Eric The Blue

Joyce's Dubliners: "A Little Cloud" and "Counterparts"

After "The Boarding House," the next two stories in Dubliners are "A Little Cloud" and "Counterparts."  They have a similar structure, for in both a man comes home in the evening somewhat the worse for having had a few--"where there are four Irishmen," my wife's Irish grandmother says, "there's usually a fifth"--and faces a discouraging domestic situation.  We have noted how the age of the main character keeps getting older as we progress through these stories, from schoolboys in the first few to the late-teen Eveline and now to thirtyish men in "A Little Cloud" and "Counterparts."  They're married with children and things are not going well.  When the "hero" of "Counterparts" arrives home near the end of the story, he enters the kitchen and, finding it dark and empty, bawls out his wife's name.  There then follows this terse summary of their life together:

His wife was a little sharp-faced woman who bullied her husband when he was sober and was bullied by him when he was drunk.  They had five children.  A little boy came running down the stairs. 

The story ends when the man beats this boy who is guilty of being present. It's an ugly scene but we are prevented from condemning him, perhaps, by the manner in which the objective, humanly convincing narrative of the man's suffocating work-a-day life has been rendered in the portion of the story I've skipped over.

The main character of "A Little Cloud" would be too timid to beat anyone.  When he gets home, his wife berates him before handing off the baby so she can shop for tea before the store closes.  When she gets back, the baby is crying and she berates him again.  In between, he has been studying their flat, especially a picture of his wife and the "prim" furniture that reminds him of her.  The theme of all these stories is entrapment.

Mapping the craziness

 

 

 

I think this is a really interesting map.  The red dots locate the home districts of the 80 Republican US House members who signed a letter to their leader, John Boehner, demanding that the prospect of a government shutdown be used as leverage to defund the Affordable Care Act.  The red and blue shaded background indicates the result of the 2012 presidential election by congressional district, blue for Obama, red for Romney.  

First, it's evident that Democrats live in cities.  By acreage, Washington and Oregon do not look like the blue states that they are.  The desert areas in the east are overwhelmingly Republican; the seacoasts, including especially the urban centers of Seattle and Portland, are overwhelming Democratic.  Look at Ohio. Obama won that state.  Look at Michigan.  Obama won it, handily.  Colorado was Obama's, too.   Big cities are necessarily in small (by area) congressional districts.  That's where the Obama vote resides. 

The 80 fellows rooting for a shutdown don't live in Starbucks land.  They're from the country, or the exurbs, and they're not worried about losing to a Democrat.  As Ryan Lizza explains, Obama lost by an average of 23 points in these districts, and the representatives who signed the letter to Boehner won by an average of 34 points. 

I agrued here that Republicans can hardly help but tarnish their brand in the big country we all share.  That's because what's in the interest of the national party is not in the interest of individual Republican office-holders.  What the Republican party ought to do is moderate, move toward the center, drop the fanaticism, wipe off the sneers and try to smile.  But that wouldn't play in the districts represented by the fellows who might very well steer us off the cliff. 

The Republican majority in the House is based on a minority of votes--in 2012, Democratic candidates for the US House received more votes, but Republicans, aided by carefully drawn boundaries and the concentration of Democratic voters near urban centers, won more elections.  And eighty is barely more than a third of the 232 House Republican members.  The letter that seems to have cowed Boehner concluded by quoting  from Federalist Paper No. 58.  There's something wrong when we all have to be in a car with a minority of a minority at the wheel and driving fast and reckless while lecturing about James Madison.

 

At the museum

Amanda and I took the afternoon off and visited the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.  The museum routine of standing in one place before walking a short distance to a new spot to stand in place, together with creaky and arthritic knees, reminds one that the making and enjoyment of art is mainly for those who do not lack the basic creature comforts. 

"Look at this Matisse," says Amanda.  Yeah.  What would really be beautiful, I'm thinking, is a bench to sit on.  You have to be careful though.  Once I almost sat down on a work of art. 

I have little interest in cereal bowls from the Huan dynasty.  Diane Arbus, however, is another story.  She's known for her photographs of nudists, dwarfs, giants and other manifest freaks, like a little boy with a toy hand grenade.  I prefer the disguised freaks--for example, the husband and wife sunning themselves on their lawn in Westchester.  You can see it in Minneapolis through October 20.

Local controversy

My wife Amanda and I have a possible disagreement about the following two sentences.  I say that they mean the same thing; she says they don't.  I say it's a "possible" disagreement because it's possible she thinks I'm right but just gets sick of dorky me, the language cop of the household, making fun of things she says.  Anyway, the sentences.

