Errantry: Novak's Journal

Personal/Theological Notebook: Scattered; Trinity for Intro; Sci-Fi Action Dreams; Jessica Watson

2009-11-21T05:17:25Z

I've been kind of scattered this week, I suppose. I haven't been able to concentrate very easily, other than on going over my preps for teaching and re-reading the relevant material. I got a bit bogged down in some grading because many my students seemed to have gotten flighty while I was in Canada and decided to start interpreting their writing assignments as asking them solely about their personal thoughts on a subject and to ignore the relevant reading, and so that resulted in a lot of comment-writing of a sort I hadn't expected this late in the semester.

We are peaking in the course right now, with respect to my course intentions, as we are doing our most sustained examination of the Christian understanding of God. After they've gotten so much background data from Jewish and Christian scriptures, and a sizable variety of selections of later Christian theology and spirituality, now that we are (chronologically) in the Middle Ages, I figure they are ready for some sustained exploration of the Trinity. So, for my Introduction To Theology students, that means two days to read and discuss C.S. Lewis's Beyond Personality, or First Steps in the Doctrine of the Trinity, which is still even chronologically appropriate as Lewis's text is a masterful cribbing and 20th century restatement of Augustine and Thomas Aquinas on the Trinity. Much of that work is actually given over to a discussion of spirituality, as the idea of God being three eternal Persons in perfect Relationship – hence "God is Love" – is at the core of Christian understanding of humanity and the universe, as well. Then we move on to the experiential perspective on the Trinity with a selection from Julian of Norwich's Showings or Revelations of Divine Love, to be followed with an art history angle of examination on the Trinity, focused largely on Masaccio's fresco of the Trinity in Santa Maria Novella in Florence.

I don't know that it has anything to do with feeling scattered, but I've had the most astonishing run of very vivid dreams for several nights running, after what I suppose are months of not usually remembering much or being struck by much in my dreams. I'm back to having tons of action-adventure movie dreams, with one unlikely scenario after another taking me through post-apocalyptic struggle for survival, taking on the rogue soldiers holding me and several others hostage, rewiring common household appliances into sci-fi weapons in order to stop a superhuman threat bearing down on me and my people (think the original Star Trek pilot "Where No Man Has Gone Before," with Mike turning pitchers of lemonade and toasters into molecular singularity bombs), and going up against a vampire-like cult of cultural elites bent on economic and world domination (Scientology meets the World Bank, I suppose). On Monday, I was on such an adrenaline rush upon waking up (about to rush a group of three during the hostage crisis dream) that I don't think the energy faded until about the time I was done with both my classes. If I was someone who just watched movies like this all the time, I could understand it, but there you go. Keeps me laughing, just to think of it.

Had some talk with Jessica the other night at Starbucks, hearing the latest on the coming-together of the wedding plans for January and talking some about graduate school. She wants to follow up on that in some more detail, as she is sketching out what seems to be to be a personally-broadening and sensible plan to do a Master's degree in Philosophy and then to do a doctorate in Theology. Since she and Nathan together require a VA hospital for him, as he's been assigned to the VA as an engineer for the Army, and a significant graduate program for her, Marquette and Duke are current contenders for being where there are both.

I do know that one distraction I have quite enjoyed has been checking in on Jessica Watson's blog, as the Australian 16 year-old seeks to become the youngest person to ever do a non-stop solo circumnavigation of the world. In a way, as I am looking ahead to the next lesson for my students, her blog and website strike me as similar to Julian of Norwich's text in giving us an eyewitness account of a most extra-ordinary experience. There's a very good chance I will never become any better sailor than I am, having only once helped sail anything more complicated than a Sunfish, and all of that on Midwestern lakes. But I recognize the attraction. And to read the earnest account by this young woman who clearly loves everything that she's doing in her adventure: that's still a notable experience for me, despite being entirely vicarious. She's one month into an eight or nine-month journey, having made it from Sydney to just crossing the equator yesterday, and I am quietly enthralled to be watching, thanks to the modern communications miracles of satellite internet uplinks.

Theological Notebook: A Few Pieces on Faith and the Arts

2009-11-13T07:29:35Z

One of the clear and sensible assessments reported in the book review of Theodore Ziolkowski's Modes of Belief: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief that I read in the latest issue of Commonweal (as I reported doing on my journey to Montreal) was from a comparison the reviewer made to Charles Taylor's recent masterpiece A Secular Age. (The reviewer was Richard A. Rosengarten, Dean and Associate Professor of Religion and Literature at the University of Chicago Divinity School.) There he noted that:

... Taylor argues that, in modernity, how we think about art shifts from imitation or inheritance to creation, from a shared set of common reference points to the expression of an individual sensibility. Poetics, therefore, reflects not public meaning but private expression. Art in turn becomes a separate form of expression rather than an integral function of religion or politics. While Ziolkowski would recognize the shift Taylor describes from art as imitation to art as creation, Modes of Faith underscores in impressive detail the role of individual sensibility in contemporary art. Ziolkowski shows how that sensibility remains not separate from religion but deeply engaged with it. For Ziolkowski, the modern negotiation of various claims to meaning has complicated religiosity – but it also seems to have deepened it.

These observations have been bouncing around in my head. I had long noticed, and been frustrated by, art's turn to the individual that Taylor mentioned, which more and more seems to me to have bogged art down with biography or individual perspective in ways that leave art less communal, and more in danger of slipping into self-absorption. Ziolkowski's observation makes for a useful balance lest I get pessimistic on the point, although a number of his case studies seem to suffer from all the flaws of modernity's tendency of "do-it-yourself" spirituality where people waste an awful lot of time "re-inventing the wheel" because of loss of any real understanding of the Jewish and Christian spiritual legacy. It is in the context of thinking about all this that I notice a few articles regarding the Vatican and the arts. The articles are newspaper-y, and therefore really basic, but they do point in a limited way to the intentional engagement between faith and art that's going on even at the top of the Church's hierarchy.

Reconcilable differences: The church reaches out to modern arts
Vatican says 262 artists accept invitation for meeting with pope

Reconcilable differences: The church reaches out to modern arts
By Carol Glatz
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Once made in heaven, the marriage between art and the church has long been on the skids.

"We are a bit like estranged relatives; there has been a divorce," said Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture.

Much of contemporary art walked away from art's traditional vocation of representing the intangible and the mysterious, as well as pointing the way toward the greater meaning of life and what is good and beautiful, he said during a Vatican press conference Nov. 5.

And the church has spent the past century "very often contenting itself with imitating models from the past," rarely asking itself whether there were religious "styles that could be an expression of modern times," he added.

In an effort to "renew friendship and dialogue between the church and artists and to spark new opportunities for collaboration," he said, Pope Benedict XVI will be meeting more than 250 artists from around the world Nov. 21 inside one of the world's most stunning artistic treasures: the Sistine Chapel.

The church's attempts to heal this rift with the world of modern arts span back to Pope Paul VI, who said the troubled relationship between the church and artists was based on misunderstandings and past restrictions on expression that had been removed.

Pope Paul loved art and saw an urgent need to encourage contemporary artists to reclaim their spiritual mission.

He held a landmark meeting with artists in the Sistine Chapel in 1964 and told them they were precious to the church for their "preaching and rendering accessible and comprehensible -- or better still, moving -- the world of the spirit, of the invisible, of the ineffable, of God."

The pope set up a collection of paintings, sculptures and graphic art to show how modern culture could still convey religious concepts. He inaugurated the Vatican's Collection of Modern Religious Art in 1973, which contains works by Henri Matisse, Pablo Picasso, Wassily Kandinsky and Edvard Munch.

Pope John Paul II, an accomplished actor, poet and playwright long before becoming a priest, eagerly continued Pope Paul's rapprochement.

He issued a papal letter to artists in 1999 in an effort to "consolidate a more constructive partnership between art and the church."

He sought to exalt artistic endeavors and urged artists and entertainers to steer clear of "empty glory or the craving for cheap popularity" or easy profit.

Artistic gatherings and events have been a common occurrence at the Vatican.

In the decades of Pope John Paul's pontificate, it was not unusual to see all sorts of popular art forms employed. In 2004, for example, Polish break dancers spun on their heads on the marble floors of the Vatican's sumptuous Clementine Hall to the pope's apparent delight while music blared from a boombox.

Pope John Paul met with countless stars from the entertainment industry, and reminded them of their responsibility to be positive role models, "capable of inspiring trust, optimism and hope."

While Pope Benedict XVI is an avid pianist and has spoken numerous times about the importance of beauty and art, he tends to shy away from raucous encounters.

In fact, the pope, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, wrote in 1998 that he had been skeptical of the idea of Pope John Paul sharing the stage in 1997 with a group of rock and pop stars that included Bob Dylan.

"They had a message that was completely different from the one the pope was committed to," then-Cardinal Ratzinger wrote. He said he wondered whether "it was really right to let these types of 'prophets' intervene."

While it is not clear who made the decision, the Vatican discontinued its annual Christmas concert under Pope Benedict's watch after a 13-year run.

The concert series, which featured well-known international stars each year, had been marred by a controversy in 2003 when the U.S. pop singer Lauryn Hill stunned the audience in 2003 by asking church leaders to "repent" and speaking of the pain of those abused by priests. It was feared other artists might use their opportunity on a Vatican stage to promote their own personal agendas.

Instead Pope Benedict eagerly attends many of the classical concerts held in his honor.

He will even be featured on a new CD singing and reciting Marian hymns and prayers. The CD, called "Alma Mater," will be released worldwide Nov. 30 by Geffen Records. A similar CD of Pope John Paul reciting the rosary in Latin became an instant hit in 1994.

Pope Benedict has said the church's ancient treasure of liturgical music should not be frozen in time, but should evolve with appropriate modern-day adaptations.

What is important is that it represents "holiness, true art and universality" and stirs the hearts of its listeners, letting them experience "the same intimacy of the life of God," he told staff and students of the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music in 2007.

Pope Benedict has said art needs to help people see that authentic truth, beauty and goodness are always intertwined and needs to allow "the beauty of the love of God" to shine through.

The human spirit longs for authentic -- not superficial and fleeting -- beauty that is "in full harmony with the truth and goodness," he has said.

Archbishop Ravasi expanded on that notion at the Nov. 5 press conference when he said art has always had an ethical and transformative role.

He said the world needs artistic expression that lifts people above and beyond "the dust of our own existence and helps us live better."

Vatican says 262 artists accept invitation for meeting with pope
By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service

VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- More than 260 painters, sculptors, dancers, actors, playwrights, musicians, architects and other artists have accepted a Vatican invitation to meet Nov. 21 with Pope Benedict XVI.

The gathering under Michelangelo's frescoes in the Sistine Chapel will bring the artists together to mark the 10th anniversary of Pope John Paul II's letter to artists and the 45th anniversary of Pope Paul VI's meeting with artists.

With the help of an international committee, the Vatican chose 500 artists from around the world to invite to the gathering. The invitations were based on leadership in their fields and not on their religious backgrounds, said Archbishop Gianfranco Ravasi, president of the Pontifical Council for Culture.

Because of scheduling conflicts, travel and the fact that the Vatican is not offering any type of compensation for their time, the vast majority of those who accepted the invitation are Italian, the archbishop said.

At a press conference Nov. 5, the council said it had received confirmation of participation by 262 artists. They included: Indian sculptor Anish Kapoor; U.S. installation artist John David Mooney; Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid; French writer and actress Florence Delay; Irish poet Ciaran O'Coigligh; U.S. video artist Bill Viola; Canadian pianist Angela Hewitt; Italian tenor Andrea Bocelli; U.S. actor F. Murray Abraham; and Algerian film director Rachid Benhadj.

Archbishop Ravasi said that while some of the invitees had not replied as of Nov. 5, all of those who sent regrets explained they did so because of previous engagements and not for ideological reasons.

The archbishop said he had high hopes that Bono, the lead singer of U2, would be able to make the audience, but the Irish musician said previous commitments would prevent his attendance.

The artists will be given a tour of the Vatican Museums' gallery of modern religious art Nov. 20. Afterward, they will be able to socialize with each other at a reception in the museums sponsored by the Italian beverage company Martini & Rossi, said Msgr. Pasquale Iacobone, a staff member of the council.

The meeting with the pope Nov. 21 will take place in the Sistine Chapel and will begin with a "musical interlude": the performance by the Sistine Chapel choir of a motet by the 16th-century composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, Msgr. Iacobone said.

Pope Benedict will address the artists and will listen with them to another Palestrina motet, he said.

After the pope leaves, he said, the artists will return to the Vatican Museums for another reception and Archbishop Ravasi will personally give each artist a gift from the pope: a medal coined especially for the occasion.

Theological Notebook: Augustine, Vienna Teng, The Dark Night of the Soul, and Modernity

2009-11-11T01:40:29Z

Huh. I just had a thought. A Thought, if I be flamboyant enough to capitalize it. I've been unpacking after a tiring separation from my luggage for a day, resulting in me just getting it a little while ago.

In the background is Vienna Teng's oddly exultant "Augustine," which, as I mentioned earlier, had been the occasion for my and Mike's speaking to her a little after her concert in Milwaukee last month. The lyrics led me to think something about the phenomenon of undergoing a spiritual crisis – something that we do more than once in our lives. In the great saints and spiritual masters – as we see stetched out over a decade in Augustine himself, as related in his amazing Confessions – such spiritual crises end not in the defeat of faith, hope or love, but in sometimes astonishing transformations in grace. "The Dark Night of the Soul" and "the silence of God" are phenomena that one finds throughout spiritual experience, as far back as the Jewish prophets themselves.

