find Lloyd and Morgan themselves as interested in ideas as Mrs. Thatcher. “Though the film pays lip service to Mrs. Thatcher’s analytic intelligence and tactical shrewdness, its focus is on the drama and pathos of her personal life. In her dotage, watched over by professionally cheery minders, she putters about in a haze of half-senile nostalgia, occasionally drawn back into the glory and pain of the past.” Again, I applaud Lloyd and Morgan for not divorcing their heroine’s personal and political life—who knows if a male director and screenwriter would ever have approached this particular subject in this particular way? But the film, like most biopics that attempt to cover the entirety of their subject’s life, left me a little cold. There are so many facets of Mrs. Thatcher’s life that were, if not passed over, given only impressionistic treatment. The film comes off as a series of episodes, as elliptical as memory itself, and while there is much interest to the approach, the lack of narrative unity left me hungry for more extended dramatic developments of her marriage and family life, her rise to power, her key political decisions, and her relationships with male political colleagues and combatants. No one film could possibly do all of this, of course, but that precisely is the grandeur and misery of the biopic: wanting to present the whole life, it ends up giving us only a series of episodes. Compare, on this score, the approach in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0436697/">The Queen</a></i> (2006, directed by Stephen Frears, written by Peter Morgan), which is not at all a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">biopic</i> of Queen Elizabeth II, but is rather a study of Queen Elizabeth in one particularly dramatic episode of her life. Perhaps this kind of approach, while limited in its own way, is the best means of telling a single story about a famous person. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">There are scenes in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Iron Lady</i> where Mrs. Thatcher is shown giving voice to her always controversial political ideas. But these scenes are either snippets of speeches, or scenes in which she is knocking down straw men (often her own advisors). One dialectic that is missing in the film is a dramatic contest between Mrs. Thatcher’s conservative ideas and those of her rivals. Scott says of Lloyd and Morgan that “they…manage to push the great passion and distinction of her life—her pursuit and exercise of power—into the background. This is not unusual in biopics, which frequently turn artists into substance abusers and sexual adventurers who just happened to cut a few records or paint a few pictures on their way to redemption. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Iron Lady</i>, following this template, makes a particular hash of British history, compressing social and economic turmoil into a shorthand that resembles a chronologically scrambled British version of Billy’s Joel’s “We Didn’t Start the Fire” (Miners’ strike/Falklands War/I can’t take it any more ...).” This comment doesn’t do justice to how fascinating Lloyd and Morgan’s whirlwind tour of Mrs. Thatcher’s political career actually is. But it does hit upon a real weakness in their narrative approach. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">One of the most intriguing facets of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Iron Lady</i> is the light it sheds on the current political scene, not just in Britain but throughout the West. To many under forty, the events portrayed in this film might seem like ancient history. The reality, however, is that the political turmoil that characterized Mrs. Thatcher’s career is all too identical to the political turmoil that characterizes our political climate today. The question that roiled Britain throughout the 1980s is still the question facing the West today: What is the guiding principle of politics? Is it the resourcefulness of individuals making the most out of their liberties? Or is it the obligation of the State to ensure the realization of the common good? Or is it some third consideration? I credit <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Iron Lady</i> for telling a story that invites its audience to ponder these issues. In trying to get my own thoughts clear on them, I have returned to a document written by one of Mrs. Thatcher’s eminent contemporaries, Pope John Paul II. In his 1991 encyclical, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.vatican.va/holy_father/john_paul_ii/encyclicals/documents/hf_jp-ii_enc_01051991_centesimus-annus_en.html">Centesimus Annus</a></i> (“The Hundreth Year”—written for the centennial of Pope Leo XIII’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Rerum Novarum</i>), John Paul discusses, through the lens the Iron Curtain's downfall in 1989, the fundamental principles of political life, and in doing so illuminates several truths about politics concerning which both conservative and liberal proponents consistently are blind. In my next couple of posts I want at least to make a list of what I have learned from Pope John Paul II in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Centesimus Annus</i>, and thus pay tribute to one thing about which Mrs. Thatcher was undoubtedly in the right: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The supreme importance of thinking. <o:p></o:p></span></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-56356209442524064092012-01-04T20:06:00.001-06:002012-01-04T20:08:56.730-06:00The Intersection of Technology and the Liberal Arts<div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_k3KG83k-1s/TwUFcflXS5I/AAAAAAAAARE/NlGpnJE0zoA/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-_k3KG83k-1s/TwUFcflXS5I/AAAAAAAAARE/NlGpnJE0zoA/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">This has become one of the more quoted sayings of the late Steve Jobs: he wanted Apple and its products to exist at the intersection of technology and what he termed, alternatively, the “humanities” or “the liberal arts.”</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">What does this mean?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Toward the end of <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Steve-Jobs-Walter-Isaacson/dp/1451648537">Walter Isaacson’s biography</a>, Jobs is quoted as observing:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The reason Apple resonates with people is that there’s a deep current of humanity in our innovation. I think great artists and great engineers are similar, in that they both have a desire to express themselves. In fact some of the best people working on the original Mac were poets and musicians on the side. In the seventies computers became a way for people to express their creativity. Great artists like Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo were also great at science. Michelangelo knew a lot about how to quarry stone, not just how to be a sculptor.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">There’s a lot to think about in these interesting remarks. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">First of all, what sense of “art” does Jobs have in mind? Self-expression? If so, does modern digital technology especially lend itself to art conceived as self-expression (as opposed to art conceived as an imitation of nature)?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Jobs clearly doesn’t have a precise idea of the “liberal arts,” confusing them indifferently with “art” and “creativity” and “humanity.” But what if one reads his remarks with a more robust idea of the liberal arts in mind (i.e., one stemming out of the medieval Christian intellectual tradition)? How would the liberal arts conceived in <i>that</i> way relate to contemporary digital technology?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">In other words, in what ways, if any, does digital technology successfully reflect the Good, the True, and the Beautiful (the traditional objects of the liberal arts)?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I’d appreciate your thoughts…<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Meanwhile, for my own humble attempt to bring digital technology into conversation with art, see <a href="http://www.wpmayor.com/interviews/building-an-immersive-kingdom-with-wordpress/">here</a>. </span>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com6tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-34245211632042361242012-01-02T12:13:00.000-06:002012-01-02T12:13:07.444-06:002012: Year of the Artist-Entrepreneur<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a3Ib6MqNszw/TwHzgb4BeKI/AAAAAAAAAQ4/BIei4PaMSeI/s1600/images-3.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-a3Ib6MqNszw/TwHzgb4BeKI/AAAAAAAAAQ4/BIei4PaMSeI/s1600/images-3.jpeg" /></a></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Back on Decmeber 29, <a href="http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/content-and-e-books/article/50009-amazon-reports-over-4-million-kindles-sold-in-december.html"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Publisher’s Weekly</i> reported</a> that in each week of December over 1 million Kindles were sold. Sales of e-books also reportedly broke records. In the period from Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) to Christmas Day, the “gifting” of Kindle books alone was up 175% over the same period in 2010. Christmas Day was the biggest day ever for e-book sales, and my family was among the eager buyers as we helped my son download some books for his brand new Kindle. Finally, what were the two best-selling Kindle books of 2011? Two self-published efforts, as a matter of fact: Darcie Chan’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Mill River Recluse</i> and Chris Culver’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Abbey</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">This was all pretty much expected. Beginning with the explosion in e-reader and e-book sales last Christmas Season, the year 2011 continued to be an <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">annus mirabilis</i> for electronic reading and the self-publishing it inspires. David Gaughran, a self-pubbed author who maintains a fantastic blog on the self-publishing world, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Let’s Get Digital</i>, has written <a href="http://davidgaughran.wordpress.com/2011/12/29/2011-the-self-publishing-year-in-review/">this vivid summary</a> of a year that in future will no doubt be considered a watershed year in the publishing industry. Among the compelling facts cited by Gaughran is that starting in February of 2010, e-books for the first time became the dominant format, outselling both hardbacks and paperbacks, and capturing an astounding 29.5% market share. In May Amazon announced that it was now selling more e-books than all print formats <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">combined</i>. In June J.K. Rowling announced the coming launch of her Pottermore website (still coming, in fact), where the Harry Potter e-books will be sold exclusively for the first time. In the midst of these sea changes the traditional publishing world began to reel. As Gaughran puts it: “T</span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">he old order was fragmenting, and something messy and chaotic (and beautiful) was emerging in its stead.”