I. That knife is a tomato knife.

II.  That knife is literally a tomato knife.

I'm going to try, in the manner of a scientist, to make the strongest case possible for the view with which I disagree.  It has to do with the intention of the knife's manufacturer.  The second sentence has a different meaning because it emphasizes that the knife is meant to be used on tomatoes.  A different emphasis means there is a shade of different meaning.

But is there more than one way to be a tomato knife?  One literal, the other unspecified?

I should admit that my objection to the second sentence is mainly esthetic.  It has an extra word that I think adds no value and that the first sentence therefore is a superior expression.  Write with nouns and verbs, someone has advised, and in general I think it's a good idea to regard with suspicion adverbial modifiers.  For example, I hate it when, already suffering from the Sunday night blues, some pretty face on the ten o'clock news reports to me and the world that there was a fire and the building "completely destroyed."  Or, similarly, when the commentating gasbags are pontificating earlier on Sunday, you might hear one of them say, "Obama is fairly unique in that, blah, blah, blah." 

Some things do not admit of degrees.  Uniqueness.  Destruction. Tomato knives.

Kind of liking the new pope

Were I determined to detest the pope--and cathedral-loads of my loyal readers know I have tendencies in that direction--I would say that his PR triumphs don't change the essential facts about his wrongness.  Wrong on gay rights.  Wrong on women's rights.  On contraception, absurd. But what do I expect?  That he would breeze into the Vatican and three blinks later declare the Church's teaching on these questions a large, long error?  Probably he's said as much as he can.  For example:

We cannot insist on issues relating only to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods.  This is not possible.  I have not spoken much about these things, and I was reprimanded for that.  But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in a context.  The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.

Sounds like what you'd say if you never wanted to talk about them--maybe because you're embarrassed by what you're expected to say.  I'm beginning to like the guy.  It's not just the funny boys and girls with whom he seems interested in making nice.  It's people like me, too.  Plus, I'm attracted to big shots who take the bus.  Not very long ago the "nuns on the bus," always travelling in pairs, usually in poor neighborhoods, were an implicit criticism of the fur-trimmed Vatican boys, including the one at the top of the heap.  Is it possible that those nuns now have on their side someone who's large and in charge?

 

Middlemarch

Finished Middlemarch yesterday.  According to Wikipedia, its author, Marian Evans, used the pen name George Eliot "to ensure her books would be taken seriously."  Having spent a couple of months sunk in Middlemarch, I have my own amateur's theory.  The book is so full of learning and intelligence that, had it sprung from the mind of a female (which, of course, it did), the critical reception might have been marred somewhat by the jealousy of male writers.  Besides the apt and ranging chapter epigraphs drawn from world literature, there is the evident mastery of diverse subjects, from contemporary politics and business to the practice of medicine to an unsentimental but sympathetic grasp of human psychology.  And it's all executed with such leisurely assurance.  If the best novel in the English language was not written by James Joyce, then it's probably Middlemarch.

I have one bit of amateurish psychology regarding Eliot.  She doesn't go in much for villains. I think she might have assented to the maxim that one who understood all would forgive all, and in that case she herself would be obliged to forgive a lot, for there doesn't seem to be anything she doesn't comprehend.  But is she not hard on Rosamond Vincy?  And isn't beautiful, spoiled Rosamond, who marries the admirable Dr Lydgate and then almost destroys him with her bitchy egocentrism, just the sort of woman that a homely genius like Marian Evans might especially despise? About the only thing to be said against Lydgate is that he was fool enough to marry Rosamond. I wonder whether Eliot wasn't in her fiction working out some bitterness--exercising her prerogative to take authorly revenge.

Virginia Woolf's famous dictum concerning Middlemarch is that it is "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people."  Less well known is the opinion of another woman, from the other side of the Atlantic.  In a letter to a relative, Emily Dickinson asked, "What do I think of Middlemarch?"--and began her reply with another question: "What do I think of glory?"

 

Flannery O'Connor and her prayers

The current New Yorker includes a selection of prayers (behind a subscriber wall) by Flannery O'Connor, best known as the author of A Good Man is Hard to Find and Everything that Rises Must Converge, two story collections that she completed before dying, at age 39, on August 3, 1964.  After graduating college, she spent a year at the Writers' Workshop of the University of Iowa, where she kept a ruled notebook in which she addressed handwritten entries to God. 

