Jordan M. Poss: Blog, Ltd.

Summer Reading 2011

2011-09-17T19:22:00.005-04:00

I've had immense difficulty putting this list together--thanks to the horrible new Facebook note editor, which I usually use to put these lists together initially--so I'm going to post it largely without comment. All hyperlinked titles will take you to my Amazon.com review of the book in question. Check back tomorrow or the next day for my review of The Storm of War, which hasn't yet been posted to Amazon. Apparently the site has a policy of spot-checking every review that contains the word Nazi, which is frustrating for people who review a lot of military history. That said, I present

The List:

The Narnian, by Alan Jacobs
Seven Lies About Catholic History, by Diane Moczar
The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, by Alan Jacobs
The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler
The Storm of War: A New History of World War II, by Andrew Roberts
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, by Hunter S. Thompson
Philosophy 101 by Socrates, by Peter Kreeft
Socrates Meets Descartes, by Peter Kreeft
J.R.R. Tolkien, by Mark Horne
Socrates Meets Marx, by Peter Kreeft
Socrates Meets Machiavelli, by Peter Kreeft
George Washington Carver, by John Perry
Socrates Meets Hume, by Peter Kreeft
A Short History of England, by G.K. Chesterton
Batman: Dark Victory, by Jeph Loeb
Guide to Thomas Aquinas, by Josef Pieper
King, Warrior, Magician, Lover, by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette
Debunking 9/11 Myths, David Dunbar and Brad Reagan, Eds.
Batman: Haunted Knight, by Jeph Loeb
Batman: Hush, by Jeph Loeb
Winston’s War: Churchill 1940-1945, by Max Hastings
Abuse of Language—Abuse of Power, by Josef Pieper
Socrates Meets Kant, by Peter Kreeft
Batman: The Man Who Laughs, by Ed Brubaker
The Unity of Philosophical Experience, by Etienne Gilson
The Discarded Image, by C.S. Lewis
Money, Greed, and God, by Jay W. Richards

Unlisted Honorable Mention:

You don't read a dictionary all the way through, no matter how short, so I didn't include The Universe According to G.K. Chesterton in the list. The book is a compilation of Chestertonian definitions--which the editors call "Chestertonitions"--collected from GKC's immense body of work. It's something like Ambrose Bierce's famous Devil's Dictionary but characterized by GKC's kinder wit, friendlier satire, and a big scoop of paradox. It's a lot of fun to browse.

Spring Reading 2011

2011-08-06T12:23:00.005-04:00

Lest you think I have been lax concerning my reading updates, let me make it clear that my laziness is only part of the problem. I've also been busy and a tiny little hard drive crash that erased everything has also gotten in the way. That said, this spring, which for the purposes of this blog runs from the second week of February to the end of May, was another reading season full of good reading.

It was also unusual in the number of books I was not reading for the first time. I'm a slow reader, and so my panic that I will never ever finish all the good book I'm interested in before I die usually means I don't reread. This season was an exception. I'll discuss the repeat offenders in due time. But first--

The List:

Run With the Horsemen, by Ferrol Sams
The Mother Tongue, by Bill Bryson
The Right Stuff, by Tom Wolfe
The Wrong War, by Bing West
Thomas Aquinas: A Very Short Introduction, by Fergus Kerr
Beowulf, trans. by Seamus Heaney
Voodoo Histories, by David Aaronovitch
The March Up, by Bing West and Maj. Gen. Ray L. Smith
Manalive, by G.K. Chesterton
A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt
Ten Ways to Destroy the Imagination of Your Child, by Anthony Esolen
Magic: A Fantastic Comedy, by G.K. Chesterton
The Hunger Games, by Suzanne Collins
Ragtime, by E.L. Doctorow
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. by Simon Armitage
The March, by E.L. Doctorow
The Trials of Kelvin and Isaac Reynolds, by Brad Garrett and Ed Long
Strong Men Armed: The United States Marines Against Japan, by Robert Leckie
Tarawa: The Story of a Battle, by Robert Sherrod
The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis
Gates of Fire, by Steven Pressfield

Once more, from the top:

Beowulf needs no introduction, especially in Seamus Heaney's translation. I've read the epic many, many times in a number of translations, but I have a special love for Heaney's since it's the first I bought for myself (at the Brunswick Mall Waldenbooks one summer at St. Simons) and read all the way through. Last season I quoted a passage from The Shadow of the Wind describing the overpowering joy of losing oneself in a good book late at night. That was me, a young middle- or highschooler, staying up late into the night, spellbound. And whenever I revisit it, Beowulf is always as good as the first time I read it.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is another old favorite. I picked up Simon Armitage's relatively recent translation at Books-a-Million while I was at Sun-N-Fun and read it over a few days there and on the way home. Despite some odd nonsense about the anonymous poet's "environmentalist subtext" and a bit too much looseness in the translation--underscored by having the original Middle English on the facing page--the translation channeled the spirit of the story and I enjoyed it for that. I guess it was like reuniting with an old friend who now has an unfortunate haircut.
As for old acquaintances you'd rather not see, I think the officious, snide, bureaucratic demon Screwtape is among the most despicable and memorable of world literature. I first read C.S. Lewis's The Screwtape Letters my freshman year of college and, like my late-night readings of Beowulf, the experience moved me so profoundly that the mere location where I read it (back corner table in the Snack Shop) is ineffaceably branded into the memory with it. After almost a decade, rereading it brought even greater rewards. Lewis later asserted that he never had a more unpleasant experience writing a book--placing himself in the mindset in which good is evil, wrong is right, and up is down was mentally and spiritually taxing--but the insights into human nature and man's relation to temptation and the Tempter were, I hope for Lewis, worth the sacrifice. Suffice it to say that I'm not going to wait another decade to reread it.
The last reread of the season was Gates of Fire, a book I'm happy to have introduced to a number of people who devoured it the way I did. This time around I read it even faster than I did the first, and with even more relish. The story of the Spartan fight to the death at Thermopylae is compelling anyway, but Steven Pressfield's novel imbues the story with an intimacy that makes it that much more thrilling and poignant. Read this if you haven't.

Best Non-Fiction of the Season:

There is no contest for this distinction. As good as much of my non-fiction reading was (The Wrong War, Voodoo Histories, and Strong Men Armed especially), Tom Wolfe's non-fiction novel The Right Stuff stole the show early on. Wolfe tells the story of the Mercury Seven, the original group of American astronauts recruited from the elite cadre of Air Force, Navy, and Marine test pilots to spearhead the space race. The book is thrilling, funny, insightful, and genuinely moving--Wolfe establishes from the beginning the cost the astronauts had to be willing to pay for the advance of America into space, and it weighs terribly in the minds of the men and their wives. The book also begins and ends with the nearly-fatal exploits of Chuck Yeager, the man who defined "the right stuff" both then and now.

Honorable mention:

I bought David Aaronovitch's Voodoo Histories hoping for a wide-ranging debunker of the more popular (and therefore more asinine) conspiracy theories current in the US. This book doesn't provide that, but that's okay--rather than wasting space debunking the usually minuscule pieces of "evidence" obsessively pored over by conspiracists (which Aaronovitch points out can take thousands of pages, as Vincent Bugliosi's 1648-page book on the Kennedy assassination proves), Aaronovitch uses case studies to examine the bad research, poor logic, paranoid psychology, or desperate need for answers that drive conspiracy theories. This is an excellent read.

Best Fiction of the Season:

This should really go to Gates of Fire, but I've already discussed that so I'll go with the best new novel I read this season, which is certainly Run With the Horsemen. This novel apparently began life as Georgia physician Ferrol Sams's memoirs, but has been fictionalized. Regardless, Sams tells the story of a runty young boy's youth in Depression-era Fayette County, Georgia. It's sometimes more an episodic compendium of stories than a structured novel, but that's not a bad thing by any means. The stories of growing up, maturing, going through the misery of school and social life are all relatable--and hilarious. Run With the Horsemen is a very, very funny book. I recommend it.

Honorable mention:

Manalive is one of two works by Chesterton I read this season and tells the story of Innocent Smith, a "holy fool" who blusters into a London boarding house one with an insatiable desire to climb trees and lunch on rooftops and a loaded pistol in his luggage. A little check into Smith's background--and an incident involving the pistol that would do Chekhov proud--result in Smith's trial before the other members of the boarding house. Who is he, and why is he running around like an enthusiastic child shooting at people?

In Closing:

All the books I read this spring were good in some degree, but I've only selected my favorites to describe here. I may have the time and interest to listen to myself, but that doesn't mean you do, after all. But if anything this list strikes your fancy, feel free to ask and I'll let you know what I thought about it. See you in a few months--and I'm glad to say that my summer reading so far has been excellent.>

Winter Reading, 2010-11

2011-02-27T19:21:00.005-05:00

That afternoon, back in the apartment on Calle Santa Ana, I barricaded myself in my room to read the first few lines. Before I knew what was happening, I had fallen right into it. . . . The minutes and hours glided by as in a dream. When the cathedral bells tolled midnight, I barely heard them. Under the warm light cast by the reading lamp, I was plunged into a new world of images and sensations, peopled by characters who seemed as real to me as my room. Page after page I let the spell of the story and its world take me over, until the breath of dawn touched my window and my tired eyes slid over the last page. I lay in the bluish half-light with the book on my chest and listened to the murmur of the sleeping city. My eyes began to close, but I resisted. I did not want to lose the story’s spell or bid farewell to its characters yet.

When I set out to explain how much I enjoyed some of the books I read this winter, I found I couldn’t improve on this passage. It’s from one of those books—The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafón—and describes perfectly the joy of losing oneself in a good novel. Anyone who loves reading will sympathize.
Between grad school and my hyperintellectual way of approaching nearly everything, it had been a long time since I had felt that kind of joy simply through reading a story. Until this winter, the strongest stirring of it had been when I read Watership Down. There was a story I couldn’t put down, about characters I knew and loved doing things I cared about deeply. Looking further back, the first novel I can find in my lists that I unreservedly loved—as opposed to enjoyed and admired, as in Deliverance and Godric—was C.S. Lewis’s Perelandra. I read it three years ago.
So I’ve gotten a lot of reading done in three years, and the vast majority of it was good, good reading. I rate the aforementioned Deliverance and Godric among my favorite books, among the best books I’ve ever read, but they didn’t grab me and keep me up deep into the night reading them the way some books had—Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban in high school; 1984, Brighton Rock, All the Pretty Horses, and To Kill a Mockingbird in college. (I suppose it’s safe now to confess I did a lot of illegal nighttime reading at BJU. In one spree, I stayed up reading From a Buick 8 until about 4:30 AM, sitting fully clothed in a second-floor Smith bathroom.)
Having also read C.S. Lewis’s memoir Surprised by Joy this season, I find joy the most appropriate word for the feeling I’m talking about. It’s something deep and unquantifiable, and no single word is quite good enough for it.
I felt that headlong joy through three novels this winter.
The first was The Shadow of the Wind, which I’ve already mentioned. This novel is undiluted, unashamed Romance of the purest capital-R kind. The novel is primarily the story of Daniel, a young boy in post-Spanish Civil War Barcelona. His father sells used, rare, and antique books in a tiny shop. When the story begins, Daniel’s father takes him through a rite of passage in the rare books trade—together they visit the Cemetery of Forgotten Books a shop hidden away in back alleys that deals in unique books. Literally unique—these books are the only remaining copies. Here Daniel must choose one book to adopt for life, a book he must cherish and keep alive long after it and its author’s work are forgotten. He chooses—almost at random—a book called The Shadow of the Wind, by Julian Carax. The passage I quoted as an epigraph describes Daniel’s reading of this novel.
Daniel loves the book so much that he seeks out others by its author. As it turns out, The Shadow of the Wind is not the only copy of the novel in existence, it is apparently the only copy of any of Carax’s work, anywhere. An unknown man has been buying up every copy in Europe and destroying those not for sale. Daniel investigates. He meets others in the rare book trade, falls in love with and has his heart broken by the niece of another seller, learns more and more about the sad, mysterious life of Julian Carax, and meets the mysterious stranger himself.
I can’t possibly summarize the novel here. I would either leave too much out or give too much away, both of which would be a disservice to the novel. Like the fictional Shadow of the Wind, Zafon’s novel “split[s] into a thousand stories, as if it had entered a gallery of mirrors, its identity fragmented into endless reflections.” It’s part detective story, part love letter to literature, part coming-of-age story, part romance, part thriller, and it’s funny, moving, and beautiful throughout. It’s easily the best thing I read this winter.
The second novel that filled me with that joy of reading was entirely different. That novel was Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card. Where The Shadow of the Wind was full of romantic atmosphere—wet, lamplit cobblestone streets, alleyways shrouded in fog, crumbling mansions, mysterious men in heavy coats—Ender’s Game was full of the brilliance of the future and the sterile harshness of outer space. If Zafon’s novel is all heart, Card’s is pure intellect.
Which is not to say it is unemotional. Quite the contrary—Ender’s Game is one of the most emotionally stirring novels I’ve ever read. Card tells the story of Andrew “Ender” Wiggin, a young boy who is plucked from elementary school to attend military school in outer space. The Earth of Ender’s time is a few generations removed from attempted invasion by the “buggers,” a far-off alien species that nearly conquered and annihilated humanity. Ender is eventually to be part of mankind’s defenses. But there are wills working outside of the Battle School’s usual regimen. Even from the beginning of the novel, someone is manipulating Ender’s training—and, by extension, Ender himself.
These forces cause Ender’s classmates to hate him. He turns inward. They put him in a poorly-run platoon. He shows leadership and makes friends. They transfer him. He begins extracurricular training with his few friends and makes more. They present him with unsolvable problems. He improvises and overcomes. They force him to fight wargames against overwhelming odds. He adapts and wins. Gradually, Ender wins the respect and loyalty of the other students, but his friends become subordinates and the games become a chore. His life is misery, and there is nothing—nothing—in his future but more and more games.
I hope I didn’t make the novel sound depressing. It can be upsetting, but any great novel should be at times. Ender’s Game is a strong, bold, thrilling, and moving novel about a boy turning—and being turned—into a general. (The book was also awesome militarily. Ender himself reminded me of Ulysses S. Grant, and his opponents in the Battle Room reminded me of Nathan Bedford Forrest, Napoleon, Rommel, the Viet Cong, and the Greek phalangites—among others.)
The last novel that really grabbed me this winter was The Man Who Was Thursday, by G.K. Chesterton. This was both unsurprising and surprising, since Chesterton is one of my favorite writers—ever—and because it’s the first piece of fiction by him that I’ve finished. I’ve previously essayed The Napoleon of Notting Hill, the Father Brown stories, and others, and while they’re all excellent (I’m finding there’s a fine line between excellent novels and the kind I’m trying to describe in this post), The Man Who Was Thursday is the first of Chesterton’s novels to affect me the way The Shadow of the Wind and Ender’s Game did.
The Man Who Was Thursday bears the subtitle A Nightmare. That’s apt. The novel is not horrifying or frightening like many bad dreams, but like many much worse dreams it dashes headlong from beginning to end with fevered intensity, one thing after another, each episode clear, distinct, and vivid beyond compare with anything that came before, only to be supplanted by what follows. It also exhibits the nightmare’s tendency to incorporate all kinds of strange, uncomfortable, or jarring real life moments in a way that seems perfectly natural at the time. If Inception taught us anything, it’s that “dreams feel real while we’re in them.” It’s because the novel is A Nightmare the titular Thursday can go from a garden party in London to a subterranean meeting of a secret society, from there on a boat ride up the Thames, to a hotel breakfast with a terrifying giant of a man, to a rundown tenement building, to a sword duel in a sunny French pasture, to London again, to the zoo, to the countryside chasing after a hot air balloon—and on and on.
Chesterton’s novel tilts along willy-nilly from beginning to end. I read it in a day or two. And, like everything Chesterton produced, you have the medieval sense that everything you’re reading is saying much more than it is literally saying at any one moment. If you’ve read his work before, you’ll know what I’m talking about. If not, you should.
That’s quite enough from me. Below is a complete list of the 21 books I read this winter, winter being defined, for the purposes of this blog, as December, January, and the first week of February. Titles I’ve reviewed at Amazon.com are hyperlinked to my review, but as always, if there’s anything you want to know more about, ask.

The Shadow of the Wind, by Caros Ruiz Zafón
Born Fundamentalist, Born Again Catholic, by David B. Currie
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, by Ron Hansen
Calvin for Armchair Theologians, by Christopher Elwood
War, by Sebastian Junger
Aquinas for Armchair Theologians, by Timothy M. Renick
Surviving in an Angry World, by Charles Stanley
Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, by John Berendt
Batman: Year One, by Frank Miller
Defiant Joy: The Remarkable Life & Impact of G.K. Chesterton, by Kevin Belmonte
Heretics for Armchair Theologians, by Justo and Catherine González
Batman: The Long Halloween, by Jeph Loeb
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare, by G.K. Chesterton
Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life, by C.S. Lewis
Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card
Saint Thomas Aquinas, by G.K. Chesterton
Luther for Armchair Theologians, by Steven Paulson
Warfighting, by the United States Marine Corps
Lilith, by George MacDonald
Shakespeare: The World as Stage, by Bill Bryson
The Prodigal God, by Timothy Keller

Honorable Mentions: Because I had so much excellent reading material this season I chose to focus solely on the three best novels I read, but there were several non-fiction works that deserve a mention. Warfighting is a lightning-fast guide to the Marine Corps's philosophy of the art of war. I ate it up. Shakespeare: The World as Stage, by Bill Bryson, is a quick, informative, and hugely entertaining biography of the Bard. And John Berendt's Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil gripped me almost as much as any of the three novels described above. A "non-fiction novel," Midnight begins as a series of vingettes of the bizarre and rareified social scene in Savannah, but halfway through becomes an incredibly powerful true crime story. The best way I found to describe it was as a sordid, salacious, Deep South version of In Cold Blood. It was very good. And of course there was C.S. Lewis, whose Surprised by Joy was both deeply moving and encouraging. I found, much to my astonishment, that Lewis and I have a great deal in common both in terms of superficial likes and dislikes and deeper aspects of our personalities. It was encouraging both in terms of discovering an ally, as well as knowing that things can turn out all right for someone like Jack. That is, me.

Two Disappointments: I only occasionally include descriptions of books I disliked, but this winter nearly everything was so excellent that the two turkeys—which were nearly unbearable turkeys—stood out all the more. The first was the failed biography of G.K. Chesterton Defiant Joy, which managed to spend several hundred pages not being a biography. The second was Luther for Armchair Theologians, which mystified me by being a book apparently written in plain English that I could not understand a word of. Steer well clear of both.

Special thanks to Megan and Carly for leaning on me to read Ender's Game and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil, and especially to Alex, who also put the pressure on to read Midnight as well as Zafon's novel, the two Batman graphic novels, Surprised by Joy, and... I think that's it this time.

2010 Highlights Reel

2011-01-02T15:05:00.003-05:00

Last year I remarked that twelve months can change a lot of things. It's a truism to the point of cliche, but it's true. Since my last Year in Review post I've written my master's thesis, defended it, graduated with my MA, decided that's enough school for now thank you, lost five pounds, read seventy books, gotten two traffic tickets, fallen in love, had my heart broken, bid good-bye to some great friends, made a couple new ones, been disappointed by some old ones, discovered lots of new movies and a few new bands, had some plans fall through, made major new decisions, visited every emotion on the spectrum at least twice, learned a whole lot about a whole lot of things--including myself--and actually watched a zombie movie of my own free choice. Life is funny.
I know I changed in 2010 but I can't say it was all for the better. For one thing, I'm sad to realize I've become a very angry person. I understand why and can see that progression through the last year and beyond--I am an historian, after all--but that doesn't excuse it or make it right. So I have that to work on this year.
But there are also lots of good things to look back on and to look forward to, and that's what this post is about--the best of 2010. If you know me at all you know that I love movies and books, so I'm limiting my prolix ramblings to those two topics--the best books and films of the scores I read and watched last year. Enjoy!

FILM

Not a bad year in film for me. I watched gobs of movies but didn't see a tremendous lot of new releases, so I was relieves to see that I did a top five last year. Here goes.

Top Five New Releases:

A Serious Man -- This was definitely the year of the Coens for me. Joel and Ethan Coen have two films in my top five new films and one in my top five "discoveries," or older films I've just now gotten around to seeing. A Serious Man technically came out in 2009 but it never got a wide release, so I'm counting it as a 2010 film. At any rate, I watched it when it came out on Blu-ray and was blown away. Essentially a modern retelling of Job, this film is the story of beleaguered Jewish math professor Larry Gopnik in 1960s Minnesota. Calamity after calamity is piled on poor Larry despite his apparently "serious" life, none of the three rabbis from whom he seeks counsel and comfort give him either, and, as in Job, a seemingly distant God arrives with a whirlwind. The Book of Job has always meant a lot to me, and this retelling of the story stunned me. No one else I've shown this to has appreciated it as much as I have, but I'm standing by it.
The Secret of Kells -- A beautifully-realized animated film that is also historically aware. What more could I ask for? The Secret of Kells tells a fictional story of the Book of Kells's creation by Irish monks--and, more specifically, a young boy named Brendan--at the beginning of the Viking Age. This film depicts the power of art--and art's Creator--in a life constantly shadowed by death.
True Grit -- The Coens' second feature in my top five for the year. This film is less a remake of the John Wayne film than another, independent adaptation of Charles Portis's excellent novel (which made my top five fiction reads). A brilliant adaptation with beautiful cinematography, a score woven through with the melodies of hymns, and excellent performances from all involved--this is an all-around excellent film. I'll be surprised and disappointed if this doesn't get Oscar attention.
Inception -- I won't weigh in on the wild internet arguments about Inception--and especially its ending--but it was gripping from start to finish, had great performances, cinematography, and special effects, and a story worth stretching over two and a half hours. This is another film that should get at least a few nominations come Oscar season.
Toy Story 3/The Social Network -- I'm splitting the fifth place spot between two vastly different films. Pixar just can't miss, and Toy Story 3 was another fun, hilarious, and moving entry in their canon. The Social Network was a fast-paced, gripping film about something that should have been neither, so props to David Fincher and his crew of very good actors. Props also to Aaron Sorkin, who crafted a brilliant if sometimes too clever screenplay from a pretty much terrible book.

Top Five Previously Released "Discoveries":

Blood Simple -- The Coen brothers' very first film is as sure-footed, gripping, and grim as any other film from their ever-growing resume. Blood Simple takes Hitchcock's oft-used idea that ordinary people would be bad, bad, bad at murder and protracts it into an unbearably tense film.
A Very Long Engagement -- From the same team that produced Amelie, which is easily the greatest romantic comedy ever made, comes this long, grim, and beautiful meditation on love and longsuffering. Part detective story, part war film, and part high romance, this is one of the few films that has made me cry. Ever.
Groundhog Day -- Not only is this film hilariously funny, it's some exceptionally chewy food for thought--and it features a live groundhog.
Roxanne -- Another genuinely sweet and intelligent romantic comedy (before this year I would have scoffed at the thought they exist), Roxanne is a modern-day retelling of Cyrano de Bergerac. Anyone who has ever felt deeply about someone else but suffered so badly from lack of confidence will be entertained and encouraged.
The French Connection -- The film that Bullit and Dirty Harry were struggling to be. It's a typically rough-hewn 1970s film, but director William Friedkin owned that roughness and created a fictional crime thriller that feels like a documentary. Gene Hackman gives the performance of a lifetime, and of course there's that incredible car chase.

LITERATURE

This was a very good year for my reading list. Not only did I read a lot--more on that momentarily--but the vast majority of the things I read were excellent. I read 70 books all the way through and was going to work up a total page count but, well--even last season's was daunting. I'll just assume I read a metric buttload because it certainly feels like I did. I like that feeling.

Top Five Fiction Reads (in no particular order):

Deliverance, by James Dickey -- Gripping from start to finish, the only word that really recommends itself when I try to describe Dickey's writing is muscular. I recommended this novel to a friend who, like me, bruised through it in a few days. He summed it up well: "It was good but, when I finished it, I just felt tired." Deliverance, in my opinion, is a far better look into the dark heart of man than Heart of Darkness.
Watership Down, by Richard Adams -- An epic in the oldest and most correct sense of the word, and it's about rabbits. You have to read it to believe it. Watership Down is one of the best novels I've ever read. I'll leave it at that.
Brendan, by Frederick Buechner -- I had previously read Buechner's Godric, a fictional autobiography of the Anglo-Saxon sinner turned saint, and was blown away--by the craft of it, the power of the language, the beauty of the message, even the individual word choice. Brendan flows in the same pulsing vein as Godric and is also beautiful. The story of the titular Irish saint and his voyages on the open sea, Brendan is about redemption of a different kind--the kind that comes to people who are already righteous, and know it.
True Grit, by Charles Portis -- I've already written on this novel a few times, so I'll be brief. True Grit is excellent. Read it before you see the movie, and if you've already seen the movie, read the novel. It's worth it.
The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruis Zafon -- This novel is to this list what A Very Long Engagement is to my film list: a beautiful--if painful--foreign love story playing across years and years of time. Zafon's novel is also about something very near and dear to my heart, the power of art, specifically literature. I can't talk about this novel without gushing, so I'll stop here.

Honorable Mentions:

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, by Ron Hansen
One Foot in Eden, by Ron Rash
Serena, by Ron Rash

Top Five Non-fiction Reads (in no particular order):

The Everlasting Man, by G.K. Chesterton -- Chesterton's powerful history of mankind--from the days of the man who lived in a cave and his eventual redemption by the man born in a cave. Chesterton examines the popular conceptions of paganism and its supposed influence on world religion (comparative religion being a burgeoning fad in his day) and deflates all those myths, replacing them with the true story of a world run ragged and frantic, without hope, but changed forever by one event. One of the best and most brilliant books I've ever read.
With the Old Breed, by E.B. Sledge -- A powerful memoir of one Marine's experiences at Peleliu and Okinawa during World War II. Read it to understand what American fighting men have gone through and you'll come away with a deep appreciation of their sacrifices. Adapted into the best episodes of the otherwise uneven HBO miniseries "The Pacific."
The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer -- The harrowing memoirs of a young German soldier's experiences on the Russian Front during World War II. Up there with Sledge's book as one of the best military memoirs I've ever read. (Lots of military memoirs this year, which I do not regard as a bad thing.)
One Square Mile of Hell: The Battle for Tarawa, by Jon Wukovits -- An excellent history of a single battle that mixes top-down strategic history with the brutal, grunt's-eye-view of combat that is, fortunately, becoming more familiar to the public through films like Saving Private Ryan. Tarawa is one of the lesser-known bloodbaths of World War II but deserves to be remembered. Read this book.
Quartered Safe Out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser -- Another memoir to round out my top five, this one by British journalist, historian, and novelist George MacDonald Fraser. Fraser fought against the Japanese in Burma and his memoir is by turns gut-wrenching and hilarious. An excellent and thought-provoking read.

Honorable Mentions:

Salvation on Sand Mountain, by Dennis Covington
In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah, by Bing West

If you check out anything I've mentioned here or want to know more, comment or send me a message. I'm always glad to talk books and movies with friends. Have a happy new year, and I hope to see you again in 2011.