And then here was my Thought: spiritual literature and scholarship has explored this "Dark Night" experience of feeling only an absence of God, and it is pretty sensibly understood, I think, by those wise in spiritual matters. But it just struck me that that is always dealt with in an individualistic manner: of speaking of God as interacting with an individual person for their spiritual benefit. What if, I suddenly thought, you could look at this as a social phenomenon as well? We speak of Modernity as a time of the fading of religion and highly-developed spirituality in the face of Secularistic philosophical movements like the European Enlightenment. But what if you could look this experience as a social or corporate experience of something similar to the "Dark Night" experience? I frequently speak in my Theology classes of the development of spiritual sensibilities on a corporate level: of the individual, almost childlike, spiritual encounter with God in the revelation to Abraham; of the development in Moses of the giving of the Law to the people of Israel, like a child gaining rules and chores as part of their development; and of the development after the revelation in Christ and Pentecost to young adulthood, of being sent out into the world with your own responsibilities for transforming it.

Well, I thought, what if one looked at Modernity and its challenges to faith as akin, on a societal level, to the individual experience of the "dark night of the soul" and that experience of the absence of God, with all its potential threats and benefits to spiritual growth? I've never heard an analysis of this sort. While I see obvious problems with it – it certainly indulges in generalization, of course – I still wonder whether such an exploration might be an interesting exercise in a kind of spiritual historiography. I've always found compelling the analogy that God relates to humanity through history like a parent or teacher, back since I found that argument or observation in Irenaeus of Lyon and his explanation of why God's approach to Israel or the Church or humanity seems to change and develop through history. On a personal level, the "Dark Night" experience is so critical for developing to a deeper level in faith, so why not the possibility of exploring that possibility on a wider, corporate level, too?

(Now if only it didn't take half an hour to type out an idea like that....)

Theological Notebook/Personal: AAR Sprint Day

2009-11-09T03:07:03Z

Utterly exhausted. An unbelievably long and full day, with lots of superstar names.

900-1130 – Rethinking Secularism a panel with Charles Taylor of McGill University, José Casanova of Georgetown University, Saba Mahmood of Berkeley, and Craig Calhoun of New York University
1145-1245 – Contemporary Islam: The Meaning and the Need of a Radical Reform Tariq Ramadan of Oxford University
100-230 – James H. Cone being interviewed by Cornel West
300-430 – The Commission on Reasonable Accommodation in Québec: Reflections with Co-chairs Dr. Charles Taylor and Dr. Gerard Bouchard
430-500 – A conversation with Professor Greer Anne Wenh-In Ng of the Toronto School of Theology, who I met sitting next to me during the previous presentation, on the subject of Canadian multiculturalism and interculturalism
500-630 – Scriptural Reasoning Group: The Other Within and Without: In Loving Memory of Michael Signer a panel featuring papers and readings from Signer, my Judaism professor at Notre Dame who recently passed away, Peter Ochs of the University of Virginia, R. Kendall Soulen of Western Theological Seminary, Medhi Aminrazavi of the University of Mary Washington, and Steven D. Kepnes of Colgate University
630-700 – Further conversation with Michelle Peterson before saying our good-byes

Add to that my getting up well before dawn, a fabulous interview in the afternoon, and a room service pizza and I'm now going to keel over.

Theological Notebook/Personal: AAR; Michelle's Project and Mysticism; Ecclesiology Group

2009-11-08T09:35:35Z

The AAR conference is still giving me the impression that it did last year: unbelievably huge. It's much less personally engaging than other conferences I've been to: too big, too diverse, too much happening at once. It's sort of the Wal-Mart of academic conferences. If I recall correctly, it's something like 7000 in attendance, but that might be the numbers from before AAR split with SBL. Normally, the word "diverse" would be a positive one, but this is "diverse" in the way a student paper ought not to be: not enough unity and focus to give it much cohesion. Still, as a buffet or sample bar, it is interesting to be able to take in talks on just about everything, but conferences that are a little more thematically unified seem to be more able to grab my attention and imagination.

I ran into Michelle P., who I met years ago doing summer Master's classes in Spirituality at Notre Dame. I thought that I might see her again, as I had last year at the AAR in Chicago, and so we once again had a good hour or hour-and-a-half of catching up. She's launching into a Paul Ricour-based dissertation on a language of silence, so to speak, analyzing and articulating the raw experience of silence and of awareness of being itself, with a lot of engagement with Edith Stein and Martin Heidegger as part of it. I thought that sounded daring in itself, because it is so difficult to try to articulate such fundamental (and such non-vocal) experiences. It reminded me of a song-writing challenge Kevin and I imagined back during the Road Trip in 2000, when we were struck by the nature of the high-altitude quiet when we stopped along the top of the Beartooth Mountain Pass: to try to somehow capture this distinctive silence in music. That same irony seemed to be driving Michelle's project, whether in language or in music one would try to describe an experience of silence. But what else are we left with, as far as human tools go? Music seems the easier option to me, really, in being able to take refuge in metaphor and in emotion-bearing sounds beyond the scope of language. But I did think that Michelle was setting herself up for a great research agenda after finishing the dissertation in being able to take the language and tools of analysis that she is crafting and then turn those onto a variety of mystical texts that she can explore with those tools. It's easier to go into kataphatic mysticism – the mysticism of "stuff," of metaphor and image and mediation through things, ranging from nature to music to conversation to sacraments – than it is to go into apophatic mysticism, the mysticism of stillness, silence and negation. But both routes are equally valid and equally necessary in human mystical experience. Nor can you really separate them, I think, because even the most kataphatic of mystical experiences, like the sacrament of the Eucharist with its language, story, drama, ritual, bread and wine, always can lead one into an apophatic experience of silence and simple awareness of the presence of God in receiving the Eucharist.

I also ran into Gavril from our Department, who I had also last seen at last year's AAR, and caught up on his news a bit, as well as running into Marquette Professors Hughson, Schultenover, and my Doktorvater Fahey after the end of the afternoon's Ecclesiological Investigations session. I had sat talking with a Dr. Kim from Leeds Trinity University College at the end of that session, where the closing respondent to the papers presented had talked about the work of Ecclesiology having shifted from the older paradigm of being concerned primarily with the question of the relation of church and state, and now had moved to the relation of church and culture. We were both struck, though, that the way that this had been presented was in such a way as to basically reduce Ecclesiology to Missiology, or the study of mission or missions. While my own ecclesiological work is concerned with such activities as an outgrowth of spirituality, it really starts, as in the Second Vatican Council's Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, with a much more explicit interest in the Triune God, and only from there moves toward activity and spirituality. That is to say, it is a primarily theological ecclesiology. The respondent's concern with the use of the tools of the social sciences for ecclesiological work just made me wonder whether that would end in the reduction of ecclesiology to sociology, or sociological descriptions of church behaviours, which I don't think is the same thing as ecclesiology at all.

Anyway, it was exciting to see that the Ecclesiology section, which Fahey told me this summer was a relatively recent addition to the AAR, had gathered quite a large group in attendance. Even more interesting was to see how young and diverse that group was. The Scottish presider quipped about this in his closing comment, wondering aloud whether this indicated that the proclamations of a post-Christian culture might be premature.

Had a good interview today, very focused on my teaching skills and history. We most talked about teaching theology to a broad and diverse stretch of students: across religious, ethnic, educational, and age groups. In many ways, my experience at Saint Joe's was more useful background than my experience at Marquette, where I've had only a few non-traditional students, whereas in South Bend I also did some teaching for the diocese, with students thirty or forty years my senior. So it was a very comfortable, "shop-talk" sort of conversation, but she definitely kept me interested in the position.

So that's been the day, with all of its random conversation and stray activities, whether talking online education with a Pagan woman trying to set up an online Pagan seminary in California as we stood in line at a conference center coffeeshop downstairs in the Palais des congrès de Montréal, or whether venturing out a little while ago to a restaurant open in an alley in Chinatown for some late-night food.

Personal: Non-Fire Alarm, Meeting Trip

2009-11-07T10:31:21Z

Arg. False alarm fire alarm at 430am-ish. Really and for true. Dress and head down the stairs as the alarm turns off, with people coming out into the hallways asking if that's a fire alarm or not. (It was a bit more mild than most fire alarms.) Check at reception. They say that they think it's a false alarm, and they'll make an announcement if not.

Seriously.

As I promised, I ask for a key for the guy next door to me who had walked out and locked himself out of his room, standing in shorts, having realized by the time I asked that no one is going to give me a room key for someone else. (He totally freaked me out, as he looked like beard-version of PJ when he came out of his room.) So I head back up and send him down. He makes it back up with the key (having been asked for ID, which he didn't have) and we end up chatting in the hall half an hour. Cool young pastor named Trip, doing his Ph.D. in Philosophy of Religion/Metaphysics out at Claremont. He was laughing at how he ended up sitting by Ben Stein on his flight from LA to Cleveland, and then next to Cornel West from Cleveland to Montreal. So we talked programs and metaphysics for a bit, until we get tired again. And I type this out in case I think it's a dream in the morning. Well, later this morning.

Personal/Theological Notebook: Journey to Montreal; Dorothy Day

2009-11-07T05:28:18Z

Sooo wiped out. I arrived at 9pm to my hotel across from the convention center where the American Academy of Religion annual meeting is being held in Montreal, after leaving my Milwaukee apartment at 6:30am. It's been a long day. I just ate some room service food and I'm about ready to keel over. That said, though, I did enjoy the travel in many ways. My schedule has just been so busy that, even though I was being carted around the country, I felt like I sat down and was still through this day more than I have been in a long time. I worked my way through the AAR schedule for the first time, checking out sessions I might like to attend, if I can get much time away from interviews at the Job Center. Looking out the window while coming in to land at LaGuardia, I saw Lady Liberty and Manhattan for the first time since flying down the Hudson to transfer at Newark on my way back from Ireland in April 1999. I also saw part of the grounds of the 1939 World's Fair, which totally took me by surprise. Sitting in LaGuardia, waiting an hour and a half for my flight to Montreal (after an earlier four hour layover at O'Hare, the monotony of which was only broken up by a payphone call to Sophie [who nodded, apparently, more than talked], Leslie and Mom), I realized that that was my first time actually being in New York City, although I'm inclined to say it doesn't count, since I didn't actually get outside.

Cleaning out my jacket pockets of old oddments of paper, I found a flyer I had been handed with my ticket for Over The Rhine last month, and had never really seen. I was utterly dismayed to discover that last Sunday, The Swell Season played the Pabst Theatre. The Swell Season are Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, the duo from the incredible film Once, which I wrote about some months back. Seeing their show would have made a good dual birthday present for Dan and Amy, Amy having gifted me with the DVD for my own birthday, some time after I had shown them my borrowed copy of the film. Anyway. Arg! Double Arg!

Starting from my departure from O'Hare, I then worked my way through the latest issue of Commonweal, the 85th anniversary issue, which was perfectly engaging. There were great book reviews to read (Eamon Duffy's latest, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor, sounds fascinating, and I was almost equally intrigued by Theodore Ziolkowski's Modes of Faith: Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief. The article entitled "The Tightrope: Loyalty, Independence & the Catholic Press," by John Wilkins former editory of the London Tablet, was perhaps the best thing I've read on the need for an independent Catholic press.

Sidney Callahan wrote a column about a 1973 letter from Dorothy Day which she had recently re-discovered while cleaning out her old files while moving. There was a passage quoted I found fascinating, because of certain heretic suspicions I've been harbouring the last few years. Although I was raised in a household headed by a strong woman, making me assume that ideas like "equal pay for equal work" were just matters of simple justice and common sense, and although my education had me take the arguments of ideological feminism as equally simple matters-of-fact, I have increasingly come to suspect that feminism as a school of thought caused very little of the women's revolution of the 20th century, no matter how much it took credit for it. (Not unlike the Enlightenment philosophers virtually taking credit for the scientific revolution.) The more I look at social history, the more the worldwide shift in the status and opportunities for women seems to me to have been driven by the technological shifts in the 20th century. Thus my interest to read Day, who lived through all this as a most exceptional and aware woman, write, inviting Callahan to come to New York and speak on women's lib:

I feel badly at seeing formerly happy women friends, bitter and angry at all they have suddenly discovered they have suffered. And they get angry for me for not being angry.... Isn't anger a sin?

The women's history I have been particularly working on (and may design a course regarding) is medieval women's history, as background to looking at medieval women mystics, like Julian of Norwich, Hildegard von Bingen, and Catherine of Siena. Reading the great French medievalist Regine Pernoud, I was struck by how far the status of women had come by the High Middle Ages, and how much of that was quickly lost in early modernity with the embrace of Roman legal codes out of the Renaissance. But I was equally struck by Pernoud's accounts of contemporary women's resistance to these facts, and the realization that the ideological articulation of feminism in the later 20th century was willing to effectively denigrate actual women's history in order to preserve its own personal narrative as the ideological liberator of women. That's all too sweeping and over-stated, I'm sure, but that sort of thing was the first real insight that I had into 1960s-1970s feminism as not just a political or social movement, but as an ideological narrative. Of course, there is no single "feminism" any more, but it is interesting to see in Day a woman who was very much at the "cutting edge" of anything like the 20th century's movement for social justice for women, but who also recognized that period's feminist narrative as a particular narrative and declined to just sign off on the whole of it in the way most people did. Anyway, I'm so interested in the way ideas do drive events that I have to be extra-careful to watch for these other kinds of causal components in history.

Coming into Montreal, the city was all lite up, with the high-rise downtown impressively glowing like all big cities at night. I saw Saint Joseph's Oratory, all solemn and subdued on the far side of the big hill in the center of town, and remembered Chris Cox, CSC telling me my first stories of Brother Andre, back during my first year at Notre Dame, walking over to Moreau Seminary after a football game. I don't think I'll be able to make it over there, but it would be kind of flooring to see the walls lined with crutches and wheelchairs and all the tangible remains of people gifted with all the strange healings reported in his company.

Off to bed. Amen.

