High Concepts

On Popular Fictions, Or How I Learned to Relax and Enjoy Downton Abbey

2012-02-21T16:51:00.000-06:00

A friend of mine wrote on Facebook about Downton Abbey: “take away the English accents, the bucolic setting, the period costumes, and the antiquated moral code, and you’re left with Days of Our Lives.

So true, I thought at first. Downton Abbey often suffers from severe melodramatic fits.

Such as: the illicit lover who ends up dying in flagrante delicto...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...

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 The Great Gatsby?

Speaking of Dickens and Wilkie Collins. T.S. Eliot (that’s Thomas Stearns 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:

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.

Eliot’s point is that what we enjoy in the best melodramas are qualities inherent to great storytelling itself.

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.

G.K. Chesterton echoes the theme in his magnificent book on Dickens (whose 200th birthday, 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 even though he was widely admired. 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.

[Dickens’s] power...lay in the fact that he expressed with an energy and brilliancy quite uncommon the things close to the common mind.

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:

[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...”

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.

I heard Julian Fellowes, the screenwriter of Downton Abbey (and a Catholic), 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, Downton Abbey 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.

And this is what Downton Abbey 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.

Can This Be the Catholic Moment in the Arts?

2012-02-15T19:34:00.001-06:00

“Irish poets, learn your trade.”

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.

The other day Emily Stimpson, a blogger over at CatholicVote.org, wrote an inspired piece called “Telling the Catholic Story.” 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:

So again, why? Why can’t we match in quality and skill the media being made by our secular counterparts?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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:

The absence of a devotion to craft.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Many Catholic individuals and institutions have recognized this truth. Barbara Nicolosi and her efforts in founding Act One, and John Paul the Great Catholic University and its mission to educate students in the arts and new media, are just two examples that readily come to mind.

But so many more devoted artists are needed.

Catholic artists, learn your trade.

* The photograph at the top is of Flannery O'Connor's writing desk at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia

Ralph McInerny, Sonnet 71

2012-01-28T20:28:00.000-06:00

My father, Ralph McInerny, died two years today, January 29, 2010. Below is his poem, Sonnet 71, from his collection, Shakespearean Variations (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.

No longer mourn for me when I am dead

Nor dirges play nor toll the dismal bell,

For when in earth I’m laid at last to bed

My spirit will in a better country dwell,

Where then what is will be as if it’s not,

And what is not will be again. ‘Tis so,

For there is that which cannot be forgot

But rises out of reach of tearful woe.

Why would the poet seek to catch in verse

Our deeds if we were only drying clay

And did not in our lives by acts rehearse

A drama that resists mortal decay?

Our going would elicit only moan

If we were wholly gone when we are gone.

Trojan Tub Newsletter Ready to Set Sail...

2012-01-26T15:37:00.001-06:00

If you’d like to follow events at my company, Trojan Tub Entertainment, then sign up for the new Trojan Tub electronic newsletter!

The inaugural edition is ready to go. To get on the list, just send your name and email address to info@kingdomofpatria.com.

What’s Trojan Tub Entertainment? Click here.

You can also follow Trojan Tub at the company Facebook page, and on Twitter.

Thanks for coming aboard!

6 Insights from Pope Benedict on Authentic Communication

2012-01-24T19:47:00.001-06:00

Today, the Feast of St. Francis de Sales, patron saint of writers and journalists, Pope Benedict XVI released, as is traditional, his Message for the 46^th Annual World Communications Day (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.”

Here are the key insights I gleaned from Pope Benedict’s remarks:

1. True communication between human persons involves an interplay of word and silence. When one of these is missing, communication breaks down.

2. In the absence of silence, words rich in context cannot exist. “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.”

3. Silence is the more necessary amid the “surcharge of stimuli” from modern electronic media. “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.”

4. 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. 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.

5. Many types of websites, applications, and social networks can be amenable to authentic questioning and the silence that must accompany it. 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, as long as those taking part in the conversation do not neglect to cultivate their own inner lives” (emphasis added).

6. 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. 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.”

The Obama Policy's Reasons of Force

2012-01-22T15:57:00.001-06:00

Still riffing on themes from The Iron Lady and Pope John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical, Centesimus Annus… 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.

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.

About this outrage, the Archbishop and Cardinal-designate of New York, Timothy Dolan, commented:

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….

“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 here.)

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.

To use a pair of terms from another encyclical by Pope John Paul II, Evangelium Vitae, in the Obama administration’s attack upon the consciences of American citizens, it is replacing the “force of reason” with the “reasons of force.”

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.

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.

GarageBand for Philosophy

2012-01-20T16:25:00.000-06:00

The introduction by Apple yesterday 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.

I think about this announcement in juxtaposition with this post by Matthew over at By Way of Beauty, 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”:

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.”

For example, the changes in the way we exist brought about by the internet are the real “message” of a medium, not its actual content (what we read through the medium—say, Wikipedia entries, news articles, etc.).

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.

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.

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.

Just think of it as GarageBand for philosophy.

The Iron Lady and the Pope, Part 2

2012-01-18T19:06:00.001-06:00

Over at Standpoint there is a perceptive review of The Iron Lady by Peter Whittle. The Thatcher years in England, Whittle observes, “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.”

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. The Iron Lady’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 malaise (this, no doubt in spite of the filmmakers’ own political propensities—which is a credit to their art).

I want to pursue this question by bringing Pope John Paul II’s 1991 encyclical, Centesimus Annus, 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.

Caveat: this is not a review essay of Centesimus Annus. For something more along those lines, see

a. George Weigel, Witness to Hope, pp. 612ff.;

b. this revisiting of the encyclical by Weigel last summer in First Things;

c. and this series of articles by Thomas Storck over at The Distributist Review.

1. There is an essential bond between freedom and truth (CA no. 4): freedom that refuses to be bound to truth falls 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 the truth about the human person.

2. Socialism mistakes the truth about the human person; its error is fundamentally “anthropological.” With socialism 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” (CA no. 13).

3. There is an inherent dignity to the worker and to work. As Leo XIII affirmed, work is “personal,” 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” (CA no. 6).

4. Human persons have a right to private property—though this is not an absolute right. It must harmonize with its complementary principle: the universal destination of the earth’s goods.

To be continued…

Peter Jackson, The Hobbit, and Tolkien's Noble Heroes

2012-01-17T19:01:00.000-06:00

I want to insert here between discussions of The Iron Lady and Pope John Paul II’s Centesimus Annus this fine piece by Erik Wecks, one of the GeekDads over at Wired, 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 Wired about Tolkien. See also here.

The Iron Lady and the Pope, Part 1

2012-01-16T21:09:00.000-06:00

I came out of the theater with a twinge of disappointment after seeing The Iron Lady, Phyllida Lloyd’s biopic of Margaret Thatcher. Not because The Iron Lady 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 Golden Globe 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 Mr. Saturday Night 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 New York Times review 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 “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 Lloyd and Morgan trying to have it both ways. The complexities of their subject 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.

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 The Queen (2006, directed by Stephen Frears, written by Peter Morgan), which is not at all a biopic 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.

There are scenes in The Iron Lady 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. The Iron Lady, 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.

One of the most intriguing facets of The Iron Lady 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 The Iron Lady 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, Centesimus Annus (“The Hundreth Year”—written for the centennial of Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum), 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 Centesimus Annus, and thus pay tribute to one thing about which Mrs. Thatcher was undoubtedly in the right:

The supreme importance of thinking.

The Intersection of Technology and the Liberal Arts

2012-01-04T20:06:00.001-06:00

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.”

What does this mean?

Toward the end of Walter Isaacson’s biography, Jobs is quoted as observing:

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.

There’s a lot to think about in these interesting remarks.

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)?

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 that way relate to contemporary digital technology?

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)?

I’d appreciate your thoughts…

Meanwhile, for my own humble attempt to bring digital technology into conversation with art, see here.

2012: Year of the Artist-Entrepreneur

2012-01-02T12:13:00.000-06:00

Back on Decmeber 29, Publisher’s Weekly reported 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 The Mill River Recluse and Chris Culver’s The Abbey.

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 annus mirabilis 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, Let’s Get Digital, has written this vivid summary 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 combined. 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: “The old order was fragmenting, and something messy and chaotic (and beautiful) was emerging in its stead.”

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.

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.

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…

But seriously, I love this electronic revolution primarily for the artistic freedom 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.

This past summer I began Trojan Tub Entertainment 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.

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.

Yesterday GigaOM, a technology blog, made this prediction 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.

If you’d like to join me, then go ahead and dive into the Kingdom of Patria website, and venture over to the homepage to download the first book in my Patria series of humorous adventures for middle grade readers: Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits. 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.

The second book in the Patria series, Stoop of Mastodon Meadow, will be released very early here in 2012. You can find a synopsis and the cover art here. Thoughts on these are welcome.

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!

New Year's Day and the Desire for More

2012-01-01T12:01:00.000-06:00

I found this meditation this morning at the beginning of the January 2012 Magnificat. 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…

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 is built into us and God made us this way so that we would never stop longing for him.

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.

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.

Through the intercession of Our Lady, Mary Mother of God, may God bless you all with abundant graces in 2012!

Best of Arts & Entertainment 2011

2011-12-31T10:16:00.005-06:00

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.

Regular readers of High Concepts 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.

So here goes: my personal favorites for 2011! Let me know some of yours when you're done reading...

Most Enjoyable Day in the Presence of Awesome Beauty

Every day with my wife…and our family’s tour of the Vatican Museums and St. Peter’s Basilica last January

Most Interesting Archaeological Phenomenon

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.

Most Compelling Reads

Anthony Trollope, The Last Chronicle of Barset…if you haven’t read Trollope’s Barchester series, pour yourself a glass of port, throw another log on the fire, and get comfortable.

Graham Greene, Brighton Rock…a chilling portrait of a damned soul wrestling with God and with himself.

Flannery O’Connor, “The Enduring Chill” (short story)…another story of a damned soul wrestling with God and with himself, only funnier.

Evelyn Waugh, “Love in the Slump” (short story), among other stories in Charles Ryder’s Schooldays and Other Stories, damned souls going out of their way not to wrestle with much of anything at all, even funnier

Charles Dickens, Great Expectations (audio book read by Frank Muller)… listened to while driving through Pennsylvania on a brilliant October day

David Mamet, The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture…I am not a libertarian, but I found much to be sympathetic with in Mamet’s cranky critique of liberalism

Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs…reading now, will blog on it soon

Favorite Movies

True Grit (Cohen Brothers version)

No Country For Old Men

Of Gods and Men

Hugo

Movies, Honorable Mention:

The Dark Knight (a superhero movie explicitly taking up the specter of nihilism)

The Dish (extremely funny Australians)

The Efficiency Expert (a sleeper Anthony Hopkins film from 1992...even more extremely funny Australians)

Tree of Life

Tintin

I enjoyed Harry Potter 7, Part 1 much more than Part 2

Favorite Documentary

Father Robert Barron’s Catholicism (the excerpts I’ve seen have sold me!)

New Favorite Comedian

Brian Regan

Favorite Television Shows

Foyle’s War
Lark Rise to Candleford

Favorite Live Theater

The productions of Henry V and The Tempest put on by the company of the American Shakespeare Center in Staunton, Virginia.

Most Sublime Athletic Performance

Barcelona's dismantling of Manchester United in last May's Champions' League Final at Wembley.

Favorite “Football” Team

Tottenham Hotspur

Favorite Music

Any number of “early music” (Renaissance) songs I downloaded from iTunes

John Rutter’s Cambridge Singers’ Christmas Album is a winner

Happy New Year 2012!

Great Snakes! Spielberg's Tintin

2011-12-22T16:00:00.001-06:00

I first encountered the Tintin 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 Explorers on the Moon 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.

I still own a tattered copy of Red Rackham’s Treasure, which in time sparked the flames of my own children’s love affair with the Tintin 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 The Adventures of Tintin. 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.

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—

The motion-capture technique is perfectly suited to bringing the Tintin comics to life, in that it retains Hergé’s ligne claire 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.

Interestingly, the Tintin comics first appeared in a Belgian Catholic newspaper for youth, Le Petite Vingtième, and Hergé himself was a Catholic.

Sneak Preview--Stoop of Mastodon Meadow

2011-12-21T12:36:00.001-06:00

The next installment in my Patria series of humorous adventure novels for middle grade readers, Stoop of Mastodon Meadow, 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:

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.

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.

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.

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!

On the lookout for that perfect virtual stocking stuffer? Do you realize how easy it is to gift an eBook as a Christmas present? Perhaps you’ll consider buying someone on your list the hilarious first book in the Patria series, Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits. 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!

