Not what you think. Or, sort of what you think. The unfinished but mostly finished and completed/compiled by the late author’s daughter novel about, well, “yellow fever.” White men who mostly/only date/pursue Asian women and the kind of dangerous sexualization and fetishism associated with that. Which is all very awkward for a guy like me who is married to a woman from Thailand (a country which has its own unique place in the pantheon of cultures creepily fetishized by White and western men).
It’s an excellent book, with some well-drawn characters and its Baltimore location felt very real to someone who has lived there and visits often. It suffered, of course, at the end, because, presumably, she would have fleshed it out more than the brief epilogue-like fragments that made up the last sections of book.
Also… classical music plays a big role, so, if you like a nice string quartet, you can hear the music in your head sometimes while reading this book.
The conceit of a biography of Thomas Jefferson through the lens of his writings is a conceit tailor-made to interest me and Kaplan, by and large, does an excellent and interesting job of it. He is willing to criticize some writings for not being his best and to draw attention to some under appreciated writings, like his inaugural addresses, especially his second one. He acknowledges that his approach leaves out entirely important aspects of his life, especially Jefferson’s relationship with Sally Hemming and their children together. This is understandable and he does a good job of recognizing that his conceit has limitations.
What I found unforgivable was that he spent no time on the late epistolary relationship between Jefferson and John Adams, after their presidencies were over and Benjamin Rush had patched up their friendship. It is one of the most brilliant and learned series of letters you will ever read and it feels shameful that they aren’t discussed. The only excuse I can give is that they don’t, so far as I have read, offer much a glimpse into their previous political careers (a sore subject, they surely avoided).
Emil Petaja asks the reader an important question: what if Finland was populated by secret space wizards?
Yes, that’s right. This book is that bats–t crazy. It starts out like a classic silver age science fiction novel, with a lost spaceman who has survived this cosmic zone of death called the Black Storm. The Storm is growing and it disintegrates everything it touches. Even the crew of the ship that picks up our intrepid spaceman (who is, we will learn later, named Ilmaren) slowly and painfully melts into atomic nothingness just from having been near things that were in or near the Black Storm. He blames himself (as do most people in the first half of the book), but later it is off-handedly said that it couldn’t be him, but maybe his spacesuit was contanimated? Felt like there was some more detail we could have gotten there, but by that time, we are off to the land of the space wizards who descended from the people of modern day Finland. Mostly, they live like gnomish wizards underground, but once a year they come up and party (protected by an illusion, so normies don’t discover them) like it’s approximately 1000 CE.
You will be surprised to learn that Ilmaren is actually a chosen savior of the galaxy who must journey to land of goblins, elves, and hell hounds, created by an evil witch who got herself a Star Mill due to… well, it’s a long complicated retelling of Finnish mythology that is barely even metaphor, apparently. Anyway, Ilmaren saves the die by traveling through a tapestry using space magic and destroys the Star Mill (though not the witch! she escapes!) using a science magic… um… light saber, I guess. It’s really not clear. He’s sort of trapped in the little space witch world, but he seemed hopeful, so I guess it’s a happy ending. And we are meant to assume that the Black Storm will not destroy the entire universe anymore, so, job well done.
The good: an amazing overview of one of the most fascinating periods in art history and probably the most fascinating period for American art history. The parties, the paintings, the development of the unique styles.
The bad: the two artists, Elaine de Kooning and Lee Krasner, who were in relationships with other artists (Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, respectively), see their work and career subsumed, even in a book about female artists, into something too much like extensions of the stories of men. Even worse, you can see it happen, because the first part of the book chronicles Krasner work and artistic engagements pre-Pollock and it is incredibly vibrant. Post-Pollock, well, I learned a lot about her husband. Kooning met her future husband early in her story, so she never got the same kind of prologue that Krasnet, at least, enjoyed.
But I am glad to have read it, glad to have learned more about these artists and their milieu. And I am also looking forward to visiting some of their works the next time I visit the museum (the National Gallery of Art, here in Washington, DC, has some admirable works by Mitchell, Frankenthaler, and Hartigan, especially; which, in this context of having just read this, also feels like another slap to Krasner and Kooning; sigh…).