Personal: High School Dream with Evil Little Sister

2009-11-03T16:28:54Z

Heh. I woke up in an absolute snit from a dream where I was back in high school, in the days when my sister and I used to fight like the proverbial cats and dogs. For the very vivid duration of the dream, I was back in high school, where Leslie had dismissively informed me that she had taken my favourite sweater (a rich crimson knit sweater, which never existed in reality, although I now realize it reminds me of a rich purple sweater I wore at the time) and had shrunk it down to fit her because she thought it looked better on her. Naturally, I blew up because she did this without even asking me and was acting as though she had a perfect right to do so. I woke up wanting to shout something like, "You've got to be kidding me!" Then, after a breath to get my bearings and realize what was going on, busted out laughing.

Personal: Too Busy To Sleep Week; Jordan and Sanderson's "The Gathering Storm" Released

2009-10-31T21:06:35Z

Well, my head is still spinning from work, from the couple days' ache I always seem to get after getting the flu vaccine, from sleep deprivation, and from getting the last of the main applications all out. It's going to feel sweet just to settle back into regular writing with the dissertation.

But I do have to note that The Gathering Storm, the new volume of Robert Jordan's The Wheel of Time, posthumously published with the aid of Brandon Sanderson working from the notes and outlines Jordan left along with those chapters he had completed, is absolutely out of this world. Several threads of the story have come to their climax, and even when there was enough foreshadowing to make for a reasonable guess as to the way some plot point or other was going to be resolved, it still was nevertheless edge-of-your-seat action and drama. Seven stars on a five-point scale. It's just too bad my brother can't keep up with the reading: now that Joe's a dad (Nate's first birthday was on Thursday) he only gets time for a bit to read here and there, and so he (slightly) ruefully said on Thursday that he was only up to chapter eight by the time I had finished the volume. But that just means to get to extend the pleasure of reading it for the first time, so I don't think there's anything wrong with that....

I meant to pass my volume on to Mike last night when we all gathered at Dan and Amy's to celebrate Amy's birthday and to enjoy the company of Bob, who was back in town for another dissertation sprint, but I left it on the shelf when I rushed out the door. Mike was dismayed, as he thought it wasn't going to be released for a little while longer, yet, and so I ended up being a tease in that he could have had it "early," if only I had remembered. So I owe him one, there.

Random: Before Sunrise/Before Sunset articles

2009-10-28T12:17:09Z

Some interesting criticism articles I found online regarding Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise and Before Sunset.

Little space in between: preliminary notes on Before Sunrise
Love’s Moment: Before Sunrise and Before Sunset

Little space in between: preliminary notes on Before Sunrise

Author: Robin Wood
Date: Jan 1, 1996
Words: 6036
Publication: CineAction
ISSN: 0826-9866

"...You know, if there's any kind of god, it wouldn't be in any of us, not you, or me, but just...this little space in between. If there's any kind of magic in this world, it must be in the attempt of understanding someone, sharing something. I know, it's almost impossible to succeed, but who cares really?

The answer must be in the attempt..."

-- Julie Delpy in Before Sunrise

I knew, the first time I saw Before Sunrise, that here was a film for which I felt not only interest or admiration but love; a film I would want to revisit repeatedly over the years; one that would join the short list of films that remain constant favourites; and one that I would ultimately want to write about, as a means at once of exploring it more systematically and of sharing my delight in it with others--of finding that "magic" in the "attempt". I believe in the possibility of a `definitive' reading of a work only in the sense that it is definitive for myself at a certain stage of my evolution, that it `defines' not the work but my own temporary sense of it, the degree of contact I have been able to achieve, as clearly and completely as I can; but I do not feel ready, with Before Sunrise, for even that limited and provisional undertaking. What follows, then, should be read as a series of loosely interconnected and often tentative probes, the beginning of a `work in progress': a preliminary attempt to define why, for me personally, this film belongs among the dozen or so that exemplify `cinema' at its finest.

STYLE

`Style' is a necessary word whose meaning we all think we understand until we try to give it a precise definition; indeed, like many necessary words, it may be useful only so long as its meaning remains somewhat vague. If we restrict it to camera-style we can handle it fairly confidently, talking about long-shots or close-ups, static or moving camera, high angle or low angle, long takes or rapid editing. Yet this is never sufficient, and such an analysis, however meticulous, may become actually misleading, as well as a way of privileging some styles of filmmaking over others. It might, for example, lead one to the conclusion that the films of Leo McCarey had no style at all, or at best a style lacking all distinctiveness and distinction, whereas its great distinctiveness (McCarey at his best is always instantly recognizable) arises not from the use of the camera but from the relationship between the director and his actors. With Linklater one can indicate certain specific stylistic preferences--the fondness, for example, for long takes, both with and without camera-movement--but this will not take one very far in defining the feel of the films, one's experience in watching them, to which `style' is obviously crucial. In this wider sense (ultimately the only valid one), style will always elude precise definition. Nor is the old style/content dichotomy very helpful. It works only if one reduces `content' to something like a plot synopsis or the `action' as one might narrate it to a friend: the `content' of a film is images and sounds, and the specific nature of those images and sounds is `style'. To talk of the two as somehow distinct and separable is impossible, and the moment one begins to talk about `style' as something with an autonomous existence one also begins to misrepresent the film. This is true even of the work of directors who developed an instantly recognizable visual style, who are commonly seen as `great stylists'. To take two obvious extremes (both of whom might, I think, have had an indirect influence on Before Sunrise), the visual styles of Ozu and Ophuls are inextricably a part of the meaning of their films; and--unless, again, we define `content' as plot synopsis--the content of a film is its total meaning, which can never be finally fixed (it will change subtly for each generation, as cultural change brings new perceptions). This is not to assert that style must `express' content in the sense familiar from traditional aesthetics. It would be more accurate to say that style is the artist's means of defining the relationship of the spectator to the film. Aside from the `realist' (i.e. illusionist) styles of most mainstream cinema (and those already embrace a very wide range of possibilities), there are the `Brechtian' styles (another wide range, as the term has been applied to everything from Sirk to Godard) and the various styles of melodrama. But they too are inextricable components of a film's meaning, its content in the wider sense.

LEVELS OF MEANING

A. The cover of the laserdisc of Before Sunrise gives (somewhat unusually) fascinating and useful information about the film's conception and creation. One can distinguish various stages in its progress from idea to realization.

i. Richard Linklater, in New York for a work-in-progress screening of Slacker, decides to visit relatives in Philadelphia; he meets a woman in a toy store, and they spend the night wandering the streets, talking.

ii. Some years later (after completing Slacker and shooting Dazed and Confused) he sees this experience as the possible basis for a film.

iii. Feeling the need of a woman's input ("I didn't want the woman in the film to be a projection of myself"), he enlists Kim Krizan (whom he had met when she auditioned for Slacker) as fellow screenwriter; together they compose scenes in which he provides the man's dialogue, she the woman's, but with some interchange (he wrote some of `her' dialogue, she some of `his').

iv. Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy are cast as the two leads, and there follows a series of consultations in which they also contribute ideas, often drawing on personal experience (Hawke: "It was like mutual group therapy, a great way to begin"; and Linklater: "The fake phone call scene came from something Julie did with her girlfriends as a teenager...I thought it was brilliant, so we just worked out the scene from there...")

v. Filming begins, but the screenplay still leaves space for interpretation, improvisation, accident (e.g., the two actors in the `play about a cow' really were two actors in a play about a cow... Hawke: "There were a lot of scenes like that.")

The laserdisc cover fails to maintain this level of interest and intelligence to the end (quoting Glamour Magazine, informing us that Before Sunrise is "The most winning romance since Four Weddings and a Funeral," and apparently not grasping that this is an insult). But such first-hand documentation of a film's creation is all too rare; so often, we critics have to rely on interviews with directors discussing films they made ten or twenty years earlier, memories of which are inevitably partial, and coloured by distance, bias and exaggeration. Just one crucial step is missing: Why Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy? How were they cast? Were other actors considered, approached, rejected? I ask because, given the result, it is absolutely impossible to imagine the film without Hawke and Delpy (Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman? Or, really to scrape the bottom of the barrel, Rob Lowe and Demi Moore?). It is clear, not merely from the account of its making but from the result, that Hawke and Delpy made themselves integral to the collaborative creative act: Have any two actors ever given themselves more completely, more generously, more nakedly, to a film? The usual distinction between `being' and `acting' is totally collapsed. Before Sunrise is both, and indissolubly, `a Richard Linklater Film' (no one else could have made it) and a densely collaborative one. It would be an ideal subject for one of those `Special Edition' laserdiscs where, on an alternative audio track, the filmmakers and actors give a running commentary on the film as we watch; one hopes that some enterprising executive will organize this before the film recedes too far into the past.

This gives us three levels of reading: Is this a film about Jesse and Celine (characters), Hawke and Delpy (actors) or Linklater and Krizan (filmmakers)? The levels are there, but they merge into each other to the extent of being ultimately undistinguishable from one another. The `style' (and also the meaning) of the film is not merely Linklater's decisions as to where to place and when to move the camera; it is also Hawke's precise gestures, Delpy's precise expressions, their intimate interaction: hence ultimately unanalysable on paper.

B. Although it is not very useful, it seems necessary to say that the `meaning' of a great film is ultimately itself: the movement from shot to shot, the precise sequence of sounds and images. Victor Perkins has demonstrated that the `meaning' of The Wizard of Oz is not reducible to "There is no place like home"; on a higher level of achievement, one must not reduce Tokyo Story to "Life is disappointing, isn't it?", or that favourite refuge of western critics mono no aware, and "For me, life is movement" does not sum up Lola Montes, let alone Ophuls in toto. Such explicit statements have their place in the fabric of a film's total meaning, but only as a contributing factor within a context that may qualify or even contradict them. I shall not, therefore, attempt to find a phrase to sum up the meaning of Before Sunrise, but I shall venture to suggest that its meaning develops simultaneously on three continuously interactive levels:

i. Personal: the detailed description of a highly specific relationship between two complexly characterized individuals.

ii. Social: the exploration of contemporary (post-60s/70s feminism) attitudes to love, relationships and romanticism.

iii. Metaphysical: the pervasive preoccupation with death, time and transience, chance and arbitrariness, a world without any sense of certitude or confidence in the future.

AFTER THE END

We know of course (having been told so many times) that characters in a fiction have no existence beyond it, and it is therefore improper to speculate about their lives outside it. But Before Sunrise seems to defy such a prohibition: everyone with whom I have watched it immediately raises the question of whether or not Jesse and Celine will keep their six-months-ahead date. The general consensus is that they probably won't, a conclusion one might find supported by both the melancholy andante of Bach's first viola da gamba sonata that accompanies the penultimate sequence, and the song that accompanies the end credits, with its refrain "Hold me like a lover should/Although tomorrow don't look so good", and its celebration of "living light": there are simply too many of those mundane obstacles, too many highly unromantic practical questions (about money, work, travel, distance, where to live...) that seem trivial `before sunrise' but will begin to loom very large after it, as time passes. (So far I have found only one dissenter, but a very intelligent one: Lori Spring, filmmaker, teacher of screenwriting and member of the original CineAction collective, who told me that she never had the least doubt that the date would be kept). That the six-months date inevitably evokes An Affair to Remember doesn't really help, beyond reminding us that `happy endings' are no longer as generically guaranteed as they used to be. But the verdict is always reached with great reluctance, testifying to the continuing pull, despite all the battering it has received, of the romantic ideal as a powerful and seductive component of our ideology of love and sexuality. I think this response--the `realistic' acknowledgement of uncertainty, precariousness, the transience of feelings, the recognition that amor doesn't always vincit omnia, qualified by a `romantic' yearning for commitment, stability, permanence--corresponds very closely to the film's overall tone or `feel', accounting for the resonance it has for contemporary audiences (with more confident marketing, it could have been a runaway `hit').

There is a third alternative: that one will and the other won't. My initial reaction was that, if that were the case, the one who did would be Jesse. I though this might be the product of some lingering trace of sexist prejudice--the `fickleness' of women and all that--but its tenability was subsequently confirmed by one of my female students, who came up, quite unprompted, with the same conclusion and offered the same justification: that he is the more `romantic', she the more `realistic'. And indeed, if such idle speculation has any interest, it resides in the possibility that it throws some light on the film's `personal' level, the level of individual character. I found myself commenting earlier on Ethan Hawke's gestures and Julie Delpy's expressions. Obviously, the distinction isn't absolute; but Jesse habitually acts things out, as if constantly anxious to convey what he means--or thinks he means, or wants to mean--he can't simply `be' sincere but must continually demonstrate his sincerity. Of the two characters he seems the more insecure, the more vulnerable, the less mature. Celine--more educated, more aware, more intellectual, though not necessarily more intelligent--is far more at ease with herself, more stable, hence less demonstrative. There is no absolute opposition: the more times one sees the film the more complex the characters appear, both revealing certain basic uncertainties, anxieties about life and death, and by the end of the film she has shown a vulnerability that corresponds to his. But the initial impression, though much less confident, lingers. The intensity with which she clings to him in their final embrace before she boards her train, the expression of near-desperation on her face which he can't see but we can, suggest both that initially she will be the one who suffers the more and that she already has no real hope of a future with him; her intellectual awareness will help her to cope. One imagines him, back in America, obsessively developing (and insulating himself within) a romantic fantasy which he half knows to be unrealistic, while she continues to meet people, look outside herself, form other relations. (On the other hand he has his buddies, not to mention his dog!). And if he is at the station on the appointed date, a part of him will even take a certain masochistic satisfaction in his disappointment; she, meanwhile, will be smiling quietly to herself at the memory of a magical night, with pleasure, tenderness and a passing regret, and will wonder where he is and what has happened to him before going on with her own life.

