Joyous Days.

From my spam folder today:

Despite the fact that each of us will certainly die, there are few books written about death and dying, because these are considered "taboo" subjects best left in the shadows for as long as possible. Yet, it is important to think about death not only when the inevitable is near, but also before it closes in.

I am a scientist seeking to understand the nature of reality and, in this context, have published a book entitled "EXPLORING DEATH: WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT DYING" which may be helpful to you. The first part of the book describes various aspects that are associated with the topics of death and dying, such as thinking about death, causes of death, death rituals, historical and unusual deaths, and the definition of death. In the middle section, evidence is presented strongly suggestive of the fact that you (your essence, your consciousness) survive the physical death of your body (pre-death experiences, near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, ghostly phenomena, after-death communication). The last portion of the book discusses what may happen to you after your death.

"EXPLORING DEATH: WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW ABOUT DYING" is now available in both paperback at kindle formats at the following amazon.comwebpages:

Paperback: http://www.amazon.com/Exploring-Death-Should-About-Dying/dp/1453721371/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1287148146&sr=1-1

Kindle: http://www.amazon.com/Exploring-Death-Should-About-ebook/dp/B004A157Q2/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&m=AG56TWVU5XWC2&s=digital-text&qid=1288707506&sr=1-1

Thinking and writing about this topic has helped me to overcome my own fear of death and, if you read my book, you may come to realize the following truth: "The day of your death is more joyous than the day of your birth".

The Examined End of Life.

Washington Post's Perri Klass (NYU Professor of journalism and pediatrics) reviews two new books that examine the dying process:

David J. Casaretts, "Last Acts: Discovering Possibility and Opportunity at the End of Life"

David Biro, "The Language of Pain: Finding Words, Compassion, and Relief"

A clip from the review:

The stories in "Last Acts" are unexpected and often quirky. Casarett's taxonomy includes Lacy, who was desperate to write a novel and leave it as her legacy, and Ladislaw, who wanted only to enroll in a clinical trial so his illness could be useful. And there is Jerry, a hospital employee "widely known for a combination of laziness and boorish behavior that made him widely feared and universally hated," whose refusal to apologize, even when seriously ill, prompts an examination of why the dying may or may not seek to make amends.

At times, the team of hospice experts are shocked at what seems selfish or irresponsible or unappealing behavior by the patients. But in fact, this is a big part of Casarett's point: that our collective sense of the "good" death can prevent us from seeing the individual realities of people's lives. It's a lesson he learns as a doctor, over and over, delineating the stubbornly individual imperatives that drive people who know they are close to death.

Biro, on the other hand, sees a unifying experience in the complexity of pain. In his erudite and ambitious book, he writes about the ways that artists, poets and novelists have described pain; he considers physical pain and psychological pain and argues that the isolation that comes with pain, especially when it cannot be described, contributes to the agony. He invokes philosophical reflections on pain by Elaine Scarry and Susan Sontag, along with personal accounts by writers ranging from Fanny Burney, who underwent surgery for breast cancer in the days before anesthesia, to Virginia Woolf and William Styron on illness and depression, to James Joyce describing Stephen Dedalus's ear infection to fictional characters suffering and dying beside Mount Kilimanjaro (Hemingway) or in the wilds of the far north (Jack London). "The Language of Pain" investigates not one single vocabulary but a complex syntax of suffering.

Klass closes the review with this:

Both books draw strength from this, from the sense that these are real, everyday situations that nevertheless require responses outside the traditional pharmacopeia. Both these books resonate not only with the common certainties of pain and death but also with the infinite individuality of human life and human voice.

Jessica Mitford and Ethics.

I just started reading "Decca's" The American Way of Death, originally published in the early 60s and revised in 1995 just before her death. So far I am humbled by the wit, humor, and tenaciousness she brings to a seemingly macabre subject, my subject, and one about which I often write with a dour and hyper-serious tone. She is light, scathing, yet grounded. As I work through edits on my own book proposal, I need to remember not only her tone but her gravity and self-assuredness. It's about death and it's a good read!

Anyway, I post to capture this one fragment of a sentence which we seem - which I seem - to forget so often when discussing death, patients' rights, separation of church and state, provider refusals, end of life care, bioethics, and health care reform:

"To be 'ethical' merely means to adhere to a prevailing code of morality...."

Need Something to Read?

From ReligionClause, a list of new books and articles:

From SSRN:

• Victor C. Romero, Of Hope and Humility: Christian Realism, Immigration Reform and Executive Leadership, (Penn State Legal Studies Research Paper No. 17-2009, Oct. 23, 2009).
• Ira C. Lupu & Robert W. Tuttle, Same-Sex Family Equality and Religious Freedom, (Northwestern Journal of Law and Social Policy, Forthcoming).
• Eric G. Andersen, Religion and Social Welfare in the United States: The Case of Charitable Choice, (The Review of Faith & International Affairs, Vol. 7, No. 3, 2009).

