The Beiderbecke Affair

‘They caused the honor of God to blaze from the page’

Colm Tóibín’s used the word magic to describe ancient stones, which he suggested were without artifice, without religion, and without history. Ironically, his description reminded me of the Book of Kells, and that, in turn, brings me to this passage in Peter Brown’s definitive history of the early Middle Ages, The Rise of Western Christendom. It seems that magic was very important, even to the monks of Ireland.

In a Christian region where books of any kind were rare objects, the Christian mystique of copying the Scriptures was yet further tinged with the magical awe that had always surrounded the áes dana, the “people of the skill,” the master-craftsmen whose legendary cunning provided secular rulers with the ornaments and jewelry appropriate to their status.

The writer as jeweler . . .

In the same way, the craftsmen of the great monasteries covered the vellum  pages of the Gospel books with exquisite illuminations. These craftsmen were the áes dana of the “High King of Heaven.” They caused the honor of God to blaze from the page. They were not simply copying a text. They were turning parts of the holy text into the equivalent of jewelry.

IMAGE: The Tara Brooch, illustration from The Early Christian Architecture of Ireland by Miss M. Stokes

This is one in an occasional series about the Virginia Festival of the Book, to be held in Charlottesville, Virginia, on March 26–30, 2008, and sponsored by my employer, the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities.

Chabon & The Frozen Chosen

John Leonard considers the unexpected Jewishness of  Michael Chabon, whose new novel imagines a Jewish state in Alaska. Here’s a taste:

Here The Yiddish Policemen’s Union reminds me of the only other north-of-the-border Jewish novel in its major league, Mordecai Richler’s Solomon Gursky Was Here (1990). In Richler’s razzle-dazzle, where the Gurskys bore a startling resemblance to the Bronfmans from whom all Seagram’s flows, we got 150 years of arctic sky, black ravens, caribou bones, Old Testament loonytunes, Lévi-Strauss creation myths, Karl Marxist confabulations, and Gimpel the Fool on permafrost. Everything that wasn’t Oedipal would prove to be cannibalistic. And Solomon Gursky himself would seem to have agreed with Landsman, in his last word—IN CAPITAL LETTERS, NO LESS!—to an increasingly dubious biographer in 1978: “THE WORLD CONTINUES TO PAY A PUNISHING TOLL FOR OUR JEWISH DREAMERS.”

Am I the only one who hears everything Leonard writes in that laconic Sunday Morning with Charles Kuralt/Charles Osgood voice of his?

TOP REASON TO READ THE WHOLE REVIEW: Jim Rockford and Jesus Christ appear in the same sentence.

Marilynne Has Hitch for Lunch

Marilynne Robinson’s essay writing is dense, difficult, pedantic, and scolding. Plus I love it. In the May issue of Poetry she contributes a review essay of The Library of America’s new anthology, American Religious Poems, edited by Harold Bloom and Jesse Zuba. One can read her paragraphs almost independently, each is so fully realized. Here is but one, in which she causes me to suspect that she does not admire the play Inherit the Wind and that she would eat Christopher Hitchens for lunch given the opportunity.

Again, poetry is best interpreted by poetry. William Carlos Williams tells us vastly more about Walt Whitman than the whole tribe of his critics and biographers can hope to tell us. Whitman made Emerson far greater than Emerson was on his own. Perhaps Sophocles did as much for Homer. Likewise, to the exasperation of those rationalists who wish they would just say what they mean, religions interpret themselves in religious terms. If the Gospel of Luke doesn’t make sense to you, Augustine and Luther won’t either. Those who look into this anthology are likelier than others to have some experience of poetry and to recognize the inadequacies of interpretation and paraphrase. But religion, not only in America, has been seriously distracted by the supposed need to translate itself into terms a rationalist would find meaningful. So liberals have set out upon a long, earnest project more or less equivalent to rewriting Shakespeare into words of one syllable—if such a thing can be imagined as an effort fired by moral passion and carried out by people who would themselves confess to a deep affection for Shakespeare. Fundamentalists have responded with a furious rejection of the very thought that the Bible might operate at the level of poetry, which amounts to a literalist insistence that the text is already available to understanding in the rationalists’ own terms and which yields endless futile controversy, notably about creation. This collaboration of supposed antagonists, liberals, and fundamentalists has meant that, for the moment, religion and poetry seem alien to one another as, historically, they have never been.