I have changed my mind many times as to whether to include the above conjectures or cut them, partly because I am uncertain as to whether they have any critical validity, partly because every time I see the film I become less confident of their validity even as interpretation. If I finally decide to leave them, it will be because the very fact that I surrender to such temptations indicates something very specific and very important about the way the film works. It is characterized by a complete openness within a closed and perfect classical form (an unquestioned diegetic world, the unities preserved, the end symmetrically answering the beginning). The relationship shifts and fluctuates, every viewing revealing new aspects, further nuances, like turning a kaleidoscope, so the meaning shifts and fluctuates also. No two individuals will respond in quite the same way, or in the same different ways on a second, third or fourth viewing. Ethan Hawke's reference to `group therapy' has implications far beyond the first stages of discussion among filmmakers and actors, it extends to the audience, involves each individual spectator in a complex dialogue: Do you feel this, do you agree with that, how exactly does this affect you, your attitude to life, your ideas about relationships, the relationship you are in, the relationship you want; or do you really want a relationship at all? The questions the film raises are never answered, the uncertainties it expresses are never closed off. But in any case, the tug of the longing for permanence is so powerful that one would love to see a sequel (Celine and Jesse Go Boating perhaps) in which they did keep the appointment, returned together to...France? America?... and tried to work out ways in which `commitment' is still feasible.

However, the question of Will they or won't they? may be a simple (and sentimental) evasion of the real question posed by the film's ending, which is far more radical and disturbing: Would it be better if they did or if they didn't?

POINTS OF REFERENCE

Through its intimate and detailed treatment of its central couple, the film explores the possibility of `meaningful' or `successful' relationships today (in the aftermath of 60s/70s feminism, with its profound effect on male/female relations which the 80s/90s backlash has been unable to eradicate): a possibility at once longed for and called into question. The film provides three reference points or touchstones, constructing a backdrop against which the problematic of contemporary relating can stand illuminated. One is dramatized within the fiction, the other two are extra-diegetic.

THE QUARRELING GERMAN COUPLE ON THE TRAIN

I take it that, like Celine and Jesse, we are not expected to understand what the argument is about (money is mentioned), but we get the impression that the mutual and bitter animosity is habitual, perhaps that it is one of those petty squabbles that often substitute for discussions of the real marital tensions that cannot be spoken. The couple are directly linked to Celine and Jesse, as the fight is inadvertently responsible for their first meeting: Celine changes her seat to get further away from their noise (she is trying to read), taking a seat across the aisle from Jesse; she and Jesse first make eye contact as the couple stride angrily past them down the aisle, and exchange deprecating smiles to acknowledge their shared awareness; they first make verbal contact when he asks her if she "has any idea what they were arguing about"; and their relationship may be said properly to begin with Celine's "Have you heard that as couples get older, they lose their ability to hear each other?". We are also shown, in a brief single shot, an elderly couple, silent, who perhaps have reached a stage of resignation and stagnation beyond bitchy arguments and who might be taken as representing what the fighting couple will become if they remain together. This is the immediate context within which the beginning of a new attempt at relating is placed; a marvellously succinct and unobtrusive statement of the film's thematic starting-point.

DIDO AND AENEAS, LISA AND STEFAN

The overture to Purcell's mini-opera accompanies the opening credits, the tragedy-laden introduction over the white-on-black main titles, the allegro neatly synchronized with the first images, shot from the rapidly moving train, its final chord coinciding with the appearance of the director's credit. And, for any filmlover in the audience, the Viennese setting, the visit to the Prater, the complex examination (however different in spirit and conclusion) of romantic love, cannot fail to evoke Letter from an Unknown Woman. Both these reference points view romantic love as variously doomed and tragic, and in both the woman is at once the emotional centre/identification-figure and the prime sufferer, but there the parallel ends: the Queen of Carthage, abandoned by Aeneas, dying apparently of a broken heart (though possibly, following tradition and anticipating Berlioz, she commits suicide, the stage direction offering only the sparse and enigmatic "Dies"); the woman who has grown up, starved of power and the experience of beauty, in a petit bourgeois milieu in late nineteenth century Vienna, and wastes her life in selfless (or selfish?) commitment to the potentially great concert pianist whose life is wasted already, in the impossible quest for vicarious fulfilment. These were surely intended (and if they weren't they should have been) as indicators of past attitudes to romantic love, and as such they cover, altogether, a remarkable time-span: Virgil, Troy, Carthage and `Italy' (to found which is Aeneas' divinely ordained destiny and his reason or pretext for abandoning Dido); Purcell's late seventeenth century England; `Vienna, about 1990'; Hollywood, about 1947; and Vienna, 1995. [This is the first time a Linklater movie has evoked a past more distant than that of his `horror' film Dazed and Confused, and these are not the only references to it. There is the pervasive presence of Vienna, its architecture, its history; Celine's mini-lecture on Seurat ("I love the way the people seem to be dissolving into the background", a description that might apply, less literally, to Before Sunrise, with its consistent concern with time and place and its repeated reminders of other human lives being lived--the actors, the fortuneteller, the poet, the people in the restaurant), and the film's most purely magical moment where the couple, at dawn, on their way for Celine to catch her train and, they believe, about to say their last farewell, become suddenly aware of the sound of a harpsichord emerging from a basement apartment, where a very early riser is playing Bach's `Goldberg' variations].

It is these reference points that imply the question I raised, implying (one might say) a signpost to an unknown destination. If a relationship must lead either to the tragic waste and desolation offered by past concepts of romantic love or to the stagnation and bitterness into which so many contemporary marriages seem to degenerate, would it not be better if Jesse and Celine were left at least with indelible memories of one magical night? The film's challenge is to define the unknown destination: if we want them to form a relationship (as surely we do), then it must be of a quite different order from anything offered by the familiar models. This is surely why the outcome becomes so important to us: not although but because it is so concretely realized and particularized--and certainly because the film convinces us so thoroughly of its potential value--it raises very acutely and precisely the fundamental questions for every spectator today: how do we relate?--how should we relate?--how might we relate?

In this context, comparison with Letter from an Unknown Woman seems especially suggestive, the films' extreme stylistic differences corresponding to an equally extreme difference in the depiction of romantic love. Both directors are obviously fond of long takes, but of a diametrically opposed nature: Ophuls' long-takes-with-camera-movement are obviously choreographed trajectories guiding the characters from here to here, suggesting some form of predestination or entrapment (whether we interpret it in metaphysical or social terms seems a matter of personal bias, as both can find support within the film). Linklater's--typically with a static camera, or with movement that is clearly determined by the movement of the actors rather than vice versa--leave the actors free, permitting spontaneity. That romantic love in Ophuls is viewed as inevitably tragic is always traceable to the subordinate position of women (with whom he plainly identifies) in patriarchal culture: in Letter, romantic fantasy is Lisa's only escape-route from the ignominy and constriction of her social position. The lovers of Before Sunrise, on the contrary, meet and negotiate on a level of equality: it is difficult to see that Jesse enjoys privileges that are closed to Celine.

That the film, however one reads the ending, always seems so inspirational and life-giving is surely because, within a cultural situation that often seems incorrigibly and fathomlessly discouraging, it reminds us that there have been advances, and important ones, however minor they may appear amid the current right-wing devastation.

A NOTE ON THE METAPHYSICAL LEVEL

It may at first seem paradoxical (but is in fact absolutely logical) that a film so committed to life should be so pervaded by references to death. Death is, after all, the supreme test of one's sense of meaning. The couple's intimacy begins to blossom under death's shadow, when (in the lounge car of the train) Jesse describes his childhood experience of seeing his great-grandmother, just deceased, in the rainbow formed in the spray of a garden sprinkler, concludes by deciding that "death is just as ambiguous as everything else", and Celine confides that she is afraid of death twenty-four hours in every day. Throughout the film, references to death counterpoint the continuous awareness of the passing of time (the few hours before they have to separate, the past centuries the film evokes). Jesse's sudden recognition, at dawn, that they are "back in real time" is immediately juxtaposed with their awareness of the sound of the harpsichord, and shortly followed by his imitation of Dylan Thomas's recording of an Auden poem about the impossibility of evading the passing of time, which leads in turn to their abrupt and frantic decision to meet again, just as Celine's train is about to leave. These intimations of mortality confer upon the relationship--however it is resolved--its beauty and importance.

IDENTIFICATION

Like `style', identification is a necessary word whose usefulness diminishes in direct ratio to the rigidity of its definition; when it is reduced to counting POV shots (or simply to `the male gaze') the usefulness is somewhere around point zero. I have tried to address at some length the complex possibilities of identification (degrees of sympathy, `split' identification, conflicts of identification at different levels simultaneously, etc.) in the Ingrid Bergman chapter of Hitchock's Films Revisited, and shall not repeat the full argument here (it has not, so far as I know, been refuted, just ignored, as is usually the case with arguments the current critical hegemoney finds inconvenient). It will suffice to say that I use the term to cover the entire spectrum, from our sharing the experience of the entire action with a single character (who would have to be the audience's magnet of sympathy and present in every scene, a possibility that remains in the realm of the hypothetical), to the flickering and fleeting play of sympathetic attaction shifting from character to character. With the former extreme one thinks of Hitchcock, but in his films such `total' identification is invariably either brutally shattered or subtly undermined: by the abrupt demise of our identification-figure (Psycho), by his sudden withdrawal from a crucial scene that reveals what he doesn't yet know (Vertigo), or by the systematic erosion of confidence in the acceptability of his behaviour (Rear Window). The latter extreme is also uncommon, but Renoir is its most obvious practitioner in, for example, La Grande Illusion and La Regle du Jeu. (1)

From first scene to last, Before Sunrise systematically and rigorously resists encouraging identification with one character above or against the other (and it's difficult to think of any other film that achieves quite this feat). Do men automatically identify with the male, women with the female? I doubt it, although our gender may of course entail a certain bias which the film goes out of its way to undermine: some men, some women, perhaps, but only those so fanatically devoted to the rights of their own sex that they are insensitive to the film's `style', the structure of its shots and its scenario, the marvellously achieved equality of its two central performances.

WATCHING AND LISTENING

When we talk casually of `reading' a film, most of us usually mean reading between the lines or below the surface, in order to extricate and explicate its `meaning', or at least its thematic complex. One does this, of course, with Before Sunrise, but the film demands more, a `reading' in a more literal sense: we must watch and listen simultaneously, with the most careful attention to every gesture, expression and word, because `meaning', here, refuses reduction to `theme'.

I have to confess, at this point, to a failure: even on first viewing I told myself that I would `one day' analyze in detail the scene in the listening booth of the record store, in which nothing happens except that Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy either do or don't look at each other, their eyes never quite meeting. After a dozen viewings I abandoned the project. I suppose one might try an elaborate system of charts and timings, annotating `direction of the gaze', when and how long each looks (or doesn't)...which would demonstrate nothing of the least importance. With no camera-movement, no editing, no movement within the frame except for the slight movements of the actors' heads, nothing on the soundtrack but a not-very-distinguished song that may vaguely suggest what is going on in the characters' minds and seems sometimes to motivate their `looks' ("Though I'm not impossible to touch/I have never wanted you so much/Come here"), the shot seems to me a model of `pure cinema' in ways Hitchcock never dreamed of (not merely `photographs of people talking', but photographs of them not talking), precisely because it completely resists analysis, defies verbal description. All one can say is that it is the cinema's most perfect depiction, in just over one minute of `real' time, at once concrete and intangible, of two people beginning to realize that they are falling in love.

I shall content myself, then, with two scenes that, without at all lacking the essentials of `pure cinema', the obligation of the spectator to watch and listen, offer themselves for some kind of clumsy verbalizing: the `Question and Answer' game on the streetcar, the imaginary telephone conversations in the restaurant. The scenes `answer' each other (within this meticulously structured film which manages to look as if it was `made up as they went along') in a complex pattern of similarity and difference: both are games, played by the two characters as a means toward mutual understanding through play, occurring at different stages in the relationship's development, the first essentially a mapping-out of differences, the second a means of discovering each other's feelings and confessing their own, implicitly with a view to a possible future ("Are you going to see him again?"/"I don't know. We haven't talked about that yet"--followed by a silence); Jesse initiates, and partly controls, the first game, Celine the second. And the scenes are paired formally by a strict stylistic opposition: the film's longest single take (just over five minutes) answered by its most heavily edited sequence (forty-three shots in just over five minutes).

Q & A

The interplay of gesture and expression throughout the long uninterrupted two-shot is so dense and intricate that one really needs to watch it three times (as one can do without difficulty on the laserdisc as it is contained within a single `chapter'): once watching Hawke, a second time watching Delpy, a third time trying to `see' them both together. Otherwise, one's eyes dart constantly from one side of the frame to the other and one misses many of the nuances.

Gesture and expression are of course meaningless unless one is listening simultaneously and with equal attention to the dialogue, which defines certain important differences that in turn contribute to defining `this little space in between'. Celine describes her `first sexual feelings' in terms of a romantic crush on a famous swimmer she actually met, Jesse his (after evading her real question, "Have you ever been in love?"--we learn later that he came to Europe to meet a woman and they have just broken up) in relation to `Miss July, 1978', in Playboy. The answers to, respectively, Jesse's "What pisses you off?" and Celine's "What's your problem?" are even more revealing. Her answers show a wide-ranging and enquiring (if embryonic) awareness of practical realities: social ("I hate being told by strange men in the street to smile, to make them feel better about their boring lives"); political (a war going on "300 kilometres from here" and "nobody knows what to do or gives a shit"); socio-political (the media are "trying to control minds" and "...it's very subtle but it's a new from of fascism realy"); sexual-political ("I hate being told, especially in America, `Oh, you're so French, you're so cute', each time I wear black, or lose my temper, or say anything about anything"). His answer, on the other hand, while it also reveals an enquiring, thinking mind, is more abstract, philosophical-metaphysical: he speaks of reincarnation and eternal souls, and the ensuing conundrum of the increase in world population: "50,000 years ago not even one million, 10,000 years ago two million. Now five to six billion. Where do the souls all come from--a 5,000-to-one split. So is this why we're so scattered, so specialized?" (While marginally more rational--if one accepts its premise--this recalls Linklater's own hilarious monologue in the taxi at the beginning of Slacker).