His Holiness, Pope Francis wrote, in his 2021 letter, Traditionis Custodes, that:
An opportunity offered by St. John Paul II and, with even greater magnanimity, by Benedict XVI, intended to recover the unity of an ecclesial body with diverse liturgical sensibilities, was exploited to widen the gaps, reinforce the divergences, and encourage disagreements that injure the Church, block her path, and expose her to the peril of division.
When the Archdiocese of Washington, DC acted on Traditionis Custodes by limiting the regular use of the Latin or Tridentine mass to three churches and requiring other churches that wish to use the Latin mass to not only apply for permission, but for the priests who wish the celebrate the Latin mass to affirm, in writing, the validity of the Second Vatican Council, better known at Vatican II. In other words, to make a firm statement that would, among other thing, affirm their participation in the unity of the Church.
The Washington Post wrote that this was “spurring anger from church traditionalists.” More recently. In a later article, the Post recorded that, “Many who attend Latin Mass say they value the chance to meditate and contemplate during the long stretches when the priest is speaking quietly in Latin.”
The last quote struck me as I was reading Romano Guardini’s 1931 book, The Spirit of the Liturgy, because Guardini specifically argues that the idea of the mass as a time for individualized contemplation is wrong in a very important. Of course, he did not predict that nearly one hundred years later, the Latin mass would be a tool for division (seeing as how the Latin mass was the rule when he wrote it), but he clearly saw how the liturgy could be misused and misunderstood by making it about individuals and small groups, as the Pope saw happening, rather than as something universal. When writing about the fellowship of the liturgy, he is clear: except in certain, very specific actions, “the liturgy does not say “I,” but “We.”” In fact, the liturgy is a form of renouncement by each congregant of that which “exists merely for itself and excludes others.” He goes on to say, “It is not to serve as a model for the spiritual life of the individual, but for that of a corporate body.”
This, I believe, is why Pope Francis issued the letter: the Latin mass was being misused by certain individuals so as not to benefit the whole body of the Church, but as an exclusionary tool to signify an elect and indulge desires to feel superior to the majority of the Church Body.
The Spirit readily acknowledges independent cases, determined individually and on their merits, but when exceptions become the rule for small groups, the Church suffers from a lack of unity in the spiritual act which both its primary tool for pedagogy and for directing Catholics, as the Body of the Church, towards God, who is our end.
The liturgy is not about the “attitude to be adopted,” but the “form taken by the permanent legislation which will henceforth exercise an enduring influence upon the soul,” a clear call for obedience to Church teachings like Vatican II.
Church shopping is something we can all acknowledge happens in our society and Guardini does not address it in The Spirit. There will always be differences between parishes in culture; one may feel more welcoming than another to young people or parents with children at home or simply feel more like home because it has a particular ethnic or cultural identity, as in our Lady of China parish, here in the District, which offers mass Mandarin and Cantonese, or Saint Augustine, which was founded by emancipated Black Catholics and is still a symbol of the city’s Black Catholic community. But these differences are, ultimately, about making the parishioners feel part of the corporate body of the whole Church and not making a particular group separate from that body, for, “the primary and exclusive aim of the liturgy is not the expression of the individual’s reverence and worship for god,” because “the liturgical entity consists rather the united body of the faithful as such – the Church – a body which infinitely outnumbers the mere congregation.”
Guardini tells us that the entire gathering should take an “active share” in the execution of the liturgy and that everyone attending is “obliged to follow with a certain amount of attention.” Without discounting the possibility that a few attendees at the regular Latin masses that used to occur at seven parishes through the city were fluent in Latin, it can be safely said that most did not. After all, the quote about meditating when the priest was speaking in Latin clearly implies that they listeners were not understanding the words, but engaging in individual meditation while priest spoke, more or less unintelligibly in the background. And I do not accept that having memorized the meaning of repeated phrases or knowing certain words in Latin, as I do, is the equivalent of participating in a liturgy performed in a language in which the majority of the congregation is fluent.