Just follow these simple instructions on how to gift an eBook via Amazon.

Poetic Cinema: An Instance

2011-12-19T15:37:00.000-06:00

Treat yourself in this final week of Advent to a viewing of Xavier Beauvois’ film, Of Gods and Men (starring Lambert Wilson and Michael Lonsdale), 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.

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—A Man For All Seasons, The Passion of the Christ, Ushpizin, Into Great Silence, The Tree of Life—it stands without the least embarrassment. It may well be better than any of these.

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.”

Greene goes to comment:

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 Shipyard…or Mr. Wright’s Song of Ceylon: 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.

Of Gods and Men 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.”

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.

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 final testament, in which he voices his desire to “immerse my gaze in the Father’s and contemplate with him his children of Islam as he sees them.”

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.

Come Chat About Writing

2011-12-16T10:15:00.000-06:00

I’m pleased to announce that I am today’s Friday Feature interview on Heather G. Kelly’s writer’s blog, editedtowithinaninchofmylife.

So come on over for a more-or-less "live" chat about writing, my new book, Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits, and the Kingdom of Patria.

I believe I’ll be able to reply to comments and questions over the course of the next few days.

See you there!

On Writing Jane Austen Sequels

2011-12-15T15:35:00.000-06:00

And what Jane Austen fan hasn’t written one, if only in his or her imagination?

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.

Many authors have gleefully given in to the temptation to continue the stories of Austen’s characters—sequels to Pride and Prejudice being the most popular choice. No doubt many of these have been dreadful. Would Western Civilization been incomplete, after all, without Pride and Prejudice and Zombies? Even the celebrated mystery writer and Austen afficionado, P.D. James, who has just come out with her own Pride and Prejudice sequel, Death Comes to Pemberley, has been the victim of tepid reviews on Amazon.

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 not wanting the party to end—especially when the party is comprised of the best of one’s friends. And this is a heavenly desire. Indeed, a desire that can only really be achieved in that ultimate sequel in Heaven.

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. The effect of which is to make the joy last forever. 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.

No one, in other words, writes a sequel to The Sun Also Rises.

This is a point Chesterton made about the characters of Dickens:

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.

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:

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.

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.”

Some may be. But not the author of Death Comes to Pemberley.

Stout Hearts on Indie Snippets

2011-12-14T12:29:00.000-06:00

Many thanks to Bryan Dennis at Indie Snippets for featuring today Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits. Check it out!

And if you haven’t yet visited the Kingdom of Patria, stop on by!

* The magnificent illustration of Patria above is by Theodore Schluenderfritz, who illustrates the Kingdom of Patria website and the Patria book covers.

The Film Director and The Noble Savage

2011-12-05T16:38:00.001-06:00

The Film Director is David Mamet, also the Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright and author of many books of essays, most recently the crackling Conservative-Libertarian manifesto: The Secret Knowledge: On the Dismantling of American Culture (Sentinel 2011).

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—

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).

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 (per impossibile) 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?

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.

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,” oikos). 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 Distributism.

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.

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:

…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.

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 dedicated 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).

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 common good (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 community and culture that Mamet is so glad to find on movie sets.

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.

A different, a deeper, philosophy of the human person, of what it means for human beings to flourish, is needed.

Christians and Aliens: Making Movies in a Culture of Death

2011-12-02T12:46:00.003-06:00

Here is irony.

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.

Meanwhile, far too many professedly Christian films fall woefully below the bar the Cohens have set.

Why is this?

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.

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.

Comments and questions welcome.

CHRISTIANS AND ALIENS:

MAKING MOVIES IN A CULTURE OF DEATH

Daniel McInerny

Radical Emancipation: Confronting the Challenge of Secularism

12th Annual Fall Conference of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics & Culture

University of Notre Dame

November 11, 2011

Introduction

Our Souls At Hazard: NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN

1. Play the opening of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2:45)

a. Landscape...barren...

b. Sheriff Bell comparing himself against the “old timers”

c. 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

2. Brief plot summary: Sheriff Bell, his soul at hazard, grappling with the meaning of evil, against the passing of an older moral & religious order

3. Sheriff Bell: “A man would have to put his soul at hazard.” (why? because he’s facing the Devil);

4. Script of “That’s vanity” scene: the devil’s territory, p. 110

5. Play the closing scene of NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (3:00)

a. trying to catch up with his father, symbol of moral & religious clarity...but he can’t catch up.

6. 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...

7. Walker Percy: before life can be affirmed in our culture, “death-in-life must be named.”

Transition: 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?

In short, how is a Christian to sing his songs in this alien land?

I want to consider two strategies:

A. The “Faith-Based” Project

B. The Approach Through Paradox

Caveat: 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.

I. The “Faith-Based” Project: FIREPROOF

1. 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.

2. 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.

3. 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.”

4. 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:

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.

5. Results: 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.

6. BELLA statistics: March 2010, Eduardo Versategui’s website: BELLA has saved over 300 babies.

7. Why isn’t it churlish to criticize such films?

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;

b. Christ told parables, but he did not “entertain”: movies are entertainment, and they have their own integrity as such

c. Even from an evangelical viewpoint: who knows what better impact might be had?

9. A big part of the issue here is the question of audience. 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).

10. Criticism of FIREPROOF: Play scene with father (Chapter 8) (3 minutes)

Didacticism not conflict: 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)

Caleb’s vision of a good man (evil) with God’s vision (good)

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.

Lack of a sacramental imagination. 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.

The moment of grace is ineffective because there is a lack of the significant, paradoxical action through which grace flows. 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, we are not shocked when it brings him low. We know he has been wrong from the very beginning. The sense of paradox is missing, MYSTERY, that shakes us out of complacency.

III. The Kickback of Grace: TRUE GRIT

1. Play opening scene: “nothing is free, but the grace of God”

2. Brief synopsis

3. 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.

4. Script 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.

5. 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.

6. Until the end: Play 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.

7. 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.

8. 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.

9. 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.

10. Play: 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.”

11. Song: 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).

Conclusion

1. Films need to depict the gesture that make contact with mystery and the invitation to grace

2. Such is a gesture we find in Mattie’s killing of Tom Chanay

3. 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.

Hugo--Redeeming the Time

2011-11-30T16:14:00.001-06:00

Martin Scorsese’s new film, Hugo, 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, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, Hugo is a family film that transcends the genre, reminding us of how wondrous and entrancing filmmaking can be at its very best.

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.

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. Hugo 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.

Coming to grips with loss, with the pain of being unable to recapture or undo the past, is certainly one concern of Hugo. 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 Hugo 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 point.

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, George Méliès.

Hugo 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.

Sacha Baron Cohen, finally, does very well in the role of the Station Inspector, but the only quibble I have with Hugo 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.

Go see Hugo. Though not officially a Christmas movie, it offers family entertainment of the highest order that resonates beautifully with the themes of the coming Season.

The Social Impact of Going Indie

2011-11-29T16:39:00.000-06:00

Here is a compelling blog post 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:

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.

You can read Gaughran’s post to check out the numbers that back up this claim. Among those statistics:

For the last few months, indies were responsible for between a third and a quarter of the top-selling e-books on Amazon.

That’s a significant loss in market share for traditional publishers, to put it mildly.

As I mentioned yesterday on the Facebook page of my company, Trojan Tub Entertainment, 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:

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?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

Meanwhile, a final note from Gaughran’s piece:

As more business shifts online and to digital (and this Christmas will be huge 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.

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?

Moral Absolutes and Foyle's War

2011-11-20T15:57:00.002-06:00

Last weekend, in a keynote delivered before the annual conference of the Notre Dame Center for Ethics and Culture, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre argued that one of the primary features of theism is a belief in moral absolutes, the view that certain sorts of action ought never to be done no matter what the circumstances.

What does this mean?

A moral absolute is, first of all, a moral precept. A moral precept commands human beings either to do or to refrain from doing something. Where do moral precepts come from? The first part of the answer is that they come from the demands of our human nature in pursuit of its fulfillment. If, in other words, we as human beings are going to be happy as human beings are meant to be, then there are certain actions that we must take, just as there are certain actions that we must avoid.

Analogy: if the flowers in the garden are going to flourish as flowers do, then there are necessary requirements that must be met. They need adequate soil, sunlight, water. So too, if we human beings are going to flourish as human beings do, then there are certain requirements that must be met.

The analogy limps insofar as we, as rational beings, have the ability to reflect upon the meaning of our flourishing, and freely decide what course of action best conduces to it. But even so, our human nature, like that of the flower, has requirements, and if our decisions fail to meet them, then moral harm is the result.

An absolute moral precept, however, is not just any old precept. I may discern that it is prudent for me, in the present circumstances of my health, to refrain from eating red meat. This discernment of prudence binds me in the circs (as Bertie Wooster would say), but it does not bind even me, much less others, absolutely. In six months’ time it may be perfectly prudent for me to go back to eating red meat again.

But an absolute moral precept binds me and all other human beings always and everywhere, without reference to circumstances. It is, for example, always and everywhere wrong to murder. It doesn’t matter if one was provoked, if the murdered person “deserved” it, whether the murderer acted in a fit of passion, whether something very good resulted from it, etc. The circumstances of the crime may mitigate judgment, but they never change the intrinsically evil nature of the act itself. In the Catholic tradition, an action prohibited by an absolute precept is referred to as a malum in se, an action that is evil in itself.

Moral precepts have a second, and more important, source than human nature’s demands. For nature itself is something that has been made by God and directed toward God as its end. Absolute moral precepts help make up what in the Catholic tradition is called the natural law. But the natural law just is God’s eternal law, as seen from the perspective of human beings.

One of the things that makes absolute moral precepts so hard to swallow is that sometimes very good things result from breaking them. This is a great temptation. But as St. Paul stresses, we may never do evil so that good may come. However attractive the result may be of a murder—and the resulting consequence of an action is one of its circumstances—the murder itself can never be morally licit.

That means never.

In any circumstances.

Whatsoever.

As examples of failures to abide by the absolute moral precept forbidding the intentional taking of innocent life, MacIntyre mentioned the Dresden bombings by the Allies during World War II and the hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians killed in Iraq since 2003. I cannot recall if he also mentioned the nuclear bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August of 1945, but he well might have. Granted, there is a distinction to be made in warfare between actions that, despite one’s honest military intentions, result in the deaths of innocent civilians, and actions that are expressly intended to take their lives. But it is this latter action that MacIntyre follows Catholic Church teaching in always and everywhere condemning. (For particular statements, see here. Also see the pamphlet, "Mr. Truman's Degree," by the late Roman Catholic philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe.)

After MacIntyre’s talk, there was some chatter among the conferees about a failure on his part to account for the role of prudence in moral decision-making—especially in wartime. If by “prudence” is meant a regard for the good consequences that resulted from bombings such as Hiroshima and Nagasaki, then MacIntyre did well to discount it. For this is not prudence but rationalization. Prudence gets started from the respect for absolute moral precepts. These set the boundaries within which prudent choice is possible. Thus, to reject moral absolutes is to reject prudence, and to morally (and spiritually) damage oneself in the process.

“But what (it will be said) “about the x number of innocent lives that were saved by the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Sometimes one has to do something awful in order to preserve a greater good.”

Generally, I believe that when someone starts using the phrase “the greater good,” something has gone dangerously wrong in his moral reasoning. For what the phrase usually appeals to is a good consequence (saving x number of innocent lives) so compelling that we should do whatever it takes in order to secure it.

But human nature, not to mention our Creator, forbids such reasoning. There are certain actions which in themselves destroy human dignity, and should never be taken no matter how much good accrues from doing so.

It is extremely rare to see in the artifacts of our popular culture a serious consideration of moral absolutes in times of war. That is why I was so glad to view recently the episode entitled “Plan of Attack” in the magnificent British mystery series, Foyle’s War, starring Michael Kitchen. “Plan of Attack” takes up the question of the morality of Allied bombings in 1944, when Germany was all but defeated, and the Allies were trying to force Germany into terms of unconditional surrender by indiscriminate bombing of public areas. The episode treats the issue of moral absolutes impressively through the vehicle of a conference of ecumenical churchmen and an important Roman Catholic character. In contrast to the way a television series such as The West Wing handled the question of moral absolutes in time of war, in which Martin Sheen’s President Bartlett was depicted as being “forced” to do evil so that good might come, the Foyle’s War episode shows deep respect for moral absolutes even in situations where it is most tempting to do otherwise. It is well worth a look if only for this, but the episode also sensitively handles questions having to do with faith, humility and forgiveness. Anthony Horowritz, the creator of Foyle’s War and screenwriter of this episode, is highly to be congratulated.