Fall Reading 2010

2010-12-03T14:47:00.004-05:00

I didn't read as much this season as far as a number of books goes, but, counting up through the 18 books I got through, I read over 4,500 pages. Not bad for three months, I think. Fall, for the purposes of this blog, is September, October, and November, with a day or two of December tacked on so I could finish Chesty. There's a lot of stress-reducing or mind-clearing literature here, you can see. Of course, stress reduction for me includes Dante's Divine Comedy (I referred only half-joking to this read-through as "my Dante therapy"), grouping him for probably the first time in history with Ian Fleming and Matt Reilly.

Anyway, I can recommend almost anything on this season's reading list. If you want more details on a book, click the hyperlinked titles for my Amazon review or--if I didn't write one--ask me. If there's one thing in life I'll always have, it's opinions.

The List:

House to House, by David Bellavia with John R. Bruning
Saving the Queen, by William F. Buckley, Jr.
Sergeant York, by John Perry
Don't Tread on Me, by H.W. Crocker III
The Moviegoer, by Walker Percy
Inferno, by Dante, translated by Allen Mandelbaum
Purgatorio, by Dante, translated by Allen Mandelbaum
The Problem of Pain, by C.S. Lewis
Hell Island, by Matt Reilly
Paradiso, by Dante, translated by Allen Mandelbaum
Ice Station, by Matt Reilly
The Bridge of San Luis Rey, by Thornton Wilder
Thunderball, by Ian Fleming
Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson
True Grit, by Charles Portis
Eugenics and Other Evils, by G.K. Chesterton
Quartered Safe Out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser
Chesty: The Story of Lieutenant General Lewis B. Puller, by Col. Jon T. Hoffman

Top Three:
(excluding The Divine Comedy, because, you know)

Quartered Safe Out Here, by George MacDonald Fraser
Fraser is famous for his series of Flashman novels, which take the roguish antihero Harry Flashman through a gamut of embarrassing or ethically dubious situations in Victorian Britain and her colonies. But Fraser didn't publish his first Flashman novel until 1969. 24 years earlier, he was a teenage private in the British Army, humping an Enfield rifle through the Burmese jungle and clearing Japanese bunkers. Quartered Safe Out Here--the title is taken from a Kipling poem--is his memoir of that time. I've read a number of combat memoirs and Fraser's is easily one of the three best I've come across.* He writes candidly about what he does and does not remember, emphasizing always the limited vision and knowledge of a grunt on the ground during war. Combat comes in blinding flashes after long periods of work, hardship, and aching boredom. Fraser's depiction of that fog of war and the camaraderie he shared with the men in his section that makes his memoir thrilling, hilarious, terrifying, horrifying, and moving. Read it.

True Grit, by Charles Portis
I'd seen the John Wayne film adaptation of this novel and was thrilled to see the Coen brothers are adapting it again, so when I saw the novel for sale in Barnes & Noble it was a natural impulse buy. It turned out to be one of the most rewarding impulse buys I've made. I breezed through it in two days and loved every second of it. If you're not familiar with the story that hardly matters--go buy or borrow it and read it. Portis takes a creative Western story and makes great literature out of it. Great characters, great dialogue, narration that is both hilarious and moving--sometimes at the same time--all in the service of a great story--what more can you ask for?

House to House, by David Bellavia
The last book I completed in my summer reading list was No True Glory, by Bing West. That book told the story of the two Battles for Fallujah in the spring and fall of 2004 from all points of view, from the President to the lowest rifleman clearing houses room by room. West's book was excellent, but I wanted to read a boots-on-the-ground memoir (like Fraser's above). Silver Star-winner David Bellavia's House to House fit the bill perfectly. This is a powerful story and rips along like the best action/thriller you can find--and it's a true story. Bellavia served in the 1st Infantry Division in Iraq and spent several weeks clearing houses in the war-torn city of Fallujah in November 2004. House to House primarily recounts the opening days of the battle, climaxing with the deed for which he won the Silver Star and was nominated for a Medal of Honor. When his unit came under fire from multiple insurgents inside a fortress-like house, Bellavia assaulted the house by himself--and took it. House to House is gripping, funny, politically-incorrect, and bluntly written. The result is a book I found incredibly moving.
__________
*The other two, in case you're wondering, are With the Old Breed, by E.B. Sledge, and One Bullet Away, by Nathaniel Fick.

Meeting Glenn Beck

2010-09-19T16:13:00.002-04:00

A Confession by Way of Prologue

Prior to seeing Glenn Beck speak at Littlejohn Coliseum Friday night, I had seen his show once. It was almost three years ago, when Beck was still on CNN. I was on a ski trip to Colorado with my dad and two friends, and while flipping between “Walker: Texas Ranger” and The Pink Panther Strikes Again we stopped on Beck’s show. We watched it for a little while—I can’t even remember the show’s topic—and I found it interesting. In the half-hour or so that we watched, I saw a level-headed conservative with a pretty good, common sense take on current events. And, wonder of wonders, he hosted a show on CNN.
And then I promptly forgot about him.
Skip ahead about eighteen months and I was in graduate school at Clemson. I had not actively thought about Beck since that trip to Colorado but I had picked up faint rumblings of the talk-show world—Beck was no longer on CNN, but FoxNews. That figures, I thought, because based on what I had seen I had wondered how long his show could possibly last on CNN. Then suddenly—a cliché I use in all seriousness—the internet was awash in Beck paraphernalia. One day I opened Facebook and an advertised poll was Should FoxNews fire Glenn Beck?
What had he done? I wondered, and forgot about it. But my iGoogle newsfeeds were brimming with Beck, too. Should Glenn Beck be banned? Does Glenn Beck go too far? Should FoxNews fire Glenn Beck? Can Glenn Beck be trusted? It was a minefield of modal verbs.
And, of course, that repository of collected wisdom—Facebook—was all aflutter. I’ll leave it at that.
I was puzzled. The Glenn Beck I had seen so briefly in January 2008 was respectable, even-keeled, thoughtful, and interesting to watch. The Glenn Beck I was hearing about from friends, TV, and the internet was a frothing lunatic, probably theocratic, definitely racist, and not to be discussed without a sneer or a smirk. Even some my conservative friends dismissed him as an embarrassment.

Before

A few months ago I saw the Beck was going to visit Clemson and speak at Littlejohn Coliseum. I was curious and thought I might like to go. I mentioned the event to my mom, who unabashedly likes Beck, and my grandma, who loves him, and we considered getting a group together for the speech. That didn’t happen, but a day or so before Beck’s speech a friend from my Epsilon Zeta Chi days at BJU, Zach, announced on Facebook that he was attending and had an extra ticket. I called dibs.
In the meantime I tried to take stock of the opinions about Beck by which I was surrounded. My family and many friends liked or even loved his show. Many of the intellectual leftist types I had known in grad school abhorred him and the Tea Party movement that holds him in such esteem. And, as I said, many of my more intellectual conservative friends disdained Beck.
Of the magazines to which I subscribe, National Review, founded by devout Catholic William F. Buckley Jr., seldom refers to Beck but usually does in terms of approval—or amusement at the rage he incites in the left. World, an intellectually lighter magazine standing squarely within the pop-Calvinist worldview, published an editorial by Marvin Olasky a few days before the speech. Olasky commended Beck for his focus on American history, saying that “Civics has largely disappeared from American high schools” and that Beck’s remedial history lessons were a service to his viewers, but took him to task for religious syncretism. As Obama unites Christianity with Marxism, “Beck is syncretizing Mormon and Christian understanding in the service of a civil religion.” Olasky did conclude that “this country is better off with Glenn Beck than without him.”
So when I met Zach for the trip to Littlejohn I had a lot to consider. But, as in the Harry Potter controversy of yesteryear, I was going to make up my own mind. I looked forward to seeing the man himself.

The Day Of

By coincidence I found Beck’s book Arguing With Idiots in Wal-Mart the afternoon before the speech. It was new in paperback so I bought it. I got a good start on the first chapter while waiting for Zach in Clemson’s Chick-fil-A.
I remembered that Arguing With Idiots had caused one more tizzy upon its publication. The hardcover featured a picture of Beck wearing a uniform designed to suggest fascism—a peak cap with a red star, hammer and sickle; an SS-gray uniform with Wehrmacht collar tabs. Reversed Rs, suggestive of Cyrillic alphabets, completed the subconscious picture. And then there was the title. Beck makes it clear on the first page, however, that the idiots in question come from all political factions: “being an idiot has nothing to do with your party affiliation, it has to do with whether you are able to look beyond that affiliation and follow the facts, wherever they may lead.”
Zach and I had a quick supper and headed to Littlejohn. He had a complimentary pass to the pre-speech meet-and-greet, so I waited outside and read while waiting for the doors to open. Chapters One and Two were about capitalism and the Second Amendment, respectively. I liked both chapters. He maintained the non-partisan stance adopted in the introduction but, not surprisingly, took issue with more leftists than conservatives.
As I waited I also partook in a favorite pastime of mine—people-watching. The crowd forming at the doors of Littlejohn was made up of an unusually high proportion of older people, ages 50 and up, all of whom were gregarious and nice to talk to, the kind of people around whom I had grown up and with whom I was comfortable. The young people in the crowd were mostly well-dressed for the occasion. Someone on the street—too far for me to see clearly—was holding up a protest sign. Two college-age guys and a girl walked slow laps around Littlejohn blowing orange vuvuzelas (seriously—can’t we forget those things exist?), though for what purpose I don’t know. A few local politicians politely worked the crowd with pamphlets and handshakes.
Zach returned from the meet-and-greet and said he’d gotten to shake Beck’s hand and talk briefly to him. “He was an agreeable enough fellow,” Zach said. Zach deals in precious metals and, when he said so to Beck, Beck gave him “a knowing grin.” I discussed the book with Zach and our conversation wandered. By the time the doors opened, I was droning about linguistic shift and differences in accent.

The Speech

I took a notebook with me but didn’t use it, so don’t expect a detailed synopsis and critique of Beck’s speech. I went to form an impression, and this note is based on exactly those impressions.
Our seats were good. Looking over the crowd filing into Littlejohn I noticed the same unusual number of gray heads and the same high proportion of nicely-dressed people. The seats in front of us were occupied by an older couple. Upon arrival, the husband looked at Zach and me and said, “I’m sorry, but I’m looking at you and you don’t look radical.” I said that I, too, was having a hard time coming up with the “hate mongers” and nutjobs described as Beck’s followers. The three of us talked books for a moment.
The program opened with a long-ish introduction by a local businessman. Beck followed thirty minutes later. The crowd greeted him with a standing ovation and cheers. Beck thanked the crowd and said that he was glad to be in Clemson, “but what’s with all the orange?” He propped a foot on speaker at the front of the stage, exposing a burnt orange sock. The crowd cheered.
Beck is a gifted speaker. He’s funny and energetic and knows how to express himself. He hooked audience—including myself—at the beginning and didn’t let go. I seldom enjoy listening to A Speech, but never once checked my watch during the roughly 90-minute speech.
Again, I’m not going to give a detailed rundown of the full hour and a half, but Beck’s salient points were:

Government is not the solution to America’s problems; rather,
Personal responsibility is, but
Americans will not accept responsibility without inner change.

I agree wholeheartedly with these points. I am no moderate conservative, but believe—as Beck argues forcefully in Arguing With Idiots—that the government creates more problems than it solves and causes more unfairness than capitalism ever has. Furthermore, Beck repeatedly emphasized the generosity of American charity. Rather than the selfish capitalist state forewarned by Marx, America has given more to charitable causes than any other country in world history, ever. (The numbers on charitable giving in Periclean Athens are surely fuzzy, but I don’t doubt the import of Beck’s statement.)
The problem with government interference now is coddling—the nanny state, what Tocqueville called “soft despotism” and Jonah Goldberg called “liberal fascism.” For many people, the government is a safety net or pair of training wheels meant to keep them from failing. But people need to be free to fail, Beck argued, just as much as they must be free to succeed. Accepting personal responsibility for the consequences of one’s actions is important, but precisely the opposite attitude has taken root in the US.
This is where God comes in, and where I became iffy on Beck’s message. Beck argued that God is the impetus behind both charity (in Christianity, one of the Theological Virtues) and acceptance of responsibility. What is needed before political change, then, is religious revival, a change from the inside out of the American spirit. As a personal example, Beck cited his own alcoholism, saying that he had to recognize he must take responsibility for his actions but could not without “the atonement of Jesus Christ.”
His declaration that “I needed the atonement of Jesus Christ” brought cheers from the audience, but felt disingenuous to me. I am no “religious bigot,” to which Beck made a passing reference (meaning people who stopped following him because of his Mormonism), but I am put off by attempts by Mormons to anoint themselves a Christian denomination. I won’t go into the particulars, but Mormonism ≠ Christianity. At all. So when Beck said he “needed the atonement of Jesus Christ” in order to take responsibility for his addiction, I 1) knew he was using language ambiguous enough for the audience to accept, and 2) wondered what he meant, as a Mormon, by those words.
He also said a few other things with which I took issue. Emphasizing the charity of the American people, Beck asserted that, given the choice, “people will always choose good over violence,” a statement so manifestly untrue that I shouldn’t have to cite examples. This, again, is a difference between Mormonism and Christianity. Mormons progress toward godhood; Christians accept the human bent toward evil and beg for God’s grace.
So Olasky’s accusations of religious syncretism are accurate. But I don’t have a huge problem with that as long as Beck remains, as he put it, “a reminder” rather than a leader. “I’m not a religious leader,” he said, and emphatically, but a political commentator, a fact this rather dunderheaded article from USA Today blundered upon.
But he is a good political commentator, and I’m satisfied with that.

After

Over the hour and a half of his speech, Beck eased from joking to serious discussion of political and social issues. I’ve dwelt on the salient points of his speech because the specifics were often phrased in simplified form. Beck, after all, is a populist, and he has a tremendous following among the middle-class (the loathsome bourgeois of leftist rhetoric), the middle-aged and elderly, the religious.
So I enjoyed my introduction to Glenn Beck. He is a gifted "reminder," well-informed, eloquent, enthusiastic, and good at distilling ideas for the unlearned—the people meant to be guided by the leftist Cult of the Expert. I heard he was a lunatic, that his followers were nuts (the average Tea Partier even being parodied in Prince of Persia), and that his ideas were for simpletons, morons, and—perhaps—the deranged, but I found all that untrue. His ideas are accessible—and, yes, sometimes oversimplified—but they’re legitimate political opinions and deserve respect in political debate.
I’d heard comparisons of the capital mall after Obama’s inauguration and Beck’s speech there. Following the inauguration, the place was trashed. Following Beck’s rally, the place was mostly clean. I looked around as we left Littlejohn and saw one or two spilled drinks, a few programs, and that was it. It seems this crowd was taking personal responsibility to heart.

Summer Reading 2010

2010-09-01T21:53:00.005-04:00

I am slowly recovering from the grad school-induced anemia that unmanned my reading life. Last fall I read five books. I read five during the winter. This spring I began the climb back to the light with twenty books--including a few pamphlet-sized pieces--and this summer I shouldered my way through twenty-two. That feels good. And it helps that nearly all of them--we'll get to the exceptions shortly--were excellent.
I'm finally reading enough books per season to justify a "Top ___" list, so below you'll find my favorite pics in fiction, nonfiction, a bonus, and the two disappointments of the summer. But first, I present

The List:

The Accidental Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich
A Scanner Darkly, by Philip K. Dick
Cities of God, by Rodney Stark
The Victory of Reason, by Rodney Stark
Churched, by Matthew Paul Turner
10 Books Every Conservative Must Read, by Benjamin Wiker
Saints at the River, by Ron Rash
Saint Patrick, by Jonathan Rogers
The Lightning Thief, by Rick Riordan
Johnny Got His Gun, by Dalton Trumbo
In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote
Heretics, by G.K. Chesterton
Lancelot, by Walker Percy
Watership Down, by Richard Adams
The Autobiography of G.K. Chesterton
Murder in the Cathedral, by T.S. Eliot
William F. Buckley, by Jeremy Lott
Joker One, by Donovan Campbell
One Square Mile of Hell: The Battle for Tarawa, by John Wukovits
Wesley for Armchair Theologians, by William J. Abraham
Hipster Christianity, by Brett McCracken
No True Glory: A Frontline Account of the Battle for Fallujah, by Bing West

All hyperlinked titles will take you to my longer, more detailed reviews at Amazon.com.

Top Three Non-Fiction Works:

In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote--The father and gold standard of true crime writing, In Cold Blood grabbed me from the first page. I've owned this book for years but only now got around to reading it (special thanks to Brad Garrett and the Applebiters, with whom I still haven't met). Capote's book tells the story of a crime from beginning to end, from the last day of the Clutter family, victims of a brutal mass murder, to the final moments of their murderers--swinging at the end of a rope a few years later. There's a terrible sense of inevitability and foreboding throughout the entire book, first because of the approaching rendezvous of murderers and victims, and then the inescapable fate of the criminals on the lam. There's not a lot else I can say about this book. It's outstanding. Read it.

One Square Mile of Hell, by John Wukovits--Tarawa is a largely forgotten battle of World War II, at least among the average American. That's a shame, because what happened there deserves to be remembered (also an important point of Bing West's book, below). Tarawa was a heavily-fortified, Japanese-held atoll almost on the equator in the Pacific. The Marines, in the first major use of amphibious assault on a fortified position, took it in three days, suffering immense casualties but annihilating the Japanese garrison. The fighting there was terrible, and Wukovits tells the story not only of the battle but of its effects on the homefront. The Marines who survived Tarawa wanted the public to know what they went through, that they "don't knock hell out of 'em every day of every battle." The graphic footage shot by S/Sgt. Norman Hatch, who spent three days walking through gunfire with his 16mm camera, was edited into the Academy Award-winning documentary With the Marines at Tarawa. Wukovits's book also details the aftermath of the battle for families that lost sons, brothers, husbands, and fiancees. It's a powerful, moving work of history that needs to be read.

No True Glory, by Bing West--Similar to Wukovits's book above is West's history of the two Battles of Fallujah, fought in April and November 2004. But while West tells a gripping, often hair-raising story of the counterinsurgency in that benighted city, he also steps back to assess lessons learned. Politics should not interfere in the pursuit of victory, he argues. When the Marines' initial attack was halted because of trumped up charges of "heavy-handed" tactics and civilian casualties (lies from Al Jazeera), Bush's administration bought time for the insurgents to regroup, turn Fallujah into a stronghold, and cause worse casualties for both sides when the Marines finally had the go-ahead to flush Fallujah once and for all. West's two important lessons are 1) let the military finish what it starts (as timely a message as ever), and 2) remember their sacrifices and courage. Because there will be "no true glory" for those men unless we do. West's book is the best contemporary war history I've read since Black Hawk Down. (Click here to read a sample chapter, one of the most intense of the book.)

Honorable Mention:

Churched, by Matthew Paul Turner--A memoir of youth spent in an independent, fundamentalist Baptist church, Turner's book was a hilarious, moving, and sometimes painful walk down memory lane.

Two Disappointments:

The Accidental Billionaires, by Ben Mezrich--This is the book adapted into the David Fincher film The Social Network, chronicling the creation and rise to success of Facebook. Fascinating subject. Unfortunately, Mezrich's book is clumsily put together, admittedly unfactual (it's a "dramatic recreation" rather than a history), and written in a bad, hopelessly showy pseudo-fictional style. I just hope Fincher's movie does better with the material than Mezrich did.

Hipster Christianity, by Brett McCracken--I felt McCracken's Wall Street Journal article, which I posted to Facebook a few weeks ago, was an outstanding critique of modern Christianity's ludicrous posturing. Unfortunately, his book fails in most of the areas in which his article succeeded. His definition of "hipster" shifts constantly and it is never clear what he is trying to say about Christian hipsters. Read it if you will--it's entertaining and enlightening in places--but if you give his WSJ article a good going-over you won't miss anything.

Top Fiction of the Summer:

Every season I have a couple standout books, fictional or not. This summer, the standout novel--so good I decided to write about only it rather than all the fiction I read--was Watership Down, by Richard Adams.

Watership Down is about bunnies. No lie. It is also one of the best novels I've ever read. Adams's novel begins with its hero, Hazel, a quiet, unassuming member of a warren in the southern English countryside, at ease in the field that hides his warren's burrows. Men arrive, put up a board on some poles, and leave. The rabbits investigate perfunctorily and chalk it up to human weirdness. But Fiver, a young half-brother of Hazel's who has been plagued with visions and dreams, senses danger and convinces Hazel that they should leave the warren. Hazel goes to the chief rabbit, fails to convince him, but leaves with an ally in Bigwig--a member of the chief rabbit's bodyguard--and a handful of other rabbits convinced by Fiver's fear and Hazel's words.

All this happens within the first few chapters, and is only the beginning of an epic story.

If you read my nitpicking grammar note, you'll remember the issue I have with people misusing the world "epic." I use it to describe Watership Down in all seriousness. The terrible adventures Hazel and his followers have in the journey to Watership Down reminded me constantly of The Odyssey and The Aeneid--the latter especially, which is an epic of finding a new home in the face of deadly enemies. Hazel, Fiver, Bigwig and the others are among the strongest, best-developed characters I've encountered in fiction and Adams invests their story with incredible emotion. Bigwig especially is a larger-than-life, heroic figure, aggressive in his support of Hazel and in defense of their new warren, a Horatius Cocles of rabbits. And Watership Down also touches on incredibly important themes of what makes a good society, what freedom is, the hallmarks of a dying culture, and--oddly enough--what humanity means.

I'd recommend almost any book on this summer's reading list, but if you pick only a few, make one of them Watership Down.

The Epically Nitpicky Grammar and Usage Note

2010-07-28T18:08:00.003-04:00

I'm a grammar Nazi, so-called. No surprise. I've been wanting to write up a list of what I consider the all-time most annoying—that is, the most common and easily preventable—grammatical mistakes, but Alex did a good job last summer with a quick, sharp note. The only reason I'm contributing this Tolstoyan monstrosity to the grammar Nazi game despite his Chekhovian grace is because, well, I'm still annoyed, I wanted to, and I have a lot more stuff to grouse about in this one. You have been warned.
I’ll start with a few simple mistakes. When I say simple, I mean easily-correctable mistakes made about easily-understandable rules. Meaning that, when you make these mistakes, you look like a simpleton.
English is glutted with homophones, words that sound the same but are spelled differently. These words trip up a lot of people—kindergarteners, mostly. Here are two: your and you’re. The first is a possessive pronoun, the second a contraction of two words—you are. Contractions mimic spoken English and run two or more words together, which is why they include an apostrophe. The apostrophe indicates that letters have been left out. That’s why that is becomes that’s, you all becomes y’all, and should not becomes shouldn’t. The correct way to use your and you’re is as follows:

You’re going to want to get your elephant out of my swimming pool.

Your and you’re are never, ever interchangeable, because your and you’re mean two entirely different things. Your going turns going into a noun, prompting me to ask what you’re going to do with your going. You’re elephant is a grammatically clunky insult.
Mimicking spoken English is a great way to get yourself in trouble. In another instance involving contractions, lots of people write things like:

You should of helped me scoop the elephant poop out of the pool.

Saying it aloud makes sense because should of sounds like the proper word: should’ve. Should’ve is a contraction of should have. Of is a preposition that never enters into an equation involving whether someone should, could, or would have done something. This is an easy rule to learn.
Another simple rule is in the use of who and whom. Always use whom when you would otherwise say him. I could go into detail about the grammar of it, but I can sense your eyes glazing over already, so I’ll get into the really nasty stuff.
There are three terrible homophones in the English language that face constant abuse from every corner of the Anglophonic world. They are the Gorgons of English. They are:

They’re—a contraction for they are, as in; “They’re going to the store.”
Their—possessive third-person plural pronoun; “They’re going to the store in their car.”
There—adverb implying direction or location; “They’re going to buy Spam when they get there.”

Confusing these words is the kind of mistake for which people should be hanged.
Speaking of which, there are—in a mystery worthy of Harry Potter—two different words bound within in the single syllable hang. One word is a general verb describing something dangling, pendant, suspended in air. The other describes, very specifically, a person executed by ligature, sometimes dropped through a trapdoor but always dangling from a rope around the neck. (Or piano wire, if you’re sick like that.)
There is one important difference between these two hangs, and it’s the preterite. That’s the form the verb takes in the past tense. If you’re describing something that, at some time in the past, was dangled, perhaps in front of a kitten, you say that it hung or was hung. On the other hand, if you’re describing someone who had a rope tied around his neck before being strung up to suffocate due to the restriction of his windpipe, you say hanged or was hanged. To say that John Brown was hung is to make unsupportable claims.
Look back at the last few paragraphs and examine the plural nouns I used. How did I make them plural? I’ll tell you how I didn’t—apostrophes.
Apostrophes are aggravating, aren’t they? (If something doesn’t sound right about aggravating, give me a moment.) Well, they shouldn’t be. They are properly used for three things and only three things: making nouns possessive, making nouns possessive and plural, and constructing contractions. If you have a kitten, congratulations! If you have two, do you have kitten’s? Most certainly not, and shame, reproach, and condemnation on you if you think you do. To prevent myself ranting further, I leave you with this chart.

-s—Adding a single S is the standard or most common way to make a noun plural. Never, ever, under any circumstances do you use an apostrophe to accomplish what the lowly S has yearned to do for all its existence. My cat had kittens yesterday.
-’s—Adding an apostrophe-S makes a word possessive. The word kitten’s in the example above could only describe a single kitten that owned something, which something we will never find out. The kitten’s box is a total mess.
-s’—Adding an S-apostrophe means that the word is not only plural—there is more than one kitten!—this group of things owns something. The kittens’ mother has run away to Abu Dhabi.

As for contractions, I think it should be clear from the above problems with they’re and you’re what they are and how you make them. Time to take the training wheels off.
Now, about aggravating. It doesn’t mean what you think it means. There are two words with which I want to familiarize you. The first is irritate. Everyone has been either irritated by or irritating to someone, so I don’t need to define it. The problem is that most people use aggravate interchangeably with irritate. This is wrong. You will be hanged if you make this mistake.
Aggravate actually means to worsen. That’s why aggravated assault is worse than assault. A pair of jeans on a summer day are only aggravating if you already have a rash, which none of us wants to hear about. Let’s move on.
There are a lot of non-words drifting around, not-so-cleverly disguised as actual words. A potential non-word is hiding in the previous sentence—a lot. A lot is always two words. Alot is just like a unicorn and an intelligent Twilight fan in that none of them exists. Allot is an actual word, but does not mean the same thing that the poor little two-word phrase a lot does. Let each do its job, and spell them correctly.
Even real words face abuse. Speaking of Twilight above, you’ll note that I did not call it The Twilight Saga. That’s because it is unworthy of the word saga by any definition in any dictionary. To get at the root of it, saga is an Old Norse word related to the modern English verb say, and that’s because sagas were originally oral history. Icelandic sagas were legends passed along from person to person like a heroic game of Telephone until they were written down later in the Middle Ages. Sagas are about heroes and cover their entire lives—birth, deeds, misdeeds, and death. The word has since been applied to long, long novels about multiple generations of entire families.
Let’s judge Twilight by those criteria.

Oral—no
Heroes—no
Vikings, at least?—alas, no
Multi-generation families—no
Entire lives—no, just sniveling emo adolescence

By the way, criteria is already plural. There are no such things as criterias.
Epic is a similar word that has been whored about a lot since The Lord of the Rings made it to theatres. Epic comes from the ancient Greek word epos, which means, like saga, speech, story, or song. The epic as pioneered by Homer—who, though blind and illiterate, was more of a storyteller than most of the rabble putting ink on paper today—was a lengthy song about heroic deeds of a long-past era. There are many other, more specific criteria, but that will suffice. The idea is oldness, vastness, and majesty. All of these things lack in most of what modern people call epics.
Then there's the word different. What could possibly be wrong with different? you ask. Look at this sentence—quoted directly from a television commercial—and tell me what’s wrong with it.