From SmartCILP and elsewhere:

• Barbara Shapiro, Changing Language, Unchanging Standard: From 'Satisfied Conscience' to 'Moral Certainty' and Beyond 'Reasonable Doubt', 17 Cardozo Journal of International & Comparative Law 261-279 (2009).
• Barbara E. Wall, Ethical Considerations for a New Jurisprudence: A Catholic Social Thought Perspective, 11 Barry Law Review 77-93 (2008).
• Samuel W. Calhoun, Getting the Framers Wrong: A Response to Professor Geoffrey Stone, 57 UCLA Law Review Discourse 1 (2009).
• Geoffrey R. Stone, The Perils of Religious Passion: A Response to Professor Samuel Calhoun, 57 UCLA Law Review Discourse 15 (2009).

Recent Books:

• Bethany Moreton, To Serve God and Wal-Mart, (Harvard University Press, May 2009).
• Amos Guiora, Freedom from Religion, (Oxford University Press, Oct. 2009).
• Vincent Phillip Muñoz, God and the Founders - Madison, Washington, and Jefferson, (Cambridge University Press, 2009), reviewed by South Bend Tribune.

Graham Greene's Catholicism.

I've been reading The End of the Affair the past few days so when the opportunity came up to catch a Graham Greene double feature at Film Forum last night with two of my favorite religion scholars, I jumped.

Elizabeth Castelli, Chair of the Department of Religion at Barnard College, is author of Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture Making. Angela Zito is professor of Anthropology and Religious Studies at New York University and author of, Of Body and Brush: Grand Sacrifice as Text/Performance in 18th century China. Time with them is like a seminar in how to read, that most basic human task of observing and interpreting experience, be it a film, a social situation, family relations, a book, or a favorite TV show. I'm always richer for their company and conversation.

It was Elizabeth who remarked, prior to the films, on Graham Greene's astute writing on Catholicism. Greene wrote 26 novels, many of which address religion, and a handful of which were made into movies. In The End of the Affair Sarah promises God, when a bomb falls on her lover's flat, that she will believe in God should he survive. He does and it is this promise, in the midst of her avoided, latent faith, that cuts short their affair. Years later, as they try to reconcile, she decides to become Catholic but is struck down by a sudden illness.

From the book:

...Suddenly I saw her for what she was - a piece of refuse waiting to be cleared away: if you needed a bit of hair you could take it, or trim her nails if nail trimmings had value to you. Like a saint's her bones could be divided up - if anybody required them. She was going to be burnt soon so why shouldn't everybody have what he wanted first? What a fool I had been during three years to imagine that in any way I had possessed her. We are possesed by nobody, not even ourselves.

*

(From a letter from Sarah to her lover, Maurice Bendrix, a novelist, received after her death.) I love you but I can't see you again. I don't know how I'm going to live in this pain and longing and I'm praying to God all the time that he won't be hard on me, that he won't keep me alive. Dear Maurice, I want to have my cake and eat it like everybody else. I went to a priest two days ago before you rang me up and told him I wanted to be a Catholic. I told him about my promise and about you. I said, I'm not really maried to Henry any more. We don't sleep together - not since the first year with you. And it wasn't really a marriage, I said, you couldn't call a registry office a wedding. I asked him couldn't I be a Catholic and marry you? I knew you wouldn't mind going through a service. Every time I asked him a question I had such hope; it was like opening the shutters of a new house and looking for the view, and every window just faced a blank wall. No, no, no, he said, I couldn't marry you, I couldn't go on seeing you, not if I was going to be a Catholic. I thought, to hell with the whole lot of them and I walked out of the room where I was seeing him, and I slammed the door to show what I thought of priests. They are between us and God, I thought; God has more mercy, and then I came out of the church and saw the crucifix they have there, and I thought, of course, he's got mercy, only it's such an odd sort of mercy, it sometimes looks like punishment.

In both the films we watched last night, it is knowledge or truth - or the resolution of plot - that hinge on relics: in The Fallen Idol, it is Mrs. Baines' footprint in spilled dirt; in Brighton Rock, it is a phonograph record made by Pinky for his new bride, Rose. Both "villains," tortured by their inability to love or be loved, experience "an odd sort of mercy" that "looks like punishment."

The Fallen Idol and Brighton Rock are showing as a double feature at Film Forum through Tuesday, September 1.

Housekeeping.

I've spent a number of the past 48 hours, including some that ended at 3 am, with Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping, a book recommended to me by Elizabeth Castelli some time ago that finally rose to the top of my reading pile. (EC's also responsible for some other wonderful consumptions of mine lately, including The Edge of Heaven, a movie about Turkish Germans and Margaret Atwood's Cat's Eye which I've shamefully never read.)

3 am is not a common hour for me. I failed to properly monitor my coffee consumption yesterday and after too many cups too late in the day from the new cafe, Fort Defiance, around the corner, I was propelled by Robinson's beautiful, mesmerizing sentences into sleeplessness.