* In thinking through this episode of Foyle’s War I have learned much from “Faith Foretold is Faith Respected,” an unpublished paper by Nicholas Plants, professor at Prince George’s Community College, which he presented at the same Faith, Film & Philosophy conference at which I presented my paper, “On Mysteries and the Higher Mysteries,” the notes of which I provided in my three previous posts.

On Mysteries and the Higher Mystery, Part 3

2011-11-17T13:24:00.004-06:00

The third and final part of my notes on my talk on the philosophical and theological dimensions of mystery stories. In Parts 2 and 3 I distinguish two very different approaches to mystery stories, the one typified by Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, the other by G.K. Chesterton’s Father Brown. Don’t worry that these are only notes. The holes in the argument you find here were all part of the delivered address.

Part III. The Detective-Hero as Metaphysical Moralist

1. GKC’s Father Brown. His origin story from GKC’s Autobiography (300-302): Chesterton, Father O’Connor, and the Cambridge undergraduates. Father Brown himself is a paradox, a featureless man, sheltered, innocent, not apparently very brilliant, knowing more about evil than anyone.

2. Represents a very different kind of detective story, and thus a very different understanding of paradox.

3. Holmes vs. Brown: GKC, “The Ideal Detective Story”: The side of the character that cannot be connected with the crime has to be presented first; the crime has to be presented next as something in complete contrast with it; and the psychological reconciliation of the two must come after that, in the place where the common or garden detective explains that he was led to the truth by the stump of a cigar left on the lawn or the spot of red ink on the blotting-pad in the boudoir. But there is nothing in the nature of things to prevent the explanation, when it does come, being as convincing to a psychologist as the other is to a policeman.

4. What does the character of Father Brown imply about the world, the human person, and mystery?

(a) the world is more than matter in motion

(b) the human person is above all a spiritual creature: with intellect and will, with ends distinct from his purposes

5. “Father Brown’s Secret”: not just imaginative, but a moral sympathy, with the criminal’s predicament as a sinner; giving insight into the full reality of human motivation.

6. the Chestertonian sleuth is not about “clues” as much as he is a reader of the human heart. “the only thrill, even of a common thriller, is concerned somehow with the conscience and the will,” “In Defence of Detective Stories.” Investigating crime and evil in light of the higher mystery: our Fall and Redemption.

7. The heirs of Father Brown?

(a) Noir in general (Thomas Hibbs, Arts of Darkness: “Noir never delivers final redemption for its characters, but it does present characters in a quest for a lost code of redemption,” p. 22).

(b) Foyle’s War

Conclusion

1. The Paradox of Evil: Nos. 394-96 of CCC: Satan is a murderer from the beginning.

2. Mystery itself only resolvable by the highest of mysteries: the God who Died.

On Mysteries and the Higher Mystery, Part 2

2011-11-16T15:00:00.000-06:00

II. The Detective/Hero as Thinking Machine

The beginning of “A Scandal in Bohemia”: “To Sherlock Holmes she is always the woman. I have seldom heard him mention her under any other name. In his eyes she eclipses and predominates the whole of her sex. It was not that he felt any emotion akin to love for Irene Adler. All emotions, and that one particularly, were abhorrent to his cold, precise but admirably balanced mind. He was, I take it, the most perfect reasoning and observing machine that the world has seen, but as a lover he would have placed himself in a false position. He never spoke of the softer passions, save with a gibe and a sneer. They were admirable things for the observer — excellent for drawing the veil from men's motives and actions. But for the trained reasoner to admit such intrusions into his own delicate and finely adjusted temperament was to introduce a distracting factor which might throw a doubt upon all his mental results. Grit in a sensitive instrument, or a crack in one of his own high-power lenses, would not be more disturbing than a strong emotion in a nature such as his. And yet there was but one woman to him, and that woman was the late Irene Adler, of dubious and questionable memory.”

1. What does the character of Holmes imply about the world, the human person, and mystery?

(a) the world is data, “facts”, sensible stimuli

(b) the human person, if responsive to such stimuli, can collect these facts, be a combiner of units of sensation (out of Hobbes, Locke and Ockham)

(c) a mystery is a paradox (Holmes is outwitted by the very woman he think he is outwitting—“A Scandal in Bohemia”) that can be unraveled by tracing the linkage of efficient causes; or, a mystery is a “puzzle” (two dimensional pieces designed to fit with one another)

2. The Holmesian “Clue.” The clue is a bogus epiphany. In itself it has no ontological significance. It doesn’t open to contemplative penetration the intelligible depths of some object; rather it suggests to the quick deductive wit discursive attention to the superficies of a dozen other objects. The clue and the chain of reasoning function, like a jigsaw puzzle, in two dimensions. The sleuth’s reconstruction of a crime works at the level of efficient causes only; the epiphany implies an intuitive grasp of material, formal, and final causes as well (Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, p. 176).

3. We are now in a position to name Holmes’s heirs:

a. CSI

b. The Matrix

c. Wallander

d. action-thriller heroes such as Bond and Indiana Jones and Bruce Willis in RED

e. Inception

f. Source Code, etc. etc.

4. In emphasizing the metaphor of the mechanic mind in these films and television shows, I don’t want to neglect the obvious fact that there is real human, indeed moral, interest in these stories. There are criminals to be apprehended, evil to be fought, truisms to be upheld (GKC: “These common and current publications have nothing essentially evil about them. They express the sanguine and heroic truisms on which civilization is built; for it is clear that unless civilization is built on truisms, it is not built at all” In Defence of Penny Dreadfuls pp. 24-25). And for this reason these stories will always be popular, and for my money, rightly so. What truisms? Greed is evil, crime doesn’t pay, love is stronger than death, etc. (And it is not to say that interesting themes aren’t played with—in the thriller genre, for example, “identity” is an integral theme, as we see in A History of Violence.)

5. And the detective/heroes of these stories often enough display residual heroic virtues, principally cunning and courage. The virtues of Ulysses. Yet we should recall that Ulysses was damned by Dante. Hubris. His failure to recognize limits to his cunning and courage. In Sherlock Holmes himself, we notice a similar hubris, a defect that mutates and spreads like a virus through the dramatic lineage of heroes and heroines who succeed him. It’s not Holmes’s addiction to cocaine (“a cynical defiance of a pleasureless world” Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, p. 173) that is so harmful, it is his devotion to his “method.”

6. Holmes plays the “game” for the game’s own sake…the “game” is his real drug…he could just as easily have been a criminal: “Burglary has always been an alternative profession, had I cared to adopt it, and I have little doubt that I should have come to the front” (“The Adventure of the Retired Colourman”). What Holmes introduces is the idea of the detective/hero as aesthete. Being a thinking machine is not incompatible with being such. What do I mean by an aesthete? Artistic temperament: Holmes’s violin, House’s piano, Edward Cullen’s piano). But more importantly, Alasdair MacIntyre: one who fends “off the kind of boredom that is so characteristic of modern leisure by contriving behavior in others that will be responsive to their wishes, that will feed their sated appetites” Wishes and appetites that may or may not be benevolent. Others are always means, never ends (After Virtue, p. 24).

Detection is as a-moral as geometry (it is not for nothing that [Holmes] so often refers to a case as “a pretty little demonstration”). Whenever they become components in a problem, human beings become numbered points, devoid of rights and autonomy, like the gunner whose response characteristics the cyberneticist incorporates mathematically into the radar mechanism. To Watson’s horrified protest at his quasi-seduction of a housemaid with information to give, Holmes calmly replies, “You can’t help it, my dear Watson. You must play your cards as best you can when such a stake is on the table,” “The Return of Sherlock Holmes.” (Hugh Kenner, Dublin’s Joyce, pp. 174-75).

7. Bringing in MacIntyre reminds us that we need to situate the rise of sensationalist literature amidst its 19^th- and 20^th-century cultural backdrop, where culture becomes more and more characterized by emotivism. There is no rational justification of the ends human beings pursue. The mechanic mind is cut loose from the truisms of culture. So What is to stop the mechanical mind from relieving itself of boredom in other ways? What keeps such an understanding of the human mind, of the person as a whole, from declining into criminality?

8. Holmes as Freak: We see Holmes’s misanthropy become even more exaggerated in the BBC’s Sherlock and in Fox Television’s House (a pun on the connection with Holmes, House creator David Shore makes clear). The image of sleuth as consuming is carried far, but not all the way.

9. But in some recent films the metaphor is carried all the way. The thinking machine becomes the consuming beast, or what Flannery O’Connor called the “freak”:

(a) A History of Violence: Viggo Mortensen’s character uses his wife & children to achieve the end of a new life.

(b) No Country For Old Men (the reductio ad absurdum of the mechanistic mind): Anton Chigurh is adept at finding ingenious mechanistic solutions to complicated problems: his weapon, the explosion outside the drugstore. Killing things for fun, with no reason. All is chance.

(d) Even in the more traditionally heroic Source Code: human lives are manipulated: Colter Stevens (Jake Gyllenhaal) takes over another person’s existence—persons are not unique.

Next post, I’ll pick up on understanding mysteries according to the “Father Brown Approach.”

On Mysteries and the Higher Mystery, Part 1

2011-11-03T15:11:00.000-05:00

This Fall I gave a talk at the 5^th Annual Faith, Film & Philosophy Lecture Series, sponsored by Gonzaga University’s Faith and Reason Institute, and Whitworth University’s Weyerhaeuser Center for Christian Faith and Learning. My talk was entitled, “On Mysteries and the Higher Mystery,” and had to do with our love for mystery stories, detective stories, and thrillers, and how this love relates to the higher, Divine Mystery.

I thought I’d pass along my notes from the talk, which I think can be followed more or less successfully. The talk was in four parts. The first part, the Introduction, took up thoughts I first presented in posts on this blog, namely, “The Good Sense of Sensationalism,” and “On Marshmallows and Melodrama.” I’ll let those who are interested re-visit those posts.

The second part of the talk attempted to define the nature and allure of “mystery,” by defining it as a paradox.

[Note: the entire talk is deeply indebted to two books by the literary critic Hugh Kenner: Paradox in Chesterton and Dublin’s Joyce.]

I. Mystery as Paradox

1. How to make a sensational story both true and exciting? I want to suggest: the key to the mystery and the thriller, as well as to higher mysteries, is the notion of paradox. In the paradox we find both the “shock” we are looking for and the “illumination” of truth.

2. “What good and bad paradoxes possess in common is the shock derived from contradiction: paradox is [apparent] contradiction, explicit or implied” (Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, p. 15). That shock may occur in a fragment of Heraclitus or in the Gospels, but it is perhaps most often encountered, though usually incognito, in tales of mystery and suspense. In fact, G.K. Chesterton, the master of paradox, in Heretics defines paradox as mystery (Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, p. 14).

3. What is a paradox? In such tales the moment of illumination, of insight, takes the form of a paradox comprised of verbal and pictorial images:

(a) Conan Doyle’s “Silver Blaze”: the horse itself turns out to be the murderer

(b) Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark: the Ark of the Covenant itself defeats the Nazis

(d) The end of Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight”: Batman has to be a villain

The paradox is no mere verbal pirouette; paradox is based upon the reality of things, and arises naturally when “the simplest truths” are put in “the simplest language” (Kenner, Paradox in Chesterton, p. 15). The detective-story or thriller works by way of paradox.

4. But there are two ways of understanding how paradox in such stories work. Not an either/or, more of a continuum. One, call it the Sherlock Holmes approach, is to see the paradox as a riddle or challenge resolvable by the “scientific” discovery of linkages of efficient causality. In this case, the paradox is merely mechanical. But another way to understand the paradox of the detective-story or thriller, call it the Father Brown approach, is to see it as resolvable by the discovery of all four causes, illuminated by the paradox of Original Sin (Fr. Brown: “I am the criminal”). The paradox is “metaphysical.” Explores the metaphysical wellsprings of human action—what St. Thomas calls the extrinsic causes of human action: God and the devil. (Summa theologiae, I-II, q. 90 prologus).

Next post, I’ll pick up on understanding mysteries according to the “Sherlock Holmes Approach”

Swords & Trowels

2011-11-01T13:58:00.001-05:00

When it comes to the renewal of a truly Catholic culture, we need both a sword and a trowel. The sword, as G.K. Chesterton puts the point, is logic. Which is to say, conceptual arguments, both philosophical and theological. Yet as Chesterton reminds us, logical arguments are essentially weapons of defense. They are useful to rebut, distinguish, clarify, even to point us in new directions. But that is not enough. Outside of renewing the practice of argumentation itself—no small thing, to be sure—logical arguments alone do not renew the practices and institutions of culture, most notably the family, education, the arts, and business enterprises of all sorts.