</span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I mention all this not out of spite against traditional publishing and traditional books. Of course, innumerable excellent books continue to be brought out by traditional publishers. And I love my hardbound books. The shelves in my office are bursting with them, and many of them are real treasures both in terms of content and design. I suspect that I will always continue to buy them.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">So I don’t take the rise of the e-book as creating an either/or situation with traditional books. For me, they make for a delightful both/and.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Still, I’d like to tell you why I love this electronic revolution in reading. First of all, reading in bed is so much more enjoyable! No more having to keep moving the book or switching positions in order to get a comfortable angle on the page. With the e-reader’s single screen, everything is always right there in front of me. I adjust the pillows once, and off I go…<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">But seriously, I love this electronic revolution primarily for the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">artistic freedom</i> it affords. The new technology has given an outlet to scads of self-published writers hungry for an audience, an audience they can invite to read their work without having to go through the middlemen of traditional agents and publishers. To the argument that the rise of self-publishing has also unleashed upon an unsuspecting world legions of awful books, one can only retort: so also has traditional publishing. A New York imprimatur does not guarantee excellence. If a self-published author is not quite ready for prime time on your e-reader, then you can be the judge and stop buying his or her books. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">This past summer I began <a href="https://www.facebook.com/trojantubentertainment">Trojan Tub Entertainment</a> with a rather simple desire to get my work quickly out to the world. But the deeper I got into developing the company, the more I became excited about this e-book revolution that was crackling all around me. I sensed that I was in the middle of a huge cultural change. I thought that, inevitably, children would be reading more and more on electronic devices. I guessed that especially when Pottermore launched, children and young readers would bond with digital books like never before.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I believe my hunches were right, and I’m very proud that my Patria series is (more or less just slightly behind) the forefront of this messy, chaotic and beautiful creative impetus in the world of publishing. And not just because it’s cool being on the cutting edge. But because this, the virtual space in which people more and more are choosing to congregate, is where the children and families (and adults!) are with whom I wish to share my writing. The rise of the e-book has allowed me the chance to create a little electronic enclave with this audience—with you!—and that is an opportunity I simply cannot pass up.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Yesterday <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">GigaOM</i>, a technology blog, made <a href="http://www.linkedin.com/share?viewLink=&sid=s787949131&url=http%3A%2F%2Fgigaom%2Ecom%2F2011%2F12%2F29%2Fwhy-2012-will-be-year-of-the-artist-entrepreneur%2F%3Futm_source%3Dtwitterfeed%26utm_medium%3Dtwitter%26utm_campaign%3DFeed%253A%2BOmMalik%2B%2528GigaOM%253A%2BTech%2529&urlhash=JPO-&pk=nprofile-edit-success&pp=1&poster=25310587&uid=5558326332552650752&trk=NUS_UNIU_SHARE-title">this prediction</a> that 2012 would be the year of the artist-entrepreneur. With distribution chains in the arts and entertainment world collapsing across all content areas, and with the changes in technology democratizing content creation, the tech-savvy entrepreneur is poised to make his or her voice well heard in the year ahead. I for one can’t wait to be a part of it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">If you’d like to join me, then go ahead and dive into the <a href="http://kingdomofpatria.com/">Kingdom of Patria website</a>, and venture over to the homepage to download the first book in my Patria series of humorous adventures for middle grade readers: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hearts-Whizzing-Biscuits-Patria-ebook/dp/B0060O7RQU">Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits</a></i>. If you like the book, think about penning a short review for the book’s page on Amazon, barnesandnoble.com, or iTunes (a few sentences will do). Self-published authors depend upon good reviews perhaps even more than do other authors, so I would appreciate anything you can manage. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The second book in the Patria series, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stoop of Mastodon Meadow</i>, will be released very early here in 2012. You can find a synopsis and the cover art <a href="http://www.kingdomofpatria.com/blog/?p=196">here</a>. Thoughts on these are welcome. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">My best wishes to everyone, especially all you artist-entrepreneurs, for a New Year 2012 full of blessings and beautiful works of art. Let me know how things are going for you, and I’ll meet you back here soon! </span>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-18327858128744444502012-01-01T12:01:00.000-06:002012-01-01T12:01:42.415-06:00New Year's Day and the Desire for More<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zS9OxenMKtI/TwCfRbs7-6I/AAAAAAAAAQg/8kiQC784f-4/s1600/images-1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-zS9OxenMKtI/TwCfRbs7-6I/AAAAAAAAAQg/8kiQC784f-4/s1600/images-1.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I found this meditation this morning at the beginning of the January 2012 <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Magnificat</i>. It’s by Father James M. Sullivan, O.P., novice master for the Dominican Province of Saint Joseph at Saint Gertrude Priory in Cincinnati. I thought I’d share it with you. It’s a wonderful meditation with which to start the New Year…<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Why do we look forward to a New Year? This perception within ourselves is almost built into us: The New Year will be better than the last. This year will be happier. I will be more organized. I will be thinner! In truth, this notion of beginning again <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">is</i> built into us and God made us this way so that we would never stop longing for him. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Whatever it is we are wishing for or desiring this New Year, stop for a second and thank God simply for the gift of desire itself, for the theological virtue of hope which shows us the fulfillment of our desire, and for the longing he has placed in our heart that will never be satisfied in this world.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">In whatever way the New Year will unfold before us remains a matter of God’s providence. Our fulfillment of his will rests in what we choose to do. In the midst of all of that, no matter what happens, never stop desiring more—more happiness, more joy, more of him.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Through the intercession of Our Lady, Mary Mother of God, may God bless you all with abundant graces in 2012!<o:p></o:p></span></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-36292815641432321432011-12-31T10:16:00.005-06:002012-01-01T14:15:00.910-06:00Best of Arts & Entertainment 2011<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8q7Hg2blpi4/Tv81RrKpTBI/AAAAAAAAAQU/D6EZ87qtbS8/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-8q7Hg2blpi4/Tv81RrKpTBI/AAAAAAAAAQU/D6EZ87qtbS8/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">My personal best, that is. I claim no comprehensive knowledge of all that went on in the world of the arts and entertainment in 2011 (I didn’t even make it to London or New York!). I fact, my list doesn’t have to do exclusively with works that appeared in 2011. This is simply my own list of works of art that I especially enjoyed this past year. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Regular readers of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">High Concepts</i> will find many items on the list familiar, as I tend to blog on things I really enjoy. But there’s one or two items I haven’t mentioned yet. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">So here goes: my personal favorites for 2011! Let me know some of yours when you're done reading...<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Most Enjoyable Day in the Presence of Awesome Beauty</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Every day with my wife…<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">and</i> our family’s tour of the Vatican Museums and St. Peter’s Basilica last January<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Most Interesting Archaeological Phenomenon</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The Church of San Clemente in Rome, with its layers of churches underground, including, at the very bottom, a pagan shrine to Mithras. That’s Christianity 1, Mithraism 0. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Most Compelling Reads</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Anthony Trollope, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Last Chronicle of Barset</i>…if you haven’t read Trollope’s Barchester series, pour yourself a glass of port, throw another log on the fire, and get comfortable.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Graham Greene, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Brighton Rock</i>…a chilling portrait of a damned soul wrestling with God and with himself.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Flannery O’Connor, “The Enduring Chill” (short story)…another story of a damned soul wrestling with God and with himself, only funnier.