It’s different than anything I’ve ever tried.

Different is an adjective, and that is all. But the person I’m quoting used it as a comparative adjective. Remember this from elementary school?

Good—A good, old-fashioned, stand-alone adjective (technically, a positive adjectival); it describes a single object devoid of context.
Better—Comparative; used when comparing two or more objects which may or may not be representative of the whole of their kind.
Best—Superlative; i.e, the best example of its kind.

Only the comparative form of an adjective uses than to make a statement.

The Da Vinci Code was better than Angels & Demons.

Different is a plain adjective, and takes the preposition from in order to form a complete thought.

But Digital Fortress is completely different from Dan Brown’s other novels.

The phrase different than is not only grammatically incorrect, it’s logically incoherent. If you’re dead-set on using the word different and making it comparative, you’ll wind up with this:

The Lost Symbol is more different than Dan Brown’s other Langdon novels.

More different than? Different is an odd duck of a word that can only really mean something when in its positive form, its plain old form. The idea of difference is an absolute. Two things are different from one another or they aren’t. One object can be no more different from another than it can be more unique than another.
Which brings me to unique, which will be a quick one: Unique means one of a kind. Literally. DNA is unique, snowflakes are unique, a customized car is very probably unique. None of these things is more unique or very unique—it either is one of a kind or it isn’t.
Speaking of the word none—none is a dinosaur of a word that has hung on into modern English all the way from the Anglo-Saxon era. It is one of a very few words surviving from Old English which express a thought by tacking a negative N onto the front of the word. In Old English, if you wanted say that a person had never been somewhere, you said he naes there; that is, he n[ot] [w]as there. Naes is no more, but never (not ever), none (not one), nothing (obvious), neither (not either), naught (“na-wiht,” not a thing, i.e: zero), and a few others are still with us.
I just want to say one thing about none—it’s singular. Always. Unfold the Anglo-Saxon word none into not one and it makes nonsense out of this sentence:

None of them were going to Kathmandu.

Not one of them were going to Kathmandu.

The problem, one of the worst in modern English, is referring the verb (were going) to the object of a preposition, which, like Toby Flenderson, isn’t really part of this sentence. The subject of this sentence is one, which is obviously singular. The correct way to use none, then, is:

None of them was going to Kathmandu.

I want to close with a classic peeve, but not one your professors will lecture on all that often. One of the most frequently used English words—both spoken and written—is a synonym for yes. Everyone knows how to use it but virtually no one on Facebook—or anywhere else for that matter—seems to know how to spell it. The problem is aggravated (remember what it means) by the fact that at least one of the word’s wrong spellings is another word entirely. Here’s a quick guide to the issue.

Yeah—a colloquial version of “Yes.”
Yea—an archaic version of “Yes,” e.g: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for thou art with me.
Ya—a non-word everywhere except Fargo.
Yah—again, a total non-word.

Now then—I’ve got that out of my system. Go thou and continue in the things thou hast learned.

Two Things

2010-07-08T14:21:00.003-04:00

First--I have finished my thesis. It weighs in at 34,210 words over 125 pages in four chapters with 398 footnotes, including introduction, conclusion, front and back matter. I defend in about two weeks. These be exciting times.
Second--I now have a Twitter account, because that's what the world needed. I'm finding it useful for posting my book reviews (which I'm finally starting back up again) as I write them. But never fear--I'll still have end of season reading lists with embedded links.
More later.

"The Pacific": After-Action Report

2010-06-20T00:39:00.001-04:00

I have mixed feelings about “The Pacific.” I admired the project and certainly thought the Marines deserved ten hours of the kind of glory “Band of Brothers” gave the Airborne, but now that the series has ended and I’ve had time to digest it I just can’t say it was as good as “Band of Brothers.” Even taking into consideration the radical differences between the war in Europe and the war in the Pacific, the tones of the books upon which each series was based, and the collective experiences of the two different groups, “The Pacific” is no “Band of Brothers.”
But that is not to say that “The Pacific” was bad. It was, at worst, uneven. Some of its ten parts were good, others so-so, only one an outright loser, and at least four were one-hour masterpieces. I have an idea about what made some episodes better than others, but first I’ll discuss the series itself.
To recap briefly some things I’ve mentioned elsewhere, “The Pacific” is based on books by two Marines and the life story of a third. The books are Robert Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow (published in 1957) and Eugene Sledge's With the Old Breed (1981), and the third Marine is Medal of Honor winner John Basilone. Absent the kind of unit that played a role in a large number of important campaigns the way Company E, 506 PIR did in Europe, the producers wisely selected a group of characters whose careers overlapped enough to carry the viewer through from the opening to the close of the Pacific war.

Leckie first saw combat at Guadalcanal in 1942, fought at Cape Gloucester in New Britain, and was wounded in the opening days of Peleliu in 1944. Sledge reached the same Marine regiment in time to land on Peleliu and also fought at Okinawa in the spring and summer of 1945. Basilone’s story also includes Guadalcanal, the homefront, and fills in the gap between Peleliu and Okinawa with his experiences on Iwo Jima. Also, this is probably a good place to warn you that there will be spoilers throughout the rest of this review.

The first episode set the tone for the first half of the series. It’s expansive and well-made but dramatically uneven. The writer and director of this episode had a rather thankless job, since they had to introduce and set up all three storylines—Leckie, Sledge, and Basilone—as well as kick off the series. Leckie and his unit land on Guadalcanal about halfway through the episode, and from then on out it’s a pretty good episode. I only have two complaints. The first is that the series rather grossly condenses the timeline of some events. Leckie was on Guadalcanal for weeks before he ever saw combat, and the impression one gets from reading his book is of months of boredom and physical misery. That impression is absent here. Leckie lands, marches around the creepy island for a while, and then fights off the Japanese in a very good battle sequence.
My second complaint is one that flavors several other episodes of the series—that racism thing. Tom Hanks, who produced the series, was in the news before the premier for making some rather stupid remarks about racist attitudes toward the Japanese during World War II. I’ve written about this elsewhere and will add a few remarks about that later. But this first episode of “The Pacific” makes some rather ham-handed attempts at confronting American racism toward the Japanese but doesn’t know what to do with it. Leckie’s platoon leader rants and raves about the “Japs” and the rest of the unit is show as rather less enthusiastic (unrealistic, considering that in 1942 emotions still ran high because of Pearl Harbor). The series does show some of the atrocities of which the Japanese were capable—Leckie’s unit marches past some unspeakably mutilated Marine bodies and witnesses a wounded Japanese soldier blowing up both himself and an American medic—but also creates an incident that does not appear in Leckie’s book. A wounded Japanese soldier stands in the middle of Alligator Creek following the climactic battle, shouts and screams while Marines take potshots at him, and then, with complete ambiguity as to his motive, Leckie shoots the man. As I said, this weird focus on racism will crop up again.
The second episode deals primarily with Basilone and his Medal of Honor-earning fight on Guadalcanal. Again the series becomes tonally weird, with Basilone’s comrades looking on him in apparent horror as he mows down wave upon wave of banzai charge.
Episode three is the nadir of the series. This episode follows Leckie and Basilone’s unit on leave in Australia. The big problem with this episode is that, while I acknowledge that sometimes fact has to be smudged for dramatic purposes, the fictionalization wrought upon this episode does an extreme disservice to the truth. First, the facts—Leckie, by his own admission in his memoir, slept with every Australian girl he could get and was wild as a tomcat. He also spent a lot of time in the brig for misbehavior, which is one reason he never rose higher than private. This, then, is the mini-series’s version of events—Leckie met and fell madly in love with an Australian girl, who dumped him when it came time for his unit to redeploy because she couldn’t stand the thought of his death. Leckie, blinded by grief and rage, pulled a pistol on his platoon leader and wound up in the brig.
Not only does the series completely recast the nature of Leckie’s experiences in Australia, it ignores the important things that happened to his unit there (loads of training and preparation for the upcoming campaign in New Britain) and uses the love story as an excuse for an uncomfortably long and graphic sex scene (which, in another weird case of cognitive dissonance, the director also tries to make humorous). Leckie’ s Aussie girl meets him, invites him over for dinner with her parents, and then drops her pants. The love story that follows is just as clumsily executed and, though the actors’ performances sell it and make it somehow touching, it just doesn’t work because it doesn’t jibe at all with what really happened to Leckie.
Episode three is frustrating because it feels like an hour wasted. There were a lot of things for which HBO could have used this hour—for example, Leckie fought in New Guinea, but this campaign goes completely ignored in the series—but instead they foisted a half-baked and completely untrue love story on us.
But I’m happy to say that it’s all uphill from episode three.
Episode four is much more psychological in focus than the first two, action-driven episodes. Leckie, fresh from the brig, is now a member of his battalion’s intelligence section and is therefore tasked with leading patrols on Cape Gloucester in the campaign on the island of New Britain. Despite a few run-ins with the Japanese in the jungle, the Marines’ worst enemy proves to be the jungle itself. Constant rain and the dense, unforgiving vegetation make the Marines miserable, and Leckie eventually succumbs to the psychological trauma and develops enuresis—when he falls asleep, he wets his pants, and he doesn’t know why. Leckie is invalided out and winds up in the psych ward of a Navy hospital.
This episode tries a bit too hard to be psychological disturbing and therefore continues the trend of uneven episodes that began with episode one. But it’s still far better than episode three, and some scenes—such as Leckie’s patrol and some of the stuff in the psych ward—is very good.
Episode five marks the series’s turning point. Sledge, who thus far has been seen only in brief vignettes—convincing his parents to let him enlist, enlisting, training—arrives on Pavuvu, where the Marines are preparing for the invasion of Peleliu. There he meets his old friend Sidney Phillips and has an invented meeting with Leckie. Phillips is a changed man by this point and tries to give Sledge some idea of what awaits him in combat. And then he’s gone, rotated home before Sledge can say good-bye. That’s the first half of the episode. It’s poignant and powerful and establishes Sledge up as our protagonist for the rest of the series.

The second half of the episode is among the best war films ever shot. Sledge and Leckie—back from hospital—ship out and arrive at Peleliu. In the hold of their transport, the innocent Sledge climbs into an amtrac, descends into the churning water, and makes his way to the smoking, fiery beach. He lands and is frightened out of his mind, crawling across the beach on his elbows while men all around him die. He makes it to relative safety with his unit and moves inland, reaching the edge of Peleliu’s airfield.

The entire landing sequence and the combat inland are brilliantly staged and—I hope I don’t use this word too much—powerful. Having seen a lot of war films, it’s hard for war movies to move me now. I was quaking as Sledge approached the beach and on edge the entire rest of the episode. And that’s what this episode—and the rest of the series—gets right. War is not fun. War is scary and chaotic and men like Sledge spent the rest of their lives saying so.
Episode six picks up at the edge of the airfield. Even reading about this episode’s events in Sledge’s memoir scared me to death—Sledge’s unit had to cross 700 yards of open fields while under constant and heavy Japanese fire. Again, these sequences were executed brilliantly. This episode ends with Leckie on a hospital ship, having been concussed by the explosion of an ammo dump during the fight at the airfield. Episode seven concludes Sledge’s harrowing time on Peleliu with the tragic death of his company commander, Captain Haldane.
Episodes five through seven are, for my money, the absolute best of the series and are just as good as anything in “Band of Brothers” or the father of both series, Saving Private Ryan. Sledge’s memoir is full of detail on the abject physical misery of combat on Peleliu—the heat, the dehydration, the constant fear and near-panic of born of fighting the Japanese. And Joe Mazzello, who plays Sledge, gives a powerful performance as an innocent young man who, in a flash, is dropped into all the gruesomeness and terror of war. He deserves an award for his work on “The Pacific.”
Episode eight resumes Basilone’s story. Having won the Congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on Guadalcanal, Basilone has spent episodes three through seven at home, shilling war bonds for the government. By this episode he’s had enough of that. His fellow Marines are still fighting and, as an experienced veteran, he feels he belongs with men who can use him. He convinces his superiors to let him return to duty and takes on a unit of recruits at Camp Pendleton, training them on .30 Browning machine guns before they depart for Iwo Jima. He also meets and falls in love with a female Marine, whom he marries just before shipping out. There, in an intense sequence that accurately captures the ugly opening hours of an ugly, ugly battle, Basilone enters combat bravely and dies within hours.

Episode nine returns to Sledge, who is now on Okinawa in the late spring of 1945. Here the first problem I had with episode one returns—Sledge spends fully half of his memoir dealing with Okinawa, which was a long, miserable, soul-crushing experience, but the series gives the campaign a single episode thats seems to condense all those months into a weekend or so. The series captures the horror of Okinawa well, but is more interested in watching Sledge’s mind fall apart because of the carnage than in fully conveying what With the Old Breed described. Which, again, is not to say it’s not a good episode, but the writers and director made some tonally weird choices here that I’ll examine shortly.

The final episode is, along with the three Peleliu episodes, one of the most powerful hours ever televised. I have to admit I wasn’t looking forward to it—even “Band of Brothers” got a little dull in the peacetime tenth episode—but the postwar conclusions to each of the main stories were incredibly well-done and, yes, powerful. Leckie, having at war’s end only recently recovered, returns home, gets his old reporting job back, and makes a determined attempt to get the girl he left behind. Basilone’s widow visits his bereaved family in New Jersey. And Sledge, still a boy by modern standards, returns to Alabama with all the weight of Peleliu and Okinawa on him. Each story is touching, but Sledge’s runs away with the series. I wept for him.
Overall, “The Pacific” delivers the goods. The performances are uniformly good and a few are fantastic—Mazzello steals the series from the rest of them. Rami Malek also deserves praise for his performance as Private “Snafu” Shelton, one of Sledge’s closest buddies and an enigmatic figure, sometimes prying gold teeth from the mouths of corpses, sometimes counseling Sledge not to. William Sadler, in a small part as “Chesty” Puller, is also a standout. The action scenes are precisely what they should be—brilliantly staged and executed and realistically ugly. The production values, costumes, sets, and especially the cinematography are excellent. The series also gets a lot of more abstract things right. Watch, in episode seven (I think), as one unit of Marines leaves a sector as Sledge’s unit arrives to relieve them. The quiet camaraderie, the exchange of looks between Marines, is perfect.
But there are those two problems that existed from the first episode. Like I said, the problem of pacing—of making the viewer feel how much time elapsed in real life—only effects a few episodes, namely one, two, three, and nine. But the whole question of racism is another issue.
I said before that the series doesn’t seem to know how to handle American racism. It look at first as though it will boldly confront the issue, then backs off into ambiguity and ambivalence before mostly forgetting about it. But there, in episodes eight and nine, it crops up again. Basilone berates a boot Marine for saying he just wants to get out there and “slap a Jap,” and rage briefly transforms Sledge into a pistol-wielding monster who guns down attacking Japanese soldiers despite a cease-fire order.
Ambivalence is the key term, here. The first episode includes footage of mutilated Marine prisoners. The Okinawa episode accurately depicts the Japanese using civilians as human shields and human bombs. But despite all this, it seems that the series must indulge in some amount of mournful navel-gazing because American soldiers dared use the term “Jap.” Why, for instance, do Basilone's buddies look horrified as he mows down attacking Japanese troops, and why, in this powerful scene from Peleliu, does such sad music play over the deaths of men who were waiting to kill Sledge?
This is a long, long review, so I’ll treat this as briefly as possible. American soldiers hated the Japanese, no doubt. They definitely called them Japs. And they killed them without mercy. But the ferocity of the war in the Pacific theatre was not the result of racism. Commentators elsewhere have pointed out that Americans allied with numerous Asian peoples against the Japanese, including the Koreans, Chinese, Vietnamese, and the Filipinos, who are some of the unsung heroes of the war. Based on my reading of numerous memoirs, testimonials, and interviews, I can say with near-absolute certainty that American “racism” was predicated on behavior, and therefore was not racism at all. Americans hated the Japanese because they didn’t fight fair. They tortured and butchered prisoners, used civilians as human shields, and—perhaps worst of all—never, ever surrendered, dragging out combat longer than necessary and wasting lives on both sides. This no-surrender policy meant that the Pacific’s bloody combat continued as long as Japanese soldiers remained alive in a given sector, and, along with the bloodbaths on Iwo Jima and Okinawa, was one of the major reasons the atomic bomb was given the go-ahead.
To sum up, watch these interviews. This is the real-life Sidney Phillips, and this is R.V. Burgin, Sledge’s mortar team leader through Peleliu and Okinawa. Notice any common themes?
The series’s biggest problem, those first horribly uneven episodes, can be chalked up to the producers and writers, and to the differences in tone between the books upon which the series is based. Leckie’s Helmet for My Pillow forms the basis for episodes one, three, four, and five, and Sledge’s With the Old Breed shares episode five with Leckie and goes on through six, seven, and nine. Leckie’s book, published in the fifties, is a whiz-bang account of a young Marine’s life in boot camp, combat, training, the hospital, and on leave. Sledge’s memoir, published three and a half decades after the war, is a much more reflective, sensitive memoir describing the destruction of a young man’s innocence.
Both books are excellent memoirs, and Sledge’s especially is a classic of literary quality. But the producers tried a curious thing, attempting to make the two Marines’ stories match in tone. And that’s the problem—Leckie’s memoir has none of the soul-crushing poignancy of Sledge’s, and Sledge’s is not nearly as adventuresome as Leckie’s. The producers of “The Pacific” wanted Leckie to be Sledge, and so they turn the hell-raising young ne’er-do-well of Helmet for My Pillow into an artificially cynical grumbler. This is evident throughout the series, but especially so in episodes three and four. Leckie makes his time in psych ward seem like a hilarious fluke. “The Pacific” makes him seem genuinely suicidal.
But again, despite the postmodern moral posturing about “racist” Marines and the weird tonal shifts throughout the first four episodes, “The Pacific” is a largely praiseworthy mini-series and an incredible evocation of heroism in the ugliest of warfare. If you can’t read the books upon which this is based, at least watch the series. Leckie, Basilone, Sledge, and the rest deserve your understanding and your respect.

Spring Reading 2010

2010-05-18T23:18:00.002-04:00

I was pretty excited to count up and find twenty books in this spring's reading list—that's a lot more reading than I've been able to do in any previous semester at Clemson. Of course, looking through the list a second time I see a lot of short books, including two I was able to read in a day apiece. But I'm not complaining—I got to read, and I read a lot. Now I'm looking forward to having the thesis finished, when I'll glut myself on a backlog of books.
It is my pleasure, then, to present

The List:

The Everlasting Man , by G.K. Chesterton
Addicted to Mediocrity: Contemporary Christians and the Arts, by Franky Schaeffer
God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades, by Rodney Stark
Shutter Island, by Dennis Lehane
What’s Wrong With the World, by G.K. Chesterton
Monster, by A. Lee Martinez
Deliverance, by James Dickey
How Fiction Works, by James Wood
Helmet for My Pillow, by Robert Leckie
With the Old Breed, by E.B. Sledge
Obama’s Radical Transformation of America: Year One, by Joshua Muravchik
Okinawa: The Last Battle of World War II, by Robert Leckie
Paul Among the People, by Sarah Ruden
Salvation on Sand Mountain, by Dennis Covington
The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson
How Obama has Mishandled the War on Terror, by Michael Mukasey
Serena, by Ron Rash
Confederates in the Attic, by Tony Horwitz
One Foot in Eden, by Ron Rash
The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer

Best Reads:

Fiction—

Deliverance, by James Dickey—The first I was ever aware that Deliverance could be more than a joke at the expense of Georgians, I was in Novel Writing class my last undergrad semester. My teacher invoked its author, James Dickey, as an example of a poet-turned-novelist and made it clear that she had read the book—several times. I made up my mind to read it, and while it took me three years to get to it, it was worth the wait. Deliverance is a grim, powerful meditation on man, manhood, human nature, and the role of all three in the natural order.

Four solidly bourgeois Atlanta businessmen decide to spend the weekend on one of the last untamed rapids in the lower Appalachians. The Cahulawassee River is about to be dammed. Lewis is a hardcore adventurer and man's man who constantly seeks to test himself against the worst nature has to offer. Bobby is a flabby whiner who doesn't belong in the wilderness. Drew is a gentle, artistic buddy along for the ride. And the narrator, Ed, is a quiet, average man—athletic, but not Lewis; creative, but not Drew; soft and urban, but not Bobby. They pack up food, tents, and two canoes and leave Atlanta on one of the last warm days of September.
The bad thing about this novel is that, regardless of whether they've read the book or seen the movie, everyone knows just how bad this trip turns out. It's a shame, because the movie's notoriety has eclipsed a really great novel. Deliverance faces the blunt fact of nature's—and man's—cruelty and asks a lot of terrible questions. This is definitely worth the read.
For what it's worth, the movie is certainly among the most literal film adaptations I've ever seen—and that's not a bad thing.
One Foot in Eden, by Ron Rash— Speaking of dammed rivers and murder, One Foot in Eden, one of my one-day reads, is among the most moving novels I've read. Set in the valley that became Lake Jocassee, Ron Rash's novel is told in the first-person from several different points of view—the Oconee County sheriff, a young mountain farmer accused of murder; his wife, whom he believed to be cheating on him; her son, as he grows older; and, two decades later, by the sheriff's deputy as the denuded valley disappears beneath the lake.
The novel begins with the suspected murder of a hell-raising mountain man recently returned from the Korean War. There is no body, but while the sheriff remains unconvinced that the man is dead, his mother is certain. She heard the shot. The sheriff's chief suspect is the man's neighbor, a taciturn farmer with a beautiful wife. The victim's mother claimed her son and the wife were having an affair, giving the farmer motive—and, the sheriff notes, the farmer certainly acts guilty. Despite repeated searches, no body is ever found.
To summarize the novel this way is to do it an injustice, because that paragraph of description covers perhaps the first quarter of the book and the perspective of only one character—the sheriff. The following chapters tell the stories of the wife, the husband, the son, and the deputy, with each version building on the other and weaving in new detail. In the end, it hardly matters that the mystery is solved—it's not really about the murder. Each character's story is so personal and movingly told that the book was worth reading.

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, by Stieg Larsson—From a grim meditation on nature and violence to a novel featuring murder, I now move to a straight-up murder thriller. And this novel, too, is set in a remote place—coastal Sweden, hours north of Stockholm. An old man who lives on an island there summons a disgraced political journalist to his home with a job offer—pretend to write my biography and use that cover to reopen an 30-year old murder case.

I've rambled quite enough about the other books so far, so I'll be brief. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is not only an unusual thriller, it's exceptionally good. Most mysteries become transparent before the halfway point, but the late Stieg Larsson's novel kept me guessing until the end. I think the mystery derives its power from the fact that, unlike a lot of modern thriller-wrights—I'm looking at you, Dan Brown—Larsson makes his characters matter. Definitely worth reading if you're looking for something to read by the pool or at the beach this summer.

Nonfiction—

With the Old Breed, by E.B. Sledge—This post marks the third time I've written on this book this semester. That should demonstrate at least some of what I feel about this book. But to recap quickly, I'll say this: With the Old Breed is the best military memoir ever written. Published in 1981, nearly four decades after the events it describes, Sledge's book is the powerful, moving story of a young man who lived through two of the most terrible battles ever waged by man—Pelelieu, in 1944, and Okinawa, in 1945.

Sledge, who earned a Ph.D in biology after the war and taught zoology and botany, was a perceptive, sensitive writer. His account is graphic but never gratuitous, blunt and unsparing but never angry. He retells his painful memories as plainly as possible, with no flights of fancy, embroidered thrills, or moral posturing. The war fought by the Army and Marines against the Japanese was brutal, and even if those of us who didn't experience it can never fully understand it, Sledge helped bring us closer with this book.
I know some people have a weird lack of awareness of or even revulsion for the military or the subject of war. I've seen plenty of eyes glaze over when I've started talking about it, and I'm only a historian. If you're one of those people, and if you only read one book about the military in your life, make it this one.
The Everlasting Man, by G.K. Chesterton— Certainly among the best books I've ever read, The Everlasting Man is a broad-strokes history of the world before and after Christ. I've mentioned David Bentley Hart's Atheist Delusions a number of times—Chesterton's book covers some of the same ground, discussing the inevitable ugliness of paganism and the redemption of the world brought about by Christ and his Church. Chesterton is always a pleasure to read, but this may be his best book. Check it out if you can.

The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer—What Eugene Sledge did for Pelelieu and Okinawa, Guy Sajer did for the Russian Front. The curious thing about this book is its perspective—most people don't want to—much less try to—understand the German soldier in World War II. But Sajer sought to correct this, not justifying the German cause but simply paying tribute to his comrades. They had been through hell together and he wanted someone to recognize their bravery and perseverance.

Sajer was 16 when conscripted into the German army. He was not yet twenty when it ended. But in his three years on the front in Russia, the Ukraine, Poland, and finally the German frontier, he saw some of the most brutal and horrifying combat in history.
First of all there was the Russian winter, and then the desperate odds of often twenty-to-one. Atrocity was commonplace on both sides and, as the fighting wore on, guerrillas and starvation took a terrible toll on the German ranks. The final chapters, in which Sajer describes the literally last-ditch efforts to hold back the Russians at a Prussian port city, read like a description of apocalypse. Much longer than With the Old Breed but no less moving, Sajer's book is a grim story but worth reading.

Salvation on Sand Mountain, by Dennis Covington—I conclude with my other one-day read. If Southerners often serve as the butt of Deliverance jokes, religious Southerners have probably heard too many snake-handling jokes. Even one is too many. The curious thing about snake-handlers—beyond the fact that they actually exist—is that they so often seem like normal people. The snake-handling Pentecostals who took Dennis Covington into their group as he researched this book are in many ways average rural Southerners—plain, hospitable, clean-cut, and religious. But so religious.

Covington's book is really unnerving in its ability to convey the experience of a snake-handling service. (It also includes some of the creepiest pictures you'll ever see, like one of an evangelist's wife with a rattlesnake.) Snake-handlers theologically have little in common beyond their call to take up serpents. They stand at the extreme end of the Pentecostal spectrum, and the snake-handlers' version of typically emotion-fueled Pentecostal worship bears marked resemblance to the Bacchanal of ancient Rome. Men and especially women in a religious frenzy shout, rave, and whirl each other to further heights of worship.
This is a wild book. Covington states bluntly that he wanted to experience what they experienced, that he developed a sort of religious Stockholm Syndrome, and before the book is over, you'll read his description of what the Spirit feels like—and what it feels like when it commands you to pick up a snake. Salvation on Sand Mountain is definitely worth reading if you're interested in Southern culture, history, or religion in general.
Hope you all have a great summer, and if you read any of the books I've so verbosely described, please let me know!

Churchill on English

2010-05-07T15:59:00.003-04:00

I haven’t the foggiest idea where I first came across this excerpt—I know it was during my time at Bob Jones, probably in a class, perhaps from one of my Creative Writing classes and possibly even from Historical Research & Writing (which taught me a lot more about individual word choice than most of my English courses)—but it made a deep impression on me. I’ll occasionally listen to Winston Churchill’s famous “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech just to remind me how much power words can muster.
This examination of Churchill’s word choice in just a few sentences of his long career comes from Write to the Point, by Bill Stott. It illustrates well Churchill’s command of words and nicely sums up my own philosophy of word choice. (For those of you who have heard me wax eloquent on this subject—often more than once—I salute you for continuing.) If you’re interested in more good stuff like this, please do read George Orwell’s short essay “Politics and the English Language.”