Housekeeping is a book about water. And the poignancy of disappearances. And cold fingers and women, from little girls to old grandmothers to rifting sisters. It's about the curl of a feather and the sound of shifting wood, about the pull to and away from societal expectations, about seeping cold, morphing histories and quiet loyalties. It is a book that I finished and immediately began again.

To convince you of the value of Robinson's sentences, I include in some of the sentences for which I dog-eared pages:

"That is to say that she conceived of life as a road down which one traveled, an easy enough road through a broad country, and that one's destination was there from the very beginning, a measured distance away, standing in the ordinary light like some plain house where one went in and was greeted by respectable people and was shown to a room where everything one had ever lost or put aside was gathered together, waiting." p. 10

"Time and air and sunlight bore wave and wave of shock, until all the shock was spent, and time and space and light grew still again and nothing seemed to tremble, and nothing seemed to lean. The disaster had fallen out of sight, like the train itself, and if the calm that followed it was not greater than the calm that came before it, it had seemed so." p. 15

"I saw the three of us posed in all he open doors of an endless train of freight cars - innumerable, rapid, identical images that produced a flickering illusion of both movement and stasis, as the pictures in a kinetoscope do. The hot and dangerous winds of our passing tattered the Queen Anne's lace, and yet, for all the noise and clatter and headlong speed, we flickered there at the foot of the garden while the train roared on and on." p. 50

"I do not think Sylvie was merely reticent. It is , as she said, difficult to describe someone, since memories are by their nature fragmented, isolated, and arbitrary as glimpses one has at night through lighted windows." p. 53

"She seemed to dislike the disequilibrium of couunterpoising a roomful of light against a worldful of darkness. Sylvie in a house was more or less like a mermaid in a ship's cabin. She preferred it sunk in the very element it was meant to exclude." p. 99

"But the lake at our feet was plain, clear water, bottomed with smooth stones or simple mud. It was quick with small life, like any pond, as modest in its transformations of the ordinary as any puddle. Only the calm persisitence with which the water touched, and touched, and touched, sifting all the little stones, jet, and white, and hazel, forced us to remember that the lake was vast, and in league with the moon (for no sublunar account could be made of its shimmering, cold life.)" p. 112

And a last:

"I knew why Sylvie felt there were children in the woods. I felt so, too, though I did not think so. I sat on the log pelting my shoe, because I knew that if I turned however quickly to look behind me the consciousness behind me would not still be there, and would only come closer when I turned away again. Even if it spoke just at my ear, as it seemed often at the point of doing, when I turned there would be nothing there. In that was it was persistent and teasing and ungentle, the way half-wild, lonely children are. This was something Lucille and I together would ignore, and I had been avoiding the shore all that fall, because when I was by myself and obviously lonely, too, the teasing would be much more difficult to disregard. Having a sister or a friend is like sitting at night in a lighted house. Those outside can watch you if they want, but you need not see them. You simply say, 'Here are the perimeters of our attention. If you prowl around unde rthe windows till the crickets go silent, we will pull the shades. If you wish us to suffer your envious curiosity, you must permit us not to notice it.' Anyone with one solid human bond is that smug, and it is the smugness as much as the comfort and safety that lonely people covet and admire."

You can find more on Robinson here and here.

Kathryn Harrison's The Kiss.

I was fortunate enough to catch "The Art of the Memoir," a panel of memoirists moderated by Leonard Lopate, at the 92nd Street Y in Manhattan on February 15th. Of the four panelists, David Carr (The Night of the Gun), Kathryn Harrison (The Kiss), Phillip Lopate (The Art of the Personal Essay), and David Henry Sterry (Master of Ceremonies), I was most taken by Kathryn Harrison's comments on memoir writing. (The event would have greatly benefitted from fewer panelists and a tighter moderator's reign. Carr and Harrison would have been enough to carry the event.) It took me a while, but this week, I finally sat down to read The Kiss.

And this is the thing with Harrison's book. It's called The Kiss. And it's about an incestuous relationship she had with her father. This huge ick factor kept me from running at the book with enthusiasm. And yet, now that I have read it, I am haunted by the dream-like way in which Harrison tells the story. She moves through time and emotion, through the difficult and heartbreaking relations with her parents, through her horror of separating from familial damage, on the sheer power of her writing skills. Not everyone has the stomach to read a memoir about incest. I can't recommend you make the attempt to read The Kiss strongly enough. After reading this book, I have faith that any story, no matter how emotionally complicated, can be told with the requisite skill.

Harrison's three other books are Poison, Exposure, and Thicker Than Water. I've added them all to my reading list.

The Blue Tattoo by Margot Mifflin

I met Margot Mifflin some months ago at a dinner following a reading by a friend from NYU and was immediately taken by her bright wit and ringing curiosity. We talked about tattoos and I was excited to learn that she was working on a book about a young pioneer woman named Olive Oatman, whom I had never heard of, captured by Indians in 1851 and willingly tattood on the chin.