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Evelyn Waugh, “Love in the Slump” (short story), among other stories in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Charles Ryder’s Schooldays and Other Stories</i>, damned souls going out of their way not to wrestle with much of anything at all, even funnier<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Charles Dickens, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Great Expectations</i> (audio book read by Frank Muller)… listened to while driving through Pennsylvania on a brilliant October day<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">David Mamet, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture</i>…I am not a libertarian, but I found much to be sympathetic with in Mamet’s cranky critique of liberalism<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Walter Isaacson, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Steve Job</i>s…reading now, will blog on it soon<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Favorite Movies<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">True Grit</span></i><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> (Cohen Brothers version)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">No Country For Old Men<o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Of Gods and Men<o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Hugo<o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Movies, Honorable Mention</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The Dark Knight</span></i><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> (a superhero movie explicitly taking up the specter of nihilism)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The Dish</span></i><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> (extremely funny Australians)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The Efficiency Expert</span></i><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> (a sleeper Anthony Hopkins film from 1992...even more extremely funny Australians)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Tree of Life<o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Tintin<o:p></o:p></span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I enjoyed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Harry Potter 7</i>, Part 1 much more than Part 2<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Favorite Documentary<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Father Robert Barron’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Catholicism</i> (the excerpts I’ve seen have sold me!)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">New Favorite Comedian<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Brian Regan<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Favorite Television Shows<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Foyle’s War<o:p></o:p></span></i><br />
<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Lark Rise to Candleford</span></i></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Favorite Live Theater<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The productions of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Henry V</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Tempest</i> put on by the company of the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Most Sublime Athletic Performance</span></b><br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
</span></b><br />
<span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Barcelona's dismantling of Manchester United in last May's Champions' League Final at Wembley. </span><br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
</span></b><br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Favorite “Football” Team <o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Tottenham Hotspur<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Favorite Music<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Any number of “early music” (Renaissance) songs I downloaded from iTunes<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">John Rutter’s Cambridge Singers’ Christmas Album is a winner<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
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</div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Happy New Year 2012!</span></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-11992599876169525522011-12-22T16:00:00.001-06:002011-12-23T07:38:41.197-06:00Great Snakes! Spielberg's Tintin<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-O9tKET_EL7U/TvOlzN7DKaI/AAAAAAAAAPA/qmRS15KsOBM/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-O9tKET_EL7U/TvOlzN7DKaI/AAAAAAAAAPA/qmRS15KsOBM/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I first encountered the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tintin</i> comic books in the little library of the Church of Santa Susanna in Rome, the American parish that my family attended throughout the 1969-70 academic year. After Sunday Mass my brother and sisters and I would eagerly stomp up the rectory stairs to the upper floor where the library was located (according to my impressionistic memory). There we would gorge on sugar donuts and check out our weekly bushel of books. Hergé’s lovely images in <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Explorers on the Moon</i> were blazed into my memory at that time, aided no doubt by the fact that as a five year-old boy I was already afire with moon landings, given that on the black-and-white television in our apartment we had watched Neil Armstrong touch down on the moon that past July.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I still own a tattered copy of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Red Rackham’s Treasure</i>, which in time sparked the flames of my own children’s love affair with the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tintin</i> books. Thus it was a real treat last night for us all to begin the Christmas break by going to the opening night of Steven Spielberg’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Adventures of Tintin</i>. It’s an absolutely cracking film for the whole family. “Unadulterated adventure,” as I heard Spielberg say in one interview. Sheer fun from start to finish.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">We whet our appetites for the movie by watching on YouTube some behind-the-scenes footage of Spielberg working with actors Jamie Bell (Tintin) and Andy Serkis (Captain Haddock) using motion-capture, a technique which Spielberg and his team—which included Peter Jackson as an executive producer, if not co-director—have brought to a high art. Here’s a sample—</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><iframe allowfullscreen='allowfullscreen' webkitallowfullscreen='webkitallowfullscreen' mozallowfullscreen='mozallowfullscreen' width='320' height='266' src='https://www.youtube.com/embed/JmdK4NdwYkY?feature=player_embedded' frameborder='0'></iframe></div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The motion-capture technique is perfectly suited to bringing the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tintin</i> comics to life, in that it retains Hergé’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">ligne claire</i> cartoon line while at the same time making two-dimensional characters three-dimensional. Captain Haddock, for example, is portrayed with his comically exaggerated bulbous nose, familiar from the books, while in other respects he is depicted with breathtaking realism—the limpid nature of the eyes, the blinks, the nose hair! This strange combination of cartoon and realism is very engaging, and makes the film a feast to behold.</span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wfxNk6fmTqk/TvOmMnzKsEI/AAAAAAAAAPY/7s6fQInqVi4/s1600/images-1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-wfxNk6fmTqk/TvOmMnzKsEI/AAAAAAAAAPY/7s6fQInqVi4/s1600/images-1.jpeg" /></a></div></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Interestingly, the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Tintin</i> comics first appeared in a Belgian Catholic newspaper for youth, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Le Petite Vingtième</i>, and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herg%C3%A9">Hergé</a> himself was a Catholic. <o:p></o:p></span><br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-P1JfgboiEFA/TvOmifyhPPI/AAAAAAAAAP8/1AMwJsFPWSM/s1600/images-2.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-P1JfgboiEFA/TvOmifyhPPI/AAAAAAAAAP8/1AMwJsFPWSM/s1600/images-2.jpeg" /></a></div></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-44001772295933873522011-12-21T12:36:00.001-06:002011-12-21T12:41:13.845-06:00Sneak Preview--Stoop of Mastodon Meadow<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7jJmdqbDvKlKOpQqUFVYJkTzAz06r0tVsvAGUzDwL-17OQ72s24ziY24H28p-PCY8IWLLV9WldetIDgtWv9x0ZXDkphyphenhyphengOWUuwvOMiwOf-gXPWqzWE-5-OG9QSqN1OhWfPCmy9GxkXTg/s1600/Mastodon+Meadow+Cover+Art.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg7jJmdqbDvKlKOpQqUFVYJkTzAz06r0tVsvAGUzDwL-17OQ72s24ziY24H28p-PCY8IWLLV9WldetIDgtWv9x0ZXDkphyphenhyphengOWUuwvOMiwOf-gXPWqzWE-5-OG9QSqN1OhWfPCmy9GxkXTg/s320/Mastodon+Meadow+Cover+Art.jpg" width="207" /></a></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The next installment in my Patria series of humorous adventure novels for middle grade readers, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Stoop of Mastodon Meadow</i>, will be released this coming January 2012. Above is the cover design by Theodore Schluenderfritz. I hope you like it as much as I do! Here’s the synopsis of the story:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">That sound you hear of whining and the stamping of feet is the joyful noise (to Patrian parents, at least) of the beginning of the new school year. And for Oliver Stoop it’s going to be an especially exciting one, as he’s been allowed to join his friend Prince Farnsworth at Mastodon Meadow, the institution that’s been shaping the formless goo of male Patrian minds for over 2,000 years.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Yet almost as soon as he steps foot into the “Meadow,” Oliver’s life is thrown into turmoil. First, by those who challenge his right as an American foreigner to join the S.F.C. (Squire Formation Course). Then, by the discovery that his new Fifth Ledge teacher is none other than his old nemesis, Miching Malchio. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">But all this is nothing compared to what happens when an outrageous newspaper appears, claiming to be written by a secret society of students from both the Meadow and Princess Rose’s academy, Madame Mimi’s Well-Ordered School for Ill-Mannered Girls. Carrying shocking (and anonymous) articles about teachers, students, and even Madame Mimi’s adorable and intelligent dog, Phideaux, the paper creates pandemonium at both establishments, and an all-out investigation is launched to identify the fiends behind it. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Could it be Malchio in the editor’s chair, seeking his revenge? Could it be the vile M’Snivelley Twins, confirmed stinkers whose one desire seems to be World Domination? Or could the publishers be the three students occupying Positions 1, 2 and 3 on the Chief Suspects List: Oliver, Farnsworth and Rose! </span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">On the lookout for that perfect virtual stocking stuffer? Do you realize how easy it is to gift an eBook as a Christmas present? P</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">erhaps you’ll consider buying someone on your list the hilarious first book in the Patria series,</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hearts-Whizzing-Biscuits-Patria-ebook/dp/B0060O7RQU">Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits</a></i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">. </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">No frustration in the mall parking lot. No long lines at the post office. Just a few clicks of the mouse and you’re done. And you can even post-date the notification email so that your happy recipient receives the eBook on Christmas Day! It makes a great gift for the kids in your life--and the kid in you!</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Just follow <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html/ref=hp_200555070_kindlegifts&nodeId=200555070#purchase">these simple instructions</a> on how to gift an eBook via Amazon. </span><br />