For the difficult “spade-work” of cultural rebuilding, a tool is needed with which to dig up the weeds and prepare the ground for new plants. What is needed is a trowel—which for Chesterton is a metaphor for the role the imagination plays within a person’s life, and in a culture.

“Seeing Things”

Comparing the imagination to a trowel is apt, for the role of the imagination is to help cultivate human nature. It is to help us realize our basic human powers to know the True, the Good, and the Beautiful.

In many ways our culture is excessively logical and rationalistic. C.S. Lewis took aim at this aspect of our culture in the essays in his little book, The Abolition of Man. Our educational strategies, for example, too often sacrifice the formation of the imagination and the emotions to the idols of technocratic prowess.

But in other ways our culture exalts the imagination (as well as the emotions) in dangerous fashion. In Friday’s New York Times, Walter Isaacson, author of the new biography of Steve Jobs, compared Jobs to both Benjamin Franklin and Albert Einstein. What Jobs possessed with these men, according to Isaacson, was genius, or at least super-ingenuity, as opposed to just being super-smart (a quality Isaacson attributes to Bill Gates). And what is genius? It is intuition. As distinct from the ability to ratiocinate, to logically analyze a thing into its parts, intuition refers to the ability to “see” reality whole and at once—an ability linked to the visualizing powers of the imagination.

Isaacson writes: “Both Einstein and Mr. Jobs were very visual thinkers. The road to relativity began when the teenage Einstein kept trying to picture what it would be like to ride alongside a light beam. Mr. Jobs spent time almost every afternoon walking around the studio of his brilliant design chief Jony Ive and fingering foam models of the products they were developing.”

But without taking anything away from Jobs’s prodigious intuitive abilities, they were restricted to product design and efficiency in the uses of digital technology. We are all—at least all of us Mac fanatics—in his debt for this. Yet surely the riches of intuitive imagination are not limited to the uses put to them by Steve Jobs. The power of imagination is above all meant to help us understand what it means to be a human being, which is far more than to be a consumer of technology. As Dale Ahlqhist succinctly puts it in a lovely article on Chesterton and the imagination: “The purpose of the imagination is to make us more like God.”

The Golden Age

This is the Catholic moment in the arts. By which I mean that now, more than ever, our culture demands the fruit of a truly Catholic imagination, to save it from the Scylla of hyper-rationalization and the Charybdis of an exaltation of the imagination rooted more in the passions than in reality.

There are many Catholics, as well as other Christians, doing exciting things in the arts. And yet so much more is needed, especially in the arenas of popular culture. Recently I decided to make my own contribution to this effort, to lend my small trowel to the cultural cause. I started a company, Trojan Tub Entertainment, devoted to my Patria series of humorous adventure stories for middle grade readers. With Trojan Tub I hope to share with children and families my passion for wholesome, but always funny, children’s literature.

Who are middle grade readers? Readers from the ages of approximately 8 to 13. Readers enjoying what has been termed the “golden age” of reading.

What makes for the golden age of reading? Surely it has something to do with the child's emerging ability to understand complex plots and complicated emotions. But it also has to do, I think, with the child's growing desire to see and understand the world, to strike out (at least imaginatively) on his or her own, to have an adventure.

And it's curious—middle grade adventures often involve a character discovering a kind of "golden" world. This is most obviously the case in so-called "high fantasy," such as we find in Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and J.K. Rowling. But golden worlds are also present in stories that are set squarely in this world. As long as the hero or heroine finds a place of haven, a place where he or she is called upon to grow in wisdom and courage, a place where he or she can truly love and be loved, then we can talk about that story as having a golden world.

Middle grade adventures tap into our deepest longings. In showing us a golden world, they paint for us a picture of what we would hope to achieve in our own lives. And the fact that our longing for a deeper happiness starts to become self-conscious just as we are ready for middle grade books, such stories tend to leave a burning impression upon the heart.

Imagining Patria

Like many writers of children's stories, my apprenticeship began in a family room chair with kids on my lap as I made up a bedtime story. I vividly remember the first time I told a Patria story, sitting with my two little girls (now teenagers). They were very different stories then. Years later, as I began to write them down, the nature of the golden world of Patria changed. What began as a fantasy world, in the sense of "high fantasy," became something "fantastical." Patria as I re-defined it no longer was discovered in another world. Patria became part of our world—that is, given a rather comical take on ancient history.

So where is Patria? Northern Indiana. I can’t be more specific than that. The precise location of Patria is a well-kept secret. You’ve heard of the government’s Area 51? Patria is Area 1.

The first book in the Patria series is called Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits. About Stout Hearts Rachel Dove, of Kindle Book Review, wrote:

“It's fresh, highly amusing, and with Oliver Stoop being such an identifiable, lovable character (and a bookworm himself to boot!) I can see this book quickly becoming a modern classic that will stay with children long after the last page.”

Here’s a synopsis:

When Oliver Stoop, age 11, moves with his family to a remote piece of land in northern Indiana, he soon discovers that someone is already living there—an entire kingdom of someones, in fact. These are the good citizens of Patria, a secret land founded by refugees from the Trojan War who sailed across the Atlantic in a reconfigured Trojan Horse—3,000 years ago!

For Oliver, Patria is a land of wonders—and for the first time in his life, friendship. There's young Prince Farnsworth Vesuvius, inventor of the Magna-Pneumatic Whizzing Biscuit Blaster, and his formidable sister, Princess Rose, whose inedible, stone-hard biscuits provide the blaster's ammunition. But there's also the rest of the eccentric and lovable Patrian Royal Family, the boy warriors in the Potawatomi Indian Camp, not to mention the Viking kids from the Geat Village, newcomers to the area who only arrived 1,000 years ago.

Yet when the noble Knights of the Blue Sock threaten to drive off the Stoops by force of arms, Oliver has to decide where his loyalties lie, and whether he has the courage to undertake the quest that is both Patria's, and his family's, last, best hope of peace.

Going Electric

Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits is only available as an ebook. It’s available now at Amazon (for the absurdly low price of $2.99), and soon, if not already, at Apple’s iBooks Store, and at Barnes & Noble.

So no hardcover or paperback? Nope. Trojan Tub Entertainment is a digital project, all the way down to the 1s and 0s. This means that Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits and my other Patria stories will only be available as electronic documents to be read on e-readers such as Kindles and Nooks, iPads and smartphones, laptops and desktops.

Did you know that, according to Amazon, Kindle books (e-books sold by Amazon for Kindle e-readers) started outselling hardcovers back in July 2010, and began outselling paperbacks in January 2011? Our culture is quickly changing from a print culture to an electronic culture, and this is more and more reflected in how we read. If pattern holds, more and more of us in the future will be reading books electronically—and that includes, I strongly believe, kids.

But if you don't have an e-reader, don't despair. You can download here a free Kindle app, so that you can read the book on your laptop or desktop or smartphone.

Or you can download here a free Nook app from Barnes & Noble and do the same thing.

Don't fret iPad people! While you're waiting for Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits to become available directly from Apple iBooks, note that both the Kindle and the Nook app can be used on the iPad!

Now, I pursue this project as a great lover and collector of conventional books. I have on my shelves the (literally) dusty tomes of Leonine editions of St. Thomas Aquinas’s Summa theologiae to prove it. Conventional books aren’t going anywhere. But they are simply being joined by electronic books as the experience of how we read broadens with changes in technology. This situation doesn’t place us in an either-or between print and electronic books. To me, it’s a delightful both-and.

When it comes to the question of cultural renewal, my idea with Trojan Tub is to go out and meet our culture where it is. And more and more, our culture can be found with its nose in a Nook.

We live surrounded by what Pope Benedict calls a great “digital sea.” Trojan Tub Entertainment is all about “putting out into the deep” (to use the beloved phrase of Pope Benedict’s beloved predecessor), bringing what I hope is a golden experience of fun and adventure to you and your children.

The Kingdom of Patria

Trojan Tub Entertainment is not only about the Patria ebooks. There is also an immersive Kingdom of Patria website which launches today, November 1, 2011, at kingdomofpatria.com. The Kingdom of Patria is a place for kids and families to play—to enjoy free Patria short stories, listen to audio, join one of two Patria “clubs”—either the Illustrious Order of Knights of the Blue Sock, or Madame Mimi’s Well-Ordered School for Ill-Mannered Girls—as well as read blog posts from Patria’s main characters: Oliver, Farnsworth, and Princess Rose.

I hope you and your family and friends will visit the site, as well as download your copy of Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits. And if you are so inclined, “Like” Trojan Tub’s Facebook page, and follow the company on Twitter: @kingdomofpatria.

Thanks so much for listening to this story of my little cultural trowel. Together, maybe we can use it to make something grow.

Come Visit Patria!

2011-10-29T14:08:00.001-05:00

I mentioned in my last post the first in the series of my Patria series of humorous adventures for middle grade readers, Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits. Well, Stout Hearts is now available at Amazon, and very soon will also be available at Apple’s iBook Store, as well as at Barnes & Noble. The audiobook will also be available this coming week, probably on Tuesday. News on that still to follow.

Here’s a link to the Stout Hearts page on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B0060O7RQU

And here is a synopsis of the book:

So come on and follow Oliver on his adventure in Patria! It will be fun for the kids in your life—and for the kid in you.

Trojan Tub Entertainment’s Kingdom of Patria interactive website is on schedule to debut this coming Tuesday, November 1. Expect more background on Patria, blogs from Oliver, Rose and Farnsworth, free short stories, and opportunities for kids to join one of two Patria-related clubs. All coming Tuesday at: http://kingdomofpatria.com

That beautiful cover art that I’ve placed at the top of this post was illustrated by Theodore Schluenderfritz. The Kingdom of Patria website is designed by Snap Design.

Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits

2011-10-26T19:56:00.002-05:00

The first review of my humorous children's middle grade novel, Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits: A Patria Story, is in!

"A funny, clever children's book that absorbs you into Oliver Stoop's adventures from the moment the first biscuit is fired."
Rachel Dove, Kindle Book Review

OK, so it's just a blurb. But the full review should be in by the weekend. Watch this space!

And starting next Tuesday, November 1, Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits will be available as an ebook from Amazon's Kindle Store, Barnes & Noble's Nook Store, and Apple's iBooks store.

Also on November 1, my company, Trojan Tub Entertainment, will unveil the Kingdom of Patria website featuring an immersive experience related to my Patria series of middle grade novels: free short stories, interactive features, contests, audio, and more! A great place for kids and the entire family to come and read and play.

The audiobook of Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits will also be available on November 1. More news on that front coming soon!

Shakespeare's Blackfriars Playhouse--in Virginia

2011-10-24T19:34:00.002-05:00

My family and I just spent a marvelous weekend in Staunton, Virginia (pronounced by the locals as “Stan-ton”). One of the things that took us there--other than views of the brilliant autumn leaves in the glorious Virginia countryside-is the town’s replica of the Blackfriars Theater in London, the indoor companion theater to the Globe that was used by Shakespeare’s company, the Lord Chamberlain’s Men, later to be known as the King’s Men.

Unsurprisingly given the name of “Blackfriars,” there is an interesting connection of the theater to English Catholic history--though the connection is to a rather sad episode: the dissolution of the Catholic monasteries by Henry VIII. Here is what Shakespeare scholar Stephen Greenblatt has to say about the Blackfriars Theater in his captivating book on Shakespeare, Will in the World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004):

"During the rein of Elizabeth, in 1596, the entrepreneur James Burbage (the father of the famous actor) paid six hundred pounds for property that had, until the dissolution of the monasteries, been part of a large friary, belonging to the order known as the Friars Preachers or Black Friars [i.e., the Dominicans]. The location was a desirable one: though it was within the city walls, it was a “liberty” and hence outside the jurisdiction of the city fathers. A theater had already been established twenty years earlier in one of the Blackfriars halls, where a succession of children’s companies had performed. But this enterprise had collapsed after eight financially troubled years, and the indoor theater had gone silent. The enterprising Burbage smelled a profit, if he could reopen it for performances by what was then the Lord Chamberlain’s Men. He had built the Theater, one of England’s first outdoor playhouses; now, by reconstructing the hall where the children’s companies had played, he would open England’s first indoor playhouse for adult actors. The location was prestigious--not in the suburbs, hard by the bearbaiting arenas and execution grounds, but right in the heart of the city. The Blackfriars hall was much smaller than the Globe, but it had the great advantage, given the vagaries of the English weather, of being roofed and enclosed. It was, at least by comparison with the open amphitheaters, a place of decorum and even luxury. Disorderly crowds would not stand restlessly around the stage; instead, everyone would be seated. Hence admission prices could be greatly increased--from the mere pennies at the Globe to as high as two shillings in Blackfriars--and, it was possible to illuminate the hall by candlelight, there could be evening as well as afternoon performances" (pp. 366-67).