They're sort of crazy.  Her stories have a hard kick--someone said, I think aptly, that you laugh and laugh and then finally may wonder what it is that you are laughing at.  But these prayers, or diary letters to God, aren't funny at all.   She's relieved to have the peace that comes from having banished sexual desire, but then it comes calling again, and she's full of self-reproach.  She's serious about heaven and hell.  She disparages science.  Regarding her fiction, she analogously credits God for whatever is meritorious in it: God is to her as she is to typewriter.  Perhaps you, as I, think this might all be more interesting if you knew more about abnormal psychology.  Predictably, abnormal psychology is another subject for which she has nothing but disdain.  Ha, ha!

When I was in college, I had a short story course for which we were required to buy The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.  It came in at around 1500 pages and included 109 stories by 87 authors.  O'Connor was represented by three stories.  In one, a family is going on a car trip.  The grandma is chatty, full of what barely qualifies as conventional wisdom.  She keeps up a running commentary, part of which involves current events--a notorious criminal known as the Misfit is on the loose.  Then there is car trouble.  Sure enough, the Misfit and his men come upon the scene. The whole family is murdered.  One of the Misfit's men makes a joke while sliding down a ditch with a body, and the story ends when the Misfit rebukes him: 

"Shut up, Bobby Lee," the Misfit said.  "It's no real pleasure in life."

In another, the main character decides to have a likeness of Christ tattooed on his back.  The tattoo artist gives him a book of Christian art to look through for possible models.  He flips past the familiar ones--"The Good Shepherd, Forbid Them Not, The Smiling Jesus, Jesus the Physician's Friend."  Finally he chooses, to have tattooed on his back, "the haloed head of a flat stern Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes."

Hers is an unusual sensibility.  She's really popular at Catholic universities but I wonder what she'd think of her most enthusiastic admirers.  Probably more than she thinks of us Sunday morning sippers of Bloody Marys.  There's enough of her disdain to go around.  Regarding the savage grotesqueries in her stories, she commented: "To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the blind you draw large and startling figures."

 

Dickens or Eliot

Having been happily sunk in Middlemarch for several weeks now, I finally got around to googling the author, Mary Ann Evans (pen name: George Eliot), and was amused to read, in the description accompanying the second return, that she was "one of the leading female English novelists of the 19th century."  This seems a lot like calling Tiger Woods one of the best mixed-race golfers on the PGA tour. It's a BBC History site, and if you click the link you discover that the article itself avoids being ridiculous by leaving off "female":  "one of the leading English novelists of the 19th century." 

The principal competition would be Dickens and I have to say that I like Middlemarch better than any of his books I've read.  But it's like Tolstoy or Dostoevski.  There's  no accounting for taste.  With Dostoevski and Dickens you have wounded geniuses working it out with pen and paper.  Tolstoy and Eliot seem more like naturals to me.  No wound necessary.  They were born to be omniscient narrators. 

 

Netflix: Jesus Camp

Christian fundamentalism as child abuse.  A question, not explicitly raised in the movie, is how Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing, the directors, gained access to the scenes at the camp and megachurches and home schools that are the heart of this documentary.  It seems they must have misrepresented themselves and their project.  On the other hand, the film's subjects are manifestly pleased with themselves, so maybe not.  A harsh critic of Jesus Camp, Ron Reno of Focus on the Family, is subconsciously stumped by the puzzle:

The directors' claim that they were simply trying to create an "objective" film about children and faith ring hollow.  I don't question the motives of the Christians shown in the film.  Indeed, the earnestness and zeal with which the young people pictured attempt to live out their faith are admirable.  Unfortunately, however, it appears that they were unknowingly being manipulated by the directors in their effort to cast evangelical Christianity in an unflattering light.

If what the film shows is "admirable," how can it be that the directors "manipulated" the subjects so that they appear "in an unflattering light"?  Admirable or unflattering--which is it?  The straightforward solution to this problem is that what the film shows is not admirable and that even the spokesman for Focus on the Family understands in his bones that there is something repulsive about children being robbed of . . . their childhood, the chance to be children.  Turns out that watching very young kids preach and proselytize and speak in tongues and endure what look like epileptic fits of religious ecstasy is a lot like watching them compete in beauty pageants: grotesque, creepy, sickening. 

Stop that cliche!

I enjoyed this, by Teju Cole, on the way that cliches function as substitutes for thought.  It's fun to try to add on to his Dictionary.  Here's a couple of candidates:

LUMINOUS: apply it to any book or movie you like (or think you ought to like).

PARADIGM SHIFT: because by now even regular people know about "thinking outside the box."