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</span></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-65242527838076294562011-12-19T15:37:00.000-06:002011-12-19T15:37:01.008-06:00Poetic Cinema: An Instance<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghgEi28Us5oshOoIFAWCRoo8lfDx1K4BQHYdBoD7rHZuGXLEcaS6HMZF4NEYfntj_SfiRfX26Mu28okV1o5e-ME49ErLdnd6Z0RtTcpivlkJD9rUHkiP3MenRAo5XcE9Q2bo4CYvc8IXk/s1600/images-1.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEghgEi28Us5oshOoIFAWCRoo8lfDx1K4BQHYdBoD7rHZuGXLEcaS6HMZF4NEYfntj_SfiRfX26Mu28okV1o5e-ME49ErLdnd6Z0RtTcpivlkJD9rUHkiP3MenRAo5XcE9Q2bo4CYvc8IXk/s1600/images-1.jpeg" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
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<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Treat yourself in this final week of Advent to a viewing of Xavier Beauvois’ film, </span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1588337/">Of Gods and Men</a></i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> (starring Lambert Wilson and Michael Lonsdale)</span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">, </i></span><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">the true story of the 1996 martyrdom by Islamic terrorists of six French Trappist monks in Algeria, and winner of the Grand Prix at the 2010 Cannes Film Festival.</span><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I had heard about this film for some while, but only in the past week did I get round to seeing it. I now rank it among the very best films I have ever seen. Next to great films that deal explicitly with the life of grace—<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">A Man For All Seasons</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Passion of the Christ</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Ushpizin</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Into Great Silence</i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Tree of Life</i>—it stands without the least embarrassment. It may well be better than any of these. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I have had occasion before to quote the lines from Chekhov that Graham Greene so admires in his essay, “Subjects and Stories.” The best novelists, says Chekhov, “are realistic and paint life as it is, but because every line is permeated, as with a juice, by awareness of a purpose, you feel, besides life as it is, also life as it ought to be, and this captivates you.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Greene goes to comment:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">This description of an artist’s theme has never, I think, been bettered: we need not even confine it to the fictional form: it applies equally to the documentary film, to pictures in the class of Mr. Rotha’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Shipyard</i>…or Mr. Wright’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Song of Ceylon</i>: only in films to which Chekhov’s description applies shall we find the poetic cinema. And the poetic cinema—it is the only form worth considering. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Of Gods and Men</span></i><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> must certainly be classed as poetic cinema. I think of the wonderful work done with the camera simply meditating upon the expressive faces of the monks as they exhibit fear, anger, or peace; the beautiful counterpoint achieved between the lines of the psalms chanted by the monks and the terrible ordeal they are going through; the unsentimental but deeply moving portrayals of their anguished prayer, their kinship with the Islamic denizens of the town in which their monastery is located, and ultimately, their heroic deaths. Of the many brilliant decisions made by Beauvois in this film, not least is the one to let the final act of martyrdom occur “off stage.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">There is one scene with a monk alone in his cell that I believe may give us the most truthful image in cinema history of a soul manifesting his love for God in prayer. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Poetic, too, are the reflections of the monks revealed sometimes in voice-over, such as the luminous paradox: “It is in poverty, failure and death that we advance towards [God].” Or in the hope divulged in the abbot’s <a href="http://www.monasticdialog.com/a.php?id=497">final testament</a>, in which he voices his desire to </span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">“immerse my gaze in the Father’s and contemplate with him his children of Islam as he sees them.”</span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">For helping us, too, contemplate our brothers and sisters from this Divine perspective, we are all in Beauvois’ debt. He has made a beautiful work of art.</span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> </span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> <o:p></o:p></span></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-52749139281859378542011-12-16T10:15:00.000-06:002011-12-16T10:15:15.522-06:00Come Chat About Writing<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"></div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVQqwT1MIc-_sLZncE-IVNKk_HlfIrN-OYI2VQxz2jj3o00eV7-DwOb-oKawOMcjBGJbm-Rv3iBEKynjpr11gJS72VeVD3DtRlZVAOpB-QnObD7GJLwRpGWSCus7l4Yz4Btu7L8HnleSQ/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjVQqwT1MIc-_sLZncE-IVNKk_HlfIrN-OYI2VQxz2jj3o00eV7-DwOb-oKawOMcjBGJbm-Rv3iBEKynjpr11gJS72VeVD3DtRlZVAOpB-QnObD7GJLwRpGWSCus7l4Yz4Btu7L8HnleSQ/s1600/Unknown.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I’m pleased to announce that I am today’s Friday Feature interview on Heather G. Kelly’s writer’s blog, <a href="http://editedtowithinaninchofmylife.blogspot.com/">editedtowithinaninchofmylife</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">So come on over for a more-or-less "live" chat about writing, my new book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hearts-Whizzing-Biscuits-Patria-ebook/dp/B0060O7RQU">Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits</a></i>, and the <a href="http://kingdomofpatria.com/">Kingdom of Patria</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I believe I’ll be able to reply to comments and questions over the course of the next few days.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">See you there!</span>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-49178927282194742512011-12-15T15:35:00.000-06:002011-12-15T15:35:10.519-06:00On Writing Jane Austen Sequels<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioZotc_W-VMg1hCFxJE-5_vQ_V97wQveovE3Fh6C7JjTzIQfT6HP-pOpVQrE_UPhpa9te0A7v0AWGLhMJ5O0N7b_MQpeA_e59h7C0Kfq7zexIBkzkJSjtAbD3EheRrpXECnBWMWPSLrCk/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEioZotc_W-VMg1hCFxJE-5_vQ_V97wQveovE3Fh6C7JjTzIQfT6HP-pOpVQrE_UPhpa9te0A7v0AWGLhMJ5O0N7b_MQpeA_e59h7C0Kfq7zexIBkzkJSjtAbD3EheRrpXECnBWMWPSLrCk/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">And what Jane Austen fan hasn’t written one, if only in his or her imagination? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I know I thought about it once, though like many I’m sure, I never scratched out even a single sentence. But in my imagined sequel, all of the central lovers from Austen’s novels, due to a wild collection of circumstances, would meet up to do—what? I’m not sure. I never got that far. It was fun enough simply to think of Elizabeth Darcy making friends with Anne Wentworth, and the Knightleys chatting with Mr. and Mrs. Ferrars after church.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Many authors have gleefully given in to the temptation to continue the stories of Austen’s characters—sequels to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pride and Prejudice</i> being the most popular choice. No doubt many of these have been dreadful. Would Western Civilization been incomplete, after all, without <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pride and Prejudice and Zombies</i>? Even the celebrated mystery writer and Austen afficionado, P.D. James, who has just come out with her own <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Pride and Prejudice</i> sequel, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Death-Comes-Pemberley-P-D-James/dp/0307959856">Death Comes to Pemberley</a></i>, has been the victim of tepid reviews on Amazon.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">But I have come to praise Jane Austen sequel writers, not to blame them. For I think the impulse to write such a sequel is an admirable one. It comes from the noble desire of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">not wanting the party to end</i>—especially when the party is comprised<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"> </i>of the best of one’s friends<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">.</i> And this is a heavenly desire. Indeed, a desire that can only really be achieved in that ultimate sequel in Heaven.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The essence of comedy is culmination in timeless festivity. Thus all five of the great Austen novels end with a joyous marriage, and do not linger long to tell us much if anything about what happened next. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The effect of which is to make the joy last forever</i>. The taking up of Austen’s characters by sequel writers does nothing to undermine this sense of timeless festivity. Quite the contrary, it acknowledges it. For if Austen’s characters did not enjoy a semi-divine status in a fictional heaven, they would not be able to appear in countless other tales just as they are, and just as they will always be.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">No one, in other words, writes a sequel to <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">The Sun Also Rises</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">This is a point Chesterton made about the characters of Dickens: <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Dickens was a mythologist rather than a novelist; he was the last of the mythologists, and perhaps the greatest. He did not always manage to make his characters men, but he always managed, at least, to make them gods. They are creatures like Punch or Father Christmas. They live statically, in a perpetual summer of being themselves. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">This is what the Austen sequel writers are after: the play of demigods in a perpetual summer. It is, as Chesterton further notes, a basically religious impulse:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Dickens is, in this matter, close to popular religion, which is the ultimate and reliable religion. He conceives an endless joy; he conceives creatures as permanent as Puck or Pan—creatures whose will to live, aeons and aeons cannot satisfy. He is not come, as a writer, that his creatures may copy life and copy its narrowness; he is come that they may have life, and that they may have it more abundantly.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">So let us praise the efforts of Jane Austen sequel writers. Theirs is the will to live that cannot be satisfied by anything but a life that never ends. “Both popular religion, with its endless joys, and the old comic story, with its endless jokes, have in our time faded together,” writes Chesterton. “We are too weak to desire that undying vigor.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Some may be. But not the author of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Death Comes to Pemberley</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-75865289048229027622011-12-14T12:29:00.000-06:002011-12-14T12:29:01.717-06:00Stout Hearts on Indie Snippets<div class="MsoNormal"><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: Times;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjerDcAqEM2gqlulKMql1nizolFW0xFCliw5_Fd-vns2HTzopv2fPudRUclCBdsJofoXR7xcYftJoO27NueqEHMujrXf18tbtrOUV-KSz6E6hioA2hRkxEBkK-PLc5F8jGCA6mqNwRaZG8/s1600/hm_illustration.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="200" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjerDcAqEM2gqlulKMql1nizolFW0xFCliw5_Fd-vns2HTzopv2fPudRUclCBdsJofoXR7xcYftJoO27NueqEHMujrXf18tbtrOUV-KSz6E6hioA2hRkxEBkK-PLc5F8jGCA6mqNwRaZG8/s320/hm_illustration.jpg" width="320" /></a></span></span></div><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Many thanks to Bryan Dennis at <a href="http://indiesnippets.blogspot.com/">Indie Snippets</a> for featuring today <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hearts-Whizzing-Biscuits-Patria-ebook/dp/B0060O7RQU">Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits</a>. Check it out!<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">And if you haven’t yet visited the <a href="http://kingdomofpatria.com/">Kingdom of Patria</a>, stop on by!</span><br />
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</div><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">* The magnificent illustration of Patria above is by Theodore Schluenderfritz, who illustrates <o:p>the Kingdom of Patria website and the Patria book covers. </o:p></span></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-63608534350872331292011-12-05T16:38:00.001-06:002011-12-05T16:57:25.497-06:00The Film Director and The Noble Savage<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUsSXZtvPTu8KEP2AyQNqeTI-dE5GT9IMfnJnY4sr98YhJXc3dodd7NoNcAXR9IsvqWEIuA10IHfs0tkH5FEmfM5RqjoOTs5klsvhGiHbb7xzRRkhYYk2MTG_R8JUlRwzUD1IZTlmUzBI/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjUsSXZtvPTu8KEP2AyQNqeTI-dE5GT9IMfnJnY4sr98YhJXc3dodd7NoNcAXR9IsvqWEIuA10IHfs0tkH5FEmfM5RqjoOTs5klsvhGiHbb7xzRRkhYYk2MTG_R8JUlRwzUD1IZTlmUzBI/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The Film Director is <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Mamet">David Mamet</a>, also the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author of many books of essays, most recently the crackling Conservative-Libertarian manifesto: <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Secret-Knowledge-Dismantling-American-Culture/dp/1595230769">The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture</a></i> (Sentinel 2011). <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The Noble Savage, so argues Mamet persuasively, is the mythological hero of the American Left, the peace-loving tribesman whose Eden it is the charge of the State to regain. And when it does—<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">There will be no more pollution, for we will vote to stop our polluting ways; there will be no more war, as all sovereign States will be subsumed into a large tribe of the mutually understanding (cf. the United Nations), there will be no more Poverty, because the Earth Holds Enough for All, and lacks only that Wise Leadership which will see to its Just Distribution (a dictator). And all that stands between this utopia and our present state of stupid error are the Conservatives, who believe only in Greed (Chapter 18).<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Mamet’s trenchant critique of the Left, its religious devotion to the State, and its devolution (daily, before our very eyes) into dictatorship, makes for compulsive reading. If the argument is between Leftist Statism and the Conservative-Libertarianism of Mamet, a political philosophy that prizes individual responsibility and the free market above State control, then Mamet surely deserves to win it. But the question that compels me in thinking through Mamet’s argument is what the territory might look like after his argument is won. Let us say (<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">per impossibile</i>) that we are governed by a State that moderates its passions and adheres to the principles of the U.S. Constitution. Let us say that we live in a polity where individuals are now possessed of the character requisite to exercise virtuous choice. What should be done with all this freedom?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Mamet says that the essence of freedom is choice. This is false. The essence of freedom is choice formed in the truth. For if I can make all the choices I want, but all they do is pamper my appetites, then how can I be said to be truly free? I am not free. I am an adolescent out of control. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">When it comes to the plying of trade in the market, the truth to which freedom most needs to conform is the fact that the economy needs to be directed to the home (our English word “economy” is derived from the Greek word for “household,” <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">oikos</i>). This means more than the garnering of wages (though that’s obviously a start). It also means ensuring that the work being done serves, rather than undermines, the common good of the family. This is the heart of the economic theory that G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc termed <a href="http://distributistreview.com/mag/">Distributism</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Which is not (it needs always be said) “re-distribution” of wealth. Indeed, it needs to be said that (at least in my view) the circumscribing of the free market within the common good of the family is not a State concern at all. It is, rather, a cultural concern—which means an artifact of a certain sort of community. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The family, however, is not the only community within which free enterprise needs be circumscribed. There are also the communities generated by the practices of various crafts and professions. Mamet himself gives us a snapshot of one, from his own experience directing films:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">…a director (I speak as one who has directed ten features, and quite a bit of television), is exposed to something of which the actors and writers may not have taken notice: the genius of America, and the American system of Free Enterprise.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in; text-indent: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The director sees, on the set, one or two hundred people of all walks of life, races, incomes, political persuasions and religions, and ages, men and women, involved, indeed <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">dedicated</i> to doing their jobs as well as possible (indeed the ethos of the film set could, without overstatement, be described as “doing it better than it’s ever been done), in aid of the mutual endeavor (the film). Each brings not only his or her particular expertise and craft, but an understanding of and dedication to the culture of filmmaking: work hard, pitch in, never complain, admire and reward accomplishment” (Chapter 19). <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">What Mamet describes here is something more than Free Enterprise. Free Enterprise can be exercised selling cheap toys Made in China. No, what Mamet describes here is Free Enterprise circumscribed by human devotion to a <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">common good</i> (making the film) that could never be realized apart from such cooperative activity. Such a common good is a very special kind of thing, requiring the very special type of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">community</i> and <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">culture</i> that Mamet is so glad to find on movie sets. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">But this kind of community and cultures does not come into being by Conservative-Libertarianism alone. Nor is it to be found in the shanty-town Social Justice of the “Occupy” movement.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">A different, a deeper, philosophy of the human person, of what it means for human beings to flourish, is needed. <o:p></o:p></span></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-16702782141314456162011-12-02T12:46:00.003-06:002011-12-02T12:54:37.829-06:00Christians and Aliens: Making Movies in a Culture of Death<div class="Body"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgze4aJFRhyphenhyphenB5xb_WqtvrK-ofr6oH3uI78g9AXcw_MIIsZlhyzxU4YvldidrZp9z4TsNjm19EzBKxVbh6k82RNf4GswRdr39NjQVrkb2bI42EgFgJAZiZeiaOZFN6VcOcCu2BE4olgosu8/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEgze4aJFRhyphenhyphenB5xb_WqtvrK-ofr6oH3uI78g9AXcw_MIIsZlhyzxU4YvldidrZp9z4TsNjm19EzBKxVbh6k82RNf4GswRdr39NjQVrkb2bI42EgFgJAZiZeiaOZFN6VcOcCu2BE4olgosu8/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Here is irony.</span></div><div class="Body"><br />
</div><div class="Body"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">One of the most perceptive cinematic portrayals of what Blessed Pope John Paul II referred to as our “culture of death,” as well as a compelling exemplar of moviemaking which points us beyond such a culture, come from two apparently secular Jewish filmmakers: Joel and Ethan Cohen.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body"><br />
</div><div class="Body"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Meanwhile, far too many professedly Christian films fall woefully below the bar the Cohens have set.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body"><br />
</div><div class="Body"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Why is this?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body"><br />