* * * * *

What [R.W.B.] Lewis wanted me to understand from the [John Crowe] Ransom essay [“On Shakespeare’s English”] was that I should write mainly with words derived from Anglo-Saxon English—Old English, as it is called. When there are several ways to say something, I should choose the “primitive” one and write, for example, “Ransom made up the adjective,” rather than concocted or fabricated it. He wanted me to understand Shakespeare’s trick of countering big words [from French and Latin] with old simple words, thus making the big words lighter. I used this trick a page back when I mixed big and little words, foreign-born and native, in the list “. . . bad social science, slobbering professionalism, and good old b.s.”
It is true that some writers and linguists claim there is no difference between the Anglo-Saxon and Latinate words in English, or indeed that the latter are preferable. . . . [But] the linguist Mario Pei has written “Avoid Latin derivatives; use brief, terse, Anglo-Saxon monosyllables”—and then pulled the rug out by announcing that his statement contained only one non-Latin word: Anglo-Saxon. That . . . doesn’t invalidate Lewis’ point that one should write mainly with Anglo-Saxon words. Sometimes a Latinate word is the shortest way to say something, as I think invalidate was in the last sentence. . . . In general, the Latin-derived words in English have several syllables. Often there are shorter Anglo-Saxon-derived words that mean the same thing. And even when the Anglo-Saxon word isn’t a monosyllable—as slobbering is not—it has a different feel, a different quality from most Latinate words (feel is Anglo-Saxon, quality is Latin). That is the point.
Consider the words Winston Churchill used to rally his countrymen and the English-speaking peoples in the dark days of the Battle of Britain. The best remembered words sound like this:

I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.

Never in the field of human conflict was so much owed by so many to so few.

We shall not flag or fail. We shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be; we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.

The words Churchill used are overwhelmingly Anglo-Saxon, the old short words he thought best of all. Consider the “we shall fight” paragraph written during the British evacuation from Dunkirk. When Churchill uses a Latinate word—confidence, say—he immediately balances it with a primitive monosyllable, strength, having tied them together not only with an and but with the same Anglo-Saxon adjective, growing. He speaks of Britain not as a “nation” or “country,” both words French borrowings, but as an island (from īgland, an Old English cognate with Old Frisian eiland and Old Norse eyland—all derived from a prehistoric Germanic word). He sees the British people fighting (the Anglo-Saxon root is feohtan) on the beaches, in the fields, and in the hills—all plausible native terms for native locales. They are to fight also on the landing grounds, two Anglo-Saxon words used despite the fact that their reference is ambiguous. Does Churchill mean “enemy disembarkation zones”? Perhaps—but he would never use such Latinate words because they hold up the white flag of bureaucratese. . . . As Churchill describes it, the battle for Britain will proceed from the beaches and landing grounds through the fields to the urban agglomerations, but of course he can’t use these words either. He won’t even speak of cities (from the Latin civis, civitatis). The fight has to be in the streets (Anglo-Saxon strēt, strǽt) and then, when it is abandoned there, back in the unsubmitting hills. After such drumfire of repetition and Anglo-Saxonisms, Churchill lets up the pressure in the last sentence’s last word. He allows himself to say surrender, a word from the French (se rendre, to turn oneself in), who were just then on the point of surrendering, and not a nice word.
Churchill used Anglo-Saxon words because, to English speakers, they are stronger than Latin words. They cut deeper into us. They are bone words, while the Latin words only reach our brains. From Latin we get “courage,” beautiful word. From Anglo-Saxon we get “guts,” an ugly ferocious word of much more force. Old English is, as Ransom said, a primitive language, as primitive as father and mother, wife and child, husband and friend, birth, death, kindness, truth, hope, hearth, home—all Anglo-Saxon words. . . . Old English is the language that names what matters most to most of us. Reason enough to write in it as much as possible.
From Bill Stott, Write to the Point (Columbia UP, 1991), 82-5.

Two Marines, Two Germans

2010-05-01T23:08:00.009-04:00

Yesterday I finished my last graduate paper. Today I finished grading the final exams from my last graduate assistantship class. Now I have nothing left but to finish my thesis, and I'm taking a day or two to unwind--totally unwind--before I dive back into that. So as part of my detox I'm jotting down a few notes on a genre in which I've done a lot of reading lately--the military memoir.

I've always been interested in war, and some of my first introductions to war writing were the memoirs and autobiographical writing of veterans. The war memoir is one of the oldest forms of literature in the world. You can safely take the form back as far as Xenophon's Anabasis and probably even further if you want to stretch. It's also one of the most popular genres, both in the past and today. Browse Barnes & Noble or Books-a-Million and you'll find enough war memoirs in stock to keep you busy for a year.
In the last year or so I've felt a renewed fascination with the memoir and have started reading as many as I can lay my hands on--and as many as I can afford to read in my minuscule free time. Below is an informal list of some of the best I've read.

I'll start with one I'm still reading. The Forgotten Soldier is a curious and unique book. For one thing, it recounts the horror of World War II combat from the German side. Its author, Guy Sajer, had a French father and German mother and found himself compelled to enlist in the German army at the age of 16. He wasn't entirely upset, though--"there was a war, and I married it because there was nothing else when I reached the age of falling in love." Initially seeing combat as a truck driver on the Eastern Front, Sajer volunteered for infantry duty and joined the elite Grossdeutschland division and found himself part of a front-line assault team.

Sajer endured hell. The Forgotten Soldier reminds the reader again and again of the misery of combat, of the loss and pain involved. Even as a truck driver, the teenage Sajer held his only friend in his lap for half an hour as the man died. A Russian ground-attack fighter had strafed their column--the man's jaw was shot off.
I'm only about halfway through Sajer's book, but it's unforgettable. (Special thanks to Dr. Andrew, who recommended it to me and a friend after reading the following book.)
Nate Fick, like Sajer, also brings an unusual perspective to his memoir of combat. A Marine Corps officer, Fick entered officer training after completing a degree in Classics at Dartmouth. Educated, perceptive, and devoted to the men under his command, Fick authored one of the best memoirs--and one of the best books in general--I've ever read. The title, One Bullet Away, originated with a reminder given him by an officer during his training--""What's the difference between you and your platoon sergeant?' He paused and then answered it himself. 'One bullet.""
Fick spends a lot of time in his book on his training as an officer. It's time well-spent. Even if this section of his book were the only part he wrote and published, it would be worth reading. Fick dwells at length on the qualities required of combat leaders. But it's in the second section that Fick's narrative culiminates--first in Afghanistan, and finally in the spearhead of the invasion of Iraq.
Fick, incidentally, appears as a character in the HBO miniseries "Generation Kill," which is worth a watch.
Returning to Teutonic writers, one of the best memoirs to come out of the First World War was Storm of Steel, by decorated soldier Ernst Jünger. World War I produced one of the world's first worldwide pacifist movements and a slew of bitter anti-war memoirs, the most famous of which may be Robert Graves's Good-bye to All That. Storm of Steel, which might also be translated Into the Steel Storm, is unusual because its author digs war. And he isn't ashamed about saying so.
Jünger exemplifies the Victorian, Teddy Roosevelt-like school of warfare. It was a common attitude in the 19th and early 20th centuries that war, far from being the absurdity as which it is usually regarded today, ennobled man and brought out his best qualities--leadership, courage, loyalty, and honor. World War I shattered that notion for most people. What did courage mean in hail of shells and machine gun bullets that could end your life at random? What good was honor in the chest-deep mud of Passchendaele? And leadership--how could belief in leadership survive men like "Papa" Joffre and Douglas Haig?
But some held onto those seemingly outmoded notions. Jünger was one of them. The result is a memoir that may seem incongruous among the other books to emerge from the trenches of World War I, but one that does not succumb to the reactionary flavor of popular interwar writing and one that examines an attitude toward war that might have been lost totally without it.

The final--and best--memoir I'd like to write about is one I've already written of elsewhere. And if you've seen me at any point in the last few months, I've probably wrung your ear recommending you read With the Old Breed, by E.B. Sledge.
Since I've already written on Sledge's memoir elsewhere, I'll be brief. Sledge joined the Marine Corps during World War II and saw his first combat in the 1944 invasion of Pelelieu, a tiny coral island in the Pacific. He next landed on Okinawa a few months later. Both campaigns were among the most difficult and bloodiest of the war. Okinawa virtually destroyed Sledge's First Marine Division. Sledge was a young but sensitive, perceptive, and articulate man. He kept notes in a Gideon Bible he carried in his jacket and, over three decades after the war, wrote using those notes and his minutely detailed memory.
Sledge experienced physical and psychological suffering perhaps unequaled in world history. He went without water in the 110°+ heat of Pelelieu and sat in maggot-crawling mud for weeks on Okinawa. He fought a tenacious and vicious enemy that had no compunction about committing atrocities, and he saw the humanity stripped from many of his buddies.
But Sledge saw purpose to his suffering, and his memoir is not afflicted by a single note of bitterness. Sledge recounts loss, waste, and carnage without laying blame or condemnation on anyone. He saw as much horror of any of the other writers but, in the end, transcended it all. The war he fought was ugly and horrifying but, at the end of his life, he could reflect that it was worth fighting. To Sledge, it was "necessary to accept one's responsibilities and be willing to make sacrifices for one's country--as my comrades did. As the troops used to say, 'If the country is good enough to live in, it's good enough to fight for.' With privilege goes responsibility."

A Few Thoughts on "The Office"

2010-04-01T21:46:00.008-04:00

I was disappointed to lay my reading and thesis work aside, pick up the remote, and discover that there would be no new episodes of “The Office” or “Community” tonight. So I had a few minutes to think, which is always dangerous.
Here I offer a few thoughts on the recent course of “The Office”:

PREFACE: I finally declared, after last week’s episodes of the two aforementioned shows, that “Community” has become my favorite show. This was a monumental shakeup for me.
PRAISE: I like Kathy Bates as Jo Bennett. I think I like her for many of the same reasons I loved Ben Matlock—she’s a strong Southerner in a Californian’s imaginary universe. (Seriously—name a show other than “Matlock” that took place in Georgia.) Bates brings a nice slice of realistic Southern-ness to a show that sometimes seems totally detached from reality—just how much about Christianity, for example, or the South do the show’s writers know? Not much, based on the “Murder Mystery” episode and nearly everything Angela has ever done. Jo, however, reminds me of some of my aunts. (This means you, Leah.) She’s a strong, sure-footed woman and plays a nice foil to Michael. I especially liked it when he failed totally to understand that, when a Southerner invites you to her home sometime, the invitation is sincere but the emphasis is squarely on the sometime.
TOUGH LOVE: Dunder Mifflin Sabre really need to let Toby, Kelly, and Meredith go, and probably Ryan, too. Meredith is a one-joke character whose joke was used up a couple seasons ago. Kelly is incredibly irritating, as always, and her usefulness has also been exhausted. The last really good laugh I had about Toby was at the end of last season, when we learned that his lethargic speech is shared by most of Dunder Mifflin’s other HR people. And it’s always seemed incredibly artificial that Ryan has gone through so many incarnations—especially when corporate fraud seemed guaranteed to can him for good. And bringing Toby back from an awkward early retirement and a spinal injury in Costa Rica (to which Dunder Mifflin dutifully sent its camera crew at one point) was almost as bizarre. In all of these cases but Meredith, the characters are played by writers or producers of the show and it seems Paul Lieberstein and B.J. Novak have really lost interest in their characters. I think it’s time these four characters got the axe.
ON A RELATED NOTE: Sabre, as helmed by Jo, seems to be a no-nonsense business, and it could be in Sabre’s capacity as Dunder Mifflin’s new owner that some of the dead weight gets heaved overboard.
STEPPING EVEN FURTHER AFIELD: Just what happened to the other branches of Dunder Mifflin? We’ve seen David Wallace post-Dunder Mifflin meltdown, but is Holly still out there? Karen?
TYING IT ALL TOGETHER: I’ve complained before about the way “The Office” sometimes seems to disregard the logistics of its premise. It’s unrealistic, and realism is what was really hilarious about the show in the beginning—especially for anyone who’s worked in an office environment. “Community” is excellent high farce—“The Office” needs to exist in the real world. Bringing the show to ground again would help it immensely. My idea, in sum:

Fire the crappy characters. This would ease up on the show's already bloated plotlines and make the show more realistic. Have any of y'all ever worked six years in a place with precisely the same people?
Facilitate the above through Jo. “The Office” used to thrive on high-octane awkward, and Michael has already proved he can distill that whenever she's around. Imagine a round of firings ordered by Jo to be executed by Michael.
Keep shaking things up, but invest it with more meaning. Darryl's promotion to an office job would have been the punchline/cliffhanger of an episode in the show's heyday.
More of the Japanese guy.

Thoughts?

"The Pacific," Racism, and History

2010-03-25T15:48:00.011-04:00

I’m not going to spend a great deal of time on Tom Hanks’s comments about racism and the Pacific theatre here. His statements were idiotic—and, adding to the disappointment, he has declined to back away from them when asked to clarify—and his historical ignorance has already been sufficiently destroyed by specialists. What I’m concerned with here in Hanks’s latest television project, the HBO miniseries “The Pacific,” which will launch its third episode this Sunday night.
“The Pacific” is based largely on the memoirs of two men who served in the Marine Corps, Robert Leckie and Eugene Sledge. The decision to use these books as source material was a good one, for Leckie and Sledge were both articulate, intelligent, and perceptive writers, they saw enough hair-raising combat to make for an entertaining series, and their terms of service were long enough and overlapped just enough to cover nearly three years of the war against Japan.
Leckie, who wrote Helmet for My Pillow, was a New Jersey native and an aspiring writer. He joined the Marines after Pearl Harbor and fought in the first major island campaign of the Pacific war, on Guadalcanal. There he was a machine gunner, manning the heavy, crew-served water-cooled .30 caliber machine gun. In its opening episode, “The Pacific” dramatized Leckie’s baptism of fire at the Battle of the Tenaru, at which waves of hundreds of Japanese infantry attacked the Marines’ fixed positions in banzai charges. The Marines slaughtered them.
Following the protracted misery of Guadalcanal, Leckie’s unit spent time recovering in Australia before deploying to Cape Gloucester, where, if at all possible, the environment was even more oppressive than on Guadalcanal. Leckie, whose talent for writing had gotten him transferred from heavy weapons duty to intelligence—an officer dubbed “Lieutenant Big-picture” in Leckie’s book having thought a battalion newsletter would be a great idea—was by this time serving as a scout. Leckie led numerous combat patrols into the jungles, which were dense, nearly impenetrable, and a constant hazard to the health of himself and his fellow Marines. And though the fight for survival in the terrible conditions of New Britain was difficult in and of itself—something the filmmakers plan to devote attention to—there were still lots of Japanese on the island.

Leckie’s last combat was in the opening stages of the battle for Peleliu, a rough coral island in the south Pacific. Leckie narrowly avoided the explosion of an ammunition dump but came out of it so terribly concussed that he was hospitalized. For him, the war was over.
But if Peleliu was Leckie’s last sight of combat, it was the first harrowing battle of Eugene Sledge’s life. The Alabama-born Sledge had not at first been able to enlist, in part because his father, a physician, had diagnosed him with a heart murmur and refused to give his permission. (Sledge does not mention all this backstory in his book, With the Old Breed, but it is dramatized in the first few episodes of “The Pacific” while Leckie and another major character, John Basilone, fight on Guadalcanal.) Peleliu was a terrible fight which Sledge somehow survived without a scratch. The Japanese, who had by now abandoned the banzai charge in favor of the attritional fight to the death, had spent their years in possession of the island digging interconnected networks of tunnels and mutually supporting gun positions. The Marines and Army advanced slowly, sometimes by mere yards or feet, and lost thousands in the combat.

Sledge emerged from Peleliu a veteran. A few months after the US secured the island, the Marines landed on Iwo Jima. The battle there was partly the subject of Clint Eastwood’s uneven epic Flags of Our Fathers, and it was in this long, bloody battle that John Basilone, who won the Medal of Honor on Guadalcanal—an event depicted in part two of “The Pacific”—was killed.
Sledge saw only two battles in the Pacific, but they were two of the worst. In April 1945 he landed with the Marines and Army on Okinawa. Leckie eventually wrote a history of the battle subtitled The Last Battle of World War II, and it is fortunate for us that it was.
Peleliu had been a horror show, but Okinawa became the Grand Guignol of the Pacific theatre. After unopposed landings on the island, the Army divisions in the southern end of the island ran into deeply entrenched Japanese forces. After securing the northern end of the island, the Marines were moved south to join the hard fighting there. At this point Sledge’s memoir becomes a long series of horrifying memories. The mud was so thick supplies had to be airdropped—trucks could not reach the front lines. It rained constantly. The Japanese routinely left their dead unburied—both Leckie and Sledge recount how Marines noted the passage of time by the decomposition of particular corpses. The constant artillery bombardment buried some decaying bodies and unearthed others, churning the mud into a stinking slop of body parts, garbage, and human excrement. Sledge saw many Marines slip and fall in the mud and rise covered in maggots.
Again, Sledge emerged from the battle—which ended, like the others, with the annihilation of the Japanese forces—unscratched, but certainly not unscathed. In his book, Sledge recounts a recurring nightmare of the dead scattered across Okinawa rising from the mud. The constant stress, exhaustion, and fear of combat against the Japanese left men like Leckie and Sledge emotionally wrung-out.
And here’s the rub—Hanks betrayed immense historical ignorance with his comments, and though I detect undertones of that variety in the series, I pray they don’t come to predominate. The ham-handed racist rants from the first episode were pretty pathetic, akin to the awkwardly incorporated racism in many movies that try to straddle the line between seriously handling an issue and keeping it commercial. It was corny.
It would be foolish to deny that Americans directed a lot of racial hatred against the Japanese. But Americans allied with many other races during the war—including the Chinese and Filipinos—and had even allied with the Japanese in the past. Leckie and Sledge make it clear that this hatred predicated on the heinous behavior of the Japanese—which stemmed from their own ideas of racial and cultural supremacy. The Japanese believed not only that they were more racially pure than their opponents, but because of their ancient honor- and shame-based code of bushido, they believed surrender a disgrace and therefore granted no respect or mercy to captured enemies. Leckie recounts the discovery of a Marine corpse that the Japanese had used for bayonet practice. At some point before the Marine’s death, they had cut a globe-and-anchor tattoo from the man’s forearm and stuffed it in his mouth. Many other captured Americans were castrated. And the Japanese deliberately targeted medics. Sledge describes over and over the Japanese attempts to gun down corpsmen (medics) and stretcher-bearers. Soldiers fighting in the Pacific feared and hated the Japanese because they were an enemy that could not, on any account, be trusted.
I’ve wondered lately why there was such a peculiar ferocity and hatred between the Americans and Japanese, and why not between the Americans and Germans. It occurred to me that, with notable exceptions—such as Malmedy—the Germans were far less duplicitous in their dealings with US soldiers than the Japanese. Germany’s grossest crime was the Holocaust, and that highlights the difference—Americans hated the Germans because they committed atrocity with the civilized precision all their science could muster; Americans hated the Japanese because they were barbarians. The nearest Europe came to the war in the Pacific was in the fighting between Germany and Russia, with the merciless Germans ignoring the Geneva Convention and the Russians competing with them in brutality.
Which begs the touchy question of whether, on the question of racism, the pendulum has swung too far. To brand something racist now is to deny that it can in any way be good. The Marines depicted thus far in “The Pacific” seem to be shown in some kind of remorseful, apologetic light because they hated their sneaky, unethical opponents. I hope the series will not be so informed by its producer’s sentiments. The Japanese army habitually perpetrated some of the cruelest, most grotesque atrocities in the history of humanity, and the Marines were not only aware of that, they were often the victims.
The first two episodes of “The Pacific” have been good, and I hope they continue to be. Some reviewers, who have seen further into the series, say that the series improves significantly when Sledge arrives on Peleliu. I hope for the best—Sledge, Leckie, and Basilone deserve it.

Difficulty

2010-03-11T15:18:00.006-05:00

In addition to the ever-demanding work on my thesis, I'm composing a few poems for The South Carolina Review's poetry contest. I'm enjoying it. It's been some time since I've habitually written poetry, and getting back into the routine and the mindset is like working out after a long break--stretching the muscles, finding yourself weaker than you remember, being sore, growing stronger.
At the moment I'm working on a villanelle. The villanelle is one of the most beautiful poetic forms. Among my favorites--and the most famous--are Theodore Roethke's "The Waking" and Dylan Thomas's "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night." I've found few examples in poetic anthologies--probably a testament to the difficulty of the form and its unpopularity in our shapeless age.
The chief difficulty lies in its structure, which has both a demanding rhyme-scheme and the internal repetition of lines. The villanelle typically has nineteen lines, and, stripped of particulars, looks like this:

Refrain 1 (a)
Line
Refrain 2 (a)

Line (a)
Line (b)
Refrain 1 (a)

Line (a)
Line (b)
Refrain 2 (a)

Line (a)
Line (b)
Refrain 1 (a)

Line (a)
Line (b)
Refrain 2 (a)

Line (a)
Line (b)
Refrain 1 (a)
Refrain 2 (a)

The poem becomes a kind of dance around lines that you must use in certain places, and which--if the poem is to be good--must fit in those places as though unthinking.
I'm not sure I'll get a good poem out of it--I've never written a good one--but even if I don't, the difficulty will be its own reward. I mentioned working out, earlier. I think the comparison is apt. Difficulty enters most important and worthwhile things in life. Human nature, like a terrestrial moving object, seeks a position of rest. We like it cushy. When I work out in the mornings, I fight constantly to push myself. I'm tired and I'm sore, and I really don't feel like trying for an extra set of crunches or heavier resistance on the lat pulldowns, but if I stay where I am I'll never get stronger.
Compare The Art of Manliness's recent article on training for the Ironman:

[P]eople’s mental image of themselves becomes very apparent when you train with them. If you run with the same 20 people every Thursday, let’s say, soon you will notice that some people are faster than others. My experience was that the distribution of people is pretty much the same each week. Most people are content to stay at a certain level indefinitely.
Each runner is seemingly thinking to himself, “Well, I am faster than Craig, but that George guy is better than me.” At the end of the run each week they will almost always end up between Craig and George.
You must not fall into this mental trap because it will cause you to stagnate.

Like I said above, I think all important things we do in life will be beset by difficulty. Remaining at rest causes muscles to atrophy, water to breed vermin, the mind to dull. This villanelle is not the toughest thing I have to do right now. Compared to my thesis writing, it's the kind of fun challenge that offers escape. But it's a challenge nonetheless, and even though it's hard, I won't give up. I can be happy because it's difficult.

Fall and Winter Reading 2009-10

2010-02-02T15:05:00.004-05:00

While I have done lots and lots of reading since last August, you are not mistaken when you look at the list below--I have only read completely ten books, and one of them a wee pamphlet of a tome. I feel no little disappointment myself. I have also slacked off on writing Amazon.com reviews, so you'll see that only a few are available from the reading list below. I hope to amend this paltry list this year.

Spring may be difficult, since I'm writing my master's thesis, but I'm already hip-deep in G.K. Chesterton's great book The Everlasting Man and there are a lot of books I've been reading for some time but haven't yet finished. And beyond this spring lies the possibility of PhD work. Who knows how these lists will look then?

Reading List
Fall and Winter, 2009-2010

British Drums on the Southern Frontier, by Larry Ivers
Heresy, by Alister McGrath
The American Civil War, by John Keegan
Pirate Latitudes, by Michael Crichton
The Increment, by David Ignatius
The Village of Cannibals, by Alain Corbin
The Vikings: A History, by Robert Ferguson
Brendan, by Frederick Buechner
How the Obama Administration Threatens Our National Security, by Victor Davis Hanson
Catholicism and Fundamentalism, by Karl Keating

Favorites:

The best non-fiction work here is easily Ivers's British Drums on the Southern Frontier, a history of the military colonization of Georgia. Georgia has a unique colonial history and Ivers's book is a good introduction to the military side, which is by no means a minor part of the story. Founded as a buffer between the rich colony of South Carolina (how art the mighty fallen!) and Spanish-controlled Florida, Georgia fought off invasion and ensured the survival of English law in the South.
The best fictional work I read in the last five months was certainly Brendan, by Frederick Buechner. I had previously read Godric, Buechner's novel about the life of the titular Anglo-Saxon saint, and fallen in love with the language, the poetry of the narration, and the power of the story. Brendan, a similarly biographical novel about the 6th-century Irish saint, was equally brilliant, and I highly recommend it to anyone reading this blog.

Things Jordan Poss Likes

2010-01-23T21:57:00.007-05:00

I publish a lot of reading lists. Here's something a little different--a few random things that I enjoy watching, reading, or laughing at and think you should check out, if you haven't already.

TV shows I actually watch:

"Cash Cab" is the most consistently interesting, entertaining, and flat-out fun game show I've ever seen. Comes on Discovery from 9:00-11:00 AM and 5:00-7:00 PM Monday-Friday, and I at least have it on in the background nearly every time.
"The Office" has fallen on hard times--especially in that clips episode this week--but I still follow it like a loyal but oft-beaten dog.
"Community" is probably the funniest show on TV right now, a statement I make cautiously since, as you see, I only watch a few right now.
"NCIS" has a distinct advantage on similar shows--such as the various permutations of "CSI"--because of the fun chemistry of its characters. Shows like "Law & Order: SVU" take themselves so seriously they drift into self-parody. "NCIS" employs almost Shakespearean comic relief and is the more entertaining for it.

Magazines to which I subscribe:

American Cinematographer is the official journal of the American Society of Cinematographers (ASC), and is some of the best reading you can find if you're interested in the actual art and science of making movies.
Journal of Military History is the journal of the Society of Military History and publishes academic papers and hundreds of good book reviews a year.
National Geographic needs no introduction. Beautiful photography.
National Review is the conservative news journal established by William F. Buckley Jr. Some of the best-informed, most intelligent journalism I've come across, and most of the writers are witty to boot.
Popular Mechanics first won my favor with their book Debunking 9/11 Conspiracy Theories. While their magazine doesn't treat such major issues monthly, it does publish lots of helpful and informative articles on a wide variety of topics. I think it fulfills my need to understand how that has existed since my dad bought me The Way Things Work as a child.
World is a conservative Christian news magazine and while it may lack the depth and intelligence of National Review, it's certainly the best of its kind, and some of its writers are gifted thinkers. Think of it as an evangelical Newsweek.
The Writer
Writer's Digest

Blogs I consistently follow, at least when they consistently update:

The Art of Manliness, which is one of the best collections of interesting and readable material on the internet. I could spend hours here.
Victor Davis Hanson's Private Papers is an aggregate site for articles published by classicist, military historian, and syndicated columnist Hanson. Hanson wrote Carnage and Culture, which is one of the Books That Made Me Who I Am.
Stuff Fundies Like--having grown up in the claustral world of Christian fundamentalism, this blog is a refreshing draught of satirical nostalgia.
Explorations, an arts, letters, and entertainment blog run by my friend Will.
bradezone covers anything and everything that interests my friend Brad.
Strange Culture, an entertainment blog.
The Athenian Life is "a blog about beauty, creativity, and excellence in the everyday" run by my friend Jenny.
How to Write Badly Well is a catalog of hilarious literary foolishness.