Mifflin's book is now out in hard cover and I was able to catch her reading here in Brooklyn last Tuesday. Mifflin retells Oatman's story, quite popular throughout the late 1800s, with exhaustive research and masterful storytelling. She works to correct the record about Oatman's tenure with the Mohave, releasing the story from the "savage Indian" rhetoric so prolific at the time, and by calling into question the facts of the story, hitherto unexamined, as well as the implications of Oatman's "marked" status as a woman returned to the white world.

At 14, during a trek West with her Mormon (Brewsterite) family, Oatman and her sister were captured by Yavapai Indians along the Gila River. The rest of the Oatman family were killed except for a brother, Lorenzo, who was left for dead. Olive and Mary Ann spent one year with the Yavapai, serving as slaves, and were then purchased by the Mohave Indians. Mary Ann died during their five year stay with the Mohaves but Olive was ransomed and returned. There is much evidence that Olive did not wish to return to the whites, that she was fully integrated in the soon-to-decline Mohave culture and that she had found there the family that she desired after her own was slaughtered by the Yavapai.

Oatman went on to be a popular subject of a book, ghost written by a controlling preacher with an agenda named Stratton, and a sought-after speaker on both her captivity and on Indian culture. At a time when feminine modesty was culturally dictated, she displayed her chin tattoo to audiences across the United States.

For a host of unfortunate reasons, I have stayed away from Indian and pioneer history and stories - with the necessary exception of Willa Cather. Mifflin's book helped me to see a need for correcting this omission.

Book!

Kathryn Joyce's new book is about to come out! You should read it!

Quiverfull: Inside the Christian Patriarchy Movement



“Kathryn Joyce's well-researched book delivers much more than a quiverfull of understanding about this movement that twists religion to justify keeping women barefoot, pregnant, and powerless. It's also a stark reminder why those who value reproductive justice must actively engage in politics and the public debate.” —Gloria Feldt, author of The War on Choice, Blogger at Heartfeldt Politics, former president, Planned Parenthood Federation of America

"’Prairie muffins,’ hayrides, and babies -- lots of babies -- don't sound like the stuff of fanaticism, but in Quiverfull Kathryn Joyce brings us the news from the most militant frontier of fundamentalism -- a patriarchy movement’ of right-wing women who embrace a caricature of 19th century womanhood as a strategy for culture war. At turns funny, terrifying, and heartbreaking, Quiverfull is a necessary book, an empathetic and brilliant analysis of how this small group of believers shape mainstream ideas about motherhood, marriage, sex and gender.” —Jeff Sharlet, author of The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power

"Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver."

I came across this quote somewhere in my death, grief and memory reading for the book and thought I would revisit Antigone, one of Sophocles (496 BC to 406 BC) remaining 7 plays (it is estimated that in his lifetime he wrote more than 120) and a study in the possibilities of grief, to find the exact context of the quote.

I've got two versions of Antigone on my shelves: The Complete Plays of Sophocles (Bantam, 1988, paperback), probably left over from college; and a Dover Thrift Editions Antigone (1993, also paperback) that I probably picked up to have something to read while traveling. I read through the first before bed one evening and was shocked by the mysogeny, the hubris of Creon's character, the wise, guiding voice of the chorus, and the sorrow of a conviction that ends in the death of three members of the Theban royal house. But I didn't find the quote I was looking for.

As the introductin says of Sir Richard Claverhouse Jebb's (1841 - 1905) translation, it "has the merit not only of extreme accuracy but also of maintaining a high formalism and dignity appropriate to Sophocles. Jebb's device for lending dignity to a prose version of stately poetry was to use archaism in vocabulary, wordforms, word order - in a word, to emulate the English of the King James Bible." I find this all a little suspect and - to use a word - British.

I switched to the Dover text, translated by Sir George Young (1837 - 1930), another turn-of-the-century Brit. The Dover edition preface says Sir George's translation, "is not only very accurate; it also preserves the feeling of the original Greek to a great extent. The verse forms are reasonable English equivalents; the diction - lightly archaic in the blank-verse dialogues, heightened and more involuted in the stanzaic choruses - admirably reflects the hieratic nature of Sophocles' drama." I still didn't find the quote; and to be more exact, I couldn't even find the equivalent of the quote I sought.

Although Antigone was written many years before Oedipus - which was composed when Sophocles was nearly 90 - the actions in the play take place after the fall of Oedipus and concern his four children, Antigone, Ismene, Eteocles and Polynices, and his wife Jocasta's brother, Creon, the ruler of Thebes in Oedipus' wake.

The play begins after a bloody battle for the rule of Thebes between Eteocles and Polynices, with the sons of Oedipus killing each other with simultaneous blows. Because Polynices is the invader, hoping to overthrow his briefly reigning brother, Creon declares to all citizens that the body of Polynices will go unburied and that defiance of this cree is punishable by death.