</div><div class="Body"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Last month at a conference of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, I offered some reasons for this sadly ironic cultural situation. My rather impressionistic set of notes is just below. It will help a lot to have seen the Cohen Brothers’ NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN and TRUE GRIT, as well as the Sherwood Baptist Church production of FIREPROOF.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body"><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: -webkit-auto;"><br />
</div><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">To help matters some, at the end of the post I'm attaching Father Robert Barron’s excellent analysis of TRUE GRIT, an analysis I depended heavily upon in the third part of the lecture.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body"><br />
</div><div class="Body"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Comments and questions welcome. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body"><br />
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</div><div align="center" class="Body" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">CHRISTIANS AND ALIENS:<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div align="center" class="Body" style="text-align: center;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">MAKING MOVIES IN A CULTURE OF DEATH<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div align="center" class="Body" style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div align="center" class="Body" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Daniel McInerny<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="Body" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Radical Emancipation: Confronting the Challenge of Secularism<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="Body" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">12th Annual Fall Conference of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics & Culture<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="Body" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">University of Notre Dame<o:p></o:p></span></div><div align="center" class="Body" style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">November 11, 2011<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Introduction<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Our Souls At Hazard: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="Body"><br />
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</div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">1.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Play</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> the opening of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2:45)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 32.0pt; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 32.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">a.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Landscape...barren...<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 32.0pt; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 32.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">b.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Sheriff Bell comparing himself against the “old timers”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 32.0pt; mso-list: l0 level2 lfo1; tab-stops: list 32.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">c.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">A killer abroad, killing for killing’s sake: “I don’t know what to make of that,” says Sheriff Bell. Can’t take its measure...irrational...he doesn’t want to go and meet something he doesn’t understand<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">2.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Brief plot summary: Sheriff Bell, his soul at hazard, grappling with the meaning of evil, against the passing of an older moral & religious order<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">3.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Sheriff Bell: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">“A man would have to put his soul at hazard.”</b> (why? because he’s facing the Devil); <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">4.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Script</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> of “That’s vanity” scene: the devil’s territory, p. 110<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">5.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Play</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> the closing scene of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (3:00)<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 49.05pt; mso-list: l1 level2 lfo2; tab-stops: list 49.05pt; text-indent: -13.05pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">a.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">trying to catch up with his father, symbol of moral & religious clarity...but he can’t catch up.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">6.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Flannery O’Connor: “...the action of grace in territory held largely by the devil.” NO COUNTRY shows us that territory, but not the action of grace...<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l0 level1 lfo1; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">7.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Walker Percy: before life can be affirmed in our culture, “death-in-life must be named.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body"><br />
</div><div class="Body"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Transition</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">: so how would a filmmaker, trying to learn not only from the Coen Brothers but even more importantly from O’Connor and Percy, make a film that would show death-in-life, as Percy puts it, but also go on to affirm life; that would show us the devil’s territory, as O’Connor puts it, but also go on to show the action of grace? <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body"><br />
</div><div class="Body"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">In short, how is a Christian to sing his songs in this alien land?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body"><br />
</div><div class="Body"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I want to consider two strategies:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 15.25pt; mso-list: l2 level1 lfo3; tab-stops: list 15.25pt; text-indent: -15.25pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">A.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The “Faith-Based” Project<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 14.6pt; mso-list: l3 level1 lfo4; tab-stops: list 14.6pt; text-indent: -14.6pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">B.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The Approach Through Paradox<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body"><br />
</div><div class="Body"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Caveat</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">: These are not the only strategies for filmmakers to take. Barbara Nicolosi, for example, has said that a comedy (e.g. a Pixar cartoon) can be a grace. Or sometimes a period piece can be very effective in showing us what we have lost culturally. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body"><br />
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</div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 11.0pt; mso-list: l4 level1 lfo5; tab-stops: list 11.0pt; text-indent: -11.0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The “Faith-Based” Project: FIREPROOF<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="Body"><br />
</div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l5 level1 lfo6; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">1.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Mel Gibson’s THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST (2004), made for 30m, worldwide gross to date is almost 612m, called Hollywood’s attention to the “faith-based” demographic. It also caught the attention of pastors: e.g. Sherwood Baptist Church in Albany, Georgia. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l5 level1 lfo6; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">2.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">FIREPROOF (2008): starring Kirk Cameron, was made for half a million dollars and has grossed over 33 million. The highest-grossing independent movie of 2008.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l5 level1 lfo6; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">3.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Barna poll showing that movies influenced Americans more than church: Alex Kendrick of Sherwood Baptist: “We read a study that said media is more influential in our culture than the church. We need to get Godly people involved in making good movies – that’s one way we can win wars and take ground back.”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="Body" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l5 level1 lfo6; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">4.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Friends Church in Yorba Linda, California, a non-denominational evangelical megachurch, is now at work on its own film, NOT TODAY, about a spoiled young American on a trip to India who is drawn into a search for a little girl sold to human traffickers. In an interview with PBS, Pastor Matthew Cork had this to say about the purpose of NOT TODAY:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">It wasn’t just to make a movie, because we’re not in the movie business. We’re a church. But as a church we do have an obligation and a responsibility to tell the message, and so we believe that this was the best way for us in what God had gifted us with.</span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l5 level1 lfo6; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">5.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Results</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">: on the official site of FIREPROOF one finds a page with the title: “7,000+ Marriages Have Been Ignited by FIREPROOF,” followed by a long list of fan comments thanking the filmmakers for helping them with their marriages or with some other aspect of their lives. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l5 level1 lfo6; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">6.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">BELLA statistics: March 2010, Eduardo Versategui’s website: BELLA has saved over 300 babies.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l5 level1 lfo6; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">7.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Why isn’t it churlish to criticize such films?