Entertaining wastes of time:

The Onion, which is probably the funniest, sharpest satire on the internet.
xkcd, an online comic strip that actually manages to be intelligent most of the time.
E-mails From Crazy People, which veer wildly from hilarious to deeply disturbing and sometimes upset me at the absolute insanity that exists somewhere in the world.
Failbooking catalogs embarrassing online faux pas, Freudian slips, and general tactlessness.
FAIL Blog--This website has mostly shot its wad, especially since the definition of "fail" seems to encompass everything now, but I still check it daily for funny stuff.
People of Wal-Mart is the ultimate in what I think of as "train wreck sites," where the contents are so horrifying you can't help but check it once, twice, ten times daily.

My internet reference library:

Dictionary.com
Online Etymology Dictionary--the best thing this side of the $295 subscription price of the OED.
Bible Gateway--quickly search the Bible in dozens of languages and translations.
The Chicago Style Citation Quick Guide--A lifesaver when it comes paper-writing time.
LEO--a massive online English-German, German-English dictionary.

2009 Highlights Reel

2010-01-11T20:13:00.018-05:00

I'll forego the usual platitudes about new years except for this one--a lot has changed. I entered 2009 as a pretty fresh student with a girlfriend, just out of my first semester, and I left it as a single second-year heading into the homestretch. Twelve months can change a lot of things.

I won't break down all the highs and lows of 2009 here. There are too many of both, and I have my diary for that. Instead, I'll give you my top fives in a few categories. These are the things I enjoyed most in 2009.

Favorite Books

Top 5 Fiction:

A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole -- One of the funniest books I've ever read. The story of Ignatius J. Reilly, an amateur medievalist cloistered in his mother's house, this novel follows Ignatius and an equally colorful cast of characters through 1960s New Orleans to a cataclysmic--and hilarious--finale in the French Quarter.

The Terror, by Dan Simmons -- Supernatural horror with authentic historical trappings? Loads of detail about Arctic exploration? And it's 900 pages? Yes--and it works. The Terror is the story of the lost Franklin expedition to find the Northwest Passage. One of the most engrossing reads I've found--I blew through it in a couple days.

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrun, by J.R.R. Tolkien -- Tolkien was a first-rate novelist, but he was also a scholar and a poet. This long poem combines his passions for Norse mythology and poetry into his own version of the various myths of Sigurd the dragon-slayer (known as Siegfried in the German version). Set in skaldic verse, this is a good read for anyone who likes mythology, history, or poetry.

Lords of the North, by Bernard Cornwell -- The third in Cornwell's Anglo-Saxon historical series, this is among his best since he manages to shove aside, for a moment, his absolute hatred of Christianity in favor of a powerful finale. Rousing action and good historical detail.

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John LeCarre -- Sophisticated, realistic spy fiction from the heart of the Cold War. Great read. Moving into the Karla Trilogy this year.

Honorable Mention: Agincourt, by Bernard Cornwell -- Compared to Cornwell's other books, this one is clumsily-written and even more rife with his usual "Christians suck" shtick than usual, but the action is fantastic and the period detail excellent. A worthwhile bit of historical fiction.

Top 5 Non-fiction:

Atheist Delusions, by David Bentley Hart -- I've already written on this book quite a lot (here, and I'm pretty sure I refer to it somewhere in Books That Made Me Who I Am), so I'll keep it short. This book has a misleading title and is one of the best historical correctives I've ever read.

One Bullet Away, by Nathaniel Fick -- Outstanding memoir from a Marine officer, one of the real-life characters in HBO's "Generation Kill." Fick's book is a powerful meditation on leadership when it counts.

British Drums on the Southern Frontier, by Larry Ivers -- This military history of the first years of Georgia's colonization provides an enlightening look at some of the colony's major figures--especially James Edward Oglethorpe, who has become one of my personal heroes over the last year--and a rousing narrative of defense, invasion, and combat.

The Price of Glory, by Alistair Horne -- I keep using the word powerful, and I mean it every time I do. These are, after all, the best books I read this year. Horne's history of Verdun is no exception.

The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman -- Tuchman and Horne's books, both of which I read for a seminar on World War I, hold a lot of traits in common--a good grasp of character, exciting narrative, and powerful descriptions of the horrors of World War I. But what Tuchman has that Horne does not is wit--this book is packed with zingers for everyone involved in the debacle that was August 1914.

Honorable Mention: Liberal Fascism, by Jonah Goldberg -- This book finally answered a question I've had for a long time--Why are Nazis, "national socialists" by definition, always called "right wing"? The answer is that they are right wing--if you're a Communist. A good look at the rise, proliferation, and popularization of fascist ideas during the 20th century.

Favorite Movies

Top 5 2009 Releases:

The Hurt Locker -- A tense, harrowing look at modern war and the sharp divide between what is considered important by people on the battlefield--even different parts of the battlefield--and at home. Brilliant performances and an intense depiction of the challenges faced by soldiers in modern combat.
Up -- One of the best movies I've ever seen--and one of only a handful in which I've cried. Touches on universal themes of love, loss, and life with genuine emotion and not a hint of cynicism.
Taken -- For my money, the best straight-up action movie of the year.
Public Enemies -- The only strike against this John Dillinger biopic is its ugly HD cinematography. Otherwise, this is a detailed, reasonably accurate movie (Michael Mann mainly messes with chronology rather than facts) that captures some of the complexity of 1930s crime and the rise of our federal police agency.
Defiance -- A dense, deep story with numerous parallels to the Biblical exodus. This film gets points for not only being a rousing action and survival flick, but for bringing attention to a complex and previously overlooked part of World War II.
Honorable Mentions:
Body of Lies -- A hard look at the Middle East. It sets out to do a lot of the things The Hurt Locker does, like examine how men react to the fog of war, and while it isn't as successful, it's a sophisticated, suspenseful action film with good performances.
The Blind Side -- Touching, entertaining, and with a surprisingly great performance from Sandra Bullock, whom I had long ago sloughed into the romantic comedy garbage bin. A good story well-told.

Top 5 Previously Released "Discoveries":

In the Shadow of the Moon -- 2007 -- A powerful documentary on NASA's Apollo program that captures the glory of space travel, the experience of walking on the moon, and the effect the program had on its survivors. Most of the surviving Apollo astronauts narrate this film, which includes previously unseen footage from the NASA archives and some of the most beautiful footage I've ever seen. I almost cried a couple times. Check this out if you possibly can. (Trailer)

Barton Fink -- 1991 -- Writer's block is hell, especially when you're living in a strange city, in a hotel that just might be the gates of the netherworld itself, with neighbors who drift between annoying, friendly, and demonic. And did I mention the writer's block? One of the Coen brothers' best.

The Vikings -- 1958 -- From the glory days of the Hollywood epic, this historical romance has some of the best material detail I've seen in a movie (aside from Janet Leigh's pointy '60s bra, that is). One of Kirk Douglas's best. If you liked Spartacus, this actually managed to be better.

Miller's Crossing -- 1990 -- The Coens wrote Barton Fink during a bout of writer's block with this movie. Vastly different in tone and content, this gangster picture is a complex, Yojimbo-like story of a man trying to work multiple elements against themselves.

J'accuse -- 1919 -- Abel Gance's silent World War I epic is universal in appeal, dealing with every imaginable theme. The result is deeply moving. Modern filmmakers should learn from classics like this. Then again, maybe Pixar did.
Honorable Mentions:
Terminator 2: Judgment Day -- 1991 -- No, I never saw until this last year. But I've seen it now, and it's an action masterpiece. James Cameron should go back to making movies like this and Aliens (which I also just saw this year) instead of bloated effects pictures.
In Bruges -- 2008 -- Beautiful scenery and great performances are among the best features of this extremely medieval contemplation on death, guilt, and atonement.

What I'm Looking Forward To

I've been a bit too busy to seek out a lot of things I'd like to see this year, so I'll focus on two that leap immediately to mind: Robin Hood and Clash of the Titans.
I hold out hope for both of them. Clash of the Titans could be a brain-dead effects piece that uses and abuses my beloved Greek mythology, but I hope it's a rousing actioner with at least respectful ties to the myths. Robin Hood could be a dark revisionist look at the hero of Sherwood Forest, especially given Ridley Scott's track record with history, but I hope that it, too, will be a rousing action story. And I always like Russell Crowe, even--perhaps especially--as the dumpy wiseguy in Body of Lies.
I also hope to finish my thesis without too much blood, sweat, and tears, and I hope to get into a good PhD program and stay in touch with all the great friends I've made here at Clemson. A lot is going to change by this time next year. I'm hopeful.

Semester's End

2009-12-07T14:06:00.003-05:00

Another semester down. Finals week begins today. I don't have any exams until Friday, and I find myself stuck in a weird mental limbo--reviewing the past semester and feverishly looking ahead. Far ahead.

This was a pretty good semester. Tough, but good. I was TA in one huge undergraduate class and took two classes--Medieval and Renaissance Florence and Vietnam Wars. Both required lengthy papers, and since I'm working on Ph.D applications (more on that later), I tried as much as possible to focus my work for both classes on topics pertaining to my future specialty--military history. With Vietnam Wars it was easy. I wrote a paper on Operation Apache Snow of 1969 and its relation to the war of attrition in Vietnam. For Florence, it was a bit trickier. I signed up for the course because I loved Dante, and while I toyed with the idea of writing something on Dante, I decided there was far too much literature on Dante--most of it literary-critical of the airiest variety--so I settled on one event in his life and wrote on that--the Battle of Campaldino in 1289.

I think I did well on both papers. The final draft of the Florence paper is due Wednesday and I haven't yet received a grade on the Vietnam paper. Still praying, of course.

Which brings me to the Ph.D stuff. I've never undertaken anything so demoralizing in my life. Perhaps a month alone in Germany a few years ago, perhaps this last summer, which was agonizingly lonely, but trying to gather my materials for applications, make contacts, and advertise myself to competitive programs when I have no idea what I'm doing is, well, awful.

Anyway.

Trying to keep a sense of humor about it though. I learned a long time ago that when I let stress get to me, it wrecks my life for weeks at a time. So I make sure I have plenty of escapist avenues open to myself when I need them. The good news is that, now that classes have ended, I have a wee bit of downtime in which I can read what I want, so I've been trying to relax that way. And, of course, there are always movies. It's working out pretty well so far.

Fall and winter reading lists coming soon. I'm combining them because I've gotten so little of my own reading done this fall.

The Office: An Unexplored Dynamic

2009-11-17T14:24:00.011-05:00

I'm a big fan of "The Office." I've followed it since college and can rat-a-tat-tat Michael Scott quotations with the best of them. It's easily my favorite show on TV. But something has been bothering me about it more and more in the last few months.

I think it first occurred to me when "Parks and Recreation," another mockumentary comedy, premiered last year. The mockumentary style is funny to me (even if "Parks and Recreation" is not) and, if executed well, undeniably hilarious. One of the top-rated comedies in the IMDb rankings is This is Spinal Tap, the granddaddy of the style. But--and this is what has been bothering me about "The Office"--when a documentary goes on into its sixth year... something has to be going on behind the scenes.

Here's what I mean. "The Office" is ostensibly a documentary, shot for unknown purposes, of the inner workings of Dunder-Mifflin's Scranton branch. Maybe it's for Dunder-Mifflin trainees, maybe it's for a Japanese company somewhere, maybe it's a psych experiment in an enormous Stanford basement--who knows. But the thing about a documentary is that the documentary style of shooting is inherently intrusive. A documentary, especially one that purports to depict a one-hundred percent real look at something, is not as trustworthy a source as it seems. Once a person is aware of the camera (and "The Office" does this well--watch how uncomfortable some newly introduced characters act, e.g. Holly Flax) his behavior will change. One of my historiography professors used to argue that the moment a camera is introduced to record what actually happens, the actual disappears and life becomes, in some degree, a performance.

And the documentary at Scranton, now in its sixth year of shooting, must be incredibly intrusive.

Think about this. The show started off with a fairly simple documentary style. One camera, sometimes two, with wide-angle lenses to catch as much of what was going on as possible. Two cameras quickly became the norm, especially during conversations. Then came two cameras for each plot, with at least one subplot in addition to the main plot being common. By the fifth season (which I'm rewatching right now), some episodes have as many as two subplots or three roughly parallel plots at the same time, all of which are captured with two cameras. Throwing an extra kink in the hose is Pam's three-month sojourn in New York, during which she frequently has at least one camera following her.

That's upwards of seven cameramen hanging around Dunder-Mifflin at any given time, waiting for the office's employees to splinter off on their various trajectories. I have to wonder when some of the characters behave so familiarly with the cameramen. Jim is the character most consistently aware of the cameras--he and the cameramen even seem to be allies, as much as Jim looks to them for understanding when the going gets crazy. Pam especially seems to talk to the cameramen a lot, in a few episodes even dragging them around to things they need to see. When Phyllis and Dwight discuss his affair with Angela in season five, she says, "You know I know," and, when Dwight scoffs, she nods to the fourth wall. "You know they know."

And I mentioned Pam's three months in New York, but lest we forget, two cameras also followed Jim when he was transferred to the Stamford branch. At least that's still within the Dunder-Mifflin company, so maybe this is some kind of corporate documentary after all? But when Michael Scott quits and starts the short-lived Michael Scott Paper Company, camera crews follow him there, too, just as the crews had previously followed characters outside the office on business trips, to parties, to after-work get-togethers, and even into their homes a number of times.

Like I said, it's been bothering me. The more I think about it, the more it seems like the show has pinwheeled wildly from its original format, pushing the documentary style toward an impossible omniscience. Every once in a while they swing back the opposite direction. Those camera guys go everywhere. They're the great unseen characters of "The Office." Presumably they know all the onscreen characters well--they've worked in the same tiny building for six years. Why don't we know more about them? Do they put down their cameras and hang out at Pour Richard's with the rest of the guys after work? It sure doesn't look like it.

It's not that I'm no longer a fan. I am. Big time. I suppose it's just a case of aggravated curiosity, but I hope the show's writers get curious, too. This is an itch I'd like to have scratched.

Bibliography

2009-10-19T17:23:00.009-04:00

Following the "Books That Made Me Who I Am" series of posts, I mentioned an idea that has passed through my mind once or twice to publish "an unadorned list" of books that have had some kind of influence on me. I hadn't thought there would be much interest to see such a list--I don't even know how many people read the aforementioned autobiographical rambling--but several people said they were interested. And since I live to serve you, gentle reader, I've slowly compiled the following list.

I had a hard time deciding how to present it. I settled on splitting the list into a few broad categories and publishing it in no particular order. A number of the books cross genres or content--notice that one category is "History and Religion"--so I recommend looking through the entire list rather than picking through the category you're most interested in. Those books I've reviewed on Amazon.com I've hyperlinked in case you want to know more.

A final word, and then the list. This list is by no means exhaustive. The "Who I Am" series was necessarily limited in scale, and while a simple list of books that have influenced me can include more, now that I've compiled that broad list I find myself panicked that I have forgotten something. So take this list for what it is--an inevitably incomplete list of favorites, books that have entertained, consoled, challenged, and otherwise influenced me in uncountable ways.

Novels

All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque
The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara
The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger

Gates of Fire, by Steven Pressfield

The Naked and the Dead, by Norman Mailer
Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury
The Hobbit, by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien
Animal Farm, by George Orwell
1984, by George Orwell
The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe
Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut
Grendel, by John Gardner
Pride & Prejudice, by Jane Austen

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand
The Fountainhead, by Ayn Rand
The Gunslinger, by Stephen King

The Lords of Discipline, by Pat Conroy

Crime and Punishment, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, by Douglas Adams
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, by Mark Haddon
Brighton Rock, by Graham Greene
Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy
All the Pretty Horses, by Cormac McCarthy
The Crossing, by Cormac McCarthy
No Country for Old Men, by Cormac McCarthy
Light in August, by William Faulkner
The Sound and the Fury, by William Faulkner
Jennifer Government, by Max Barry
Shiloh, by Shelby Foote
The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis
Out of the Silent Planet, by C.S. Lewis
Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis

The Screwtape Letters, by C.S. Lewis
Godric, by Frederick Buechner
Doctor No, by Ian Fleming
The Terror, by Dan Simmons

History and Religion

The New Concise History of the Crusades, by Thomas F. Madden
Carnage and Culture, by Victor Davis Hanson
Liberal Fascism, by Jonah Goldberg
Atheist Delusions, by David Bentley Hart
The Fourth Crusade and the Sack of Constantinople, by Jonathan Phillips
The First Crusade, by Thomas Asbridge
Christianity’s Dangerous Idea, by Alister McGrath
The Killing of History, by Keith Windschuttle
Black Hawk Down, by Mark Bowden
A History of Warfare, by John Keegan
Colossus, by Niall Ferguson
The Face of Battle, by John Keegan

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon
City of God, by St. Augustine
Socrates Meets Jesus, by Peter Kreeft
The Unaborted Socrates, by Peter Kreeft
The Best Things in Life, by Peter Kreeft
Orthodoxy, by G.K. Chesterton

Mere Christianity, by C.S. Lewis

The Imitation of Christ, by Thomas a Kempis

The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman

The Price of Glory, by Alistair Horne

Band of Brothers, by Stephen Ambrose

Classics

The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri

The Iliad, by Homer

The Odyssey, by Homer
Apology, by Plato

The Poetics, by Aristotle
The Histories, by Herodotus
History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides
Ananbasis, by Xenophon
Metamorphoses, by Ovid

The Epic of Gilgamesh
Njal’s Saga
Gisli Sursson’s Saga
The Saga of Grettir the Strong
Das Nibelungenlied

Lancelot, by Chretien de Troyes
Beowulf
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
The Canterbury Tales, by Geoffrey Chaucer

Poetry

The works of Edgar Allan Poe
The works of John Keats
The works of Edwin Arlington Robinson
Opened Ground: Selected Poems 1966-1996, by Seamus Heaney
The Waste Land and Other Writings, by T.S. Eliot
The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, by J.R.R. Tolkien

Miscellaneous

On Writing, by Stephen King
The Art of Fiction, by John Gardner
On Becoming a Novelist, by John Gardner

The Sounds of Poetry, by Robert Pinsky

Meditations, by Marcus Aurelius
A Tramp Abroad, by Mark Twain
The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard
Essays, (including “Politics and the English Language”), by George Orwell
“Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics,” by J.R.R. Tolkien
The Dangerous Book for Boys, by Conn and Hal Iggulden
One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick

Summer Reading 2009

2009-10-03T17:48:00.005-04:00

Now that we're already several weeks into the official fall season, allow me to present my summer reading list. This list terminates August 31--not that it really matters, since I have not completed any books since then. These is tough times for readers.

The List:

What’s So Great About Christianity, by Dinesh D’Souza

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John le Carré

Lords of the North, by Bernard Cornwell

The Ancient Egyptian Books of the Afterlife, by Erik Hornung, trans. by David Lorton

The Strain, by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan

Public Enemies, by Bryan Burrough

The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman

The Real War, 1914-1918, by B.H. Liddell Hart

The Price of Glory: Verdun 1916, by Alistair Horne

Storm of Steel, by Ernst Jünger, trans. by Michael Hofmann

Ivanhoe, by Sir Walter Scott

Liberal Fascism, by Jonah Goldberg

Good-bye to All That, by Robert Graves

The Social Contract, by Jean Jacques Rousseau, trans. by Maurice Cranston

South of Broad, by Pat Conroy

A Confederacy of Dunces, by John Kennedy Toole

Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, trans. by J.R.R. Tolkien

Best Reads:

This summer's reading, while not as uniformly excellent as this spring's, was still good and certainly more varied.

John Kennedy Toole's Confederacy of Dunces is the funniest novel I've read since The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, and certainly more philosophically rich. The novel's hero, Ignatius J. Reilly, is a mouth-breathing loser with a head for Boethius and a healthy appetite for hotdogs and Dr. Nut cola. While, at the beginning, the novel seems like a catalog of Ignatius's Quixotic adventures in New Orleans, it soon becomes apparent that all the strange and colorful characters whom he meets, while moving in a multitude of directions for their own reasons, are all swirling around Ignatius and an intersection of all their lives is inevitable. Inevitable, and hilarious.

In nonfiction, Alistair Horne's Price of Glory is among the best historical works I've read. It's a narrative of the Battle of Verdun, which raged for nearly a year on the Western Front during World War I. If you have any interest in World War I, military history, or just need a good true story to read, pick this one up as soon as possible.

Bryan Burrough's Public Enemies was also an excellent work of nonfiction, in this case a history of the crime wave of 1933-4. The basis of Michael Mann's film, which focuses primarily on John Dillinger, Burrough follows Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, Machine Gun Kelly, Pretty Boy Floyd, Bonnie and Clyde, the Barker gang, and a host of small-timers as the fledgling FBI struggles to apprehend them. Though Burrough does bust a lot of myths (especially when it comes to Bonnie and Clyde, whom he rightly characterizes as sociopathic rednecks), he does seem to get caught up in Dillinger's sweep and charm from time to time. Nevertheless, this is a good book. Check it out if you saw the movie and want to know more.

Honorable Mentions:

The Guns of August, by Barbara Tuchman. A lively and sometimes darkly humorous history of the first month of World War I. Tuchman rightly won the Pulitzer Prize for this book. This book and Horne's complement each other well if you'd like to read a couple books on World War I.

Liberal Fascism, by Jonah Goldberg. A plea for correct semantics, Goldberg points out that fascism is, historically, a leftist movement rather than the "radical right-wing" position it has been characterized as.

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, by J.R.R. Tolkien. The late, great Tolkien's conflation of the Sigurd (Siegfried) legends, written in modern English but Old Norse alliterative verse. Very good reading, especially if you're looking for an introduction to Norse mythology.

Worst Reads:

I really like Guillermo del Toro. In interviews he comes across as not only smart but wry and witty, and his films are dense, thoughtful, and meticulously crafted. His novel The Strain was not. Perhaps meant to cash in on the current vampire mania, The Strain is del Toro and co-author Chuck Hogan's grim take on vampires. As you can read in my review (linked above), this novel reads like poorly assembled, derivative fan fiction. Vampirism is a virus (Matheson's I am Legend) that, once released, travels with frightening rapidity through the population of New York City (King's The Stand), leaving only a few non-vampire survivors (both) who are the constant targets of the infected (Invasion of the Body Snatchers and zombie movies ad nauseum). There are a few standard del Toro-esque elements thrown in, such as the Elderly Man Who Knows About This Stuff and a government agency that must deal with the mess.

I have to saw that Hellboy would have made this novel immensely more readable.

Another big problem was that The Strain is the first of a projected trilogy, which shouldn't necessarily be a bad thing but, as with a lot of amateurish fantasy writers whose "cycles," "trilogies," and "sagas" have overpopulated bookstores today, del Toro and Hogan leave too many threads hanging loose for the first volume to be self-contained and therefore satisfying.

Fortunately, the other "worst read" of the summer was a standalone. South of Broad is the work of Pat Conroy. Rather than spending most of this post dwelling on the immense flaws of Conroy's latest opus, read on below to get all my thoughts in one paragraph.

Second Thoughts Award:

I was entirely too generous to South of Broad in my Amazon review. When I read the novel, I rolled my eyes quite a bit, guffawed more than once, was actually repulsed by the vulgarity of the story and its cliches a number of times, but I was still entertained and plowed through the novel quickly because I wanted to know what would happen. But since I finished it, all I can remember are the hackneyed characters, the cliches, the florid purple prose, and the offensively stereotypical characters. The novel hits on a lot of big issues--racism, integration, physical abuse, death, loss, AIDS, Hurricane Hugo--and the net result is that it feels like, instead of a caring, thoughtful, issue-driven novel, a rather exploitative page-turner. Disappointing, because I have nothing but fond memories of The Lords of Discipline, the only other Conroy novel I've read. Stay north of South of Broad

Books That Made Me Who I Am, Part V

2009-09-24T17:00:00.004-04:00

In the words of Forrest Gump, “College was confusing times.” I had been raised by devout, level-headed parents and grown up around friends with whom I held nearly everything in common. In changing high schools I met people from a broader spectrum of Christianity—people who spoke in tongues, Presbyterians, and—gasp—people who didn’t believe in the Rapture. Upon entering Bob Jones University, I suddenly found myself thrust into a world of balkanized religion. Here were dozens of different sects, every permutation and perversion of Christianity I could imagine, and each of them seemed to vie for my attention. I was fresh meat. Eager representatives pitched and proselytized. Thanks to my parents, I both knew what I believed and had a healthy dose of common sense. But that doesn’t mean I wasn’t confused.

I only thought the last post was difficult to finish. Notice that it’s been two months since then, and only now am I sucking it up and forcing myself to finish this project. Which is odd, since one section of this post was the very first part I wrote of the entire series.

I’ve decided to end with this post. I wanted to list a few books that have shaped me since graduating college, but I don’t think I have the perspective to do so yet. Perhaps I’ll follow this post up with a list of honorable mentions.

Revisiting my college nonfiction was tougher than I’d anticipated. Some of this was easy to write. My early interest in Beowulf and The Lord of the Rings bore fruit when I studied Anglo-Saxon history and read a famous essay by Tolkien. Anyone who knows me will recognize these topics as among those I won’t shut up about. But some of this post was more difficult—if not the writing, then reliving some difficult times and upsetting mental struggles. I may have come to college with common sense, but that doesn’t mean my beliefs, as they evolved, always made sense. My reading during these years helped.

V—College Nonfiction

Socrates Meets Jesus, by Peter Kreeft—This book was a watershed for me. I had previously read Kreeft’s Unaborted Socrates, in which Socrates breaks the all various arguments about abortion down to a simple question—is a fetus fully human? The answer to that question will determine the rest. I loved the book. But Socrates Meets Jesus was something else entirely.

The conceit of Kreeft’s Socrates books sounds silly at first—imagine Socrates returning from the dead and questioning, in his tireless way, modern people. Socrates Meets Jesus has the philosopher rising from the grave in a thinly-disguised Harvard and carrying on dialogues with a young student and her various divinity professors. Along the way, Kreeft touches on numerous issues relating to modern life, but the main point of the book is to turn the Socratic method to the claims of Christianity—and of course Jesus.

This book was important to me because it was not only a brilliantly-written piece of apologetics, helping to confirm logically many beliefs I had already held and introduce to me the outworkings of those beliefs, it was also simply that—logical. Socrates uses his brain. He asks questions that provoke deep and sometimes uncomfortable thoughts.

I won’t go so far as to say that fundamentalist Christianity is anti-intellectual, although currents of anti-intellectualism run swift in some of its shallower eddies. The truly anti-intellectual are a rare breed. I have known only a handful of them—after all, many fundamentalists fancy themselves very intellectual indeed. But one could not escape the impression, growing up exclusively among fundamentalist orthodoxy, that the human mind was something of lesser value than faith, optimism, and adherence to set ways of doing things—none of which, I want to point out again, is bad. Human logic was invoked only to point out the absurd end result of some idea—always something a person had come up with on their own. At the risk of being over-candid, I have always been one “of little faith,” and identify strongly with the man who came to Christ exclaiming, “I believe—help my unbelief!” But, though I was never told so in so many words, I had the repeated impression that, when I doubted, it was because I was using my mind too much. I had even heard an administrator at Bob Jones rhapsodize about how marvelous it is that the gospel doesn’t make logical sense. I was appalled. But the gospel does make sense! Imagine, then, the impact of a passage like the following:

But could Socrates have thought his way through to Christianity? Is human reason that strong? Of course not. Christianity is not the conclusion of a philosophical debate but the result of an incredible and utterly unexpected divine miracle. But the echoes of that miracle, however muted and mangled, might be just enough fingerprints for this God-detective to detect the true God from them.
After all, human reason—though fallen—is designed by God. There is nothing wrong with that sword, only with how we wield it. For that sword was forged in heaven . . . . To put the point less poetically: God sent not only a few special prophets like Moses to one special people but also the universal inner prophet of reason and conscience to all people. The medievals loved to say that God wrote two books: nature and scripture. And since he is the author of both books, and since this teacher never contradicts himself, these two books never contradict each other. And since this God who never contradicts himself also gave us the two truth detectors, faith and reason, it follows that faith and reason, properly used, never contradict each other. Therefore, all heresies are contrary to reason. Not all the truths of faith can be proved by reason, but all arguments against the truths of faith can be disproved by reason.