We saw two performances at the Blackfriars Playhouse put on by the repertory company of the American Shakespeare Center: on Friday night, Henry V, and on Sunday afternoon, The Tempest. Both performances were hugely enjoyable, living up to the company’s motto of “serious fun.” Both performances aimed at being as accessible as possible, and they mostly hit the mark extremely well, though at times giving in a bit too much to buffoonery and sexual gags (not in Shakespeare’s text).

But it was a charming discovery to find this replica of the Blackfriars Theater in a small town in central Virginia. It is a testimony to what the arts--privately funded as far as I can tell-can be in our polity.

Love in the Ruins

2011-10-18T09:46:00.000-05:00

“Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?”

Such is the beginning of Walker Percy’s darkly comic apocalyptic novel, Love in the Ruins: The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World.

Percy’s satire—published back in 1971 (two years before Roe v. Wade)—dovetails nicely with the prevailing negative mood in our country, and in the West in general:

off-the-wall protests on Wall Street…similarly protesting Italians taking a statue of the Blessed Virgin Mary out of a church and smashing it (don’t ask why)…a pervasive sense of malaise even as our economic doldrums drag on…a weariness with institutions at all levels…Europe crumbling…a gross lack of civility and simple good manners everywhere…a general shabbiness and neglect of good craftsmanship…an educational system decades past the point of crisis and in deep decline…

“Undoubtedly something is about to happen.

Or is it that something has stopped happening?

Is it that God has at last removed his blessing from the U.S.A. and what we feel now is just the clank of the old historical machinery, the sudden jerking ahead of the roller-coaster cars as the chain catches hold and carries us back into history with its ordinary catastrophes, carries us out and up toward the brink from that felicitous and privileged siding where even unbelievers admitted that if it was not God who blessed the U.S.A., then at least some great good luck had befallen us, and that now the blessing or the luck is over, the machinery clanks, the chain catches hold, and the cars jerk forward?”

It is hard to know anymore what it means to be an American. In principle, it means being dedicated to the Constitution. But in practice, the Constitution is simply one more battleground in the cultural conflict.

The constitutional crisis however is just one symptom of the deeper cultural crisis. The dystopian scenario depicted by Alasdair MacIntyre in the prologue to his book, After Virtue, seems more definitively to characterize our way of life than when it was written in the early 1980s.

A culture at bottom is a cultus, a way of worshipping. So what are we worshipping, here in the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world?

(The image at the top was painted by William B. Montgomery)

Kids & Kindles

2011-10-17T08:10:00.001-05:00

Apologies for being out of touch with High Concepts of late, but I’ve been going great guns preparing for the launch of Trojan Tub Entertainment’s “Patria” website two weeks from tomorrow on November 1^st. (What’s Trojan Tub? Click here.)

I’m writing web content this week, as well as recording the audio book of the first book in the Patria series, Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits. Meanwhile, the folks at Snap Design continue their marvelous work constructing the site, and Ted Schluenderfritz continues to amaze with his delightful illustrations.

As I talk to people about Trojan Tub, the question tends to arise, “Are kids really reading books on Kindles, Nooks, and the like?” More and more, I think they are. A recent survey by Scholastic Publishers bears out the hunch. For a summary, click here.

And with Pottermore readying to launch at the end of this month, I believe the buzz around children and ebooks will only grow louder.

Last Christmas was the break-out season for ereaders and ebooks. This Christmas could very well be the break-out season for children’s ebooks.

From My Mac...to Patria

2011-10-07T15:38:00.001-05:00

I'm a Mac person—and not just because I'm a McInerny. I’m vain enough to be proud to own one of the few black Macbooks. I love my iPhone. I love using many Apple apps, such as iMovie, iPhoto, iTunes, and Garage Band. I love the way images look crisp on a Mac.

And like many, I'm attracted to the sleekness of Apple design—in hardware, software, and in their graphic presentation. Bold images against a white background. The simplicity of the Apple logo. The overall user-friendliness of their devices. The “coolness” factor is very compelling.   

Steve Jobs, who died Wednesday, had of course much to do with making Apple one of the most exciting companies on the planet. He is being widely celebrated this week for his innovation and savvy, and there is much to admire in what he accomplished.   But what I appreciate most in the achievement of Steve Jobs is the way the personal computer, of which he is one of the founding fathers, makes possible a certain kind of creative and economic freedom. Under the digital cloud, entire businesses can now be run from a desktop. Indeed, entirely new industries have become possible because of the technology that Jobs helped make so widely available.

One of these industries is the self-publishing industry, which is being freshly re-imagined almost by the minute. Capitalizing as it does on the surging interest in ebooks (a surge in which the iPad has played a significant part), self-publishing is just one instance of the revolution in ownership, and one that I myself have decided to plunge into.

I would like to introduce to you today my new company, Trojan Tub Entertainment, a web-based children’s entertainment company featuring my Patria comic adventure stories for middle grade readers (approximately 7-13 years old). Designed by the superb creative team at Snap Design, and illustrated by the rich and whimsical talent of Theodore Schluenderfritz, the Patria website will launch November 1, and feature the free first chapter of the first book in the Patria series, Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits. Those parents willing to dig deep enough into the old sock to purchase the entire book for their offspring will be directed to Amazon’s Kindle site, Barnes & Noble’s Nook site, or Apple’s own iBooks store in order to exchange the ridiculously low price for hours of peace while their children squirrel themselves away with this soul-stirring adventure. Given that your credit card will already be drawn and quivering, the site will also direct parents and other readers to iTunes, where the unabridged audiobook of Stout Hearts & Whizzing Biscuits will be awaiting your download.

However, the Patria website is not all about commerce. There will also be free Patria short stories available on the site, blogs written by the main characters, an interactive map of Patria, contests, not to mention the free first chapter of the sequel to Stout Hearts, tentatively titled, Work More or Less in Progress That Needs to Get Finished Pretty Darn Quick. This sequel will be available (gulp!) December 1.

So how to fill the trackless void until November 1? Visit the Trojan Tub Facebook page and “Like” the company, and join up to follow the news from Patria on Twitter: @kingdomofpatria.

Trojan Tub would not be possible, in the end, without the kind of vision displayed by Steve Jobs. And for that, I am sincerely grateful.   May God bless him, and may he rest in peace.

Upstairs, Downstairs, Miss O'Connor Reads, The Return of Whit Stillman, Kindles at the Public Library

2011-09-25T11:51:00.002-05:00

Today I offer a potpourri of links to some interesting and fun items that have been attracting my attention over the last few days…

First, my wife and I very much enjoyed the initial three-episode “season” of the BBC reboot of Upstairs, Downstairs. Excellent script, great characters, superb acting, intriguing setting against the political backdrop of the abdication of Edward VIII, and to top it off, an extremely realistic and sympathetic portrayal of a child with Downs Syndrome. Put it on that Netflix cue.

Making its way around the web the other day was this link to an audio file of Flannery O’Connor reading her short story, “A Good Man Is Hard To Find” (my favorite of her stories) at Vanderbilt University in 1959. Sit back and enjoy Miss O’Connor’s lovely drawl.

And I was glad to see this week that after 13 years the writer-director Whit Stillman (Metropolitan, Barcelona, and The Last Days of Disco) is coming out with a new film, Damsels in Distress. Stillman is a keen observer of social mores, and his films always promise sly humor and insight.

Finally, the New York Times today had a story about how Amazon's Kindle will now be be available to download ebooks from collections at public libraries. Another major move in our cultural transition to the ebook.

No Country For Old Men

2011-09-21T19:31:00.002-05:00

I’m reading Hugh Kenner’s wonderful book on Chesterton, Paradox in Chesterton, published in 1947 by Sheed & Ward. The introduction is written by Kenner’s mentor, Marshall McLuhan, before he became the pop-culture prophet of “the medium is the message.” McLuhan’s introduction is a marvelous précis of our modern cultural predicament. As I’m guessing Kenner’s book is out of print, I’ll quote liberally, not to say profusely:

When the Church Fathers adapted the neo-Platonic and Stoic concept of the Logos to Christian Revelation, they committed the Church to many centuries of symbolism and allegory. The result was that for a very long time the outer world was seen as a network of analogies which richly exemplified and sustained the psychological and moral structure of man’s inner world. Both inner and outer worlds were mirrors in which to contemplate the Divine Wisdom…

McLuhan then goes on to describe the impact of this synthesis upon human beings and society:

Society, national and international, grew up once more. And it was an organic and closely-knit society in which the individual enjoyed a very high degree of psychological if not physical security, because of the universal acceptance of the moral and social implications of the Divine order mirrored simultaneously in physical nature, human nature, and political organization.

He then observes how such order serves as the theme of Ulysses’ speech from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida:

The heavens themselves, the planets and this center

Observe degree, priority and place,

Insisture, course, proportion, season, form,

Office and custom in all line of order.

….O! When degree is shak’d,

Which is the ladder to all high designs,

The enterprise is sick. How could communities,

Degrees in schools, and brotherhood in cities,

Peaceful commerce from dividable shores,

The primogeniture and due of birth,

Prerogative of age, crowns, scepters, laurels,

But by degree, stand in authentic place?

Take but degree way, untune that string,

And, hark, what discord follows!...

Then everything includes itself in power,

Power into will, will into appetite;

And appetite, an universal wolf,

So doubly seconded with will and power,

Must make perforce an universal prey

And last eat up itself. (Act I, Scene 3)

These lines of Shakespeare’s resonated especially with me today as I was making a study of the Coen Brothers’ adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel, No Country For Old Men. The country portrayed in that film is one in which “degree” has been “shak’d,” and the heart of the film, in my mind, is the way in which that “shaking” enters the heart of one of the few decent characters in the story, Sherriff Bell (played magnificently by Tommy Lee Jones). He is at a point in his life in which he should be enjoying, as Shakespeare’s Ulysses puts it, the “prerogatives of age.” But as he chases a peculiarly ruthless and violent criminal, he begins to sense that the “high designs” of his world have come undone. The string of degree is out of tune. And he harks what discord follows. An old man, he finds himself confronted by the thought that “everything includes itself in power,” a power that, like “an universal wolf,” eats up everything (though the movie does not show us how it last eats up itself).

How did Sherriff Bell’s world—our world—come so undone? McLuhan continues his analysis by writing that from the time of Descartes

men would seek intellectually only for the kind of order they could readily achieve by rationalistic means: a mathematical and mechanistic order which precludes a human and psychological order. Ethics and politics were abandoned as much as metaphysics….

Since the time of Descartes the strategy has been followed consistently. A high degree of abstract mechanical order has been achieved. Great discoveries of a potentially benign sort have been made. And human moral, psychological, and political chaos has steadily developed, with it concurrent crop of fear and anger and hate. The rational efforts of men have been wholly diverted from the ordering of appetite and emotion, so that any effort to introduce or to discover order in man’s psychological life has been left entirely to the artist.

And so McLuhan proceeds with a incisive comparison between the medieval and modern conceptions of the artist:

Whereas the medieval artist was a relatively anonymous person whose function was not to discover order but to represent an already achieved psychological unity, the modern artist is regarded as a pioneer….

As the contemporary artist attempts to chart the psychological chaos created in the heart of man by a mechanistic society his activity is scanned with the utmost concern. A Blake, a Wordsworth, a Baudelaire, a Rimbaud, a Picasso, or a Rouault is regarded as a major source of hope and discovery. The disproportionate burden placed on the artist is the measure of the failure of the philosophy.

I haven’t even touched on what McLuhan has to say about how all this relates to Thomism in the 20^th century, or what he—much less Kenner—have to say about Chesterton. There is much in what he has to say, in what Cormac McCarthy and the Coen Brothers have to say, that repays attention.

On Not Telling Our Stories In Vain

2011-09-19T19:51:00.000-05:00

Perhaps virtual summer circles on the philosophy of art, like art itself, are never finished, only abandoned. Though I have touched on only a portion of Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, with nary a peep about Chapters VI-IX—it’s September 19^th, autumn is nigh, and it’s time to gather up the coffee cups and put this summer exercise to bed.