THE IMAGINARY PHONE CALLS

The forty-three shot sequence perfectly exemplifies that fundamental principle of western (and other?) art, almost (but not quite) perfect symmetry. It is introduced, punctuated around the midpoint, and closed, by three identical two-shots of the couple opposite each other at the restaurant table; Celine's imaginary call has twenty-eight shots, filmed in strict shot/reverse-shot form; Jesse's has twenty-two, filmed similarly. To clarify:

Shot 1: Two-shot: the couple

Shots 2-29: Shot/reverse-shot (Celine's call)

Shot 30: Two-shot: the couple

Shots 31-42: Shot/reverse-shot (Jesse's call)

Shot 43: Two-shot: the couple

The restaurant scene follows the scene in the street at night that concludes with Celine's speech quoted at the head of this article, the last words provoking a lengthy silence and a cut to long-shot as they continue sitting on the bench; it is introduced (before the imaginary phone calls) by a series of shots of other customes: a mixed group at one table, two men playing cards, two bearded men conversing, a woman alone reading a book, an American couple (the man grumbling about the service), two men and one woman, laughing at a joke...other lives, other relationships, other problems. Celine's speech, and the other customers, create a context (both of lives and of ideas) for the couple's exploration (through the game) of each other's feelings and expectations, testing the possibility of a continuing relationship. I feel disinclined to dissect this wonderful sequence in detail. I would describe it as one of the film's high points, were it not for the fact that it doesn't have any low ones. The use of play as a medium for revealing truths and emotions that one can't quite dare speak `seriously' is touching in itself, in its implications of vulnerability, the desire to speak out inhibited by the fear of being hurt, the suspension at the end--Jesse's question (in the role of Celine's confidante) "Are you going to see him again?" remains unanswered--anticipating the similar suspension in which the spectator is left at the end of the film.

FINAL

Perhaps the film's moment of greatest tenderness occurs after the lovers have separated: the sequence of shots (accompanied on the soundtrack by Yo-Yo Ma playing Bach) re-viewing the places they visited as the new day begins, some with the first stirrings of activity, some still deserted, an old woman glancing disapprovingly at the empty wine bottle they discarded in the park where they made love. The sequence evokes the ending of Antonioni's L'Eclisse, but without its sense of desolation and finality: rather, the feeling is of sadness and happiness inextricably intermingled, regret for the separation and the uncertainty but a deep satisfaction in the degree of mutual understanding and intimacy two human beings have achieved in a few hours, how nearly successful the attempt to bridge "this little space in between". And, as Celine says, the "answer", the "magic", must be in the attempt. The same might be said of the critic's relationship to the films s/he loves.

(1) There may be a direct connection between Renoir and Linklater--there is certainly common ground, in the emotional generosity, the range of sympathy, the attitude that manages the difficult feat of being critical without being judgemental. I think particularly of Slacke. Renoir once said that the film he's always wanted to make but could never set up was one in which we would follow one set of characters for a little while, then others would walk by or appear in the background and we would leave the first set and follow the newcomers, who would shortly give way to yet others, and so on throughout the film. Slacker may be Linklater's realization (though very much on his own terms) of the film Renoir never made.

COPYRIGHT 1996 CineAction
Copyright 1996 Gale, Cengage Learning. All rights reserved.

Cinemascope – Independent Film Journal
Issue 4 January‐April 2006

Love’s Moment: Before Sunrise and Before Sunset
Adrian Martin

I did not much like Richard Linkater’s Before Sunrise (1995) when I first saw it, at the moment of its international release. I don’t remember what mood I was in then – it must have been a rather sour and shut-down state – but how could I have so comprehensively missed the joys of this movie?

How could I have missed the perfect, delicate structure of the film’s progression of events (within the wonderfully developed arc of a single day-night-morning), or its touchingly observed mise en scène of growing private and interpersonal emotions struggling to express themselves within the confines of various public spaces? How could I have judged it as an artless, talk-heavy ‘indie’ American film, tainted by a comparison with the likes of Kevin Smith and Whit Stillman? How could I have concluded that there are “no epiphanies in this gab-fest, only a few nice, brittle jokes”? How could I have written that “the chat that goes on between Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke hits a superficial groove very early on, and keeps raking over the same topics: the difference between men and women, idealism versus pragmatism, the aimless disenchantment of contemporary youth” – without sensing how intimately tied to the inner lives of the characters these chats are?

And how could I have figured for a single moment that Before Sunrise “repeats the sin of much contemporary romantic comedy: it just doesn't succeed in making the woman's part a real, equal, reciprocal match for the man's”? Robin Wood had a much clearer vision of this aspect in his important essay “The Little Space in Between: Preliminary Notes on Before Sunrise” (Cineaction no. 47, October 1996): “From first scene to last, Before Sunrise systematically and rigorously resists encouraging identification with one character above or against the other”.

Stumbling upon Before Sunrise one day on afternoon television in 2003 – during its long-take tramcar scene – I was stunned by the detailed beauty of Before Sunrise, by its sense of space and place and incident, not to mention the unimpeachable loveableness of its two leading players, both as fictional characters and pure screen ‘presences’. Watching it all again (several times) since on DVD, I am now convinced that Before Sunrise is among the great films of the ‘90s, and, alongside The School of Rock (2003) certainly Linklater’s best. Then along came Before Sunset (2004) … but more on that later.

In 1995, Before Sunrise landed in the midst of an often dispiriting American romantic comedy revival – Only You (Norman Jewison, 1994), Miami Rhapsody (David Frankel, 1995), I.Q. (Fred Schepisi, 1994), Speechless (Ron Underwood, 1994) and While You Were Sleeping (Jon Turteltaub, 1995), as well as a revival of An Affair to Remember (Leo McCarey, 1957), sometimes watched on TV by the characters in these modern films. These retro romantic comedies of the ‘90s were very self-consciously in the classic romantic comedy mode – sometimes set during Christmas; often about travel to exotic foreign places; stories of initial hate slowly turning to love; stories about love as a liberation from social constraint, or a coming to know oneself and one's true heart desires. But then there are other sorts of modern, even modernist romantic comedies, ones that try to bring a fresh angle to the revival of the great old romantic comedies – let’s call them neo romantic comedies. We could start with films that are resolutely anti-romantic, totally cynical or ironic in relation to the dreams and dramas of romantic love.

Richard Brooks’ The Happy Ending (1969), for example, is a relentlessly miserable experience: kitchen-sink realism of the most depressing kind, wheeled in to demolish every old ideal of true love, love at first sight, love everlasting, happy families in love, you name it. The title is corrosively, bitterly ironic: there is no happy ending in this movie. Brooks uses characters who were themselves hopelessly duped, in their fair, innocent youth, by the dreams and illusions of romantic love, Hollywood-style. Decades later, when we pick up their story, these characters are surveying the shattered pieces of their horrible, loveless married existences, a reality so terribly far from their dream.

There are related films that, not quite so grimly or hopelessly as Brooks, compare the mundane realities of people's lives with the fantasies that have influenced them. This is the sort of modern romantic comedy that weighs up the illusions, criticises the unreal expectations that people sometimes have, works through the real problems of intimacy, commitment, ageing and sexual appetite - but which still, at the end of all this, believes in love and its transformative, vital power. Here I am thinking of movies including Robert Altman's rarely screened A Perfect Couple (1979), John Cassavetes' marvellous Minnie and Moskowitz (1971), the Australian film Lonely Hearts (1981) by Paul Cox and, mostly recently, Kriv Stenders’ digital feature Blacktown (2005). Woody Allen, too, works in this fruitful zone between grey disillusionment and the bright enchantment of the heart.

There's another kind of neo romantic comedy which is determinedly modern, both in its surface look and its themes. These are the films that take on topics like gay love, group love, bisexuality, open relationships, and so on. There have been many films of this kind since the early ‘90s, basically teen movies or ‘twentysomething’ movies like Three of Hearts (Yurek Bogayevicz, 1993), Threesome (Andrew Fleming, 1994), the delightful Go Fish (Rose Troche, 1994), and Spanking the Monkey (David O. Russell, 1994). Although these films have a basically progressive political agenda, they try to stay close to the spirit of the romantic comedy, keeping themselves light and whimsical, with old ‘life's like that’ tag line waiting in the wings for the final fade-out.

A particular subset of this group of films concentrates on the so-called ‘slackers’ of Generation X: those strange teens and twentysomethings whose grasp of reality and morality and emotion is supposedly so damnably weird and new-fangled that, if by chance they happen to fall in love, you can bet it will be a love like no other ever previously seen on screen. Hal Hartley's films inhabit this cultural space, as do, in a more militant gay spirit, those of Gregg Araki. But you can tell from a mile off when one of these Generation X movies is about to lose its nerve and turn into just another retro romantic comedy about picking the right guy or gal and making an old-fashioned commitment. That's what happened to Reality Bites (Ben Stiller, 1994), for instance.

All this talk of slackers and Generation X and ‘laid back’ love brings us to Before Sunrise. Many people would think of it as a love story rather than a romantic comedy, because the laughs are very low-key, incidental, and emerge purely from the interactions and chat of the two main characters. But it's not really a love story in the manner of Brief Encounter (David Lean, 1945) either, or the Meryl Streep-Robert De Niro film Falling in Love (Ulu Grosbard, 1984), or even Dirty Dancing (Emile Ardolino, 1987). There is no great drama of love in Before Sunrise, no renunciation, no confrontation with partners thrown over, no violent change of lifestyle. No obstacles in the way of love, really, beyond a looming sense of the real, practical world and its daily obligations. It’s a film about love as a matter of a philosophical, existential choice.

There are aspects of Before Sunrise that are not totally unrelated to the retro romantic comedies. Like in Only You, there's an exotic, European backdrop. There's an inter-cultural frisson between the lovers (here, an American guy and a French girl), like between Antonio Banderas and Sarah Jessica Parker in Miami Rhapsody. There's that old device beloved of the classic romantic comedies - sexual tension or sexual deferment, whereby it takes a hell of a long screen time before the main characters start getting it on. It must be said here that Linklater delivers the sexual tension game more skilfully and deliciously than just about any contemporary romantic comedy, whether retro, anti, or neo – right down a discreet did-they-or-didn’t-they ellipse just before that fearsome sunrise.

But one can easily overstate the American romantic comedy genre influences and context in reference to this special, delicate, quite individual film. Understandably for a film which is an Austrian-American co-production, it mixes up romantic comedy influences with other elements, mainly from European art cinema. This mix is evident from the casting. Hawke as Jesse has a very attractive rebel-beatnik aura, sensitive, intelligent, goofy – and also evasive when it comes to emotional declaration or an admission of any romantic yearnings. That all comes with the territory mapped out for this star by Reality Bites. Delpy, on the other hand, has been in some gloomy European or Euro-styled films such as the odd, ponderous incest fantasy Voyager (Volker Schlondorff, 1991) and the AIDS-displaced nightmare Mauvais sang (Leos Carax, 1986). But it was Krystof Kieslowski who gave her a part in a very black, inverted romantic comedy, the tragic love-gone-wrong story which is Three Colours: White (1993). Delpy has had some spectacularly fetishised roles across all these movies, always figuring as some kind of male projection, inside some kind of male fantasy. Before Sunrise gives her a more normal, earthier role. She plays a smart, savvy, hip, modern woman, and she gets to deflate Jesse's sillier flights of egoistic pretension with considerable aplomb. (A moment where she unexpectedly makes a ‘you’re crazy’ gesture with her finger and a vocal sound effect is one of the funniest and loveliest in the entire film.)

The European art cinema influence shows up in the way the film is plotted, too, and its entire feel. Hawke and Delpy meet as strangers on a train and impulsively decide to spend a night wandering around Vienna together. One might hear (because of the Viennese setting) an echo of Letter From an Unknown Woman (1948), but I believe there is far more of Roberto Rossellini's classic Voyage in Italy (1953), particularly when these budding lovers have random, meaningful encounters with cemeteries (death or a sense of mortality is a central motif), posters, a street poet, and the gorgeous Bach harpsichord music coming out of the basement of a building. Like in Rossellini’s film, wandering through a foreign place, experiencing its culture and manners, brings not only intoxication, but also disquiet, a feeling of being unsettled deep in one’s soul: a heady but also queasy feeling of being not yourself in this time and place, yet more deeply and truly yourself than you have ever been before.

As in Dazed and Confused, Linklater displays his good ear for music: in the best scene of Before Sunrise, he jams Delpy and Hawke into a pokey listening booth in a somewhat old-fashioned Viennese record shop - it's old fashioned because they still sell vinyl LPs there - and they squirm, trying to avoid each other's eyes as they listen to an earnest folk tune by Kath Bloom, "Come Here". I would call this mise en scène Hitchcockian because Hitch himself used this very same example of private/public interference, taken from the spatiality of the real, everyday world, and varied it to sinister ends in Strangers on a Train (1951). But virtually every scene in Before Sunrise offers a similar example of the emotionally charged (and emotionally repressed) spaces of everyday architecture: bars, restaurants, viewing cable cars (where they kiss, above the world), paths beside a stream.…

Before Sunrise is a fully achieved work of art, far from the exercise in improvisation it has sometimes been mistaken for. Study, for instance, the subtle reframing camera movement around the couple as the fortune teller approaches – one of many small moves in the film that wield, on repeated viewings, tremendous emotional power. Like Claire Denis’ Friday Night (2002 – with which it forms a fascinating diptych), it seizes the detail of the everyday and transforms it into rich, poetic metaphor, without for one moment losing its line to the human presences whose trembling trajectory it so finely stages. And it is not the end of Jesse and Céline’s story: there they are, still talking their pillow talk in Waking Life (2001), and more importantly a full-blown nine-years-later sequel, Before Sunset – for once, a follow-up idea with staggering possibilities, which all Linklater fans were dying to discover.