Again I find myself confronted by Dante, who was guided first by Virgil—human reason—to the brink of salvation, beyond which he could not pass. And there Dante was met by Beatrice—divine love—and delivered into heaven. Beatrice I may have met first in my life, but I think it was yet another act of God’s love that introduced me, though later, to Virgil.

* * * * *

Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics, by J.R.R. Tolkien—This is not actually a book, but a lecture delivered and published by Tolkien in 1936. Most people know Tolkien for The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings. Few people know that Tolkien is almost single-handedly responsible for reviving the study of Beowulf as literature.

Prior to that lecture, academics had mostly approached Beowulf as a supremely flawed source for Anglo-Saxon history. What’s with all these monsters and dragons? And all those random allusions to other stories? Why couldn’t the poet focus on the subject at hand?

Tolkien asserted that the monsters were the point of the story, and that the allusions were a brilliant literary device that not only placed the story within a larger mythological framework, but made the story real. The extraneous characters are no more extraneous than your nextdoor neighbor, who may not figure directly into the plot of your life. The allusions are not sloppy attempts to work in more stories, they are real exchanges of news and shared history by realistic people. The events at Heorot were no isolated incidents that could be studied on their own—Beowulf’s actions took place at the same time as other, equally or perhaps more important events of which the characters are only partly aware.

This idea has had a profound effect on my writing. Since reading the lecture, I have generally found most poor fiction to be written within stand-alone worlds, where the plot is self-contained and the characters care only about the plot and interact only with each other. Even worse, the worlds in which they live often feel fake. Compare Tolkien’s Middle-earth, which often feels much more real than more traditionally realistic fictional worlds. How often do the characters allude to other realms, other times and places, and sing songs that have no bearing on the actual plot? Do you think Tolkien was being sloppy?

I took this idea most to heart in my novel No Snakes in Iceland, which I’m now revising. In it, I have tried very hard to incorporate rumblings of the world beyond the plot. The events within the plot, in the long run, may or may not be important to the people figuring into the story. Beyond the farm on which Edgar investigates a haunting is a larger valley, with other farms where people have other concerns; beyond that valley is an entire island, where others live and news of which my characters share; and beyond Iceland lies an England under the constant threat of invasion.

* * * * *

Politics and the English Language, by George Orwell—This piece by Orwell is also an essay, and a slender thing compared to the one by Tolkien. “Politics and the English Language” is one of the idols of my writing career. When I read it, I was a young writer who liked words and had a sense of how properly to use them for good effect. When I finished, I had matured already. I turned a newly critical eye to my own writing and the writing of others and picked it apart. I found misused words. I found authors who picked the first word that came to mind, regardless of whether it was the right one or not. I not only had to have the right word, I had to have the best word.

Orwell also showed me how writers can use words intentionally to mislead and obscure. For this reason I brook no jargon or doublespeak. It pains me to read modern political writing, press releases, and postmodernist anything. Orwell tolerated no bullcrap, and neither can his perhaps too eager pupil.

There is little else I can say here. Orwell, after all, would join Strunk and White in admonishing every writer to concision. But the effect of Orwell’s essay was further to sharpen my mind and make me a tougher critic—not only of the way language is used, by of my own work.

* * * * *

The New Concise History of the Crusades, by Thomas F. Madden—I have been fascinated with the Middle Ages since high school, but only in college did I begin systematically to study the period. I’ve learned, for instance, that the very term middle ages is an Enlightenment slur against what a cabal of eighteenth century intellectuals perceived as a dark and backward period of superstition—by which they meant religion. Christianity, specifically.

Madden’s book marks the beginning of my obsession with rooting out myth. The Crusades, of course, are still a byword of Christian insanity and white European guilt. Unjustly so, as Madden points out. The Crusaders who marched overland to Jerusalem beginning in 1096 were by no means striking a terrible first blow against a peaceful Muslim world. The Pope who called the crusade in 1095 was not preaching forced conversion or racial supremacy. And the soldiers who took the cross were not marching toward land and plunder.

Of course, no legitimate Crusade historian believes the ever-popular myths now, but the myths endure, perpetuated by movies like Kingdom of Heaven and irreligious writers with chips on their shoulders like Karen Armstrong.

But in first delving into an unbiased, non-polemical history of the Crusades—and learning the truth—I unearthed an idea that has had a profound influence on my thinking ever since—it’s okay to be a European, and moreover, it’s okay to be a Christian. It’s unnecessary to resort to gimmicks like apologizing for the Crusades or the Inquisition (like that soft-peddling sophist Donald Miller) because their crimes have been exaggerated, their purpose misrepresented, and—of course—I personally did not take part.

And though I read it after graduation, Victor Davis Hanson’s Carnage and Culture made me understand that it is not only okay to be the inheritor of Western civilization, but it’s okay to be a little proud of that. Christians, especially European ones, may not be perfect, but they aren't all villains. Madden’s New Concise History started my shift from shame to pride.

By way of ending—

I have a novella on which I’ve been working for several years now. I usually call it my “Swiftian satire” or “my religious story.” It concerns a young man who leaves home for the first time, sailing by boat for wherever he’s meant to land. He wears the simple, unadorned clothing of his family and homeland and carries with him a copy of the Law Royal, from which a distant king governs the known world. The sea is calm at first, but soon rages, destroying the young man’s boat and casting him up, unconscious, on the shore of a strange island.

On this island the people wear immense robes of dense, rich fabrics. Their robes are many different colors, and even those of matching color are set apart by the numerous variegated strips of cloth which they’ve sewn onto their sleeves. The robes and stripes are the uniforms of thousands of sects living on the island, each dedicated to interpreting the king’s Law in a different manner.

The young man’s simple clothing immediately sets him apart. He wears no robes, no designating strips of cloth. His interpretation of the Law is foolishly simple and does not easily fit that of any one sect.

The sectarian leaders—Purple, Black, Blue, Yellow, and others—set up a tribunal to determine which sect the young man should belong to, because to be unable to identify oneself on this island seems—to them—a fate worse than death. The young man endures thousands of hours of grueling interrogation. The sectarian experts question him on every detail of the Law. How does one become a citizen? Can one lose one’s citizenship? Does the king allow only specific friends of the kingdom to become citizens, or can anyone achieve citizenship? No single sect holds a claim on him. His tunic, true, was a bluish tinge when he arrived, but some of his views are scandalously close to Purple—the Blacks certainly won’t have him. But his view of citizenship and the magistracy is a little too Yellow for the Purples! The young man loses heart. The island, which at first was odd and then amusing, has become a nightmare. He longs for home.

In the end, the young man escapes. He watches from far at sea as the island is obliterated by some catastrophe only he could see coming—because only he was paying attention.

I could never decide how the novella should end—that is, I could never settle on a particular cataclysm suitable for the story. And I never wrote more than a few thousand words of the story as a whole. But I return to it often—at least mentally—and think about how I should write and finish it if I ever take it up again.

My time in college was most useful to me because, through examples both negative and positive, I learned what I believed and why. Confronted with hundreds of contending beliefs, all of which were seemingly rooted in the Bible, I had to strip away every pretense and colorful bit of cloth and see what mattered in my life and religion, what was worth fighting over and what was a waste of time. I changed a lot, and I’m still changing. But to use a metaphor Dante adopted for Purgatorio, his story of the in-between places of the afterlife, my little ship now courses over better waters.

Books That Made Me Who I Am, Part IV

2009-07-24T21:51:00.015-04:00

Had it been up to me, I never would have gone to college. It would have been the worst mistake of my life. But once more or less forced into the college atmosphere—insofar as it existed at Bob Jones University—and acclimated to it, I used my time there to learn and grow. I realize the novelty of this idea, but think it should be suggested to other college students.

I read so much in college—both by necessity and for pleasure—that I’ve split this memoir of my college reading into two parts: fiction and non-fiction. Most of my deepest personal growth stemmed from my non-fiction reading, as I’ll describe soon, but my fictional reading was also important to me both as a person and a writer. Few of these books were revelations—with the major exceptions of Grendel and Blood Meridian—but mainly served to reinforce my mostly pre-formed literary tastes. Which, of course, constantly shifted without my notice.

Paradoxical? So were my college years. But I’ll explore that more in the next installment. Until then—

IV—College Fiction

Animal Farm and 1984, by George Orwell—The first opened my eyes to the biting power of satirical fiction, a genre at which I’ve tried my hand, with little success so far. The second novel stirred in me a number of ideas that have since crystallized and become very important to my thinking.

First, the power of language—and its abuse. Newspeak is an abomination, and only a writer of Orwell’s caliber could have created such a thing and used it so well to convey the destructive power of poor language. As I’ve written elsewhere, language is important and must not be abused, not matter how shrill the uneducated declaim their ability to say things however they want.

The second idea comes from the obvious message of the book, the terrible cost of totalitarian government. But what I’ve learned most from this angle of the book comes by way of negative example. In his review of 1984, C.S. Lewis pointed out that Big Brother’s strict sexual mores seemed tacked on—in the current parlance, they were not organic to the rest of the novel. I have since seen this crop up in other dystopian fiction—the film version of V for Vendetta especially.

This constant fretting about the restriction of sex in dystopian fiction stems from the old misunderstanding of fascism as a right-wing phenomenon. By combining government control of everything—a distinctly non-right ideal—with government control of morality, paranoid leftist thinkers created an impossible chimera. A government-sanctioned promiscuity—like that in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We—is infinitely more likely, as we have seen in our own time with the encouragement of safe sex and the proliferation of free contraceptives. And has the result been more freedom?

What does this mean to me? Not much, but it is a topic over which I’ve mulled quite a lot. People don’t want to be told what to do, but they especially don’t want to be told who they can—or worse, can’t—sleep with. And for some reason, the idea of fascism seems to strike first at the libido, only second at the brain.

* * * * *

The Bonfire of the Vanities, by Tom Wolfe—Wolfe’s novel was unlike anything I had read before. Big, sprawling, embracing an entire city from the lowest of the low to the Mayor himself, full of real people and realistic dialogue—this novel blew me away. And to Wolfe I owe one very important artistic epiphany.

I remember reading this as a freshman (at Bob Jones University, no less) and stumbling into the junior English major’s room next door. I had just realized that Wolfe wrote in such a way that his style reflected the mental state of the point of view character. I’m sure my friend thought I was an halfwit, but that epiphany was one of those blinding moments of revelation we experience only a few times in our lives, and I was happy I could articulate it.

And while that epiphany has proven important to me artistically, I would never write the way Tom Wolfe does. But wow—that man can write.

* * * * *

The Great Divorce, by C.S. Lewis—If Speed is “Die Hard on a bus,” The Great Divorce is Dante on a bus. I had actually once begun to read The Great Divorce in high school, but it disturbed me so much I had to put it away and I had a difficult time sleeping that night. I’m not kidding.

The Great Divorce begins, like The Divine Comedy, in a dark place. Dante finds himself in a forest, Lewis’s nameless narrator in a rainy town of “mean streets,” in the dismal half-light of a perpetual dusk. The narrator boards a bus and leaves for parts unknown—by flight. “Several hundred feet below us, already half hidden in the rain and mist, the wet roofs of the town appeared, spreading without a break as far as the eye could reach.” The destination, it turns out, is heaven, and the passengers may stay if they please.

Like Dante’s poem, Lewis’s novel is episodic. The narrator meets a number of characters in a string of encounters, each of whom represents some human problem—a bitter husband, a proud socialite, a youthful communist poet, and a Virgil figure in the Scots writer George MacDonald. These characters are beyond the grave, and what soon becomes terribly apparent is that unless these characters—all good people living according to their principles—repudiate their pride, their stubbornness, their self-righteousness, they will return on the bus to an afterlife that is most definitely not heaven, where they will torture themselves through eternity.

Unlike Dante’s poem, Lewis’s hell—for that’s what the mean town seems—has no demons. It is gloomy, it is hopeless, and it is both precisely because the people there have abandoned God. Also unlike the Comedy, Lewis’s damned have the opportunity to see Paradise in all its glory—and they reject it.

That’s because The Great Divorce is less about the afterlife than the present. Each of Lewis’s characters leaves heaven, walking out on the only hope they have for eternal joy, not because of the pure evil of their actions or the preponderance of sin in their lives—there are no Hitlers among them—but because of petty, everyday flaws that they could easily correct if only they chose to recognize them as damning—the pride of a man who won’t accept help, the bitterness of a man who can’t forgive his spouse, the attachment of a man to his pet vices. Lewis gives us people like ourselves and shows why they can’t enter heaven on their own.

Lewis’s book lacks demons because it is often unnecessary for them to interfere with humanity. Human nature is evil enough that, when a man is “drawn away of his own lust,” following his own desires of his own free will, there is no end to the evil he can accomplish. At the very least, he will damn himself.

The Great Divorce—and the rest of Lewis’s work—also reinforced for me the power of concision. I read this book in an afternoon at school. Those four or five hours have stuck with me ever since. Lewis’s works have no wasted or unnecessary words, and each word is chosen and placed with the skill of a master stonemason building a cathedral. And his is a cathedral that, like the finest built in medieval Europe, has always pointed me upward.

* * * * *

Slaughterhouse-Five, by Kurt Vonnegut, and Everything is Illuminated, by Jonathan Safran Foer—I include these two novels as examples of the kind of literature I usually dislike. Intensely. But these novels I love, and think about often. Why?

First, both are hilariously funny. Vonnegut had an incisive wit worthy of Swift, and Foer had a knack for making dialect funny. Second, both novels, despite their often humorous content, are incredibly moving. Third, they manage to be hilarious and moving simultaneously.

It takes a rare kind of talent to make a person laugh and cry at the same time, and while I may never write like Vonnegut or Foer—especially Foer, who in his other novel does a lot of typically cute postmodernist stuff with typesetting and pictures—I have to admire their work. Learning to admire others, despite sometimes vast differences, was an important step in my maturity.

* * * * *

Grendel, by John Gardner—If Tom Wolfe taught me the value of a nearly limitless vocabulary, John Gardner’s novel Grendel taught me the power of a carefully chosen word-hoard. I have a soft spot for two of Gardner’s other books as well—both On Becoming a Novelist and The Art of Fiction were textbooks in the novel writing course I took my final year of undergrad, and both offer profound advice and not a little inspiration. But while those two books are meant to teach, Grendel shows the teacher at work himself, and I’ve always learned best by watching—then trying.

Grendel is the story of Beowulf as told by the villain of the piece—the eponymous monster—and in that sense is a very postmodern novel. Beowulf appears less of a hero in Grendel’s version of the story and more a savage opportunist. He is, in fact, a barely two-dimensional figure compared to Unferth—the Thersites figure of the original—and the impotent king Hrothgar, who cannot even defend his queen in their own bedroom when Grendel attacks.

As I said, I can appreciate a postmodern novel despite my many misgivings about postmodernism, but it is Gardner’s technique rather than his perspective that grabbed me in Grendel. Gardner, by training a medievalist and specialist in Anglo-Saxon literature, not only based his novel on Beowulf but absorbed elements of the period’s literature into his work. Structurally and tonally the book is postmodern, but in language, cadence, and atmosphere the book is 9th-century. It’s like listening to a story told by a bog man.

The language of Gardner’s novel is what I still remember, and what I strive to emulate in my own work. Grendel uses mostly words of Germanic origin (as opposed to the grotesquely obese Latin-rooted vocabulary of our language). This is a good habit for any writer, as Germanic words—which include many of our most basic words—are generally stronger and more concrete than those of other languages. Compare He impaled him through the abdomen with He stuck him in the gut.

English has so many synonyms thanks in large part—as any reader of Ivanhoe will recall—to the Norman Conquest. The Normans usurped the English throne, contributing, among other things, a heady dose of French vocabulary to the Germanic Old English tongue. The language of government, the military, and the upper classes in general is rooted in French and ultimately in Latin—royal, congress, constitution, lieutenant, bayonet, castle, mutton, beef. Our simplest, day-to-day words are still virtually identical to their Old English forebears—father, day, night, fish, hound, hand, foot, cow. Gardner strips his novel of what Latin words he can, leaving his narrator to speak in words that an Anglo-Saxon might understand. He took this selectiveness to a higher level, using his grasp of English not only make his writing stronger and more vivid, but to establish a voice entirely different from that of a modern man. His Grendel’s narration is old, unsettled, harsh, loud—and beautiful.

As a side note, another book that make excellent use of its vocabulary to suggest a difference in historical period is Frederick Buechner’s Godric, which has the added benefit of being a beautiful religious story.

* * * * *

Atlas Shrugged, by Ayn Rand—I’m going to be frank. There are a lot of pompous young jackasses who truly dig Ayn Rand. I’m not one of them. I didn’t take away a lot of the things others apparently find so appealing—the cavalier sex, the “virtue of selfishness,” the swaggering intellectualism, all the ideals of the posturing, Nietzschean Übermenschen with which she populates her story.

All these traits contribute to the brutal charm of her manner of writing, but what stuck with me most was her vision of a descent from freedom to totalitarianism—the bullying of the strong by the weak, which, thanks to politics, is a much more common phenomenon among humanity than the reverse. With all the talk of “fairness” and nationalization today, I often find myself thinking back on my 1200-page slog through Rand’s masterpiece.

Rand, no doubt bringing with her some of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky’s juju from her motherland, also impresses me with her ability to develop a huge story around a few central characters over the course of decades. The Fountainhead follows three major characters from their college graduation into their middle ages, Atlas Shrugged a larger cast over several years, as the nation descends from economic freedom—and therefore strength—to fascism. Her characters may be ciphers, her philosophy barren and ultimately illogical, but her ability with structure cannot be doubted. Like Vonnegut and Foer, Rand is someone from whom I have learned without necessarily liking her.

* * * * *

Blood Meridian, or: The Evening Redness in the West, by Cormac McCarthy—The novel opens with “See the child.” The protagonist, “the kid”—whose name the reader never learns—begins in stasis, but that is soon to change. In many ways, Blood Meridian proved powerful to me because it is, darkly, a coming-of-age story. I was a child when I left for Bob Jones, and when I finished I may still have had had growing up to do, but I didn’t leave unscarred. Neither did “the kid.”

I end this post with one of the most difficult books I’ve ever read, which is fitting because this is the most difficult post of the series thus far. It’s hard to summarize books like these—one has to fish around in the mess that is memory and streamline often lengthy or painful mental developments into a coherent narrative. It’s a lot like writing history.

Blood Meridian is based on historical events, but the author, Cormac McCarthy, has embellished the smattering of fact with a heaping helping of apocalyptic imagery, violence, and beautiful, beautiful writing. I shall be as brief as possible.

The story of Blood Meridian is less important than the fact that it opened to me a vast new plane of literature. In its wake I read Flannery O’Connor and William Faulkner, and of course the rest of McCarthy’s body of work. Previously I had failed to appreciate books like this, put off by their “mannered” style, as Gardner would call it, and inclined to think their stories unimportant tales swaddled in pretension. I was wrong.

Blood Meridian, like all of McCarthy’s work, is strongly styled. There are no quotation marks. There is no omniscience. One is never offered a glimpse inside the characters’ minds. Sentences run at great lengths, baroquely ornamented with biblical grandeur. But I could see through this style a master teacher, like Gardner, at work. Thanks to its vocabulary, the book bordered on being a lexicon living by example, but its vocabulary was as controlled as those of Wolfe or Gardner. The lack of quotation marks and stripped-down punctuation were self-imposed limitations that actually strengthened McCarthy’s writing—his nouns were concrete, his verbs dynamite. And, of course, the story was a wonder.

You may notice something held in common among the writers whose books make up this post—I would never write like them, but I admire and have learned from them. McCarthy is another such example, and his example, by the very strangeness of its style, proved the most powerful of all.

Books That Made Me Who I Am, Part III

2009-06-28T22:44:00.006-04:00

I wrote my first novel in high school. It was a World War II action story that I never properly titled, but concerned the terrible events that befell one Corporal John M. Phillips between D-Day and the end of June 1944. I wrote it because I typed so fast in Typing class that I’d finish my exercises and have nothing to do. One day, I described Phillips and his companions struggling to remain upright in a Higgins boat, and 70,000 words later, I had a novel. Then I wrote a sequel.

High school was a critical period in my development, as it is for any person. I was in the grip of any number of the themes that take teenagers emotionally hostage—unrequited love, the poetic cruelty of life, the weepy beauty of heroic death, and any of those other Shelley-worthy sentiments. So when I started writing, I was unstable. I was a big fan of Poe, of course, which dictated certain tics of style and theme if not content, and as I read the following books I changed and evolved accordingly. That was inevitable.

I was obsessed, as I’ve overabundantly shown, with truth and realism. But what I most needed to learn was moderation. My novels left out nothing. I poured in detail. My battle scenes were studies in gratuitous violence. I had yet to learn that less is more, that a mature writer—as any kind of mature person—knows how to limit himself to what is absolutely essential. Indulgence warps his art. John Ciardi, translator of a poet who was to reshape my whole world at the end of high school, said that “Poetry is the art of knowing what to leave out.”

That was an art I would commit myself to soon.

III—High School

All Quiet on the Western Front, by Erich Maria Remarque—I never studied World War I as closely as I did the other wars that obsessed me in elementary, middle, and high school—the Civil War and World War II. It’s odd that I didn’t—though I have studied it in more detail since high school—because when I was in 10th grade I read the novel that became and remains my favorite to this day—All Quiet on the Western Front.

There was nothing particularly different about All Quiet that set it apart from books like Red Cap and The Killer Angels. Like those, warfare is depicted realistically and bad things happen to characters that matter. Unlike those, Remarque’s novel does not end happily. I think the unhappy ending appealed, at the time, to my teenage sense of the beauty of tragedy, a stage I think a lot of teenagers go through—though I must point out that I never succumbed to anything as pathetically emo as Twilight.

What really set this novel apart, though, was that it was among the first novels I read to deal with first-person, boots-on-the-ground experiences in combat—it took place literally in the trenches. The Killer Angels is told primarily from the point of view of generals and combat commanders, and though the Civil War general was of necessity close to the combat and very often did his share of brutal fighting, the novel’s limited time-frame left room for nothing of the day-to-day life of soldiers. The characters of All Quiet, on the other hand, spend a great deal of their time in boredom. The reader learns about waiting out a shelling, stringing barbed-wire, and even the preferred style of toilet to be used in the field.

And, of course, All Quiet continued my burgeoning obsession with realism and truth. I loved this novel because it was realistic and, therefore, had the ring of truth about it, even if I realize now that its anti-war message was something with which I couldn’t agree.

* * * * *

The Catcher in the Rye, by J.D. Salinger—I can’t explain why I like this novel except to say that it has, in a way, grown up with me. I first read it on the recommendation of a friend in high school. I was shocked by the language—or at least the idea that high schoolers somewhere talked like this—but found Holden Caulfield an incredibly funny person. And, of course, I could smirk when I recognized the targets of his cynicism.

I have since read it at least twice and each time I have grasped more and more clearly what kind of person Holden Caulfield actually is. While I was amused by him in high school in precisely the way I was amused by some of my more bitter friends, I recognized on later readings that Caulfield was actually a self-consumed, almost sociopathic person. He always finds a way to hold the blame for his own actions at arm’s length, exonerating himself of everything and lashing out at the “phonies” who insist he take some responsibility. The antagonist in the novel isn’t the staff of Pencey Prep or Ackley or the elevator operator or anyone else—it’s Caulfield himself.

As psychoanalysis of the modern American teen—or modern Americans in general—Salinger’s work was prophetic.

I admire this novel because, like any good work of art, each new visit reveals new layers of art and meaning that had gone unnoticed before. I must also admire anything that can be so funny and so profound at the same time. I may never write like Salinger, but I certainly hope I can balance my art like him.

* * * * *

Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury—High school was a period of firsts for me. Fahrenheit 451 was my first taste of dystopian fiction, a genre which has long intrigued me and to which I hope someday to contribute.

Curiously, Fahrenheit 451 is read by a generation that needs its message but is looking for an entirely different message. In a video interview I watched in high school, Bradbury discussed at length the fact that his novel wasn’t originally about censorship—it was about television. Television, and the mind-numbing, soul-searing effect it has on the perpetual couch potato.

Bradbury’s novel had two profound effects on me. First, it continued my obsessions with truth and completeness—with the irritation over Edgar Allan Poe’s bowdlerization still burning in my mind, a novel ostensibly “about” censorship appealed to me powerfully. Through Bradbury’s story of Montag and the firemen I first grasped that censorship is necessarily an opponent to truth, since censorship is the tool of human agents acting in their own interests. And the moment something is censored, what little you have left of it is no longer the true image of what it was. How could one understand the horrible ugliness of Mein Kampf if one never read it unabridged?

Second, while censorship is usually used as a cudgel to brain the perceived fascism of conservative groups, censorship is a crime anyone could commit. Everyone who has felt offended by something or someone and who seeks to eliminate the source of offense is on a dangerous anti-intellectual path. Or, as Bradbury put it, “There is more than one way to burn a book. And the world is full of people running about with lit matches. Every minority, be it Baptist/Unitarian, Irish/Italian/Octogenarian/Zen Buddhist, Zionist/Seventhday Adventist, Women's Lib/Republican, Mattachine/Four Square Gospel feels it has the will, the right, the duty to douse the kerosene, light the fuse.”

In other words, I do not censor because I do not want to be censored.

It’s worth noting that Fahrenheit 451 is one of the few books I’ve read more than once. It’s short enough—and important enough—to warrant a rereading every few years. If you haven’t yet introduced yourself to this novel, I beg you—please turn off the TV and read it. Bradbury and I will thank you.

* * * * *

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien—I’ll be brief in my treatment of these novels, since what I learned from them I mostly learned upon reflection in college. But that’s not to say that Tolkien’s seminal works had no effect on me as a highschooler.

My friend Josh introduced me to Tolkien, and to him I am eternally grateful. The Hobbit was the first real fantasy novel I ever read. Until I picked it up in Wal-Mart on Josh’s recommendation, I had dismissed it as the kind of weird and, having heard no few sermons on Dungeons & Dragons, possibly demonic pulp that food-court druids liked to dip into between vampire novels. As a child, the VHS cover of the animated version scared me every time I went to the video store. With these presuppositions and memories firmly in place, I bought The Hobbit and opened it for the first time.

Suffice it to say that I was caught off guard. The novel was not only not weird—and definitely not demonic, especially since I found out later that Tolkien was a devout Catholic—but it was so beautifully layered, at times majestic, funny, frightening, and possessed of the power of our oldest dreams, that it carried me away. I was transported. I bought all three volumes of The Lord of the Rings before I finished it.