Because Antigone sees this as a criminal slight to the gods and to human dignity, she chooses to bury her brother to prevent birds and dogs from desecrating his body. (Here I have to think of the grief Antigone and her sister have suffered! First she finds out that her father, Oedipus, is also her brother, then her mother, Jocasta, kills herself, Oedipus is banished from the kingdom, then her two brothers kill each other in battle. That's a grief wallop.)

Proud Creon discovers that Antigone has betrayed his order and refuses to relent his sentence, though she is betrothed to his son Haemon. He orders her to be buried alive even though Haemon pleads for her life.

Antigone is the tragic figure here, not Creon. As the Bantam introduction notes, he is just sad. When one of the senators of the chorus asks Creon to bend for Antigone, he replies,

"Truly if here
she weild such powers uncensured, she is man,
I woman!"

When his son Haemon begs for reason, Creon says,

"Men that we are, must we be sent to school
To learn discretion of a boy like this?"

Proud.

Tiresias shows up, as he does in Oedipus, to talk some sense into the ruler. He predicts great death in the house of Creon and then quickly leaves. This news makes Creon see the light and he runs off to bury Polynices, then to release Antigone from her grave. But by the time he arrives at her cavern, she has already hung herself, her lover Haemon clings to her waist and wails. When he sees his father, he drives a knife through his chest.

Creon returns to the palace distraught, carrying the body of his son. Only to find that his wife, Eurydice, has already heard of the death of her only son and also killed herself after cursing him.

The Dover version is in verse, which I find gives the chorus, for instance, and Creon's wailing cries of guilt in the death of his son and wife more impact. Compare these passages:

Bantam:

Oh Hades, all-receiving, whom no sacrifice can appease. Have you no mercy for me? You herald of bitter evil tidings, what word are you uttering? Alas, I was already as dead, and you have smitten me anew! What are you saying, my son? What is this new message that you bring - woe, woe is me! - of a wife's doom, of slaughter heaped on slaughter?

Dover:

Woe is me again, for this new sorrow I see.

What deed is not done?
What tale is not told?
Thy body, O son,
These arms enfold -
Dead--wretch that I am! Dead, too, is the face these eyes
behold.

Ah, child, for thy poor mother! ah for thee!

Alas, I faint for dread!
Is there none will deal
A thrust that shall lay me dead
With the two-edged steel?
Ah woe is me!
I am all whelmed in utter misery!

Peter Manseau writes in his new novel, Songs for the Butcher's Daughter, "As the old Italian saying has it, Traduttore, Traditore. A translator is a traitor. With poetry it is even more complicated than that."

Unless we read Greek, any version of Antigone comes to us from the hand of a traitor.

In the NY Times today there is a review by Anita Gates of "Too Much Memory," an award-winning staging of Antigone currently at Fourth Street Theater here in Manhattan. I mean to see it before it closes on December 22. But I don't expect to hear the quote I am searching for.

Book Proposals and First Snow.

After a mellow and enjoyable evening with K and C in Astoria last night, I stepped out of their building at midnight to find that it had snowed. A thin crust of white lay on the roof and bed of my truck. By the time I reached the BQE it was gone; a shiny reflection in the orange light of flashing road signs warning of wet surfaces.

Yesterday was a good day. I had scratched out about 3000 words on the first draft of my book proposal, maybe 1200 of which were worth keeping. As K said, "That's a typical ratio, two to one." It was the thinking about the book that I had found so rewarding, the explanation of the project I have been monastically steeped in(another K insight) for the past year. I now have a much clearer idea of what I want it to be - and the discovery of this has taken me to some unanticipated readings. I've left behind the feel-good best sellers like Three Cups of Tea and Eat, Pray, Love and the less-selling chick travel books like A Journey of One's Own and Spriral Jetta.

My friend J wrote to me in August, "...I see (would see) it as an achievememnt if you got beyond 'good story' which means of course you would have to forfeit the big payout in Reader's Digest?!" I had been writing to him with so much self- and project- deprecation, relying on the quality of the material to keep me going("Well, it's a good thing the material is so good..."), that I forgot - or failed to articulate - my clear expectations for the book.

The books above, in my estimation, will not stand. Eat, Pray, Love has been on the NY Times best seller list for 96 weeks; Three Cups of Tea for 95. And yet, if you are one of the 12 people in the US who has not read them (beware your Christmas stocking!)they are both semi-interesting exercises in naval-gazing. (TCT was actually written by someone other than the angelic hero, Greg Mortenson which means a whole lot of gazing at someone else's naval.) You won't find anything deeper than the bland feel-good chattiness of say, an Oprah book club. Oh dear, EPL's Elizabeth Gilbert mentions masturbation and sex! but she does so in an easy and funny way that even my Aunt, living in Lancaster and attending church every Sunday, didn't find offensive. In other words, the writing in both is dishonest (and/or naive or unengaged) and flat. They're easy books that make middle-aged women feel like the world is a sweet place to be. Short chapters help too.