If there is a Holy Grail that virtually every film by Linklater tenaciously pursues, it is the ideal of living in a way that is ‘totally open to the moment’ – as many of his protagonists might describe it. From Slacker (1991) onwards, his hyper-talkative characters aspire to such heightened sensitivity within themselves – allied with the romantic dream of connecting, almost by chance, to another person who shares that same, heightened state. These very poignant people want to grasp the moment together – and they want to make it last for an eternity.

As the filmmaker who tells this sort of story, Linklater himself is able to go beyond the sometimes comic ditherings and fumblings of his characters in order reach another, more contemplative but no less anguished level. Within each scene, he too tries to capture the immediacy of the moment in all its vibrant, messy complexity. But he realises that a movie as a whole can offer much more than the illusion of an eternal moment – it can provide a reflection on these dreams of spontaneity and fusion, and show what happens to them within the context of passing time, of personal and social history. The ultimate question left open in the story of Before Sunrise – would Jesse and Celine show up six months later for their second, appointed meeting? – vividly dramatised the question of whether ‘the moment’ that they shared would or could survive the steady onslaught of daily reality. At the start of Before Sunset, Jesse is launching his first novel in a Paris bookstore. He has, of course, lightly fictionalised his Viennese experience of nine years previously. As he completes his spiel to journalists, he looks up: Celine is standing there, silently waiting for him. No lover of the original film can resist this perfect, tantalising opening. But where can Jesse and Celine go from here? That, once again, is Linklater’s deepest question. What remains of the fire of their moment – nothing, something, anything, everything? This time, their interaction is bound to be different.

For starters, Celine is longer on holiday in an exotic city; she is at home, in her daily life. So Linklater eschews the parade of eccentric characters and symbolic sites on which the original story was structured – necessarily losing, along the way, the enriching evocation of Voyage in Italy. And then, of course, a lot of water has passed under the bridge for both of them – experiences, relationships, obligations – and for the wide world, too.

So Celine and Jesse go walking. It is possible to find the central section of this second-time-around film a little banal and uneventful in comparison with Before Sunrise. Some aspects of the script – the credit is shared by Linklater with his two brilliantly lovable actors – seem forced, such as the contrast of French versus American manners, or the discussions of global politics. Most sorely missing is the mise en scène characteristic of the original, that exquisite tension between public and private spaces.

But there are, again, subtle riches here. What would normally count in the craft of screenwriting as mere ‘backstory’ – the details of what happened to Jesse and Celine between the end of the first movie and the start of this one – becomes crucially important. On a superficial level, Before Sunset is virtually plotless – a miniature or vignette, the record of a few hours. But its true plot is the intricately structured way in which Celine and Jesse gradually open up to each other about their respective backstories. What they each choose to tell, how, and in what order – as well as the fine details of what they remember, and how different those memories are, not to mention their evasions or outright lies in confessing their feelings – become the substance of the movie.

The very title, Before Sunset, gives this continuation of Jesse and Celine’s story a melancholic pall. Mid-life crisis seems to have come early for these good-looking, well-off professionals in their early ‘30s. The film somewhat overloads the dice in this regard. The more dissatisfied in their lives that Jesse and Celine seem, the more prone they are to be gripped by the possibly foolish romantic notion of ‘the one that got away’, and the less equipped they become to negotiate daily reality. Linklater, I feel, also loses sight of this bigger picture periodically.

But, about fifteen minutes before the end, Jesse and Celine finally get into one of those tight spots reminiscent of the original film – sitting in the back of a chauffeured cab destined to take Jesse to the airport. From that point on, Linklater refinds the romantic tension of Before Sunrise – and adds to it nine years of accumulated doubt, pain and regret. The closing moments are absolutely superb, playing brilliantly on at least two conceptions of time: the pressing time of the deadline, versus the time that Celine dramatises in her affectionate mimicry of Nina Simone’s song – expansive time, suspended time, ‘all the time in the world’. It is in the interval between these two time-frames that a cinematic love story occurs …

Henceforth, Linklater’s artistic integrity as a filmmaker is really on the line. He could, if he so wished, keep pursuing this project for decades to come, as François Truffaut did in his Antoine Doinel series starring Jean-Pierre Léaud. Or he could simply leave us with every question that arises from the portrait of a relationship that has really only taken up parts of two days nine years apart – a sunrise and a sunset. Maybe the love story of Jesse and Celine is simply too fragile to pursue any further into the wilds of time and history. Or maybe that fragility is, after all, the point.

© Adrian Martin October 2005

Personal: Surprising Amounts of Time with Friends; Shooting with Jessica

2009-10-26T01:03:54Z

I have been too busy or distracted to keep a log for a few days. After my long talk with Kate last Sunday night, I had a similarly long phone conversation with Kevin, until we both wore out our phone batteries, while I squirmed with envy to hear him describing the view as he was talking to me from the hot tub on his in-laws' deck overlooking a clear, warm sunset behind the Grand Tetons, and then later oo-ing and ah-ing from seeing a pair of large shooting stars over the mountaintops. That was Wednesday night. Thursday night I went to an art opening at the Harley-Davidson Museum called "The Helmet Project," which was put together by students at the Milwaukee Institute of Art and Design. My former high school student Leslie Sutton is there now, and she invited me to the opening, where we caught up while taking in the exhibition together, and then kept talking over drinks and dessert over at the Hotel Metro. Friday night featured a long evening with the gang, joined by Anthony and Kelly, who drove up from northern Illinois and treated us to Boeuf Bourguignon, along with their company. So Saturday I got back more exclusively to work, although I did have a good long talk with Mom in the evening. More on all that later, I hope.

But Wednesday afternoon, after I had posted my tongue-in-cheek rant about the weather this October, and my feeling that I had been robbed of our usual glorious Peak Week experience, suddenly cleared up, as if in answer to my protest/whine. It still wasn't terribly sunny, but it was a definite improvement. When I got done teaching at 2pm, I walked back over to my apartment, had lunch, and then grabbed my camera and headed back out. Crossing Wisconsin Avenue, I ran into Jessica, and we quickly found out that she was free to join me for an hour taking a look at the colours before she started her shift at Starbucks. This gave her a good laugh in itself, given the several abortive attempts we had made at trying to get together over the last several weeks, only to be able to spontaneously just hang out without trying to make our schedules work.

And so we strolled around the center of campus, swapping off on the camera, and shooting what caught our eye, while we talked of her and Nathan's upcoming plans for the Fall Break, where they were actually going to be constructing the bed she had designed and showed me the other week, in a vaguely Chinese style, as part of their work building up to their wedding in January. We talked about learning to fight fairly with a Significant Other, and the importance of figuring out that skill. Some of my job application stories came up, and we talked about the different kinds of emphases in different positions, and the pros and cons of each of these. And in and out of all the more concrete specifics of life and living as we were currently experiencing it, we talked about angles and colour and composition, and what beauty we were finding in the heart of Marquette's otherwise urban campus. Good times.

I was particularly pleased with the portrait shots I took of her, sitting on a bench by the Chapel of Joan of Arc, of which this is a cropped version of my favourite. This one definitely goes into my "Portraiture" album.

Personal: The Gloomy Peak Week of 2009

2009-10-20T18:56:10Z

I have to admit, I feel ripped off this year. Yesterday was it: our first and only clear, bright, crisp, not-too-cold autumn afternoon, just after what seems to have been the peak of Peak Week. Otherwise, Milwaukee's October this year has been uniformly cold and overcast, and mostly rainy. We had one day yesterday that fits into that glorious mould of the "Peak Week" time that I love, and today it is once again gone, replaced by the dull chill gloom I described, with more rain on the way tomorrow and through the rest of the week.

So I feel ripped off. I mean, Peak Week is my favourite time of the year, no question. I feel as though, weather-wise and season-wise, the rest of the year are the dues I pay, the cover charge, just to get in this one week of unrestrained, exploding colour, to watch the variety of trees the groundskeepers have cultivated on campus do their magic, to watch the row down the center of Wisconsin Avenue explode into a red that threatens to go pink. At Notre Dame, where we got a much more welcome full week of Fall Break, I would take that mid-semester catch-up time for grad student work to read while walking around Saint Mary's Lake (and less frequently Saint Joe's, too) taking in the beauty along with the theology, as is fitting.

So. Whine whine whine. Yes, I fully know that there's a lot worse going on in the world. But still. Drat.

Personal: Catching Up With Kate

2009-10-20T01:56:02Z

Had a long, lovely talk with Kate last night, up in British Columbia. It had been a while since we caught up, and it was good just to hear her voice and feel her spirit. It's been five years since we have actually laid eyes on one another, when she and Paul flew me up to visit them using their own frequent flyer miles for me, while they were trying to get in all the visitors they could before Kate gave birth to their first, Sophia, the next month. Now Sophia, who was almost my goddaughter, before I was disqualified for being too distant, is five years old and starting in a French immersion school. Kate and Paul are both working different careers than when I saw them, and life rolls on. One of the things that attracts me to a Canadian teaching position is just to take advantage of some of those in-country travel opportunities, just so that I could see them more frequently. I've been repeatedly blessed in not only having old "best friends" who have remained such despite the interruptions of time and distance, but also in their acquiring spouses who I enjoy just as fully, and who welcome me just as generously.

So we talked current job stuff, and I filled her in on the prospects for professorships in the coming year, some of which we talked over in greater detail. We ranged from the seriousness of talking about interviews, with her full of what she cheerfully admitted was unsolicited advice, all of which was more than sensible, to less serious bits of fun like the upcoming release of the 12th volume of The Wheel of Time the latest season of Smallville, and the not-entirely-unrealistic possibilities of getting onto the Vancouver set of Smallville as extras, just to look around. We did a bit of mutual net-surfing, directing one another to a few things we wanted the other to see, and she got a good laugh or two out of seeing my shots of her eight months pregnant in my photo album, which she hadn't seen before, especially the one she had forgotten about where she posed in a large garden pot, since she was "about to bloom." She even sketched out for me the kernel idea of a writing project she's starting to play with, which was a great surprise, and which I thought was a timely theme with a lot of innate potential. She would not tell me any more, however, until she could do so in a coffeehouse, which just adds to my need to get up thereabouts as soon as reasonably possible.

Personal/Musical: George and the Freeks: Greatest Live (Free Download)

2009-10-17T15:40:59Z

Since Dan received his birthday gift of a guitar from Amy, I've given him a couple of very basic guitar lessons. Just that sentence will make my musician friends laugh, because I'm nobody's idea of a guitar player. I picked up enough from Mark, J.P., Doug and Erik to start writing down the music I heard in my head, for which I'll forever be grateful, but I was pretty sure up front, having a poor innate sense of rhythm, that I could only go so far as a guitar player, and so I've not invested much effort on getting past that point. Just being able to go into the studio and tell the guys, "Play that, in such-and-such a way, but better," was enough for me.

But in showing Dan around the guitar, I've had to go with what I know. To start with, we don't know much of the same music. Dan's taste seems as eclectic as mine, which I enjoy, but it's all over the place with lots of things I don't know, and so I've come back from his house with borrowed CDs ranging from Coldplay to Johnny Mathis' Christmas music. Last week, while trying to show him a thing or two, we ended up playing around with things like U2's "Mysterious Ways" and Sixpence None The Richer's "Kiss Me," that I knew he knew as well. But to show him a chord, a technique, or a sound, I've had to go with what I know.

Thus entered the Freeks.

I have explained my liaison at Notre Dame with George and the Freeks elsewhere, and so I won't repeat that here. But it is a bit inconvenient to give guitar lessons when the music that you have mostly played on the guitar is from a band that very few people have heard of. Dan said something about passing some of the band's music to him, which seemed the easiest way to build a common guitar idiom. I've been listening to the Freeks a lot the last week or two because of this guitar-playing, and I thought that perhaps the easiest way to get Dan familiar with some of the music was to put some on the internet that I had intended to upload for quite some time, anyway.

At an earlier stretch of graduate school, as the ten-year anniversaries (Yikes!) of a lot of gigs the band played rolled around, I had been uploading digital files I had made from tapes of the band's gigs. (Since then all made available for easy downloading from MegaUpload.) I had first uploaded the Freeks' private second album, recorded during their Senior Week at Notre Dame. A bunch of early songs recorded in an "unplugged" acoustic setting, The Senior Week Sessions had long been a fun listening experience. These had been followed by Live at Bridget's Pub, a February 1996 gig that was one of the highlights of my first months working sound for the band, and the best recording with the original lineup with Erik as lead guitar. Live in Dayton followed, which is probably the clearest recording from the 1996-97 Freeks lineup, with Chris replacing Bryan on drums and Mark starting to get more comfortable in his rushed move up to lead guitar. I had also uploaded Live at Corby's Pub, another South Bend venue, which was the first recording I had of the latter Freeks lineup, and features the introduction of some material that would be a staple of the rest of the year, as the Freeks began touring regionally. With graduate school proving a horrible distraction, I had not gotten around to uploading anything else, other than the Freekish first Chrysogonus Fest from the summer of 1997, after the Freeks had officially broken up once some of the guys decided that they didn't want to make a full-time go of it in music and with the others heading to D.C. to become Hoobajoob.