Tolkien’s novels have had an enormous influence on my literary tastes, style, and method—but more on that in the future. What struck me in high school was the story itself. This was something I could sink my teeth into, something that, despite its potentially off-putting exotic settings, had the ring of true life about it. And let’s face it—if Tolkien has taught us anything, it’s that fantasy is sometimes more real than real life.

* * * * *

Harry Potter and the Sorceror's Stone, by J.K. Rowling—Honestly, as much as I’ve enjoyed the stories of Harry, Hermione, and Ron, it feels a little wrong to move from Bradbury and Tolkien to this novel before finishing up with Dante. But I have Rowling’s Harry to thank for a particularly important formative episode in my life.

The cumulative effect of my experiences with Poe—whose work was censored in my textbook—and Bradbury—whose inclusion in our high school English class resulted in a completely straight-faced censorship challenge—was to make me a skeptic. Not a skeptic who refused to believe anything, but a skeptic who had to investigate everything to determine its validity. My skepticism was uncynical.

This, then, was my frame of mind when the Harry Potter rage hit its first strides. Of course, coming from a fundamentalist Baptist background, everyone had an opinion on this new series. Since I was incurious at first, I mostly let the storm pass over. I couldn’t care less. But I had friends who liked it and trusted authorities who thought it hellspawn, and I, caught indifferent in the middle, at some point felt it necessary to form an opinion. It was readily apparent to me that the e-mail forwards and sermons based on third-hand information weren’t going to be enough. I had to find out for myself. I wanted to come by my opinion honestly—and find out the truth.

To be brief, I dove into this first novel searching for something wrong, and found nothing. The controversy was sound and fury, signifying nothing. In fact, I was so charmed that I immediately lit into the rest of the series.

The most important fruit borne of this incident was that my skepticism was suddenly justified. I had investigated an issue and discovered the truth—Harry Potter was harmless fantasy fun, unless you happened to suffer the delusion that broomsticks were airworthy. Second-hand information would never again be enough. I found myself identifying with the New Testament Bereans, whom St. Luke lauded for their skepticism and willingness to investigate diligently the claims made by others, even men like St. Paul. These discoveries would soon bear exponential dividends.

* * * * *

The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri—This is perhaps the most daunting of any of the books I’ll revisit in these posts. How do I put into words my admiration, appreciation, and abject need of a book that means so much to me?

I can start by saying how I came to The Divine Comedy. I already liked medieval poetry and was writing a rather lame epic of my own when I decided to check out Dante, which I did for reasons similar to those for which I dug into Poe in elementary school. I was after the grotesque and lurid, and figured the story of a journey through Hell itself could offer up plenty of over-the-top supernatural phantasmagoria. I wanted something stereotypically medieval. That wasn’t what I got.

I resist saying anything even remotely laudatory of Dante because I find it nearly impossible not to gush. It’s difficult not only to know where to begin, but where to stop. Despite its decidedly medieval provenance, The Divine Comedy is the most transcendent work of literature ever committed to paper. Here you find the whole of human experience—birth, death, final fate, and everything in between. And here also you find the most beautiful and perfect allegory of salvation outside the Bible.

For those who haven’t read it, I can only say do so immediately. But I offer a short version here.

The character of Dante—who, as a pilgrim, represents the individual human—finds himself lost in a dark wood. He has strayed from God and cannot find his way. Repeatdly attacked by three sins, he prays and God sends Beatrice, the symbol of Divine Love, to the Roman poet Virgil. Virgil, because he lived a pagan and could not convert, languishes in the eternal boredom of Limbo, and represents Human Reason—the mind. Virgil comes to Dante and guides him through Hell and Purgatory. In Hell, Dante at first sympathizes with the damned, until he recognizes the monstrosity of sin and rebellion against God. In Purgatory, he meets those fated for salvation but not yet pure, and slowly Reason guides him through even these sins closer to God, revealing to him his own need for salvation. Finally, at the top of Mount Purgatory, Reason can take Dante no further—Reason cannot save a person, Divine Love must take over. At last, Dante is swept with Beatrice into Paradise and is saved.

My summary does terrible injustice to Dante’s poem, but it’ll do.

At first I didn’t know what to make of Dante. Whatever interest I had in the disturbing content of Inferno dissipated rapidly. Something else grabbed me about the story. I see now that another part of my appreciation grew in college, as I delved further into issues like the role of human reason in faith. But the initial impact of Dante’s work on me was like an earthquake far out to sea—quiet, indeed silent, but more powerful the longer its effects linger. It was so deep, so layered—even more so than Tolkien’s novels—and above all so beautiful that I could do nothing but read more.

This post has gone on quite long enough, so I’ll try to rein in my enthusiasm of Dante and summarize his effect on my mind and heart quickly.

First, I was once again reminded of the power of fiction. I also realized that there was more to mythology than cool stories—here was a whole system of shorthand meaning, and through Dante I learned to appreciate it. And use it. Dante did not include Cerberus in Hell because he thought that was what Hell was actually like (something people continually ask me), but because Cerberus, the guardian hound of the pagan netherworld, was a useful symbol of sin—specifically, gluttony and wrath.

In a related effect, I realized what a truly gifted writer could do. To this day, through many, many readings of the Comedy, I still find new layers of meaning and parallels in the three parts of the poem. The foresight, planning, and artistic brilliance of Dante in executing this work still floor me.

Finally, in an area in which I’m still realizing its effects, The Divine Comedy opened my eyes to the middle ages, specifically medieval religion. In high school, the Catholic Church was the punishing fury of all the Foxe’s Book of Martyrs stories I’d heard handed down through the years. Depending on who I asked, it was a series of misguided rituals masquerading as Christianity, it was the Great Whore of Babylon, the Antichrist, the False Prophet, even the seat of revived Egyptian paganism—or things even more creative. But everything Dante said was strictly orthodox, even if an entire volume of poetry named Purgatorio made fundamentalists squirm. His allegory of salvation was so beautifully perfect I can think of no better articulation outside scripture itself. Furthermore, Dante was a great writer. And everything he said made logical sense. I would have to investigate further.

Reading The Divine Comedy was an epiphany of sorts. I could articulate for the first time the dissatisfaction I felt with my own corner of Christianity—after all, I had investigated Harry Potter because many of my coreligionists were issuing blanket condemnations of a book they'd never read. I wanted artistic excellence and intellectual rigor, and fundamentalist and evangelical Christian writers and thinkers seldom achieved either. Their fiction was terrible and their “inspirational” and devotional works unfulfilling. Dante, though intended for neither purpose, met both needs. And those two needs—artistic excellence and intellectual rigor—combined to hone my search for truth and realism ever finer.

Later, of course, I would finally dive into C.S. Lewis, T.S. Eliot, Peter Kreeft, David Bentley Hart, and others. More on that in future posts. But until then, Dante was the only Christian writer whom I ever loved. And I still do.

Books That Made Me Who I Am, Part II

2009-06-04T16:17:00.005-04:00

Guibert of Nogent was a twelfth-century French monk who wrote one of the few surviving autobiographies of the middle ages. Not only an historian and theologian, Guibert had a lot to say about the corrupt world he found around him as an adult. But his memories of growing up with his mother are fond, rosy, and genuinely moving. In my first post in this series you could probably tell that, like Guibert, I get the warm and fuzzies when I think about my earliest memories.
In his memoir On Writing, Stephen King compares his memories from youth onward to walking through a forest in which a dense fog slowly dissipates. The farther back one thinks, the less forest one sees—individual memories, like trees singled out in the fog, stand out from the murk with no “forest” context in which to place them. As one gets older, the fog burns off and the trees blend into a tangled forest as one becomes more and more aware of the world around them and more events become important for purely adult reasons.
Those warm images—like the single trees in my now hoplessly mixed metaphor—melt into one another and their sentimentality becomes more lukewarm as I grow older. In my childhood now—which for convenience’s sake I identify with elementary school—my reading becomes more adult both in its sophistication and its realism. Like Guibert, I have to leave the rosiness and comfort of infancy to become, slowly, a member of the real world.

II—Childhood

Dangerous Journey, adapted from John Bunyan—I remember this book from my earliest childhood, too, but it was also a book I was eventually able to read for myself. A lavishly-illustrated adaptation of The Pilgrim’s Progress, I remember this book for two chief reasons. First, the beautiful illustrations. Second—and closely tied to the illustrations—its Apollyon scared the living crap out of me.

Those things impressed me as a kindergartener—I imagine a dragon-like demon breathing fire from a second mouth in his belly would make some kind of impression on any child—but looking back I also realize that this book marks my first encounter with allegory. The Berenstain Bears and ValuTales series wore their morals on their sleeves, imparting simple lessons with obvious morals. Nothing wrong with that. But an important part of growing up is moving on to things ever more sophisticated—from colored blocks to Legos to cars and computers. And literature should be no exception.

While Brother Bear and Sister Bear might have to consider the implications of telling a lie or talking back to their parents, Christian and Faithful face decisions that could lead to their deaths. The simple, cipher-like characters of children’s books gave way in Dangerous Journey to complex people whose actions stood for more than themselves—corrupt leaders, shallow townsfolk, the lazy and slothful and, of course, death itself.

Dangerous Journey also continued my early obsession with truth. Among the first things I wanted to know about stories—like those of Louis Pasteur and the Wright brothers—was whether they were true or not. Dangerous Journey, as an allegory, was a challenging bridge in that obsession. When Christian suited up for combat with Apollyon, my dad pointed out King David’s armor in the armory. I wanted to know if those were really his. No, my dad, said, it’s just a story, and I don’t remember anything else about that but he somehow helped me understand that fiction isn’t necessarily untrue. And that’s especially the case with allegory.

A lot of people consider Bunyan’s work the greatest allegory ever written. It’s not—The Divine Comedy is infinitely more complex and subtle—but it’s one of the best and most important books of all time. And I’ll always value it as a book that introduced me to complex fiction and pushed me forward from my literary teething-toys, forced me to consider not just the immediate consequences of my actions but their moral implications, and, yes, scared me to death.

* * * * *

Red Cap, by G. Clifton Wisler—The first historical mania I developed was for the American Civil War, and I read a lot of Civil War novels in elementary school. Indeed, two of them are on this list.

Red Cap is the story of a drummer boy in the Union Army, a flaw for which I was willing to forgive him, as Confederate-centric children’s novels like Johnny Reb were few and far between in the God’s World catalogue. The story begins with a boy joining the army and assigned as a regimental drummer, and because he is issued—or finds, or happens to inherit—a red artilleryman’s kepi, the unit nicknames him Red Cap. Red Cap’s unit tangles with the Confederates and many of the men are killed or captured. Red Cap is captured, and he and the survivors are sent to the prisoner-of-war camp at Sumter, Georgia—better known as Andersonville.

Andersonville, for those not in the know, was a hell-hole. POW camps in the Civil War were notoriously bad and had tremendous mortality rates, and the problem was especially acute at Andersonville. The struggling Confederate economy could not afford to reroute the supplies necessary to keep the camp’s huge prisoner population healthy, and even had the had the resources, Georgia was at the same time feeling the ravages of Sherman’s army, which destroyed the state’s infrastructure and most of its agriculture while making no effort to rescue the prisoners. This is where Red Cap lived out the rest of the war.

Red Cap stands out to me not for the strength of its narrative—if you haven’t inferred it yet, I have forgotten most of the main events of the book and even the names of all but one of its characters—but for the simple fact that some very, very bad things happen to the protagonist. Red Cap and his compatriots starve, waste away, and die in Andersonville amid miserable conditions. This never happened in a Golden Book.

As with Dangerous Journey, I remember this book and realize that another step in maturing is realizing that bad things happen and being able to incorporate that reality with one’s world view. One may never be pent up in a wooden stockade with thousands of other dysentery-stricken prisoners, but it is a mark of maturity to know that some people have and, no matter how painful it is, to empathize with them.

* * * * *

The works of Edgar Allan Poe—Poe was the first real adult literature I ever read, and here’s why—I heard he was creepy. As I got older and entered the 4th-6th grade class, which met as one group in my small private school, I first read actual literature, including simple poems and short stories. Somewhere in there was Poe, skulking in a dark corner of the Bob Jones lit book like a predatory octopus. I remember reading some piece by him, one of the milder short stories, and hearing some classmate say that his stories were usually scary and weird. I liked the sound of that. Beginning with books like Red Cap, I couldn’t get enough of more realistic fiction, and so I got on the internet at my dad’s office later and read “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.”
There are some movies and books I wish I could experience again for the first time. Those two short stories are among them.
Poe’s grim menace struck a chord with me. Here was the odd supernaturalism of Dangerous Journey and the stark, cruel reality of Red Cap. Here were people making big choices and suffering the consequences, whether they were even caught by the authorities—as in “The Tell-Tale Heart”—or not—as in “The Cask of Amontillado.” And in addition to all that, there was the admitted fascination that many young readers have with the lurid and shocking.
I compared Poe to an octopus earlier for a more important reason than that the octopus is a violent lurker. Poe’s works have had an incredible influence on me—his poetry, short stories, essays, and theory all reach into my thoughts and work like so many tentacles. Thanks to him, I find overlong short stories intolerable and never-ending chapters in novels a torture. His poetry was my first introduction to the beauty of sound, and I carry a fascination bordering on mania with words, their meanings and sounds and the way both change when put together with other words.
Poe also occasioned another chapter in my obsession with truth. After Red Cap I searched diligently through photos of Andersonville for a drummer boy in a red cap—just out of curiosity, and with the secret hope to be surprised that Red Cap was a true story. With Poe, the surprise I did receive carried more consternation. After maintaining for years that the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” did not cut up the old man’s body but buried it whole beneath the floor, I read an unedited version of the story and found that the version through which I had met Poe had been bowdlerized. I swore I’d never read an edited or abridged version of a story again, and I haven’t.

* * * * *

The Killer Angels, by Michael Shaara—If Poe was the first real literature I ever read, The Killer Angels was the first serious, adult novel I ever read. I can’t remember which came first for me—the novel or its film adaptation, Gettysburg—but at any rate I came to one through the other, and for years the movie was my favorite movie, and the book my favorite novel. And it helped that the novel is actually great literature.
I’ll wrap this up quickly.
The Killer Angels is still among my favorite books, and it’s among the best examples I’ve ever read of good historical fiction. This novel stepped into an important gap in my life, giving me good history, good fiction, and a mostly true story in an exciting package. It’s long, complex, and mature, and with this novel I think my literary taste reached something approaching adulthood. Ever since, the criteria on which I judge historical fiction are those that I picked up from this novel.
And of course, those criteria are the same I apply to my own historical fiction. I only hope I can live up to them.

Books That Made Me Who I Am, Part I

2009-05-29T00:29:00.005-04:00

While at dinner with some friends tonight, the conversation passed over my latest reading list before moving on to bigger and better things. It reminded me, though—and I mentioned this at the table—that I have for a long time been considering some kind of semi-biographical essay, or at least a ramshackle post about the books that I consider most important to my formation as a person—the books that made me who I am. One difficult thing to accomplish in the many, many times I’ve thought about putting together this list is narrowing it to a manageable size. After all, everything I read influences me in some way.

So after typing out the first books to come to mind—those that prompted me to compile a list like this in the first place—I decided I could sort them into chronological categories, beginning with childhood reading and ending with “post college,” a catch-all into which I’ve put several books I’ve read since undergraduate school and here for my master’s work.

There is a lot more to making someone who they are than the books they read. In an age of literal mass media—our prolific speciation of the kinds of media someone can enjoy—the means of entertainment and enlightenment in which people indulge are legion and will all contribute in some way to the shaping of their persons. And of course personal choice is a factor which I can’t address—I have read The Catcher in the Rye a half-dozen times without turning into a blasphemer or assassin, after all. But looking back, my reading has both reflected and affected the changes in my thinking. It’s that chain of books, stretching back to my earliest memories, that I want to examine.

After an hour or so of fevered writing in one category gave me nearly 2,000 words, I decided to publish this post in installments. The benefit, I think, is that you’ll get to spend a bit more time reading about my reading evolution, and evolve with me. Or something like that.

Enjoy.

Prehistory

I call this prehistory because it concerns the books that were read to me before I could read myself. I honestly don’t know the titles or authors of most of them. We had a huge collection of Golden Books and Berenstain Bears books, and a series on great historical figures that I’m sure had a huge impact on my young mind. It’s hard to think about these books without getting at least a little confused—their messages have been so long ingrained in my mind that it’s hard to say for sure that the book on Louis Pasteur taught the value of imagination (or was it perseverance?) or that the book about the kitten that ran away from home was a Golden Book. But I remember the stories and the illustrations with alarming clarity—alarming, because as an adult I often can’t remember how many laps I’ve run when I go jogging.

I grew up in the best home I could possibly imagine, and I was fortunate to have parents who not only took the time to read to me, but also valued that time and actually wanted to read to me. The books they bought were good children’s books—easy to understand, with quality artwork, plots that could keep a four year-old entertained, and the kind of morals strong people like my family valued. I remember those books fondly, not only because of whatever influence they have had on the development of my intellect, but also for the amount of my parents that went into them. They weren’t just books, they were books Mom and Dad had bought for me.

Since they are lamentably not in my possession right now, rather than attempt a detailed breakdown of the books I’ll mention a few and briefly describe something they taught me.

First of all, the kitten that ran away from home turned me into a sentimental fool, but with good reason—home is important. The people at home love me and home is not only a place from which I shouldn’t run away, but it’s a place to which, as an adult, I can always return and still find love. No matter what I do—if, for instance, I flee to what I took to be Alaska and learn to ice skate—it is nothing without someone who loves me to enjoy it too.

The Berenstain Bears were monumental figures in my childhood. Their books were a shorthand morality for my sister and I. I learned to read from them, and remember many of their stories in blow-by-blow detail. But the books not only taught a great number of good moral lessons—don’t ever lie about a soccer ball-patterned bird breaking a lamp—their stories and illustrations gave me early lessons in plot and atmosphere that I haven’t forgotten. Anyone else remember every part of the spooky old tree?

The influence the series on historical figures had should be obvious. You know me. But I can’t overstate the sway under which these books held me. My favorites were Louis Pasteur—who cured the horrible rabies bite with a syringe full of bright-eyed soldiers—and the Wright brothers, who, because of my early fascination with flight, have always been important figures to me. Both of these books taught a similar lesson beyond the particular moral they were trying to preach—hard work regardless of criticism and failure.

I could dredge up more books and more instances of character traits imbued in me by them, but I’ll stop here. I want to reiterate, by the way, that I am hardly a believer in Freudian psychology. But I think it is unquestionably true that those stories that influence us as children are the most important stories. Here, then, you already have three important cogs in my mental and moral outlook—perseverance, artistic excellence, and love. But the greatest of these is love.

Spring Reading 2009

2009-05-28T21:01:00.001-04:00

This has been one of the best reading seasons I've yet had. Of the sixteen books I read between the end of January and the first weekend of May (which period, for the purposes of this blog, shall be defined "spring"), I disliked only one. I also got in a good mix of fiction and non-fiction this Spring, which was a nice change from my reading over the fall and winter.

Once again, hyperlinked titles will take you to my more detailed reviews at Amazon.com. A few more reviews are forthcoming. Hope I can help someone find something good to read for the summer.

The List:

Agincourt, by Bernard Cornwell
The Return of Martin Guerre, by Natalie Zemon Davis
The Saga of the Jómsvíkings, trans. by Lee M. Hollander
The Last Kingdom, by Bernard Cornwell
The Face of Battle, by John Keegan
A Slobbering Love Affair, by Bernard Goldberg
The Pale Horseman, by Bernard Cornwell
The Godwins: The Rise and Fall of a Noble Dynasty, by Frank Barlow

Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Batallion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, by Christopher Browning

Fallon, by Louis L’Amour
One Bullet Away: The Making of a Marine Officer, by Nathaniel Fick
Intelligence in War, by John Keegan
Goldfinger, by Ian Fleming

Atheist Delusions: The Christian Revolution and Its Fashionable Enemies, by David Bentley Hart

Angels & Demons, by Dan Brown

All Shall be Well; and All Shall be Well; and All Manner of Things Shall be Well, by Tod Wodicka

Best Read:

Though almost everything I read this Spring was good or excellent, David Bentley Hart's historical treatise Atheist Delusions, despite its polemical-sounding title, was easily the best book I read--both this Spring and in a long, long time. I'd have to go back to Carnage and Culture for another book that has so radically challenged and shaped me. Atheist Delusions is a brief history from which anyone would benefit--especially the author below.

Worst Read:

In a field of reading this good (in my private list I gave virtually everything As and high Bs), Dan Brown's Angels & Demons is an almost obscenely fat, easy target. It's bobbing there, waiting to be picked off like a weak, diseased gnu straggling behind the herd. But I'm not above taking cheap shots when a book is this insipid, misguided, inaccurate, poorly written, unjustifiably self-confident, and totally, brutally, criminally retarded. So there.

Second Thoughts Award:

Following several months of thought on The Return of Martin Guerre, I find that I was far, far too generous in my Amazon.com review. To be more to the point than in my review, this book is Marxist, feminist trash with a clever but overblown story.

Honorable Mentions:

It was the distinct misfortune of One Bullet Away to be read shortly before Atheist Delusions, because in any other seasonal reading list this would be the best read. The story of Nate Fick, a former Marine lieutenant in the invasion of Iraq, One Bullet Away was not only literate and exciting, but it challenged me to be a better person and a stronger leader. John Keegan's Intelligence in War was also a good non-fiction read, and is not only a great set of case studies in the usefulness and shortcomings of military intelligence (which many people seem to assume is flawless), but has given me a lot to consider for my master's thesis.

I've already finished four books since the end of my designated "spring" season. I'm sorry to say you'll have to wait to hear about those until September, though I can say that I liked every one of them. Until September, then, this is what I've read so far this summer:

What’s So Great About Christianity, by Dinesh D’Souza

The Legend of Sigurd and Gudrún, by J.R.R. Tolkien

The Spy Who Came in From the Cold, by John le Carré

Lords of the North, by Bernard Cornwell

Religion and Semantics

2009-04-02T00:47:00.004-04:00

The other day, in the class for which I take attendance, the professor spent most of the period showing the students a documentary on Tibet. While I mostly just enjoyed the images of the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau, I was amused at one point to hear a Buddhist theologian say, “Buddhism isn’t a religion, it’s an educational system.” I was amused because I’ve often heard similar things from Christians, who often claim something to the effect of “Christianity isn’t a religion, it’s a relationship.”
I have no patience with this kind of semantic game.
A good part of my aversion to such statements is my long experience of the catastrophic failure of fundamentalist semantics. One of my undergraduate professors at Bob Jones had a well-worn chestnut that the many rules (with which I had few problems, by and large) were not meant to isolate the students, no, but rather to insulate them from ungodly influences. The problem, I immediately thought, was that the root of insulate is the Latin for island, and the verb form insulate therefore means to make an island of—isolate.
Fail. And that was one of the more innocuous failures I’ve heard.
I also have to admit a certain amount of revulsion to the cuteness of statements like the one in question. It smacks of pop theology—Jesus music, “Christ followers,” and WWJD bracelets. It’s the kind of clever statement with no purpose but to provoke amens and nods from those who are already convinced of its truth. See also “Jesus is the reason for the season.”
But the biggest issue at stake here is the abuse of language inherent in this statement. For instance, in another incident this week, the subject of my Medieval Women class was “illicit sexuality”—in this case, homosexuality. Reading for the day was a journal article by the well-known feminist historian Judith Bennett. In her article, she proposed the adoption of a new term in medieval women’s studies—“lesbian-like.” The term as Bennett defined it would connote nothing about sexuality, but rather something about the relationship of "lesbian-like" women to societal norms.
Class discussion rapidly descended into chaos. The undergraduates couldn’t grasp that any portmanteau term including lesbian could or should be applied to non-lesbians. The graduates mostly sat, gaping.
Bennett made a mistake in using a loaded term—and few terms are as loaded as lesbian—to describe something which shared none of that term’s usual, defining characteristics. Lesbian is a concrete term referring to a specific kind of person or behavior. When Bennett sought to extend that term, as “lesbian-like” to unmarried brewsters and cloistered nuns, the issue was confused. Few—if any—of the students left convinced of the usefulness of the term “lesbian-like.”
This incident is fairly typical of postmodern destruction of language. Our era is the beneficiary of an incredibly well standardized written and spoken language. Seldom has a language as widely used as English been mutually understandable among speakers from different regions. Much of the work of movements like postmodernism—a strange bedfellow for Christians—has been to demolish concrete definitions. Words today are qualified, tweaked, redefined, and qualified again until they have lost virtually all meaning, and all this in the ostensible search for their actual meanings.
Words are important—Christians, worshipers of the logos himself, should be aware of this more than others. As the heir of a document-based history religion like Judaism, precision with the written and spoken word has historically been a top priority of the great theologians. It’s this trait that probably endears to me the few modern theologians still practicing careful use of language—men like C.S. Lewis, who never committed a wasted, imprecise word to paper, G.K. Chesterton, who so mastered language that he could make theology witty, and Peter Kreeft, who has written a number of books using the Socratic dialogue, itself built on meticulous definition of terms, as a vehicle of apologetics.
Christianity is a religion. Deal with it. Religion is a concrete term with a discrete definition. Relationship is too. The bait and switch some of my coreligionists pull with these terms cheapens both.

Winter Reading 2008-2009

2009-02-03T21:20:00.003-05:00

This winter, which for the purposes of this blog I have defined as December and January, I have read completely six books:

A History of Warfare, by John Keegan
The Terror, by Dan Simmons
Colossus, by Niall Ferguson
The Fall of Rome, by Michael Curtis Ford
Nations Divided, by Don Doyle
Postmodernism: A Very Short Introduction, by Christopher Butler

Best fictional read was The Terror, a 900-page brick of a book that nonetheless had me glued to it for days. Best non-fiction read was Keegan's History of Warfare. Worst read was easily The Fall of Rome, which is one of the most misguided, clumsily-written works of fiction I've yet come across. I had to force myself to finish it. But, on a side note, that is inspiring—if something like that can get published, so can I. I just have to stick with it.

I also read a goodly chunk of Women in Early Medieval Europe, which is a textbook for my Medieval Women and the Family class. I did not enjoy the book.

Currently reading Agincourt, by Bernard Cornwell. Cornwell is not the best writer to take up a pen—he falls back on stereotyped characters and howling bad adverbs with astonishing aplomb—but his grasp of period, story, and character are so strong that I've been swept along in his book and am enjoying every minute of it.

2008 in Review

2008-12-31T15:22:00.003-05:00

This has been an amazing year. I may as well make the requisite comment about not being able to believe it's over, so there—I can't believe 2008 is over, and that it's over so soon. New Year's Day 2008 I worked an auction and packed for a ski trip before falling to sleep in my room in Georgia, and now here I sit in my apartment in Clemson, awaiting the beginning of a new year and new semester.

Something that has especially helped me bring the year's events into focus is my diary—this is the first year in which I've kept one. I bought the Moleskine daily diary in Trier last summer and I've managed to write an entry, no matter how brief, for every day of this year. Looking back, it's amazing just how much things have changed. I have a job, I've finished my first semester of grad school (theoretically the first 25% of grad school), I completed my novel, started revision, got my own apartment and—mostly—paid my own way, and, most importantly, I have Amy.

Before I veer off into my own abundant sentimentality, I'll end this prologue and introduce my year-in-review. In it I'll include a few of the major events in my life and, at risk of trivializing my actual life, some of my favorite films and books from the past year.