Don't get me wrong, finding yourself is important! Doing good things is good. And I would surely love to write a book that rides the best seller list for 90 weeks (I can dream!). But more importantly, I want this book, my book, to stand: To say something important about not just travel or child abuse or palliative care or victimization or death, but about living. I want it to live, shiny and bright and honest. Not pretty pink.

Someone I'm having a tiff with - ok, I'll come clean, my sister - recently emailed me her "personal philosophy" of "peace and love." I have no idea what "peace" and "love" mean in the complicated world we've got, a world that is sadly oversimplified by writers like Gilbert and Mortenson. We're commonly told that a good deed will save mankind, that treating others as we wish to be treated will bring about peace, that we must love others as we love ourselves. This is all new-agey, pseudo-Christian clap trap of the sort that we have been gobbling up from the self-help, corporate marketing spoon-feeders for ages. Tell it to a woman in Eastern Congo who has been systematically raped and see what it will get you. (Yes, I just demonstrated my bad attitude which is, as far as I can tell, the source of the tiff. Don't leave me alone with your houseguests!)

The world is relative, I know. My father's death from cancer doesn't compare to war in the Congo or the Holocaust, while for me it was horrible. But the world - and daily life - certainly doesn't demonstrate the peace and love that one would expect from watching Katie Couric cancer specials.

I want my book to be about living: not as we should live, but as we do live.

So I've left behind the books that I first approached when starting this project. If I am writing a travel memoir, I thought I should be reading Naipaul and Thoreaux. I've since left them behind to spout off into their bloated egotism or poor politics (really must get my hands on the new Naipaul bio by French!).

These days I'm reading some of the women who have been doing the heavy lifting for a while: the journalists who have been reporting on how we live for decades: Didion, Ehrenreich. In Welcome to Cancerland, Ehrenreich shreds the pink, feel-good culture of breast cancer patients, debunking it as a cult that fails to hold those responsible for breast cancer accountable, that fails to ask the necessary and difficult questions of the disease and its "industry".

When I get to the 10th chapter of my book about Rwanda and the necessary discussion of the aid industry in Africa, I know I can count on Ehrenreich to keep me free of sentimentality.

Other recent sources for me? Sophocles' Antigone. If you remember, her father, Oedipus, married her/his mother after killing his own father. He is banished from Thebes and his two sons kill each other in a duel for the throne. Eteocles is given an honorable burial while Creon, the new king, refuses to allow Polyneices to be buried. Antigone defies Creon's order and is, despite the pleas of Teiresias, the great seer, and the chorus of Theban elders ("Grief teaches the steadiest minds to waver.") sentenced to die. As the preface to my edition states, "Creon's lot is sad. Antigone's tragic."

Last night I read a lecture given by the Israeli writer, David Grossman, author of See Under: LOVE. The lecture discusses, among other things, how he came to write the book after discovering the work of Bruno Schulz. Grossman says:

Because reading Schulz's stories gave me the feeling that in general we experience our lives mainly as they disappear from us - when we are old, when we lose our bodily force, when we lose family members and close friends. And then we say to ourselves, well, there was something here once and now it's gone. And the heart stops for a moment, alas. We've captured this just when it's lost to us.

About Israel, the Shoah, and victimization:

And when history suggests to us the rare opportunity to stop merely surviving, and to begin to live our life by making use of the enormous military power that we have gathered, and to use it to create a political solution that is strong and generous - we are unable to do this with the initiative and courage required. We prefer vacillation, which ultimately brings us back to the life that isn't life, but just surviving from catastrophe to catastrophe. Surviving, in its paradoxical way, is likely to expose us, in fact, to the danger of death.

Peace on A Reading.

On Friday night I made it out through the steady rain to Peace on A, a poetry reading series that Thom Donovan hosts in his second floor apartment on Avenue A in the East Village. Two featured poets gave readings from new or forthcoming books.

Stacy Szymaszek read from "Orizaba: A Voyage with Hart Crane" (Faux Press) and Sam Truitt read from "Vertical Elegies: Three Works" (UDP, 2008).

As most of you know, I don't make it out to readings very often. Friday night was a certain treat. For photos and more information, click here.

An Unreview of a Review of a Book I Haven't Read.

A friend recently gave me a copy of Rick Perlstein's new book, "NIXONLAND: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America". I haven't cracked the book yet but George Will's review of it on tomorrow's cover of the NYT Book Review (I have home delivery) gives me reasons not to.

Will, a columnist for the Washington Post (WaPo in webspeak) and Newsweek, reported on the Nixon white house back in the day. When asked by the book review staff how Nixon fits "into the larger story of modern conservatism" Will answers, "He doesn't. His tenure was an empty parenthesis." Ouch for Perlstein; that's pretty much the premise of the book.