But not before a final word about Maritain’s rich Chapter V, “Art and Beauty.” I believe already twice since I started this blog last October I have quoted from the passage that begins toward the bottom of p. 32*:

The moment one touches a transcendental, one touches being itself, a likeness of God, an absolute, that which ennobles and delights our life; one enters into the domain of the spirit.

Ray Stevens was right. Everything is beautiful in its own way. Beauty is a transcendental, which means that it is a constituent feature of reality. Whenever one finds reality—up in the Heavens or down in the swamp—one finds beauty (which implies that the ugly is in some sense “unreal”). Along with truth and goodness, beauty transcends any and all particular categories of reality (such as material reality, immaterial reality, artistic reality, logical reality, mathematical reality, etc.). Thus we can talk variously of beautiful sunsets, beautiful churches, “elegant” scientific or mathematical solutions, and most of all, with Gerard Manley Hopkins, God’s Grandeur.

In my posts on the three features of the beautiful—wholeness, order and clarity—I focused on just one general kind of beautiful thing: beautiful works of literature. Beauty can of course be found elsewhere—everywhere, sings Ray Stevens—but this does not mean that the beautiful is exactly the same in all of its manifestations. How shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? wondered Shakespeare. It was a real predicament. For on the one hand was the object of his devotion in the sonnet, and on the other hand a summer’s day. Both are beautiful. But the comparison is difficult. That is because the comparison is not between beautiful apples and beautiful apples, but beautiful apples and beautiful oranges. All beautiful objects manifest wholeness, order and clarity, but not, as the philosophers say, univocally, i.e., in one and the same way, but analogously, in a way that exhibits both sameness and difference. It took some work, but Shakespeare finally figured out how to plot the analogy between his love and the summer day. Read Sonnet 18.

Because beauty is stitched into the very fabric of reality, it is not exclusively material (for reality is not exclusively material). The human experience of the beautiful begins with, and never really jettisons, sense experience. But while wholeness, order and clarity may be embodied in a material object, because they are transcendental they are not reducible to the matter of the thing. This is why Maritain says that in delighting in beauty we pass “into the domain of the spirit.” Maritain continues:

It is remarkable that men really communicate with one another only by passing through being or one of its properties. Only in this way do they escape from the individuality in which matter encloses them. If they remain in the world of their sense needs and sentimental egos, in vain do they tell their stories to one another, they do not understand each other. They observe each other, each one of them infinitely alone, even though work or sense pleasures bind them together (pp. 32-33).

Human beings can only communicate truth, goodness and beauty to one another by transcending the privacies of matter. To be sure, matter is required to communicate, in speech and in the arts. But it is not matter alone that speaks. The closer a story, to take Maritain’s example, cleaves to the material aspects of our being—our “sense needs and sentimental egos”—in vain do we tell our stories to one another, for in failing to pass into the domain of the beautiful, of the spirit, we fail to communicate. Pornography is not art, therefore. Spectacle alone is not art.

But let one touch the good and Love, like the saints, the true, like an Aristotle, the beautiful, like a Dante or a Bach or a Giotto, then contact is made, souls communicate. Men are really united only by the spirit; light along brings them together…(p. 33).

* Page numbers refer to Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry, trans Joseph W. Evans (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974).

The Meaning of Life

2011-09-16T17:37:00.000-05:00

According to the medieval legend, the philosopher’s stone was capable of turning base metals into gold or silver. The philosophical articles now being featured by the New York Times under the title, The Stone, work in the reverse order. They take the gold of the Western philosophical tradition and turn it into the base metal of post-modern noodlings. Take, for example, the recent cogitations on the meaning of life by Clemson philosopher, Todd May:

The philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre thought that, without God, our lives are bereft of meaning. He tells us in his essay “Existentialism,” “if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us.” On this view, God gives our lives the values upon which meaning rests. And if God does not exist, as Sartre claims, our lives can have only the meaning we confer upon them.

This seems wrong on two counts. First, why would the existence of God guarantee the meaningfulness of each of our lives? Is a life of unremitting drudgery or unrequited struggle really redeemed if there’s a larger plan, one to which we have no access, into which it fits? That would be small compensation for a life that would otherwise feel like a waste — a point not lost on thinkers like Karl Marx, who called religion the “opium of the people.”

Keeping in mind that Christianity is doubtless one of the chief, if not the chief, target of this passage, the ignorance of it is astonishing. “Is a life of unremitting drudgery or unrequited struggle really redeemed if there’s a larger plan, one to which we have no access, into which it fits?” Well Pope Saint Cornelius, whose Memorial we celebrate today, certainly felt his life had been redeemed, even when he was dying a martyr’s death in exile at the hands of the Emperor Gallus. Martyrdom does tend to put a damper on one’s earthly expectations, yet Pope Saint Cornelius did not repine. He knew what gave his life true meaning, and what was so much chaff. He would have been appalled by the suggestion that the sad ending of his life called into question its meaningfulness. Indeed, he would have said that it was precisely his death that made his life meaningful. But Professor May blithely skips by the thoughts and feelings of two thousand years of Christian witness.

What’s especially curious is that Professor May’s remarks in the quoted passage begin by hypothesizing knowledge of God’s existence (“why would the existence of God guarantee the meaningfulness, etc.”), but then, a sentence later, he breezily refers to the “larger plan” affirmed by Christianity and other religions as one “to which we have no access.” So he begins by trying to imagine the issue from a theistic viewpoint, but then has to interject that, of course, “we” have no access to a God with plans for our benefit. Who is this “we”? The enlightened readers of the Times, no doubt.

But there is another “we.” The company among which Saints Cornelius and Cyprian stand. In this fellowship, the drudgery and struggle endured in this life, which from a certain point of view, and not necessarily an irreligious one (think of Job), seem to make of life a waste, are, as joined to Christ, the wellsprings of meaning, satisfaction, joy.

*The image above is from the Catacomb of Saint Callistus outside Rome, where many of the early popes, as well as Saint Cecilia, are buried.

Beauty's Clarity, Or, Why Wodehouse Freshens the World

2011-09-14T13:53:00.002-05:00

With the third and final feature of beauty that Jacques Maritain gleans from St. Thomas Aquinas—clarity, or radiance—it is best to approach by way of examples.

Consider the following. First, from the world champion humorist, P.G. Wodehouse:

“Can you dance?” said the girl.

Lancelot gave a short, amused laugh. He was a man who never let his left hip know what his right hip was doing.

* * *

Lord Emsworth had one of those minds capable of accommodating but one thought at a time—if that.

* * *

The butler loomed in the doorway like a dignified cloudbank.

* * *

In praising Hilaire Belloc’s introduction to the compilation of Wodehouse’s works, Week End Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh applauded Belloc’s observation that every sentence in Wodehouse is “simple, exact and original” (see Waugh’s essay, “An Angelic Doctor,” in A Little Order: Selected Journalism). One might paraphrase Belloc by saying that Wodehouse’s writing exudes claritas.

In Chapter V of Art and Scholasticism, Maritain says that clarity answers to the intellect’s love for light and intelligibility. “A certain splendor,” writes Maritain, “is, in fact, according to all the ancients, the essential characteristic of beauty…but it is a splendor of intelligibility” (p. 24*).

Which is to say—the clarity of beauty illuminates the mind with the forms of things. Even if it is only Lancelot’s form on the dance floor, or the echoing form of Lord Emsworth’s empty egg.

Take more examples. Such as the simile Italo Colvino, in Why Read the Classics?, celebrates in Dickens’ Our Mutual Friend:

…with an immense obtuse drab oblong face, like a face in a teaspoon.

Or Ezra Pound’s famous imagist poem, the two-liner, “In A Station of the Metro”:

The apparition of these faces in the crowd;

Petals on a wet, black bough.

Or Joseph Hutchison’s one-line poem, “Artichoke”:

O heart weighed down by so many wings.

Former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser, in his book, The Poetry Home Repair Manual, talks about poetry’s power to change our perceptions of the world: “Poems that change our perceptions are everywhere you look, and one of the definitions of poetry might be that a poem freshens the world.”

I love that phrase: “a poem freshens the world.” This is the power of clarity. Beautiful writing of any kind possesses it. Clarity jolts us out of our ordinary way of seeing and allows us to see the world again, in the sense of “seeing” that Josef Pieper talks about in his lovely essay, “Learning How To See Again”:

Before you can express anything in tangible form, you first need eyes to see. The mere attempt, therefore, to create an artistic form compels the artist to take a fresh look at the visible reality; it requires authentic and personal observation. Long before a creation is completed, the artist has gained for himself another and more intimate achievement: a deeper and more receptive vision, a more intense awareness, a sharper and more discerning understanding, a more patient openness for all things quiet and inconspicuous, and eye for things previously overlooked (Only the Lover Sings: Art and Contemplation).

This litany of qualities characterizes any person, not just the artist, attuned to clarity, both in the beauty that God has made and in the sub-created beauty that artists make from it. To take a line from Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poem, “God’s Grandeur,” when we awaken to the clarity of beauty, we slow down enough to permit our minds to become receptive to “the dearest freshness deep down things.”

* Page numbers refer to Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry, trans Joseph W. Evans (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974).

Beauty's Order, Or, Why LOST Sometimes Was So Frustrating

2011-09-12T16:37:00.000-05:00

Beauty—as we discussed last time in our Virtual Summer Circle of Thomistic Studies—has to do with the wholeness of a work of art. What does it mean for a work of art to be “whole.” It means the work has perfectly achieved the end, or aim, for the sake of which it was undertaken.

What, then, about the second feature of beauty that Jacques Maritain, following St. Thomas Aquinas, discusses in Chapter V of Art and Scholasticism: proportion? Maritain says that it is a kind of “fitness” or “harmony” (p. 27*). Maritian also speaks of it as an “order” (p. 24) that comes into being “in relation to the end of the work” (p. 28). Proportion is thus a function of wholeness. In order for the work to achieve its end, its parts must be set in order.

Let’s once again bring a very abstract concept closer to home by trying to see it in play in a work of art with which we are all familiar: the detective or mystery story. Here’s what one of the genre’s foremost practitioners, G.K. Chesterton, had to say about this genre in his essay, “Errors About Detective Stories”:

there is evidently a very general idea that the object of the detective novelist is to baffle the reader. Now, nothing is easier than baffling the reader, in the sense of disappointing the reader. There are many successful and widely advertised stories of which the principle simply consists in thwarting information by means of incident.

Chesterton negatively describes the end of a detective story: not to baffle the reader by means of useless incident. A little later in the essay he puts the point more positively:

The true object of an intelligent detective story is not to baffle the reader, but to enlighten the reader; but to enlighten him in such a manner that each successive portion of the truth comes as a surprise. In this, as in much nobler types of mystery, the object of the true mystic is not merely to mystify, but to illuminate. The object is not darkness, but light; but light in the form of lightning.

In this paragraph Chesterton refers to both the wholeness and the proportion, or order, of a good detective story. The end is to illuminate, but the illumination must come about in the order due to a detective story, in which “each successive portion of the truth comes as a surprise.”

It is crucial that the sequence of surprising revelations in a mystery possesses an order, and is not just, as Chesterton remarks, the thwarting of information by incident. This was one of the criticisms often made against the television serial, Lost. Surprising incidents were piled up, but without any clear relationship to one another or to the illumination that eventually came in the show’s final episode. Lost, in the view of these critics, lacked order or proportion. About such piling up of sensational but incoherent elements Chesterton goes on:

Now, it is quite a simple matter to fill several volumes with adventures of this thrilling kind, without permitting the reader to advance a step in the direction of discovery. This is illegitimate, on the fundamental principles of this form of fiction. It is not merely that it is not artistic, or that it is not logical. It is that it is not really exciting. People cannot be excited except about something; and at this stage of ignorance the reader has nothing to be excited about. People are thrilled by knowing something, and on this principle they know nothing.

In saying that people are thrilled by knowing something, I take it that Chesterton means that people are truly thrilled when they realize that a surprising incident is integrally connected to the illumination of the mystery. In the final moments of an episode of Foyle’s War, for example, Detective Chief Superintendant Foyle will typically recap how he came to unravel the mystery, indicating the logical sequence of his deductions, distinguishing what is essential to the solution from what is accidental (the red herrings). Indeed, the last few pages or minutes of a detective story, when the end and the things ordered to the end are laid out for the reader or viewer, provide a case study in how order plays a role within this genre.

* Page numbers refer to Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry, trans Joseph W. Evans (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974).

Dour Combat: Gavin O'Connor's "Warrior"

2011-09-09T08:02:00.000-05:00

Here is a link to a piece of mine appearing today on Catholic Exchange, a review of Gavin O’Connor’s fine new film, Warrior (click here for the trailer).