</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; text-indent: 22.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">a.O’Connor: the fact that grace can work through a poorly-made church is God’s business, not ours. It’s not an argument for bad church architecture...analogy to poorly-made movies;<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; text-indent: 22.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">b. Christ told parables, but he did not “entertain”: movies are entertainment, and they have their own integrity as such<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; text-indent: 22.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">c. Even from an evangelical viewpoint: who knows what better impact might be had?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l6 level1 lfo7; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">9.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">A big part of the issue here is <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">the question of audience</b>. Who is the movie for? A demographic that already has the eyes to see, or a demographic O’Connor describes in speaking of the “modern man who [like Sheriff Bell] can neither believe nor contain himself in unbelief and who searches desperately, feeling about in all experience for the loss of God” (“Novelist and Believer,” p. 159).<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l6 level1 lfo7; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">10.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Criticism of FIREPROOF: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Play</b> scene with father (Chapter 8) (3 minutes)</span><br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
</span></b><br />
<b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> Didacticism not conflict</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">: the opposing value is not given sufficient play; the territory of the devil is never surveyed; (such as the value we place on Mattie’s quest for revenge); thus the conflict comes off as two-dimensional & sentimental; as pure good vs. pure evil. For this reason there is no irony, no lack of fit between what is said and what is intended (what screenwriters call subtext--it’s all text)</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> </span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> Caleb’s vision of a good man (evil) with God’s vision (good)</span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 11.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> There is a wrestling with the devil, but our hands never get dirty; we are not compelled by the evil in any way--either by seeing it as good, or seeing its horror, or even facing significant obstacles (cost) to flee it.</span><br />
<span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Lack of a sacramental imagination</b>. The “heart-to-heart talk” and “music video” over action, image, symbolic representation (the sacramental aspect of art); rooting us not so much in things but in words. The “kickback” of a gun vs. the Cross in the park that the character reads for us.</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
</span><br />
<span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">The moment of grace is ineffective because there is a lack of the significant, paradoxical action through which grace flows</b>. The moment in which that which is mistaken for “life” must die--often violently. “The music video.” In FIREPROOF the death-in-life is simply not very compelling. Because we have not identified with Caleb’s misguided wish, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">we are not shocked</b> when it brings him low. We know he has been wrong from the very beginning. The sense of paradox is missing, <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">MYSTERY</b>, that shakes us out of complacency. </span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 23.0pt; mso-list: l7 level1 lfo8; tab-stops: list 23.0pt; text-indent: -23.0pt;"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">III.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span></b><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> The Kickback of Grace: TRUE GRIT<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l8 level1 lfo9; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">1.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Play</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> opening scene: “nothing is free, but the grace of God”<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l8 level1 lfo9; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">2.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Brief synopsis<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l8 level1 lfo9; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">3.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">As Father Robert Barron has pointed out in his insightful analysis of the film, Mattie is driven by a single-minded desire for justice. The film opens with a quotation, white letters over black, from Proverbs 28:1: “The wicked man flees, when none pursueth.” The verse continues: “but the just, bold as a lion, shall be without dread.” Mattie is the lion who pursues Tom Chaney without dread. At the beginning, when she asks a sheriff for advice on where to find a man with “true grit” to help her pursue Chaney, the sheriff offers several possibilities. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l8 level1 lfo9; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">4.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Script</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> of Mattie’s choice of Rooster Cogburn. Mattie opts for the “pitiless man,” not the man “straight as a string” who “believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake.” Mattie’s sense of justice is that of an eye for an eye. It is the justice of the Furies in Aeschylus’ The Eumenides. It is a justice driven more by blood-thirst than by respect for an impersonal order. Mattie’s father was killed, Chaney must die, and no pity or legal niceties must enter into it.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l8 level1 lfo9; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">5.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">But as Father Barron points out, Mattie’s sense of justice leads to a string of brutal killings. Between Mattie, Cogburn and Leboeuf, eight corpses are on the ground by the time Mattie completes her quest. That is not to say that these killings are unjust—not, at least, in the moral territory in which these characters move. But the film has something to say about this brand of justice. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l8 level1 lfo9; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">6.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Until the end: <b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;">Play</b> the climactic scene: the Kickback of Grace...the pit, snakes, images of Hell, the devil. Mattie’s desire for a very severe form of justice leads her into the very “valley of death” that she tells her mother, in a letter, the Lord will lead her through. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l8 level1 lfo9; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">7.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The action of grace in the form of a paradox: in achieving her aim of revenge against Tom Chanay, Mattie is “kick-backed” into death. Pure revenge leads to death, but it is in that dying that grace is made possible. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l8 level1 lfo9; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">8.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">We have to undergo the paradoxical realization, the epiphany, that what we thought was “life” was really death, and in dying to that “life” we come to realize what life really means. But we have to see the attraction in that former “life,” or else there is no conflict. It cannot be a straw man. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l8 level1 lfo9; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">9.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Cogburn’s mercy in racing her to her rescue: Cogburn cuts her hand and tries to suck out the poison. Then he takes Mattie on horseback to a doctor, many miles away. Cogburn runs the horse ragged until it collapses and he has to shoot it. He then carries Mattie the rest of the way, showing us, as Father Barron observes, that he is now moved by something other than cruel justice. He is moved by pity and affection for Mattie.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l8 level1 lfo9; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">10.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Play</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">: final envelope scene. True Grit’s structure takes the form of an envelope. We begin with a voiceover narrated by Mattie in 1908, twenty-five years after her pursuit of Chaney with Cogburn and LeBoeuf. At the end of the film, we again hear the older Mattie, and see her too, and learn that she has only one arm, the other cut off, in order to save her life, by the doctor Cogburn brought her to. As Father Barron astutely perceives, Mattie’s one arm images the lack of symmetry in the justice that drove her to pursue Tom Chaney. A justice without mercy, that disregards the claims of even the worst of men to a fair shake, is not the justice God intends for human beings. It is a justice, rather, for “misfits.” <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l8 level1 lfo9; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">11.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Song</span></b><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">: Iris DeMent: “The Everlasting Arms”: The film closes beautifully with images of mercy: in Cogburn’s transformative act of devotion in getting Mattie to the doctor; but also in the lovely spiritual with which the film ends, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” a song in which Mattie’s single armed justice is perfectly balanced by the two loving arms of the Father (imaged by Rooster Cogburn). <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><b style="mso-bidi-font-weight: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Conclusion<o:p></o:p></span></b></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l9 level1 lfo10; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">1.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Films need to depict the gesture that make contact with mystery and the invitation to grace<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l9 level1 lfo10; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">2.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Such is a gesture we find in Mattie’s killing of Tom Chanay<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: 14.0pt; mso-list: l9 level1 lfo10; tab-stops: list 14.0pt; text-indent: -14.0pt;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">3.<span style="font: normal normal normal 7pt/normal 'Times New Roman';"> </span></span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Much like O’Connor in her fiction, the Coen brothers in TRUE GRIT have used dark comedy, violence, and a stark refusal of sentimentality to picture a territory held largely by the devil, but one still capable of surprising its inhabitants with the kickback of grace. Ironically, it is from these (apparently) secular Jewish filmmakers that we have films that show us one of the most compelling paths toward the future in Christian filmmaking. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