Perlstein's big book prior to this one was "Before the Storm: Barry Goldwater and the Unmaking of the American Concensus". Seems he's got a theme: We were once not so divided a nation. And our current divide, still raw, has its sources.

You hear a lot about Goldwater these days as we grind through what the Democratic Party hopes is the bitter end of the presidential nomination campaign. Hillary Clinton was famously a Goldwater girl in 1964, a point that Obama supporters bring up to prove her right wing bent, and that everyone brought up when she was campaigning in Alabama to negate her claims of support of Martin Luther King.

Obama's campaign has been compared to Goldwater's repeatedly. The enthusiasm, the electoral map, the throngs of volunteers, and the use of new technology as an effective campaigning tool have reminded many of Goldwater's 1964 campaign for the white house which saw large numbers of young people mobilized by his message. He may have lost the campaign but those mobilized voters were ready for the next election.

Barry Goldwater was a major general in the Air Force and a five term Senator from Arizona (he preceeded John McCain) before he ran for the presidency against Lyndon Johnson. In his opposition to New Deal policies he is credited with the resurgence of the conservative movement that later brought Reagan to the presidency. Goldwater opposed Johnson's social policies and was strongly against unions, the welfare program and big government. But he lost soundly to Johnson in 1964 and in the 1980s even condemned the Christian Right for it's positions on abortion and gay rights.

An aside: Phyllis Schlafly, the contested candidate for an honorary degree from Washington University, wrote her first book, "A Choice, Not an Echo" on Goldwater, attacking liberal republicans.

One of Goldwater's legacies, many claim, is turning the traditionally Democratic south over to the Republicans; indeed the south has remained a Republican stronghold ever since with some few exceptions like Carter. Hence the hoopla over Obama's recent big win in North Carolina (not to say, as the Clinton campaign does, that presidential candidate races go the way that primaries do).

But that's Goldwater and I started off with Perlstein's Nixonland. Will writes:

"In Perlstein's mental universe, Nixon is a bit like God - not, Lord knows, because of Nixon's perfect goodness and infinite mercy, but because Nixon is the explanation for everything. Or at least for the rise of the right and the decline of almost everything else."

Why does Will praise his Goldwater book but not "the second installment of Perlstein's meditation on that era's and, he thinks, our current discontents," Nixonland? Among the criticisms are, "too engergetic", his language has caught "the 60's disease of rhetorical excess", the narrative is "pell-mell" and "piles up jejune incongruities", and "calls to mind a Pieter Bruegel painting of tumultuous peasants." Say what?

But, most importantly to Will, Perlstein misses the big point: "Having cast the Nixon story as a psychodrama, Perlstein has no need to engage the ideas that were crucial to conservativism's remarkably idea-driven ascendency, ideas like the perils of identity politics and the justice of market allocations of wealth and opportunity." Because he "dwells on motives" and compares our current political divide, comparably, to the turbulent, "boiling", violent 60s that voted for Nixon.

"So exquisitely sensitive are Americans today, they worked themselves into a lather of disapproval when Hillary Clinton said that Lyndon Johnson as well as Martin Luther King was important in enacting civil rights legislation." In other words, we're way left these days and no longer fighting the divides.

Yes, as he points out, a woman and an African American are running for president, but I don't think we're as far left as he does. Perlstein is one year younger than I am and comes to the book without the history that Will has. Is this view of Nixon generational? Is there no mention of the Christian right and their devastating influence on human rights, foreign policy, and women's rights in all of this? There is a divide so do we have to be relative to be worried about it?

I guess I might have to read the book now after all, "pell-mell" be damned. The Right still scares me, or rather, the Right scares me more than ever. One read of Katha Pollitt's Backlash Spectacular and the brink nature of women's rights alone will make you look at the Obama campaign with great expectation. Of course we want answers.

Jeff Sharlet on NBC News Tonight.

Jeff Sharlet's book, The Family, which I mention in a previous entry, was featured in a segment by Andrea Mitchell tonight on NBC Nightly News. You can view the clip here.

Jeff's been researching this book for years and knows more about their history or "works" than anyone.

The segment goes a long way in introducing the reach and duration of the organization in Washington but unfortunately doesn't hit the proper emphases that are necessary to make the public pay attention. Commonly both the media and the viewing public glaze over when religion comes up. The idea that religion is a personal issue and that religion is a good thing, bringing people under the umbrella of a loving and caring morality, make many disinterested or even overly tolerant.

This organization is Jesus to the core, but the way they use Jesus' teachings and the cover that faith plays for a more central objective of power is misleading. The current campaign climate, with discussions of Obama's pastor still whirling in heads, also drags down what I think is the central story here.

What the segment fails to do is convey the "good works around the world" that the Family is doing. Their international reach has proved disasterous in various international arenas, particularly on the African continent. Mitchell fails to look into how the organization survives financially, disregarding a lead into the story that would give it more teeth. Is Hillary Clinton a contributor? Who is contributing to The Family? How does The Family influence domestic policy? What is The Family's objective? And why all the secrecy?