In yesterday’s New York Times, A.O. Scott wrote an exceptionally interesting review of the film. I especially like the following observations in which he links the film’s setting in the world of mixed martial arts with America’s current economic and cultural plight:

But if there is something primal and archaic in Mr. O’Connor’s fable of fathers and sons, he nonetheless grounds it in the painful realities of contemporary America. With arresting honesty and enormous compassion — but without making a big topical deal out of it — Warrior looks at an American working class reeling from the one-two punch of war and recession. Tommy and Brendan are too proud for self-pity, which makes the evident pain of their circumstances all the more affecting.

They fight because every other way of being a man has been compromised, undermined or taken away. Patriarchal authority, as represented by Paddy, is cruel and unbending until it turns sentimental and pathetic. The roads to an honorable life promised by work and military service are mined and muddied by the greed and mendacity of the institutions — government, schools, banks — that are supposed to uphold integrity.

In such conditions stripping down to your shorts and beating another guy senseless can seem not only logical, but also noble. The mock-gladiatorial theatrics of mixed martial arts may look tawdry and overblown, but the sport, perhaps even more than boxing, expresses a deep and authentic impulse to find meaning through the infliction and acceptance of pain. While the Conlon brothers are both fighting for the money, the real stakes are much deeper. Though their climactic confrontation is terrifyingly violent, it is also tender. And the most disarming thing about Warrior is that, for all its mayhem, it is a movie about love.

Beauty's Wholeness, Or, Why We Care Who Killed Edwin Drood

2011-09-06T19:52:00.002-05:00

Inspired by the success of his friend Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens set out toward the end of his life to write a mystery. He called it, aptly enough, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and for nearly 150 years it has exercised a fascination over readers—principally because it is a mystery without a solution. Dickens died on June 9, 1870 before he could complete his tale, and ever since readers have wondered just who killed Edwin Drood. In fact, on the 7^th of January 1914 in London, G.K. Chesterton, along with his brother Cecil and others, staged a mock trial in which a character from the novel, John Jasper, was put on trial for the murder of Edwin Drood (George Bernard Shaw was foreman of a jury that included, among many others, Hilaire Belloc).

I began thinking of Edwin Drood as I pondered Chapter V of Jacques Maritain’s Art and Scholasticism, the focus of our Virtual Summer Circle of Thomistic Studies. Chapter V is devoted to theme of Art and Beauty, and in the chapter Maritain follows St. Thomas Aquinas in naming three “conditions,” or what we might call “features,” of beauty: integrity or wholeness, proportion, and clarity or radiance. Over the next three days I would like to reflect briefly on each of these three features—beginning with integrity or wholeness.

Maritain defines wholeness as the pleasure that the intellect takes in the fullness of Being (p. 24*). This is precise but abstract. Keep in mind that the experience of beauty is an experience of delight in the intellect’s grasp of the form, the intelligible structure or design, of a thing. What we are doing now is getting more specific about what in the design of a beautiful thing the intellect is finding joy in.

Let’s bring the abstractness of wholeness closer to the ground by thinking of the wholeness of a particular work of art—let’s say a novel, even better, a murder mystery. According to Maritain and St. Thomas, no murder mystery would have a chance of being beautiful if it did not possess fullness of Being. Or we might say, if it didn’t come to its perfect realization. Now Edwin Drood cannot possibly possess wholeness, for the obvious fact that it is unfinished. On p. 27 of Art and Scholasticism Maritian speaks of the wholeness of the Venus de Milo, but I don’t believe wholeness can be said, simply speaking, of a broken statue, or an unfinished murder mystery. This is not to deny that some beauty exists in the unfinished or broken work—only that its beauty is, well, unfinished or broken. Wholeness, again, refers to the perfect realization of the form or design of the work.

So what, when it comes to a murder mystery, is required for wholeness? The work must be finished, first of all, meaning not just that the artist lived long enough to write, “The End,” but that the work possesses the basic narrative structure of beginning, middle and end: the set-up in Act I leading to the complications of Act II in turn leading to the fingering of the murderer in Act III. At the end of such a narrative, the sense that a story has been fully told, our satisfaction that the murderer has been brought to justice, is a sign that the work is whole. In this light, it is interesting to note that since Dickens's death, many authors have set about trying to complete Edwin Drood.

The full realization of the design of a murder mystery is achieved in various other ways, such as in the characterization, or the use of symbolism. Wholeness also comes into play in the way in which the mystery is resolved. One of David Mamet’s rules for writing is, “Embed the end in the beginning.” When the rule is applied to a murder mystery, we feel that wonderful frisson at the climax when we realize the essential clue was in front of us the whole time—giving us a wonderful sense of integrity of the work (the extreme case: Poe’s “The Purloined Letter”).

But whether abiding by Mamet’s rule or not, the good mystery writer knows that the integrity of the work can only be achieved by not making the solution to the mystery ad hoc. The key evidence must not descend like a deus ex machina, but must have been put before the reader along the way. The murderer in a murder mystery can cheat all he wants. But the mystery writer must be scrupulously fair with his readers.

Yet in speaking of wholeness and the laying of clues, the difficulty presents itself of distinguishing wholeness and the second feature of beauty, proportion—which has to do with the ordering of the parts of a work. But tomorrow I will try to distinguish between these two features of beauty—and thus probe deeper into its mystery.

* Page numbers refer to Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry, trans Joseph W. Evans (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974).

Beauty as a Call

2011-09-01T19:48:00.002-05:00

Art is capable of expressing, and of making visible, man’s need to go beyond what he sees; it reveals his thirst and his search for the infinite.

Pope Benedict XVI, General Audience

August 31, 2011

Yesterday from his residence at Castel Gandolfo, the Holy Father delivered an inspiring address on the theme of beauty as a way to God. The full text of his brief meditation is just below, but before I leave you to enjoy it, I would simply like to point out to those participating in our Virtual Summer Circle of Thomistic Studies, the way in which Pope Benedict’s theme resonates with what Maritain has to say in Chapter V of Art and Scholasticism.

On p. 31* Maritain recalls the etymology of the Greek word for beauty, to kalon, which derives from the verb, “to call.” The beautiful is a call—ultimately a call by God to the human person “wounded,” as the pope puts it in his address, by the beautiful work of art. He then quotes St. Thomas Aquinas: “the beauty of anything created is nothing else than a similitude of divine beauty participated in by things.”

In his address Pope Benedict focuses on beautiful works of art, and Maritain adds the point that everything beautiful serves as a point of contact with the Creator, who is Beauty Itself.

Pope Benedict observes: “Art is capable of expressing, and of making visible, man’s need to go beyond what he sees; it reveals his thirst and his search for the infinite. Indeed, it is like a door opened to the infinite, [opened] to a beauty and a truth beyond the every day.”

What Pope Benedict says next, however, raises a question. He writes: “But there are artistic expressions that are true roads to God, the supreme Beauty — indeed, they are a help [to us] in growing in our relationship with Him in prayer. We are referring to works of art that are born of faith, and that express the faith.”

Now, before this passage he says that beautiful works of art open us to the infinite. Then he says, “But there are artistic expressions that are true roads to God, the supreme Beauty”—these expressions being properly Christian art. I don’t take the Holy Father to be saying that art made by non-Christians does not lead us to the infinite, and thus in some sense to God. I take it that he’s saying that any work of beauty can potentially lead to an experience of God, but that properly Christian art can lead one to a specifically Christian conversion, as well as deepen the experience of Christian prayer.

Let me know how you see it after reading the full text of the address.

* Page numbers refer to Art and Scholasticism and The Frontiers of Poetry, trans Joseph W. Evans (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1974).

P.S. The image at the top is of "Exodus" by Marc Chagall, who is mentioned in the pope's address.

Full Text of Pope Benedict’s General Audience Address

August 31, 2011

Dear brothers and sisters, 

On several occasions in recent months, I have recalled the need for every Christian to find time for God, for prayer, amidst our many daily activities.The Lord himself offers us many opportunities to remember Him. Today, I would like to consider briefly one of these channels that can lead us to God and also be helpful in our encounter with Him: It is the way of artistic expression, part of that “via pulchritudinis” — “way of beauty” — which I have spoken about on many occasions, and which modern man should recover in its most profound meaning. 

Perhaps it has happened to you at one time or another — before a sculpture, a painting, a few verses of poetry or a piece of music — to have experienced deep emotion, a sense of joy, to have perceived clearly, that is, that before you there stood not only matter — a piece of marble or bronze, a painted canvas, an ensemble of letters or a combination of sounds — but something far greater, something that “speaks,” something capable of touching the heart, of communicating a message, of elevating the soul. 

A work of art is the fruit of the creative capacity of the human person who stands in wonder before the visible reality, who seeks to discover the depths of its meaning and to communicate it through the language of forms, colors and sounds. Art is capable of expressing, and of making visible, man’s need to go beyond what he sees; it reveals his thirst and his search for the infinite. Indeed, it is like a door opened to the infinite, [opened] to a beauty and a truth beyond the every day. And a work of art can open the eyes of the mind and heart, urging us upward.  But there are artistic expressions that are true roads to God, the supreme Beauty — indeed, they are a help [to us] in growing in our relationship with Him in prayer. We are referring to works of art that are born of faith, and that express the faith. We see an example of this whenever we visit a Gothic cathedral: We are ravished by the vertical lines that reach heavenward and draw our gaze and our spirit upward, while at the same time, we feel small and yet yearn to be filled.

Or when we enter a Romanesque church: We are invited quite naturally to recollection and prayer. We perceive that hidden within these splendid edifices is the faith of generations. Or again, when we listen to a piece of sacred music that makes the chords of our heart resound, our soul expands and is helped in turning to God. I remember a concert performance of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach — in Munich in Bavaria — conducted by Leonard Bernstein. At the conclusion of the final selection, one of the Cantate, I felt — not through reasoning, but in the depths of my heart — that what I had just heard had spoken truth to me, truth about the supreme composer, and it moved me to give thanks to God. Seated next to me was the Lutheran bishop of Munich. I spontaneously said to him: “Whoever has listened to this understands that faith is true” — and the beauty that irresistibly expresses the presence of God’s truth.

 But how many times, paintings or frescos also, which are the fruit of the artist’s faith — in their forms, in their colors, and in their light — move us to turn our thoughts to God, and increase our desire to draw from the Fount of all beauty. The words of the great artist, Marc Chagall, remain profoundly true — that for centuries, painters dipped their brushes in that colored alphabet, which is the Bible.  How many times, then, can artistic expression be for us an occasion that reminds us of God, that assists us in our prayer or even in the conversion of our heart!

In 1886, the famous French poet, playwright and diplomat Paul Claudel entered the Basilica of Notre Dame in Paris and there felt the presence of God precisely in listening to the singing of the Magnificat during the Christmas Mass. He had not entered the church for reasons of faith; indeed, he entered looking for arguments against Christianity, but instead the grace of God changed his heart.  Dear friends, I invite you to rediscover the importance of this way for prayer, for our living relationship with God. Cities and countries throughout the world house treasures of art that express the faith and call us to a relationship with God. Therefore, may our visits to places of art be not only an occasion for cultural enrichment — also this — but may they become, above all, a moment of grace that moves us to strengthen our bond and our conversation with the Lord, [that moves us] to stop and contemplate — in passing from the simple external reality to the deeper reality expressed — the ray of beauty that strikes us, that “wounds” us in the intimate recesses of our heart and invites us to ascend to God. 

I will end with a prayer from one of the Psalms, Psalm 27: “One thing have I asked of the Lord, that will I seek after; that I may dwell in the house of the Lord all the days of my life, to behold the beauty of the Lord, and to inquire in his temple” (Verse 4). Let us hope that the Lord will help us to contemplate His beauty, both in nature as well as in works of art, so that we might be touched by the light of His face, and so also be light for our neighbor. Thank you.

Graham Greene on the Art of Storytelling

2011-08-31T20:05:00.000-05:00

Stephen Holden’s review in last Thursday’s New York Times of Rowan Joffe’s new adaptation of Graham Greene’s 1938 thriller, Brighton Rock, emphasized the way in which the film distances itself from the book’s theological preoccupations. Brighton Rock is the story of a small-time teenage hood named Pinkie, whose “perfect murder” has a loose thread that slowly but ineluctably unravels the whole plan, jeopardizing Pinkie’s dreams of leading the best gang in Brighton. It also jeopardizes his soul, so Pinkie reckons. Pinkie’s Catholic upbringing, though long formally discarded, still provides the dominant voice inside his conscience, which torments him as he is forced to take ever riskier and more ruthless measures to protect himself from his pursuers.