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</div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-20232315338601460642011-11-30T16:14:00.001-06:002011-11-30T16:15:21.957-06:00Hugo--Redeeming the Time<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn4uCpwLhKXU1XaQIAGP32zvHiwMfPKC85nzklUBpwte5ZM5aBKLZn7f2UPy466Q_0wMU2Xvr33jwutOb8NRU7CcdvSS0zAeQK6YarQ5mJaMaRICdM0R6Ih-Ed18mv_XN5Hlo-VVpCkZw/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjn4uCpwLhKXU1XaQIAGP32zvHiwMfPKC85nzklUBpwte5ZM5aBKLZn7f2UPy466Q_0wMU2Xvr33jwutOb8NRU7CcdvSS0zAeQK6YarQ5mJaMaRICdM0R6Ih-Ed18mv_XN5Hlo-VVpCkZw/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Martin Scorsese’s new film, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0970179/">Hugo</a>,</i> is a remarkable, deeply satisfying work of art. With a screenplay by John Logan based upon Brian Selznick’s 2007 Caldecott award-winning children’s book, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><a href="http://www.theinventionofhugocabret.com/index.htm">The Invention of Hugo Cabret</a></i>, <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hugo</i> is a family film that transcends the genre, reminding us of how wondrous and entrancing filmmaking can be at its very best.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The eponymous Hugo is an orphan living alone in a train station (the Gare Montparnasse) in Paris. Hugo lives by his wits and light thievery, creating cover for himself by continuing to run the enormous station clocks that his wayward uncle has abandoned. Hugo’s father was a watchmaker and taught Hugo many skills. Together they worked on repairing an ingenious automaton (with the ability, when in good working order, to write) salvaged by Hugo’s father from a museum. Even after his father’s death, Hugo continues to try and repair the automaton, believing that when he has it up and running again it will bring him a message from his father. Hugo does succeed in repairing the automaton, and the message it brings him leads him on a grand adventure involving friendship, family, and the magic of the movies themselves.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Saying only this, however, might lead one to believe, as I believed before seeing it, that the tone of this story is one with that of the Harry Potter films, or any other fantasy children’s film. But this is not the case. <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hugo</i> is not high fantasy, though it has certain whimsical elements and plenty of excitement. Its tone is rather more meditative, at times even melancholy (should I say more French?), and generally takes a more dramatic slant on its central theme of time and how to redeem it. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Coming to grips with loss, with the pain of being unable to recapture or undo the past, is certainly one concern of <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hugo</i>. But at its core the film presents a quest for redemption, a search for the key to fixing the brokenness of human beings. The analogy at the heart of the film is between the broken automaton and the brokenness of the human beings associated with it. It may not seem on the surface a felicitous comparison, considering human beings as machine-like. But <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hugo</i> makes good use of the analogy insofar as to indicate, as Hugo himself remarks, that like machines the world, and every human being within it, has a purpose, and that nothing happens that doesn’t have some <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">point</i>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">On the way toward finding his purpose Hugo encounters friendship in a girl named Isabelle, and the unsentimental portrayal of their friendship is lovely, and happily never even entertains the temptation to introduce the sexual element into their tween affection. Hugo also encounters a mystery involving the early history of the movies, and some of the most charming parts of the film are the scenes in which Scorsese presents a cinematic valentine to the work of the early French filmmaker, <a href="http://www.earlycinema.com/pioneers/melies_bio.html">George Méliès</a>. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Hugo</span></i><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"> offers a fairy tale view of Paris in the Twenties, with superb costuming, set design and acting. Ben Kingsley gives a memorable turn as George Méliès, and the young and richly- talented Asa Butterfield and Cloë Grace Moretz deserve special kudos for their performances as Hugo and Isabelle. The impressionistic performances by Christopher Lee, Emily Mortimer, Frances de la Tour and Richard Griffiths, all characters in the train station, are also charming. Helen McCrory deserves congratulation for her role as the wife of George Méliès. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Sacha Baron Cohen, finally, does very well in the role of the Station Inspector, but the only quibble I have with <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hugo</i> is the two coarse comments his character utters, not funny to begin with, but also completely out of keeping with the tone of the rest of the film. They clunk as alarmingly as the spanner with which Hugo just misses hitting his character.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Go see <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Hugo</i>. Though not officially a Christmas movie, it offers family entertainment of the highest order that resonates beautifully with the themes of the coming Season. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1999089465199150217.post-25684157981506789882011-11-29T16:39:00.000-06:002011-11-29T16:39:33.767-06:00The Social Impact of Going Indie<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzKtwB1ePNLvJyN-hcK-w_1IUS7qB8_KvGTThVswVOfKvj3GsC8NNOMKc3quLZdBPafhgBUE9H-s5_WeNiUs3cinRLGDHld54Qji50sbgu6K7PXg5GpOPwj3h9G_9XHBAuN6jL0lWMffg/s1600/images.jpeg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhzKtwB1ePNLvJyN-hcK-w_1IUS7qB8_KvGTThVswVOfKvj3GsC8NNOMKc3quLZdBPafhgBUE9H-s5_WeNiUs3cinRLGDHld54Qji50sbgu6K7PXg5GpOPwj3h9G_9XHBAuN6jL0lWMffg/s1600/images.jpeg" /></a></div><br />
<div class="MsoNormal"><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><a href="http://indiereader.com/2011/11/the-future-is-indie/">Here is a compelling blog post </a>by independent author David Gaughran, who apart from his fiction writes probably the best blog out there on independent publishing. Gaughran makes the case that the future of publishing belongs to those going indie:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">The problem for large publishers…is that they are transitioning from a marketplace where they controlled distribution to one where they don’t. The digital playing field is wide open and, for the first time, the publishing conglomerates are facing real competition from a horde of hungry self-publishers, savvy small publishers, as well as, of course, Amazon.</span><span style="font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">You can read Gaughran’s post to check out the numbers that back up this claim. Among those statistics:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">For the last few months, indies were responsible for between a third and a quarter of the top-selling e-books on Amazon.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">That’s a significant loss in market share for traditional publishers, to put it mildly. <o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">As I mentioned yesterday on the Facebook page of my company, <a href="https://www.facebook.com/trojantubentertainment">Trojan Tub Entertainment</a>, last I week I called into the Kojo Nnamdi Show, a local Washington D.C. radio talk show, which was featuring a panel discussion on the rise of e-books. I wanted to respond to one of the panelist’s observations that the rise of e-books (even apart from independent publishing) threatens traditional brick-and-mortar bookstores and the culture they foster and sustain. As I told the panel, I am in no way eager for the loss of traditional bookstores. As long as they’re selling coffee, they provide something rapidly disappearing from our culture: shared public space in which to relax, talk, read, learn. Yet at the same time, I don’t want to be romantic about contemporary bookstores. Most of them don’t really provide a rich “café culture,” however good the lattes may be. But the panelist did raise an issue worth thinking about:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">What’s the social impact of the rise of the e-book, and of the scores of independent authors and publishers, like myself, who are capitalizing on the technology? As more and more of the reading experience goes, as it were, “underground” to the Internet, is it a net loss or net gain when it comes to creating communities? In my call to the Kojo Nnamdi Show I claimed that the independent authors and their readers are forming vibrant virtual communities. The website on which Gaughran piece appears, IndieReader.com, is just one of many sites and blogs where such communities are being formed. But is this an exaggeration? Can we really call these communities? Or are they simply marketplaces?<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">I would love to hear your thoughts.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">Meanwhile, a final note from Gaughran’s piece:<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left: .5in;"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">As more business shifts online and to digital (and this Christmas will be <i>huge</i> in that regard), large publishers are going to suffer even more as, for the first time, a significant portion of their business is going to be subjected to the kind of competition they were shielded from through their control of the print distribution network.<o:p></o:p></span></div><div class="MsoNormal"><br />
</div><div class="MsoNormal"><span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-family: 'American Typewriter';">If true, this is a powerful point about tectonic shifts in the field of book distribution. But even if it's true, what’s the social impact?</span><br />
<span style="color: #0e0e0e; font-family: 'American Typewriter';"><br />
</span></div>Daniel McInernyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17395718013706017328noreply@blogger.com4