Hillary's campaign is given a chance to respond to her relationship with The Family (mentioned by the former First Lady in her book) and she uses it to dig at Obama's relationship with his minister by saying, "He is not her minister", refering to Doug Coe, the central figure in the segment. Of course he isn't, she's a Methodist. Using the narrow discussion of religious influences here only distracts from the difficult-to-explain power that The Family weilds in Washington. There is a world of difference between a lone minister in a baptist church and the breadth, reach and power of this organization.

There are racial undertones to how big the Wright story was - a point that will be proven if the media and the public don't jump on Coe's Hitler and Mao stories with the same vigor.

Here are a few of the articles you can read to learn more about The Family:

Harper's, March 2003
Mother Jones, September 2007
The Nation, March 2008

You can get Jeff's book here.

For more information, google Jeff Sharlet and The Family.

If you don't read carefully, you can fall into the dismissive attitude that this all sounds crazy. You can tell yourself that in a Democracy like ours influential people are voted into power and ethically and equally represent a very diverse population that ascribes to a host of beliefs and political views. Read carefully! Our government needs a lot of light and our failure to recognize this has done a world of damage these past few decades.

From Vows, by Peter Manseau

One of the mothers would always see you if you went for the door, so the escape tactic that worked for me was to slump lower and lower in the big dining room chair until I was entirely under the table. Hidden by the curtain of the tablecloth, I'd be free to dig into my pockets for pieces of the miniature magic kit that at the time was my favorite toy. The best trick involved an orange plastic box into which a nickel would be placed. I would snap the lid on top, shake the box so I could hear the coin rattle inside, then take the lid off and - abracadabra, hocus pocus - the money was gone.

Hocus Pocus - a bit of fake Latin, I would later learn, a medieval parody of Hoc est corpus meum, the ritual words of transubstantiation, the spell for which my parents' friends now waited. Magic above the table, magic below.

"This is my body," I would hear Dad say. "This is my blood."

Vows: The Story of a Priest, a Nun, and Their Son, by Peter Manseau, (Free Press, 2005)

A Great Scary Read.

Speaking of friends who write scary things:

Jeff Sharlet has a new book coming out: The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power.

Read about it here.
Order it here.

Some comments about Jeff and his book:

"The stupidest of their students become journalists… [such as] Jeff Sharlet.”
-- Ann Coulter, writing on liberal professors in Godless.

"Of all the important studies of the American right, The Family is undoubtedly the most eloquent. It is also quite possibly the most terrifying. This story of a secretive and unmerciful church of "key men" goes way beyond Jesus Christ, CEO—it's Jesus Christ, lobbyist; Jesus Christ, strikebreaker; and maybe even Jesus Christ, fuhrer."
--Thomas Frank, author of What's the Matter with Kansas?

"This is a gripping, utterly original narrative about an influential evangelical elite that few Americans even know exists. Jeff Sharlet's fine reporting unveils a group whose history stretches from the corporate foes of the New Deal to the congressional lawmakers who gather each year at the National Prayer Breakfast. The 'Christian Right' will never look the same again." --Michael Kazin, author of A Godly Hero: the Life of William Jennings Bryan and The Populist Persuasion: An American History

The Poem of a Life.

A few weeks ago I got my eager hands on Mark Scroggin's new biography of Louis Zukofsky, The Poem of a Life. It's a giant book, coming in at nearly 500 pages and representing more than five years of research and labor; but then Zukofsky is a giant subject.

I was introduced to Zukofsky's poetry while a student at Shippensburg University in the late 80s and early 90s by the brilliant poet and professor John Taggart (who receives a nod in Scroggins' acknowledgements). Taggart's dissertation, "Intending a Solid Object: A Study in Objectivist Poetics", was an early and seminal look at the writings of George Oppen and Zukofsky. At the 2004 Louis Zukofsky Centennial Conference at Columbia University, I was briefly introduced to Scroggins by Taggart - which is how I knew that this biography was on the way.

While Scroggins' writing is so far (I'm about a fifth of the way through) about as stiff as his author photo on the back inside jacket cover, the book is thorough and well noted. To my knowledge this is the first comprehensive biography of Zukofsky.

While I am excited to see a big book on Zukofsky on the shelves of Barnes and Noble's stores, I wish that Scroggins weren't the first to make the introduction to the "general reading public". He does an admirable job of summarizing the happenings in Zukofsky's life and while I think he probably accurately characterizes the great poet, he fails to adequately and appropriately address Zukofsky's work.

Of course, Zukofsky had a quiet life so to write a biography about him, as I think Zukofsky would agree, one must write about his poetry. Scroggins tries but misses. It reads like a book by an academic. What I want is a book by a poet. That, unfortunately, Scroggins is not.