“By discarding most of the theological debate,” writes Holden of Rowan Joffe’s adaptation, “the movie is no longer a passion play but a gritty and despairing noir. That’s good enough for me.”

But not good enough for Greene himself, who had much higher aspirations for his storytelling. Besides being a brilliant novelist, Greene was also one of the most perceptive film reviewers and critics of film of the 20^th century. In his 1937 essay, “Subjects and Stories,” written at more or less the same time as Brighton Rock, Greene considers the tremendous cultural power of the cinema, a power he believed had been largely untapped by mainstream films. He affirms his ideal for the cinema, and of storytelling in general, in the opening lines of the essay, starting with some lines from Chekhov about novelists:

‘The best of them 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.’ This description of an artist’s theme [continues Greene] has never, I think, been bettered…

To portray life as it is…but also life as it ought to be. This, for Greene, is the storyteller’s task. In Brighton Rock, Greene saw fit to set his teenage hood against a supernatural backdrop, and so to accord Pinkie the respect of allowing him to wrestle like a man with the angel’s voice inside his conscience. According to Stephen Holden, Rowan Joffe’s film does not accord Pinkie such respect—or at least not so well as Greene’s novel does. Writes Holden: “If you strip away the book’s Roman Catholicism, which the movie mostly does, its story fits right into the nihilistic mood of today.”

Having yet to see the movie, I cannot judge how far Rowan Joffe’s film ventures into nihilism. But I am leery that, in soft-pedaling Greene’s concerns in his novel with life as it ought to be, this new adaptation of Brighton Rock only underscores life as it is in a postmodern world which has been, for many, drained of all meaning.

No More Rock-Hard Marshmallows

2011-08-30T20:17:00.000-05:00

It’s good to be back at the helm of High Concepts, after my little, unannounced, two-week hiatus, in which I had a chance to re-charge my blogging batteries.

I apologize for any just frustration you may have felt in the last two weeks, when every time you checked the blog you found the same, rock-hard, “On Marshmallows and Melodrama” piece. Don’t worry. It’s not that I thought that piece demanded two weeks of deep meditation…

But a special apology is due to those participating in the Virtual Summer Circle of Thomistic Studies. You must feel pretty irked at the unexpected lull in the conversation, thinking perhaps that this wasn’t the Thomistic cruise you signed up for. “Where is my Maritain?” you have been rightly asking yourself. Well, don’t write the Circle off just yet. It’s only August 30, we have more than three weeks of summer still to go, and I plan on making the most of it. I have one or two things more to say about Maritain’s discussion of beauty in Chapter V, not to mention topics covering the rest of Art and Scholasticism, so go find your book where you tossed it into the hedges in sheer disgust, and get ready.

A great cultural event occurred today, which will no doubt curb the slide of Western Civilization for a day or two. At Prospero’s Books in Manassas, Virginia, I found a copy of the February 1915 number of The Century, a successor to Scribner’s Monthly Magazine, which began publication in 1881 and pooped out in 1930. The reason this number of The Century attracted me so is that it contains a short story by that peerless comic genius, P.G. Wodehouse, as well as—a fact I didn’t even realize until I raced furtively from the bookstore and flipped through the contents in a shadowy corner—an article by the Catholic writer, Hilaire Belloc. The Wodehouse story is called “Bill, the Bloodhound,” and how better to enjoy this pleasant latish summer eve than by reading it.

Cruel, I know, not to transcribe the entire thing for you here. But if I send you madly scrambling to your local bookstore from some Wodehouse, then my work will be complete.

Apart from the Virtual Summer Circle of Thomistic Studies, other Coming Attractions on High Concepts include…

A post tomorrow on Graham Greene. One of the books I read this summer is Graham Greene’s marvelous thriller, Brighton Rock. (I see, by the way, that a new film has been made of it, which I haven’t yet seen.) But tomorrow I want to say something about how Greene’s short essay, “On Subjects and Stories,” can help understand what Greene is up to in Brighton Rock and his other fiction.

And for those readers in and around Spokane, Washington who have no more satisfying social life, I will be speaking at Gonzaga University late next month as part of their annual Faith, Film and Philosophy extravaganza. The topic of this year’s meeting is the mystery genre in film. On Thursday evening, September 28, I will be giving a talk entitled “On Mysteries and the Higher Mystery,” in which I will offer some Chestertonian reflections on the reasons why we love tales of mystery and suspense, with special reference to how the genre has been transformed in recent film and television. The conference is sponsored by Gonzaga’s Faith and Reason Institute and Whitworth University’s Weyerhaeuser Center for Faith and Learning. Perhaps I will see you there.

On Marshmallows and Melodrama

2011-08-15T21:09:00.000-05:00

Recently my wife and I finished watching our 40^th and final episode of the BBC television series, Lark Rise to Candleford, which ended its hugely popular original run on the BBC earlier this year, and is now going like rented hotcakes on Netflix. Lark Rise, loosely based upon Flora Thompson’s semi-autobiographical novel of the same name, is set in the 1890s and centers on a young woman, Laura Timmins (Olivia Hallinan) from the Oxfordshire hamlet of Lark Rise who moves to the nearby market town of Candleford to work for her cousin, Dorcas Lane (Julia Sawalha), the town’s postmistress. But the series is much more of an ensemble piece, featuring a large and engaging cast of characters from both Lark Rise and Candleford. The stories are warm, comical, romantic, and at times surprisingly poignant about what is lost and what is gained in modernity’s progress away from the small, local virtues of rural life. Lark Rise is just about as satisfying a melodrama as one could wish for.

Which raises the question: why would one wish for a melodrama in the first place? Aren’t melodramas the marshmallows of the world of story—almost painful in their sugary sweetness, and utterly void of all nutritional value?

Melodrama is a definition with no precisely fixed meaning, but the kind of definition found on Wikipedia is fair enough: a melodrama is a story which exaggerates plot and character in order to appeal to the emotions. The exaggeration can take many forms: contrived plots, emotionally explosive romantic triangles, broad comic characters, and thrilling dramatic twists. All of which are on display in Lark Rise—in each 50-minute episode.

But I am loathe to dismiss Lark Rise, and melodrama in general, as no more than a silly, guilt-inducing pleasure—a marshmallow that might better have been exchanged for a lean chicken breast and two veg. When it comes to melodrama, I am in agreement with T.S. Eliot, who, in an essay on two of the greatest melodramatic novelists, Wilkie Collins and Charles Dickens, wrote:

And the same holds true of movies and television shows. What Eliot is saying is that what we enjoy in the best melodramas are qualities inherent to great drama itself. 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 marshmallow-glutted crowd that doesn’t know any better.

What I like especially in Eliot’s point is the way it blurs the distinction between “high” and “low”—or “popular”—culture. The best drama—Dickens’ Bleak House, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, James Joyce’s Ulysses—is full of the exaggeration of plot and character that tugs melodramatically upon the emotions. There is perhaps no more melodramatic writer in the English language than Shakespeare (for sheer implausibility, there’s nothing like the heartstring-yanking Act V of The Winter’s Tale). But this is what we want from stories, and if we can’t find it in the works that so-called “high” culture has on offer (and increasingly, we can’t), then we will go looking for it elsewhere. In the same essay alluded to above, Eliot makes this point:

Those who have lived before such terms as “high-brow fiction,” “thrillers” and “detective fiction” were invented realize that melodrama is perennial and that the craving for it is perennial and must be satisfied. If we cannot get this satisfaction out of what the publishers present as “literature,” then we will read—with less and less pretence of concealment—what we call “thrillers.” But in the golden age of melodramatic fiction [Eliot is thinking of the literature of the mid 19^th-century] there was no such distinction. The best novels were thrilling; the distinction of genre between such-and-such a profound “psychological” novel of today and such-and-such a masterly “detective” novel of today is greater than the distinction of genre between Wuthering Heights, or even The Mill on the Floss, and East Lynne, the last of which “achieved an enormous and instantaneous success, and was translated into every know language, including Parsee and Hindustani (Eliot, “Wilkie Collins and Dickens,” 409-10).

East Lynne, by the way, was a sensational novel published in 1861 by Ellen Wood, a novel replete with all manner of outrageously melodramatic devices….

So am I saying that there is no difference between East Lynne and Bleak House? Or between Bleak House and King Lear? Are there no such things as dramatic marshmallows? Of course there are. You find them every afternoon in the soap operas that ceaselessly bubble up on network television. The point is not that there is no such thing as sappy, corny, campy storytelling. The point is that what we are looking for, even in the clumsiest melodramas, are essentially the same qualities, far more artfully presented, in the greatest drama. I would not say that Lark Rise to Candleford achieves that height of which Eliot speaks, where melodrama becomes great drama. But that it is a very fine melodrama, one that here and there achieves greatness, I am sure.

And so I recommend it to you.

e-books Rising

2011-08-10T14:59:00.000-05:00

Picking up on my post from last week about the surging market for e-books: a comprehensive survey of all aspects of the publishing industry, covering the period from 2008-2010, was released yesterday, and among the many interesting conclusions found in it is the following, as reported by the New York Times:

E-books were another bright spot, thanks to the proliferation and declining cost of e-reading devices like the Nook by Barnes & Noble and Amazon’s Kindle, and the rush by publishers to digitize older books.

In 2008 e-books were 0.6 percent of the total trade market; in 2010, they were 6.4 percent. Publishers have seen especially robust e-book sales in genre fiction like romance, mystery and thrillers, as well as literary fiction. In 2010, 114 million e-books were sold, the report said.

The survey does not include statistics for 2011, which so far has been a boom year for e-books as prices for e-book readers have continued to come down.

The Times also reported that

Sales of trade books grew 5.8 percent to $13.9 billion, fueled partly by e-books…. Juvenile books, which include the current young-adult craze for paranormal and dystopian fiction, grew 6.6 percent over three years.

As I predicted last week, I think the soaring interest in e-books is in the near future going to converge with the soaring interest in juvenile books, as more and more young readers and their parents partake in the easy accessibility of e-books and e-book readers.

Harry Potter 7, Part 2: My Wife Speaks

2011-08-08T20:43:00.001-05:00

Were any of you as disappointed as my wife was upon seeing Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2? The movie, she felt, failed to portray many riches found in the book, especially how Harry’s final confrontation with Voldemort underscores Rowling’s chief theme of the power of sacrificial love. In Chapter 36 of the book, “The Flaw in the Plan,” we read:

“You won’t be killing anyone else tonight,” said Harry as they circled, and stared into each other’s eyes, green into red. “You won’t be able to kill any of them ever again. Don’t you get it? I was ready to die to stop you from hurting these people—”

“But you did not!”

“—I meant to, and that’s what did it. I’ve done what my mother did. They’re protected from you. Haven’t you noticed how none of the spells you put on them are binding? You can’t torture them. You can’t touch them. You don’t learn from your mistakes, Riddle, do you?” (p. 738)

None of this nuance is portrayed in the film. Instead, after Harry comes back to life, Voldemort is shown to be as strong as he ever was. The diminishment in his powers brought about by Harry’s sacrifice is passed over. True, Voldemort is accurately shown not to be the master of the Elder Wand. But it would have been a much more fitting ending, thematically, if the dialogue from the book quoted above would have been used. Too much time was taken up with Harry’s and Voldemort’s rather boring, and wholly invented, flying grappling match.

A blog I read pointed out that the film also fails to include Harry’s crucial plea for Voldemort to show remorse for the evil he has done:

“But before you try to kill me, I’d advise you to think about what you’ve done….Think, and try for some remorse, Riddle….”

“What is this?”

Of all the things that Harry had said to him, beyond any revelation or taunt, nothing had shocked Voldemort like this. Harry saw his pupils contract to thin slits, saw the skin around his eyes whiten.

“It’s your one last chance,” said Harry, “it’s all you’ve got left….I’ve seen what you’ll be otherwise….Be a man….try…Try for some remorse…” (p. 741).

Too bad these lines were left out: lines about how even the most corrupt person always has a chance to change his ways…about the meaning of genuine manhood.

“I’ve seen what you’ll be otherwise.” A reference to the shriveled, damned soul of Voldemort whimpering in its torment which Harry sees at “King’s Cross.” The movie depicts Voldemort’s damned soul quite movingly. It would have done well to also employ Harry’s dialogue quoted above.

And don’t even get me started on what my wife had to say about how the film spoils the book’s portrayal of the true friendship that underwrites Ron and Hermione’s budding romance.

So, Potter fans, what did you think?