But I had always meant to do something. Before getting around to uploading some of the other gigs, I thought I would try to eliminate some of the problematic nature of live music, of me being a soundguy who had not yet learned to listen simultaneously to the full band playing (a skill I really wouldn't start to master until recording in Nashville), and of having to mix the soundboard and main speakers against whatever level of sound was coming out of the band's amplifiers: I would make a "Best Of" collection.

And so I did. And George and the Freeks: Greatest Live has remained among my iTunes playlists for a few years. Until now. With Dan needing to hear some of this music, and some of the Freeks having not heard a lot of this taped music since we moved into the Digital Age, I figured it was finally time to get off my tush, upload these tunes, and make them available. I stand by my assessment that this music is something special, that the tunes – whether pure fun, grim introspection, or moving into the mystical – have a lot to offer both heart and mind. As a vocalist, I had to love a group that, depending on the lineup, had anywhere from three to five singers, four of whom were good songwriters, and thus had a variety of voices in the literal and literary senses. Doug, LiveJournal's own weaklingrecords, remains, in particular, one of the most gifted songwriters I have ever heard, and it's a tragedy that his music didn't get a wider chance to be heard, although given the delight he has had in following his parents and creating a family of his own, I imagine that he wouldn't pick musical success over his personal success, anyway.

George and the Freeks: Greatest Live (FREE DOWNLOAD)

Gotta Be Good (McKenna) Every bit as "bad ass" a tune as Mark says at the end: words you wouldn't associate with the Irish Blessing until Doug's adaptation.
Wanting, Waiting (McKenna) One of Chris' first contributions was giving Doug's new song this irresistible groove, over lyrics more sober than they sound.
Join Us On the Ride (Lang) Mark's classic invitation to the audience: a song frequently found around the opening of a gig.
Bittersweet Highway (McKenna) Andy's organ explodes in this version of Doug's raging song of self-conflict.
Thoughts (McKenna) Doug never felt finished with this song, but it remained one of the Freeks' staples, although you never knew what the lyrics would be at the end.
Let Your Spirit (Brenner) Andy's longing, hopeful tune draws on the deep wells of no less than Augustine's Confessions. I always hear this chorus in my head during the consecration.
Away (McKenna) The rarest treasure of this collection. In one of Erik's farewell gigs, his guitar goes as far to the edge as Doug's vocals.
The Search for Aeneas (Lang) One of Mark's early mystical pieces, later aptly re-recorded as "The Search for Sophia," the song tries to move toward pure self-abandonment.
Beginnings (McKenna) Another early Freeks staple, Doug's exploration of the drama of ambiguity and fidelity is as sharp as ever.
Tree (McKenna) Spanning everything from surviving a typhoon in India to the Cross, Doug serves up terror and triumph with one of the most dangerous riffs ever, here with the rare extended ending.
Oddity of a Stranger (Goldschmidt) Erik's searching self-exploration, here served up in a rare acoustic gig.
Only Beauty (McKenna) One of Doug's most popular songs, here with a perfect duet of a jam between Andy's piano and Mark's lead guitar.
Gypsy Moths and Cantaloupe (Goldschmidt) This version of Erik's failed mystical dialogue with God remains a band legend, even for the self-confessed "Most Narcissistic Band on Campus."
Good-Bye (McKenna) A slower version of Doug's testament to love lost, and all the more heartfelt for it.
Empty Space (Brenner) The beauty in music redeems even the pain of breakup and emptiness in this earlier tune of Andy's.
Don't Go (McKenna) Bassist J.P.'s genius for arrangement is evident in this moody masterpiece of Doug's, such as in his changing the bridge from the song's 6/8 time to 5/4.
Gratitude (McKenna) A gem of Doug's last year with the Freeks, and a personal favourite, this chord progression alone is perfection and I probably play it on guitar more than any of my own songs.
If I Go On My Way (Lang) A rarity of Mark's, this gorgeous song crept out for one acoustic warm-up for a few early fans before a gig, never to be heard again, except for here.
Field of Bliss (Goldschmidt) Another exploration of mystical frustration, with elements as old as the Song of Songs and as modern as the Allman Brothers, this song will make you shoot out of your mind.

Personal/Random: Nice Compliment Amid Midterms; "Everwood" Reunion on "Grey's"

2009-10-16T19:56:56Z

Gave my Midterm earlier this afternoon. I got a grand compliment when one guy, turning in his exam, asked me if I was teaching any mid-level courses this spring. I was slightly amazed, both that someone already had decided I was worth taking again, and because of the context of asking while I was terrifying them with my exam.

Now I'm eating a late lunch and watching last night's Grey's Anatomy. I know Mercy West hospital is merging with Seattle Grace Hospital, but honestly: it's more like the wonderful cast of my favourite family drama, the late and celebrated Everwood is merging with Grey's. Last week had the versatile Tom Amandes guest-starring, who I still miss in the choice role of Dr. Harold Abbott, who began as the occasional comic relief and became the social heart of the show. And now this week has all of Amy Abbott's friends joining the staff, with the wonderful Sarah Drew, who played Hannah Rogers on Everwood, and Nora Zehetner, who played Laynie Hart, the girl Hannah replaced as Amy's best friend. Now if Grey's would just give homes to the Everwood powerhouses: writers like Michael Green and John E. Pogue....

Personal: On Talking to the Nieces on the Phone, or Not

2009-10-16T02:56:32Z

Just back in after doing a two hour review session with some students for my Midterm Exam tomorrow for Introduction To Theology. I talked with Sophie and then Grace on the phone today, with Haley declining phone conversation, as usual. Sophie talked mostly of painting flowers at pre-school (green and purple), and tried to tell me that she was playing with puzzles a lot at home, although I needed Grace to translate that for me. Grace spoke of doing a lot of math at school, of the cold and drizzly weather we were both having, and expressed her horror when I mentioned having to deal with a student who cheated. Then Sophie, I think, opened a door and Lucky shot right through it, leading to confused scrambling just as Grace was going to ask Haley again if she wanted to talk. She put down the phone and everyone tore after the little Yorkshire terrier. While Leslie then drilled the girls on taking care of the dog before opening doors to the outside, Grace forgot about the phone. I listened to the house settled down and everyone getting back into their routines for about seven minutes while I did some typing, laughing to myself about when Grace might remember the phone or someone might discover the open line. At that point, I just decided to stop spending any more minutes. A little while later, Leslie callled, laughing about discovering the phone beeping, and Grace suddenly remembering and saying, "Uh-oh...."

Personal: Fighting the LOMC Fire of 1988

2009-10-15T04:53:28Z

Running around all day today, preparing for Midterm Exams for my students, I was pleasantly surprised to be taken out of the tyrannical now and thrown back 20 years in time by a note from Angie. She wanted to use a story I had told her as an illustration for something she was writing, and wanted both my permission and a reminder as to where she might find it on my journal. The thing was, I realized, that she was remembering a story I had told her, and not a story I had written down already.

And so: The Great LOMC Prairie Fire of 1988.

It was the first of my three summers working at Lutheran Outdoor Ministries Center, LOMC, and it was a week with a smaller group of kids in attendance, and so I was spending the week working maintenance for Virgil Rocke, the Property Manager. I was actually rather enjoying myself because I was teamed up with another SGL (Small Group Leader, a.k.a. "camp counselor") who was also on maintenance duty for the week, Murray Weldon, a student in Agronomy who was, along with me and Marine Lt. Rob Guy, the other real enthusiast for deep woods hiking and exploration on the staff. Murray was, naturally, particularly interested in the plants growing in the woods and prairie of the property, and was forever murmuring Latin plant names to himself, and forcing me to eat things he found growing along our hiking routes.

This particular hot day, in July, I think, we were up on the roof of Hillside House, replacing shingles or something of that sort. It was late morning, if I recall correctly, with the day having not yet the fullness of its considerable heat. Northern Illinois had been suffering from the Drought of 1988, and everything was growing brown and dead, so much so that you were starting to get that horrible dead dust rising up as you crunched your way across the lawn.

Suddenly! A hue and cry broke out! Junior high school-aged boys came running up from the pond where they had been starting to fish from the dock, I think, crying out that a fire had broken out on the campfire ring on the far side of pond, where a group had failed to extinguish all the embers from their evening campfire the night before. As this news was shouted up toward us, Murray and I straightened up and, sure enough, smoke was rising beyond the trees circling the pond to the north. "My biscuits are burning! My biscuits are burning!" Murray cried out, in perfect imitation of the Yosemite Sam from that summer's hit film, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, though the movie reference was more to the seat of his pants afire, not something else. The two of us scrambled off the roof and down the hill toward the Administration Building. We knew that the fire department in Oregon, Illinois would be coming, but it was a volunteer department, and aid would take time to arrive. And a summer grass fire can move fast. Steve, the lifeguard at the camp's pool, had already pulled out the camp's prairie fire equipment, kept for both occasions like this and for the intentional burns that are a part of the life cycle of prairie plants. LOMC featured a number of areas of restored prairie and areas where the original prairie plants of Illinois were in the process of being restored, and so had the equipment to go with that project, in this case a wheelbarrow full of shovels and of wide and thick rubber flaps at the end of shovel handles, used for slapping out grass fire. Murray and I each grabbed one of these off the top of the pile in the wheelbarrow and began running for the fire.

I was still in the height of my distance-running shape, and I took off at race speed, something like a five-minute mile pace, leaving Murray behind as I ran toward the trees ringing the pond. When I burst through the gap in the trees made by the service road, I saw that the whole eastern side of the campfire space was aflame, with smoke pouring into the sky eastward in the wind. I kept running, passing the campers and their SGLs still at the dock and tearing around the pond, stopping at the end of the flames and looking back to see the rest of the available staff starting to come around the shore after me. I pulled off my t-shirt and tied it around my nose and mouth for a little breathing protection and waded into the fire.

The simple truth of the matter was that I had the time of my life. The heat, the danger, however great it was or was not, the urgency, and the utter unity of the staff members as we beat at the fire – all of these were enthralling when put together. Whether smacking down the small traces of fire as sparks threatened to set new patches of grass ablaze, or whether being confronted or mostly surrounded with sudden walls of fire taller than me, every motion counted, every choice mattered. We beat and smothered what we could, shoveled dirt onto the flames, both trying to create a firebreak and to smother what was already burning. I cannot remember if it was twenty minutes or an hour before the firetruck came lumbering around the pond: I probably couldn't have said at the time. When we stepped back to let the firefighters finish the job, I was black with soot and ash, looking like I had been used to clean out an old chimney. But I had also had an adventure, done something useful, and was drunk on a not-inconsiderable adrenaline binge. I still get a bit of a rush, remembering the flame all around me, of locking eyes with Murray or one of the others and seeing in that look the agreement to tackle this or that section of fire next, of darting back from the heat and then plunging in for another round. It's one of those tiny episodes in life that is writ much larger in memory than the time it actually took or occupied.

Random: The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company

2009-10-14T19:35:02Z

Dan just emailed me this link to the 17th Wonder of the World: The Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company

Random: The Discovery of a Previously Unknown Da Vinci Painting

2009-10-14T16:29:45Z

Had I only known, I could have spent $19,000 of student loan money, myself, and alarmed Mom beyond all reason....

Art experts find possible new da Vinci
Oct 14, 10:32 AM (ET)

By ROB GILLIES

TORONTO (AP) - A new painting by Leonardo da Vinci may have been discovered thanks to a centuries-old fingerprint.

Peter Paul Biro, a Montreal-based forensic art expert, said Tuesday that a fingerprint on what was presumed to be a 19th-century German painting of a young woman has convinced art experts that it's actually a Leonardo.

Canadian-born art collector Peter Silverman bought "Profile of the Bella Principessa" at the Ganz gallery in New York on behalf of an anonymous Swiss collector in 2007 for about $19,000. New York art dealer Kate Ganz had owned it for about 11 years after buying it at auction for a similar price.

One London art dealer now says it could be worth more than $150 million.

If experts are correct, it will be the first major work by Leonardo to be identified in 100 years.

Biro said the print of an index or middle finger was found on the painting and that it matched a fingerprint from Leonardo's "St. Jerome" in the Vatican. Biro examined multispectral images of the painting taken by the Luminere Technology laboratory in Paris. The lab used a special digital scanner to show successive layers of the work.

"Leonardo used his hands liberally and frequently as part of his painting technique. His fingerprints are found on many of his works," Biro said. "I was able to make use of multispectral images to make a little smudge a very readable fingerprint."

Technical, stylistic and material composition evidence also point to it being a Leonardo. Biro said there's strong consensus among art experts that it is a Leonardo painting.

"I would say it is priceless. There aren't that many Leonardos in existence," Biro said. He said he had heard that one London dealer felt it could be worth 100 million British pounds (more than $150 million).

Silverman said his Swiss friend saw it first and told him it didn't look like a 19th century painting. When Silverman took a look at the painting at the Ganz gallery in 2007, he thought it might be a Leonardo, although that seemed far-fetched. He hurriedly bought the painting for his Swiss friend and then started researching it.

"Of course you say, 'Come on, that's ridiculous. There's no such thing as a da Vinci floating around,'" Silverman said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "I started looking in the areas around da Vinci and all the people who could have possibly done it and through elimination I came back to da Vinci."

Last year, Silverman bumped into Nicholas Turner, a former curator of drawings at the J. Paul Getty Museum and the British Museum. Turner said it was a Leonardo and other leading art experts have backed it up as well.

Silverman said thanks to the fingerprint image at the Luminere Technology laboratory it was confirmed.

"That was icing on the cake," he said.

Silverman describes the Swiss private collector as a very rich man who has promised to buy him "lunch and dinner and caviar for the rest of my life if it ever does get sold."