—Major Events—

January 2-10—Trip with Dad, Greg and Joel Peters to Colorado

January 22—First solo date with Amy

February 14—Completed No Snakes in Iceland

March 3—Interview for grad school at Clemson University

March 21—Amy and I "make it official"

April 4—Receive offer of assistantship at Clemson

May 2-3—Trip to Greenville for Meredith's graduation

July 9—Sign a lease on my apartment

August 17—First night spent in the apartment

August 20—First day of classes

October 31—Halloween party at my apartment

December 12—Final exam, the end of my first semester

December 15—Christmas party at my apartment

—Musical Discoveries—

Muse, especially the albums Black Holes and Revelations and Absolution (special thanks to Chiafos)

Sixpence None the Richer (special thanks to Amy)

Megaherz

—Workout Stuff—

In January I was struggling with weights in the upper 190s, getting one rep of 200 lbs. every once in a while but mostly maxing out around 185 or 190 lbs. As of my last workout, I routinely bench two sets of ten at 185 , one set of five at 215 , and can usually get two reps of 225, sometimes three. I also branched out—thanks in part to Clemson's amazing gym—to a lot of other exercises. Not the kind of shocking progress you see on TV, but I have to say I'm happy with the slowly-realized results of hard work and patience. Here's hoping I can keep it up in the new year.

—Favorite Films—

To my astonishment, I've seen so few films this year that a top ten list would be almost self-defeating, since among the ten would be films that I wouldn't normally include in any kind of recommendation to anyone. So rather than list the usual ten, I'll just name the five favorite (not necessarily best) films I've seen this year and give a brief run-down why.

The Dark Knight—Combines all the best qualities of Batman Begins and the Michael Mann films Christopher Nolan strove to emulate—real-world psychological complexity, a densely-woven plot, hard-hitting action, and great performances. Throw in some probing moral quandaries and you've got a great motion picture.

There Will be Blood—It's a shame this had to go up against No Country for Old Men at the Oscars, since my love of Cormac McCarthy threw me down on one side of a call too close to make.

Iron Man—Great characters, thrilling action, and some really hilarious one-liners make this one of the most purely entertaining films in a long time. Some of its thunder—as a superhero movie, anyway—may have been stolen by The Dark Knight, but Iron Man is one for the ages.

Dark City—A real head-scratcher that becomes more complex with every viewing. Special thanks to Bean for introducing me to this one.

Zodiac—Dense, realistic, meticulously-recreated—quite possibly the best true-crime film ever committed to celluloid (or, in this case, HD video). Advertised as some kind of serial killer thriller, Zodiac is much more a series of character studies—of the investigators, the reporters, and, of course, the killer himself—and a procedural.

Honorable Mention: Get Smart—this movie is hilarious, one of the few genuinely funny comedies released in a long time.

—Ten Favorite Books (nonfiction)—

Carnage and Culture, by Victor Davis Hanson

City of God, by St. Augustine

The Killing of History, by Keith Windschuttle

A History of Warfare, by John Keegan

The Worst Journey in the World, by Apsley Cherry-Garrard

The Reason for God, by Timothy Keller

Christianity's Dangerous Idea, by Alister McGrath

The Double Helix, by James Watson

History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides

The Persian Expedition, by Xenophon

—Ten Favorite Books (fiction, poetry, etc.)—

Perelandra, by C.S. Lewis

Out of the Silent Planet, by C.S. Lewis

Das Nibelungenlied, as translated by Burton Raffel

Godric, by Frederick Buechner

Killing Rommel, by Stephen Pressfield

Cities of the Plain, by Cormac McCarthy

Lancelot, by Chrétien de Troyes, as translated by Burton Raffel

King Solomon’s Mines, by H. Rider Haggard

Shiloh, by Shelby Foote

From Russia with Love, by Ian Fleming

I'll also include an honorable mention for The Terror, by Dan Simmons, a 950-page novel that I began this week and haven't been able to put down. I won't finish it in time to include it as a "best read" of 2008, but—barring a really lame ending—it'll definitely be in the top ten for 2009. Check it out.

And that's about it. I hope you've all had a great year and that the next one will be even better.

Fall Reading 2008

2008-12-06T18:56:00.007-05:00

Grad school is a busy time. Much busier than I'd thought. I did a lot of reading, but I didn't really complete that many books. For instance, I read several hundred pages of Edward Gibbon (as mentioned here) but didn't come anywhere close to reading all of his Decline and Fall. (Reading 300 pages of Gibbon is like reading two or three books by most other authors. Except maybe Ayn Rand.)

In the past, my reading list has been made up of books that I've read in their entirety, and I don't want to compromise that. Big deal, I know. So I'm including with this list a list of books that I read huge portions of, even if not the whole thing.

As usual, a hyperlinked title will take you to you to my more extensive review at Amazon.com (or should--there seems to be something wrong with Blogger's hyperlink system). Here goes:

Fall 2008

Faces of History, by Donald Kelley
The Anglo-Saxon Age: A Very Short Introduction, by John Blair
The Isle of Stone, by Nicholas Nicastro
The Double Helix, by James Watson
History: A Very Short Introduction, by John Arnold
From Russia With Love, by Ian Fleming
Doctor No, by Ian Fleming
The Crusades: A Very Short Introduction, by Christopher Tyerman
The Killing of History, by Keith Windschuttle

Books of which I read the majority or a good chunk:

A War to Be Won: Fighting the Second World War, by Williamson Murray and Allan R. Millett

A Monk's Confession, by Guibert of Nogent, translated by Paul J. Archambault

A Brief History of the Human Race, by Michael Cook

The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, by Edward Gibbon

Books that I am currently reading:

A History of Warfare, by John Keegan

The War of the World, by Niall Ferguson

The Saga of the Vapnafjordings, translated by Gwyn Jones

The Politically Incorrect Guide to Western Civilization, by Athony Esolen

The Fall of Rome, by Michael Ford Curtis

Best Read of the Season: Keith Windschuttle's Killing of History, certainly. From Russia With Love was a good fictional escape but the ideas, arguments, and other food for thought in Windschuttle's book are still running through my mind and will be for some time to come. This will probably rank with Carnage and Culture among the formative books of my life.

Worst Read: Having stayed out of school for a year, reading only what I wanted, I'd forgotten exactly how much bad writing there is out there. Reading for classes this semester reminded me. The worst-written book I actually finished was Kelley's Faces of History, which is a 200-page brick of intellectual gobbledygook. (Read my Amazon review for a typically bad sentence.) It's a good thing I'd already read a lot of historiography because otherwise I'd have been lost. The worst book ideologically was probably Cook's Brief History of the Human Race, which was a postmodernist, anthropology-laden jog through geographical determinism. In other words, rubbish. And, though I hate to say it, I'm trying to make myself finish Curtis's Fall of Rome, a novel so clumsily written it's making me hate the period of history in which it takes place. Sad.

Unexpected Surprise: Check out Guibert of Nogent's Monk's Confession (not the original title) for an intriguing medieval memoir. Guibert was a monk, chronicler, and one of the very rare medieval people to tell the story of their own life on paper. Touching, funny, and moving in equal parts.

That's about it. I hope to recuperate with a lot--and I do mean a lot--of reading this winter.

Ode on History and a Dry Lake

2008-11-08T17:52:00.004-05:00

I love history. History—and especially my sometimes inordinate love for it—has informed my thoughts and decisions for a long time. Even some of my earliest memories revolve around two things—true stories and historical stories. Truth and history. The first I could write about at length—Pontius Pilate and his “Quid est veritas?” has always touched a strange chord of sympathy with me—but it’s history for which I feel a more concrete love.
I went to the gym today to work out. My off days—Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday or Sunday—I dedicate to cardio workout, which used to mean running but, two pain-wracked knees later, means a long, sweaty ride on the stationary bike.
To reach campus from my apartment you have to cross Lake Hartwell, or what used to be Lake Hartwell. With drought and now winter approaching, the water level has dropped incredibly low. What is normally a beautiful piedmont lake is ringed with naked red clay banks sloping down to shallow water. The lakes back home have been no different—Hartwell, if anything, simply has a greater number of tree stumps exposed by the receding water—so during my time at Clemson so far, Hartwell has simply been another lake half-drained by drought.
But a few days ago I noticed something unusual. Crossing the Hartwell bridge on my way back from campus one day, I glanced at the lake and spotted another bridge—this one barely visible above the water. I slowed my car and watched it, and checked it out again when I returned to campus later. The bridge appears to be an old-fashioned concrete bridge, the two-lane kind common all over the South, the kind replaced more and more by simple concrete-and-rebar four-lane spans with high, closed guardrails and no view for a vehicle smaller than a semi. The bridge I cross to campus is one of the new kind—I can’t see the lake when I cross it, and so I’d missed the old bridge until now.
I don’t know how long it’s been exposed, but I’d like to think I’d have noticed it if it had been there a long time. At any rate, the water level has fallen and keeps on falling, so it’s not unthinkable that the bridge has returned to the world of sky and air only in the last few weeks.
Over subsequent trips back and forth to campus I’ve watched and appraised the bridge several more times. I noticed new things. There seemed to be another span of it nearby, perhaps just road since it has no guardrail, and a good length of road leading toward the bridge from the banks. I had noticed what I thought was a boat ramp on the shore before, so I had decided that the boat ramp was in fact the former road into campus or Clemson itself. I pointed the bridge out to Amy on one trip and talked about my curiosity.
Today it was too much. A beautiful Saturday and, aside from the trip to the gym, the threat of an entire day spent indoors, reading. And there was the bridge, mud-smeared in the middle of the lake. I’d go look at it. Now. It even occurred to me that I could wade or swim to the bridge from the spar of road jutting into the basin.
On the way home I pulled off the road and found a dead-end. A well-worn trail led around a barricade and through a thin stand of trees, so I climbed over, walked a few yards through the trees and found myself in what used to be a deep, stream-fed cove of Lake Hartwell.
The lake had receded to a shallow bay at the bottom of a muddy hollow, but the place where I stood was easily recognizable—a two-lane road, the dashed white lines still visible on the asphalt. The bridge was far off in the distance. I walked down the road until the scrub on the shoulder was thin enough for someone in shorts and a sweaty undershirt to pass through, and then tried to find a way across the inlet and over to the bridge.
The search failed. The recently-exposed lake bottom was still sodden and some alarmingly deep footprints from former explorers warned me off. I returned to the road and followed it downhill, toward the lake. Some distance on, I came across a pair of concrete ramps running uphill, perpendicular to the road itself. The ramps were just wide enough for a car’s tires and were open in between, where a profusion of dried-out weeds stood waist-high. This, I thought, could be a boat-ramp, added since the lake was flooded. I followed the concrete ramps and found something else entirely.
The ramp itself ended not far from the road, and very far from the tree-line. And running from either side of the concrete were two easily-distinguishable lines of bare sand, probably pulverized concrete, since nothing grew in it. This was no boat ramp.
On a whim, I followed one path. I ran several yards and abruptly turned left. I now stood on a confused patch of brick. I stared down at it for a while, trying to determine what this place had been. The ramps, I had thought for a minute, may have been part of an old garage grease-pit, now silted in. But now this sidewalk and the bricks—
It was a house. I was standing on the front stoop.
I looked around and made out the edges of the old foundation. Broken brick lay everywhere. The weeds didn’t grow as densely here as they did around the perimeter. The stoop itself was solid brick, an old staircase.
For a moment, I could see the house by the road, the old-style driveway and the sidewalk, garden, and brick steps. The road into town ran not far from the house itself. My head swimming with the vision I had of the old countryside, I walked back down to the road, back to my car at the dead end, and got in. I’d go look at the bridge now. I’d had a little taste of history, and then a big, juicy bite. Now I had to glut myself.
By history, of course, I mean something other than written history. Perhaps a better term would be the past, but for me that’s too vague. A past can be positive—“Our nation’s glorious past”—neutral—“Tell me a little something about your city’s past”—or negative—“She’s got a past, you know.” At the risk of obfuscating real history, Herodotus’s inquiry, I’ll stick with the term history for the time being.
There’s something intoxicating about feeling history around you. Old churches do it to me. Cemeteries do it. Ruins do it. A barren landscape with just a hint of human touch—a few rocks too neatly placed, a long flat strip that could only be a road bed—does it too.
When I hiked up several hundred yards of foggy mountainside above Heidelberg last summer and found, shrouded in mist, the ruins of a medieval monastery and cathedral, I felt some part of my brain tingling. I got excited. I couldn’t take in the sights fast enough, take enough photos, or view it from enough angles. I was drunk on history. And now I was again.
Add to it the undying childhood delight in scrambling over rocks, and I was a goner.
I drove back toward campus and found a spot better suited to exploring the shore and the bridge. Two cars were there ahead of me. I jumped a gate and ran through the forest—a purely nature-loving moment—and came out on near the new bridge. I picked my way through the tall, dry weeds and found a strip of beach to walk on between the soggy mud along the water and the weeds above. I walked up the shoreline and came to a steep drop-off from the trees to the water. The beach was almost uniformly covered in smooth scree. I plunked a good-sized one into the water and kept going.
Here and there were signs of non-human habitation—shallow caves hollowed out between the roots of trees and littered with clamshells—but the it was the bridge that drew me on.
I came close to the bridge and found more and more of the old human clues. There were, of course, the bottles and glass-shards dropped from boats long ago, and even an old potsherd, but there were also slabs of rock neatly arranged at the top of a hill. The road that ran out to the bridge was tilted hard to the left and covered in muck. The bridge itself seemed perfectly on kilter, well-engineered and lasting beyond anything its builders could have planned for it.
I found other things, too. What had to be another road bed, silted over but wide and flat enough to accommodate two lanes of traffic. It led down from the treeline and disappeared into the water, but I was certain it was the same road that reemerged and struck out across the water for the bridge. The neatly-stacked and aligned rocks must have belonged to an old home—in what function I don’t know, but, leaning over the sheer drop-off to the lake, I found a staircase half-fallen away, and the remains of a sidewalk, now a concrete shelf underwater.
I took pictures with my cell phone. I called Amy and told her about it. I went home.
Of course I thought, even while I was poking around the rocky lakebed, that I should find old maps, surveys, or photographs of the area. I called Dad and asked when Hartwell was flooded and if he’d ever seen anything underwater from the air. He said no, he hadn’t noticed anything underwater, but the lake was flooded in the 1950s—around 1955 probably. I did some research. Lake Hartwell was formed by Hartwell dam, built between 1955 and 1963 by the US Army Corps of Engineers.
Little by little, I had started to reveal all the mysteries that had intoxicated me as I discovered history in the lake.
That initial discovery is something like the romance in a relationship—lots of heady excitement, the thrill of rushing along from one thing to another. And then comes the maturation—from the romance to the long-haul, from discovery to research. They’re two very different parts of the relationship between history you can see and feel and the kind that enlightens and informs, but, as with relationships, they shouldn’t be mutually exclusive—the romance should never completely die out.
For me, I doubt it will.

Faith, Reason, and Other False Dichotomies

2008-10-08T14:06:00.005-04:00

A recent article from Wired magazine showcases the incredible personal library of tech guru Jay Walker. Described in rich detail--though, oddly, without stating the actual number of books--the 3600-square foot library features Escher-inspired floor paneling and scores of museum piece books and objects, including a 16th-century Coverdale Bible and an Enigma code machine. Singled out for special mention is an illuminated celestial atlas. The atlas dates to 1660 and includes, says Walker, "first published maps where Earth was not the center of the solar system. . . . It divides the age of faith from the age of reason."

One of the most popular, difficult, and widely-disseminated attacks on "faith"--supposedly meaning religion in general but almost always Christianity in particular--is the idea that faith and reason--meaning science--cannot and have never coexisted.

I've recently encountered the idea, albeit in subtle, almost subconscious form, in my graduate historiography class. The majority of the class expressed impatience with the great medieval historians Bede and Gregory of Tours, who spend entirely too much time reporting missionary activity and mircles and blame everything on "the work of the devil." By contrast, the renaissance historians we studied the next week were "more rational," "more critical," and "more analytical."

The situation is only aggravated by a rigidly enforced false dichotomy--faith or reason, never both; anyone choosing faith necessarily abandons reason and becomes a pariah. Actor Matt Damon recently attacked vice-presidential nominee Sarah Palin as an "absurd" choice, saying at one point in his rant: "I need to know if she really thinks dinosaurs were here 4,000 years ago. That's an important--I want to know that, I really do, because she's going to have the nuclear codes."

Dinosaurs and nuclear codes? What looks at first like a typical Hollywood non sequitur shows, on further examination, typical modern prejudice against "faith." What Damon alludes to is Palin's purported belief in creationism (extrapolated from her "Bible-believing" Christianity and the fact that she wants creationism and evolutionary theory taught in schools), a belief she holds for religious reasons. Since creationism--and its recent cousin Intelligent Design--fly in the face of established science, Palin has sacrificed reason for faith--regardless of how she came to the decision--and anyone who prefers the latter over the former must be mentally unstable. That is, someone you don't want to have "the nuclear codes."

Anyone and everyone is open to ridicule. President Bush is routinely lampooned as a religious moron. The trailers for Oliver Stone's upcoming film W. even show a Jesus impersonator lugging a cross past the window of a diner, pairing Bush with bizarre religious imagery from the get-go. Religious people are clearly nuts.

And when the religious protest, the rational point out that the faith-reason divide is historically attested. Remember the Dark Ages, when the Church held sway and people believed the earth was flat? Remember Galileo, Copernicus, and their struggle with the Church?

First, Westerners since ancient times--those who cared to think about it, at any rate--have believed in a spherical earth. St. Augustine, Bede, St. Thomas Aquinas, Dante--all believed in a spherical earth, and Dante especially hinged the physics of his Divine Comedy on the idea of crawling through the center of the earth, going so far as to depict himself and his guide Virgil climbing down and then up without changing direction:

"You think you're still on the center's other side,"
[Virgil] said, "where I first grabbed the hairy worm
of rottenness that pierces the earth's core;
and you were there as long as I moved downward
but, when I turned myself, you passed the point
to which all weight from every part is drawn."
(Inferno, XXXI, 106-111)

Pretty sophisticated for a religious nut.

"[P]hysically considered," wrote C.S. Lewis, who was a scholar of Renaissance literature and a man of faith, "the earth is a globe; all the authors of the Middle Ages are agreed on this." The flat-earth theory, it turns out, originates with a mock "history" of Christopher Columbus written by Washington Irving, placing the story on the same level as Rip van Winkle and the Headless Horseman.

But the most often-repeated story is that of Galileo Galilei.

Most first encounter Galileo in elementary school, where they learn that he improved the telescope and looked at the planets and stars, and learn perhaps later that he supported Nicolaus Copernicus's heliocentric theory--the idea to which Jay Walker refers in Wired, that the earth orbits the sun and not vice versa. That's when he got in trouble with the Church.

The story as usually told is that the Church disliked Galileo's experiments and solar observations, because science threatens religious belief (the dichotomy cropping up again). The officially accepted theory of the day--apparently given the status and endorsement enjoyed by evolution today--was that the sun, the planets, and the universe all the way to the "fixed stars" revolved around earth. Copernicus's theory contradicted that, and Galileo, within striking distance of Rome unlike the late Copernicus, supported him. At that point the Church stepped in to defend its power against the new theory, and Galileo was forced by the Inquisition to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest for questioning the authority of the Church.

This is religion's "war" against science. Argue at length over the faith and reason dichotomy and this story will put in an appearance.

The story has myriad problems, not the least of which is that Galileo and Copernicus were both devoutly religious and that Pope Leo X was interested in heliocentrism--unlike Calvin and Luther. Galileo even dedicated his Assayer, a tract rejecting any authority outside of observation and reasoning, to Pope Urban VIII.

But a problem seldom pointed out is that the geocentric view held by the Church was that put forward by Aristotle--not a Christian, but a pagan and a convinced materialist. Galileo and Copernicus weren't arguing with the Church, they were arguing with Aristotle.

And the Church's resistance to the idea is easily understandable. Long-held ideas, especially those that matter deeply to the believer, are often bitterly defended. "This fool," Luther said of Copernicus, "wishes to reverse the entire scheme of astronomy." If you want to imagine mainstream reaction to a theory that upends generations or even centuries of established thought, look no further than Intelligent Design. Ben Stein, producer and star of a documentary on Intelligent Design and freedom of speech, has been viciously harangued since the release of the film as "hysterical," "unprincipled," and the star of "creationist porn."

But the problem is that Aristotelian theory didn't matter that much to the Church, which is why Christianity is still here and geocentrism is not. Once the new, untested Copernican theory was not so new and had been tested, the Church wholeheartedly embraced the idea and has been quick--some would say too quick--to embrace new scientific development ever since.

So much for Galileo versus the Church. But does that prove that the either-or between faith and reason is a false dichotomy?

Galileo can certainly be taken as a case in point, but if you need more proof there's always more. Copernicus, Newton, Mendel, and dozens of other scientists of the past were devoutly religious and there are many religious scientists today. And the development of more modern, more sophisticated sciences in the renaissance and early modern era do not prove that the Christianity-dominated Middle Ages were a scientific dead zone--without medieval developments in logic, historiography, engineering, mechanization, education, economics, and manufacture the world would be a much "darker" place than it believes it is now. Or, as Anthony Esolen poetically puts it,

Magnificent churches, whose ingenuity challenges the most daring of modern architecture, and whose liveliness and beauty leave us far behind, stipple the continent. And who builds these, but teams of ordinary men? Modern music is born in the modes of Gregorian chant; one Guido of Arezzo invents Western musical notation. Capitalism is born, and international banking, and credit, and modern accounting. . . . The university comes into being, along with its stagy oral examinations, colorful, combative, and public. No fear of competition here.

Jay Walker is confused--there is, historically, no divide between ages of faith and reason. But it's strange that such an enlightened, scientific, rational age as our own should have such fear of competition from "faith."

Reflections on Gibbon

2008-09-24T13:26:00.010-04:00

For my graduate-level historiography class this week I had to read several hundred pages of Enlightenment-era historians. Foremost among them, and making up the vast majority of the reading, was Edward Gibbon. The often-imitated title of Gibbon's magnum opus has entered the English language as a byword for epic history: The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.

If the Renaissance was an irreligious time, the Enlightenment became the first openly anti-religious era. In this respect, Gibbon is a man of his times. The biggest problem with his history--aside from his all-too-trusting faith in the Historia Augusta--is his scathing assessment of Christianity. Roman polytheism, according to Gibbon, was a remarkably tolerant, open institution that virtually guaranteed peace because it was accepting and universal. Christianity, like a popularized Judaism, virtually guaranteed strife because of its exclusive claims to the truth and, in Gibbon's oft-repeated words, its "obstinacy."

Gibbon approaches the subject of early Christianity with typical Enlightenment tact and decorum, saying things like "the lower we depress the temporal condition of the first Christians, the more reason we shall find to admire their merit and success" (I, xv). But his hatred quickly becomes obvious. He asserts and that "so intimate is the connection between the throne and the altar, that the banner of the church has very seldom been seen on the side of the people" (I, iii), a remark that one editor noted is "wholly incorrect."

By the end of Chapter XVI, which is one of two famously incendiary chapters treating the birth of Christianity, Gibbon has outlined and, so to speak, deconstructed the history of Roman persecutions from Nero onward. He ends the chapter with the following:

The vague descriptions of exile and imprisonment, of pain and torture, are so easily exaggerated or softened by the pencil of an artful orator, that we are naturally induced to inquire into a fact of a more distinct and stubborn kind; the number of persons who suffered death in consequence of the edicts published by [the Romans]. The recent legendaries [i.e: John Foxe] record whole armies and cities, which were at once swept away by the undistinguishing rage of persecution. The more ancient writers content themselves with pouring out a liberal effusion of loose and tragical invectives, without condescending to ascertain the precise number of those persons who were permitted to seal with their blood their belief of the gospel. (I, xvi)

And, after deducing from Eusebius the number of Palestinian martyrs and extrapolating that number as perhaps 1/16th of that of the whole Empire, which was comprised of sixteen provinces, Gibbon concludes that

the whole [number of martyrs] might consequently amount to about fifteen hundred, a number which, if it is equally divided between the ten years of the persecution, will allow an annual consumption of one hundred and fifty martyrs. Allotting the same proportion to the provinces . . . the multitude of Christians in the Roman empire, on whom a capital punishment was inflicted by a judicial, sentence, will be reduced to somewhat less than two thousand persons. Since it cannot be doubted that the Christians were more numerous, and their enemies more exasperated, in the time of Diocletian, than they had ever been in any former persecution, this probable and moderate computation may teach us to estimate the number of primitive saints and martyrs who sacrificed their lives for the important purpose of introducing Christianity into the world. (ibid)

In other words, yes, thousands were killed merely for their adherence to Christianity--but it only amounted to 150 people per year. And 150 Christians per annum is all right.

During class discussion, the professor made the canny remark that Gibbon's treatment of Christian murders was so dismissive and prejudiced, one could easily change the word Christians to Jews and have a polemic from the pen of a Nazi.

But what did I like about Gibbon?

Remarkably, quite a lot. While his prejudices--or hatreds--certainly get the best of him, he is a very witty, well-read man and it shows through in his writing. Rarely is a work of history so entertaining. But the thing I like most about Gibbon is something often overlooked because of his obvious hatreds--his emphasis on cultural values as the deciding factor in human history.

Geographical determinism is a very popular idea today, especially since the publication of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel in the late 90s. The theory basically asserts that human societies are not responsible for their own ascendancy--geography, the random distribution of natural resources, and the spread of immunity and disease determine success on the world stage. Europeans only succeeded because of the abundance of their natural resources, the proximity of the Mediterranean and its climate, its shameless plunder of Eastern culture and the exploitation of peoples from "less fortunate" regions.

The idea, which was argued well enough by Diamond to earn him the Pulitzer Prize, is very popular because in our politically-correct age, ascribing any kind of importance or superiority, even if it has nothing to do with race or genetics, to the long-dominant Western world is viewed as racist, backward, and/or Eurocentric.

In the Western Civ class in which I take attendance and grade papers, one of the three required textbooks is Michael Cook's A Brief History of the Human Race, which not only propounds the theory, but assumes its truth. As a result, Western civilization is pigeonholed into a handful of chapters, earning little more coverage than the Maya or aboriginal Australians.

So Gibbon was a breath of fresh air, especially when he says things like the following:

The Goths were now in possession of the Ukraine, a country of considerable extent and uncommon fertility, intersected with navigable rivers, which, from either side, discharge themselves into the Borysthenes; and interspersed with large and leafy forests of oaks. The plenty of game and fish, the innumerable bee-hives deposited in the hollow of old trees, and in the cavities of rocks, and forming, even in that rude age, a valuable branch of commerce, the size of the cattle, the temperature of the air, the aptness of the soil for every species of gain, and the luxuriancy of the vegetation, all displayed the liberality of Nature, and tempted the industry of man. But the Goths withstood all these temptations, and still adhered to a life of idleness, of poverty, and of rapine. (I, x)

Here Gibbon presents us with a people which, according to geographical determinism, should have everything going for them. But their culture did not encourage scientific endeavor, personal initiative, or simply personal betterment the way the Romans--or Greeks, Franks, English, or Americans--did, and so they did far less with their "more geographically blessed" land than they could have. They did not have, in Gibbon's words, the "martial nobility and stubborn commons, possessed of arms, tenacious of property, and collected into constitutional assemblies" (I, iii) that made Rome and the West great.