I freely admit that I have attended Tridentine masses on several occasions and enjoyed them very much, but after reading The Spirit of the Liturgy and appreciating the wisdom of Traditionis Custodes, I also see the danger that lies within that appreciation. As someone who sees myself as exceptionally well educated, a person with a particular love of art, symbolism, history, and philosophy, my attendance reinforced feelings of difference, rather than unity. I also fell into the error of “appreciating the Church’s worship merely for the sake of its aesthetic value.”
I also do not believe that anyone in the Archdiocese meant for the Latin mass to represent separation from the body of the church, only that the regular use of it by parish congregations had been corrupted by a few so that it became a symbol of division, exclusion, and even disobedience, however well meaning.
This does not mean I will never attend another one, because there is certainly room for the particular form of personal contemplation it encourages in me and, apparently, in others. But, as Guardini emphasizes, that kind of individualism should remain the exception. So, my rule will be to follow his teachings, supported by the wisdom of Traditionis Custodes, through regular attendance at the standard masses offered at my parish of St. Peter’s on Capitol Hill and to participate in them as a small, but vital part of the corporate body of the Church.
The premise is that four women of varying closeness to each other who also studied philosophy together helped push back against the analytic turn in British philosophy and the apparently nefarious influence of A.J. Ayer’s version of logical positivism.
The four women as fascinating and clearly did important work (obviously, Murdoch is well known beyond philosophy), but the thesis of the subtitle is not really upheld. Did they bring philosophy back to life? They could have, but the authors don’t necessarily make that case (and even undercut it by mentioning several men who came back from World War II and felt driven by what they saw and experienced to turn away from analytic philosophy). In an unfortunate choice, the focus on Anscombe’s friendship and professional relationship with Wittgenstein risks making her appear as a moon, albeit an important one, in his orbit. I am convinced their work was important and interesting, but their influence, particularly on the (still) male-dominated world of philosophy is poorly documented, nor is it suggested that they created a cohort of female disciples to batter down the patriarchal door.
I checked this book out from the library because I had very much enjoyed Wills’ Inventing America, which was about Jefferson and the Declaration of Independence. He’s a fine stylist, though this slim volume on James Madison is not the best introduction to him (though a decent introduction to Madison).
Part of a series of books on American presidents (to which Arthur Schlesinger placed his imprimatur), Wills struggles manfully to write an introduction to one of the most intellectually interesting men to ever be president that is simultaneously under 150 pages, covers the major points, and is new/interesting. To he credit, he doesn’t like the middle prerogative interfere too much.
He tries to put more of emphasis on Madison’s presidency, which he suggests has been given short shrift in the past and treated as an embarrassing interlude, rather than the highpoint. While not necessarily revisionist, he argues that the War of 1812 didn’t end as badly as most of us think and that Madison, though not a natural executive, was more successful that he is given credit for.
Interesting fact I learned from this book: A young Benjamin Franklin, attempting to make a name for himself in London, decides to return to America where geniuses are less thick on the ground, so more likely to be rewarded; he expresses this sentiment as part of his correspondence with David Hume!
The good: learned some interesting things. Was not up on the conflict between Madison and Hamilton on paying the domestic debt. Hamilton wanted to pay the wealthy Americans who had bought up Revolutionary era debt at a discount, whereas Madison wanted to give them a small profit on their below face value purchase, but also make sure the the original holder, who received a promissory note for $100 (for example) for $100 worth of grain, would, if not made whole, at least receive some part of it. Suffice to say, I’m on Madison’s side. Also interesting to read how a man named William Duer, a one-time lieutenant in Hamilton’s treasury department, almost singlehandedly (according to Shankman) created dangerous investment bubbles and subsequent crashes in 1791 and 1792, which feels downright contemporary, except that Duer went to prison and we never seem to hold the rentier class accountable.
The bad: AP style gone awry. The dreadfully boring style and monotonous sentence structure makes this a real slog to read. AP style is not meant to create boring prose, but to set a floor which the writer can choose to rise above. This writer, ahem, does not appear to have made that choice.
I’m probably being too harsh. It’s a fine monograph, limited in scope, but covering an important issue (debt and credit) in the early years of the United States, through the lenses of Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison, though Jefferson is, surprisingly, the least important of the three (possibly because Madison, as his de facto political lieutenant, was more active in the national conversation, while Jefferson kept his image as the retiring philosopher).
the coffee philosopher 