Personal: Back in From Celebrating Nate's First Birthday

2009-10-12T04:41:16Z

Just back in from the 10pm campus Mass at the Chapel of the Holy Family right after arriving home from my quick weekend with family celebrating nephew Nate's first birthday, which is actually coming up on the 29th. Nate was in his (more-or-less) characteristic good spirits, being a pretty amiable baby. I thought he's looking more like Daniele now, whereas at first I mostly saw Dave, Daniele's dad in him. He was amazingly wired last night on cake and ice cream, so he stayed up 'til late hours with the adults giggling and cooing until he finally crashed. He's still far more muscle-ly and strong than any recorded Novak: far more of an upper-body workout in taking care of him than any of the nieces were. He gives you that whole Charles Atlas thing: the "dynamic tension" of constantly pushing back against you or trying to climb over you, so that holding him is always kind of wrestling him (with lots of laughing).

Niece highlights included Grace telling me once again (as she did a few weeks ago when I babysat), "You need to get married before you turn fifty." That gave me an interesting perspective on how I look to a seven year old: a pre-geriatric uncle guilty of nothing more than laziness, apparently, in not just getting off my rear and giving her cousins to have fun with. I did, of course, also appreciate the root idea that I think was in there, of just her wanting her uncle to be happy. Once I got over the initial moment of horror. Smelling blood in the water, she also made a poster for me today while I was in the shower which referred to me as "Old Person." I think the Sweeney blood is coming on strong. However, she doesn't yet know to take the long view on these things, and never considered that I'm likely to be alive when she reaches my age. Mom and Joe both thought it would be good to save the poster for her and present it back to her at that time. Of other note, Grace told me today that she studied "conscience" ("which is spelled like 'con-science'" she noted) in Religious Ed this morning. And she got the idea. I was into the Apollo program when I was in second grade: I don't think I learned about conscience for years. I was a bit impressed.

Haley got more and more chatty as the weekend went on, which was a pleasure in itself because although she's now five, she's still the shyest in many ways. When she was little, she seemed quite the thrillseeker or mini adrenaline junkie, and so I foresaw her becoming the radical bungee-jumping college student among the daughters. I mentioned something like this to her today, and she didn't know what bungee-jumping was, so I showed her on YouTube. "So you think you'd like to do that?" "NO WAY!" The last few visits, she had mentioned art as her current thought of What She Wanted To Be When She Grew Up: that she was going to be a painter. I liked that image, too, and so I thought about bringing her one of my art books this weekend, if I could find something that I thought she might enjoy paging through, as these girls enjoy paging through scientific field guides and the like, despite their young age. But it turned out that she was going to be a painter no more. Current plan? Tap dancer. This is because she and Grace are very much under the influence of The Fresh Beat Band, and she had been really excited by one of their tap routines. So I made a point of watching Gene Kelly and Donald O'Connor do their "Moses" routine from Singin' In The Rain with her.

Sophie continued to be a cutie unless she was tired and grumpy. She cooed over Nate quite a bit, and was much more gentle with him than she thinks to be with the much smaller Lucky, their still-new Yorkshire Terrier. She was just very enthusiastic in whatever grabbed her attention at a given moment, from wanting to watch my old YouTube videos of her sisters when they were younger or her age, to showing me (at last!) the hi-definition video of the blue whales they saw off California in the summer. She's got an already-evident musical enthusiasm and love for singing that I don't see in the other two, and she demanded to watch the Vienna Teng YouTube video I linked in the previous entry more than once, taken in by the keyboard and vocal. Unlike Grace, who was definitely practicing razzing me, Sophie was completely innocent when we were looking at one of her books this morning and engaged in this routine:

Mike: "And what's this?"
Sophie: "A duck!"
"And what's this?"
"A chicken!"
"And what's this?"
"A cow!"
[stops looking at the book and looks closely at me for a moment]
". . . You have a big nose!"

This was followed with a very 2-year-old contrast of, "I have a little nose!" When I then asked her if she liked my big nose, she smiled and nodded enthusiastically. And thus showed that she was still very innocent or becoming very smart.

Low point: getting on the wrong train in Chicago. (I forgot about the express trains on the commuter rush.) I got on the right route, but ended up in the outer suburbs before I realized what was going on, got off and waited outside in the 40-degree autumn twilight for fifty minutes before I caught a train going back in toward the city and my actual stop. (Which train turned out to be the one I had gotten off fifty minutes earlier, so I could have just stayed aboard, and warm.) This made me recall my favourite mock-motivational poster, and wondering if this, in the end, will really best sum up my life:

Personal/Musical/Theological Notebook: Back from Over The Rhine and Vienna Teng

2009-10-09T04:30:03Z

Just in from an evening with Mike and Donna (and Mike's visiting brother Nick) down at the gorgeous old Papst Theater in Milwaukee taking in a show by Over The Rhine, with Vienna Teng opening for them. She was new to me, with me only have heard one song of hers from Emily. Swoon. Both with lovely sets, and OTR as good as I've ever seen them. I wish I could follow them the next two nights to Madison and Minneapolis, as Mike was thinking would be cool, if only I weren't going to trump good music with visiting family over the weekend. Anyway, concert details to follow. And bootlegs.

Mike and I were naturally curious in seeing a song entitled "Augustine" on her latest disc, and in talking with her after the show, she told us of reading The Confessions as a freshman at Stanford, and the sense of struggle or challenge in the text staying with her across the years until she wrote the song. So I'll drop her name for a little extra celebrity glitter when I try to sell reading our large selection of The Confessions to my own freshmen in a few weeks.

Personal: Weathertop and Reading Tolkien;

2009-10-07T02:02:07Z

October 6th. I always liked doing a re-read of The Lord of the Rings right about now, so that I could hit the October 6th attack under Weathertop (and it's "under" – sooo much better and creepier in the book than Peter Jackson's movie staging of it) at the right time of the year, maybe reading by a window with the dark and the wind and the moon on the other side. Thinking about just the reading of my favourite novel now always gets me excited for the day when the next generation of the family can read it, although at seven years old, Grace is still too young to handle it. Although she might be about ready to read or to have The Hobbit read to her. But autumn is the best time of the year to read The Lord of the Rings, because the look and the weather make it all the more easy to enter into the story. This was especially true growing up in Oregon, Illinois, which looked so much like Tolkien's descriptions of the Shire to begin with.

I've been working all day on job applications: plodding, pedantic, detail-oriented work, with each school needing something just different enough to demand lots of consideration for each version of an application. And all I can really think is that I'd rather be talking to Sophie on the phone, even when she has lots to say about nothing, and most of that unintelligible to me. I had a phone message from Mom the other day, when she was over there babysitting the girls, and she started to laugh as Sophie was anxiously screaming in the background, "I want it! I want it!" regarding the phone, although she didn't quite get that I wasn't actually on it. So Mom asked her questions or prompted her in lieu of my actually conversing with Sophie:

"Say 'Hello.'"
"Hi!"
"Say 'How are you?'"
". . . ? Goood."
"Say 'I'm behaving.'"
"No!"

I'm really looking forward to seeing all the kids this weekend, when Joe and Daniele bring Nate up to celebrate his immanent first birthday with the family.

I actually met Professor Morales today for the first time, a young guy the department hired to do Pauline work last year. I knew he was a friend of Deirdre's from our conversation at Summerfest this year, but I didn't know that he was also a friend of aristotle2002 from when he did his Master's at Notre Dame, while I was teaching at Saint Joe's. He popped in when I was talking to Mickey during office hours today, and we all ended up mostly talking about Notre Dame's catechetical initiative and Mac hard drives. Go figure. Anyway, he seemed like a great guy – someone who would make a good friend, and so it's too bad that I met him as I am on my way out the door.

Theological Notebook: John Allen on Benedict XVI and media coverage of the papacy

2009-10-06T03:36:01Z

Huh. I'm always curious and interested to hear or read a story about the way in which the news media conveys news to us, because any reasonably-informed person in our media world (here I mean "media" in the broad sense) knows that the method can have as much impact as the content of what is reported. While I am aware of the difference in the historical reaction to John Paul, I was not aware that things had "faded" to this extent in international coverage. And that's too bad, because while I was fully aware of Karol Wojtyla's/John Paul II's curiously emblematic role as a man of the 20th century, I rather am more impressed with Benedict XVI as a theologian-pope. And I didn't think at all about any of these particularly "Italian" implications. So: huh.

The pope has become an Italian story

By John L Allen Jr for National Catholic Reporter
Created Oct 02, 2009

Rome -- At one point during Pope Benedict XVI's trip to the Czech Republic last weekend, I strolled across the press center in the Prague Hilton. Taking in the conversations floating through the air, and gazing at the people in the room, I was struck by this insight: The pope has once again become largely an Italian story.

Pope John Paul II was a global newsmaker, and the press corps that followed him was strikingly international. These days, the non-Italians who regularly travel with the pope have dwindled to the media equivalent of a remnant church. On this trip, there was no one from The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, or CNN (unless you count me, but my phone never rang), all of whom used to be regulars. Fox was on the papal plane, but only because their Rome correspondent is invested in the Vatican story; if he weren't around, it's a good bet Fox wouldn't be in the mix either.

To be sure, those agencies have a presence in Prague, so it's not like they blew off the story. But once upon a time, all would have had a correspondent moving with the papal party and filing daily coverage. At that level, the American presence boiled down to the Associated Press, a producer from ABC, and the Catholic News Service. (I made the trip, but not on the plane.)

Probably the lone thing that people who get their news from American TV know about the trip is that at one point a spider crawled across the pope's garments. That clip has become popular on You-Tube, and of course it doesn't require any reporting or analysis to understand.

Two points probably help explain this lack of global interest.

First, Benedict XVI simply isn't the charismatic figure John Paul II was. Second, Benedict has surrounded himself with Italians who sometimes seem more interested in il bel paese than the global scene. Cardinal Tarcisio Bertone, the Secretary of State, regularly injects himself into Italian affairs. The best sound-bites from the Holy See usually come, in Italian, from prelates such as Archbishop Salvatore Fisichella, president of the Pontifical Academy for Life, and Archbishop Agostino Marchetto, secretary of the Pontifical Council for the Pastoral Care of Migrants and Itinerant Peoples.

In many ways, this is more a return to historical form than a novelty. Prior to John Paul II, most popes were figures of occasional interest around the world; only in Italy were they everyday headliners. Rather than being an exception, Benedict XVI is more like the norm -- and hence a reminder of just how remarkable John Paul actually was.

Nonetheless, this reversion to the papacy as essentially an Italian news beat carries two dangers.

First, it tempts Italians to interpret almost everything the pope says or does as a veiled commentary on Italian affairs. A comic moment in the Czech Republic came near the end, when Benedict XVI made a generic reference to the need for public officials to respect moral values. That triggered a debate among Italian correspondents about whether this was a criticism of Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi, who celebrated his 73rd birthday this week. Berlusconi's alleged escapades with young courtesans fueled a juicy bit of summer theater here.

The second risk, more relevant for people outside Italy, is that international understanding of the papacy is ever more dependent upon Italian coverage. As I've said before, depending upon the Italians is a dangerous proposition.

To be sure, Italian journalism has its strengths. It's more art than craft, so correspondents are encouraged to bring their personalities into the coverage. That often makes their essays provocative and highly original. A concern for factual accuracy, however, does not figure prominently among its virtues. Sometimes speculation or hypotheses run on the news pages, without much indication that they're not to be taken seriously.

Of course, Italians know all that, and they're highly sophisticated about reading between the lines. When this speculation is translated into other languages and taken as real news, however, it can cause a great deal of mischief -- especially, perhaps, in Anglo-Saxon cultures, where we're still at least somewhat inclined to assume that what appears on the news pages is factually true.

If the Italian near-monopoly on Vatican coverage gains strength, therefore, more and more the rule for understanding news about the pope will have to be caveat lector: "Let the reader beware."

Personal: Here Comes The Chill and the Dark

2009-10-02T00:47:09Z

Corollary to my earlier entry about complications of living in the Ardmore in the autumn: it is also sucky, though less so than the early comment about the heat, to have to re-learn every autumn that the electricity in my apartment blows out if I use the floor heater and the microwave at the same time. Okay, so maybe that's really more a comment about me than the the apartment....

Theological Notebook: Figuring Out Something About A Taxonomy of Charisms

2009-10-01T16:41:42Z

I made a discovery last night while working on the dissertation over at Starbucks. In the history of discoveries, it's not much – it's virtually nothing, but nevertheless it was still kind of exciting for me. Working on a text from the Second Vatican Council dealing with a particular idea of a charism (a spiritual gift from God), I was lead back a century and had to read through a parallel text from the First Vatican Council in 1870. Comparing the two documents helped me see something distinct about this particular charism, and then it was just as though something slid into place in my mind.

Basically, I had a taxonomical insight: like a biologist working on different species of animals, I've started to be able to see relations and levels that I don't think anyone's identified before. You can look at animals and just see lots of different species. And that's perfectly fine. In the same way, you can look at all sorts of natural and spiritual gifts and just see charisms or gifts. Or you can look at animals and see domain, kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus, species: the different biological levels of classification. I'm starting to understand more of what seems to be a logical taxonomy of charisms. Sullivan had made a few important insights in this direction, and last night, the logic of another level came clear for me. I ran a couple of logic tests on it, and it seemed to hold up well as I wrote up the definition in the section I was writing. I'm not going to go into more detail here, because I realized that I'm putting together enough of a set of ideas here that I think this could develop into a "side" article for publication from my dissertation research.

But is just One Of Those Things: the sweet experience of an insight you weren't at all expecting just showing up in front of you, like what I call a "Mozart Experience" in songwriting, when a song just shows up, unannounced, and the whole thing – lyrics, melody, chords – just pours out of you, complete, in a matter of minutes. "Simple Things," "Begin To Be," "My Mom," "I Met You When You Just Got Going (Uh-Huh)," and "This Romance" were all like that. It's a treat to have had an analogous theological experience, too.