ADDITIONALLY: Is poetry actually best interpreted by comic books?

I believe! I believe!

Anne Enright on faith:

No one talks about how much fun it is to be a fundamentalist. The word has changed, of course: for any rational person, ‘fundamentalist’ now means ‘manifestation of raw evil’, but being a charismatic Christian was a hoot. It was like being at a wild party with no drink, no sex, no hangover, no regrets. I believe! I believe! I am in a suburban sitting-room, and I believe! It was a constant state of expectation and yearning; a suspension so high and long, it was almost like release. Speaking in tongues – I could do it now, if I dared – was pure flow; you had to wince at the sweetness of it. Miracles were two a penny. Everything made sense. People prayed for their lost glasses and found their dentures instead and we all laughed at God’s little joke. You can’t live up there for ever, of course, and the downs, like a junkie’s, were terrible and complicated. The whole group tried to undo the knot of your error, to release you back into the ether where you belonged. These people – dentists, housewives, students, lost souls – performed a kinder and less lonely version of what Catholics call ‘examining your conscience’. This is an overly rational, slightly paranoid activity that involves thinking very hard for a very long time, until the answer comes from somewhere else entirely. Love. God. That which descends. The answer. Bliss.

PREVIOUSLY: Anne Enright on shopping: “Their secret was not one of class, although that seemed to help, but one of belief, and like all questions of belief, it involved certain mysteries. How, for example, does one believe in navy?”

Don’t Fiddle with the Yiddle

I’m tempted to take all my life lessons from Mezz Mezzrow and just leave it at that. This one in particular comes from Really the Blues, the early jazz musician’s 1946 memoir written with Bernard Wolfe. Here he introduces readers to that rarest of creatures, the Yiddish cowboy:

Monkey wasn’t jiving about that bartender. He wasn’t exactly a rabbi, yet and still Mac was an honest-to-God Jewish root-toot-tooting cowboy straight from Peckerville, Texas, pardner, and itchy in the trigger finger. He was one of the best marksmen that ever came out of the Panhandle, and he had a gang of medals and cups for his sharpshooting, plus a Dead-Eye Dick control on the trigger and nerves like high-tension coiled springs. For our afternoon sport we’d go out in the back yard and watch him pick dimes off beer bottles with a six-shooter at fifty paces, whooping as though Indians were biting the dust by the gross. Sometimes he would twirl his lasso and rope the whole bunch of us in with one flick of his wrist, yelling “Yippee-i-yip!” like it was round-up time on the range. One of the funniest things I ever heard was Mac spieling in Yiddish, because he spoke it with a thick Southern drawl, piling on more “you-all’s” than a Geechee senator. “Was macht ir, you-all?” he’d say with his nasal twang, and he had us rolling on the floor. We called him “Ragtime Cowboy Jew” and Monkey nicknamed him “Yiddle.” Mac was always sitting out in the yard, sunning himself and twirling his guns lazily at the hip, so I made up a little doggerel song about him that went, “Don’t fiddle with the Yiddle, or he’ll riddle you in the middle.”

While uncommon, the Yiddish cowboy is not unknown. Edward Meeker sang of him as far back as 1908 (“I’m a Yiddish Cowboy” [Mp3]), and the wonderfully kosher folks at Manischewitz once used him to move their matzo [Mp3]. Meeker, by the way, was the Tin Pan Alley singer who first crooned “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” More about Meeker (including a great photo of him singing while the other musicians hold their noses) can be found at The Anachronist, the proprietor of which is curating (has curated?) an actual “Jewface” compilation!

PREVIOUSLY: Mezz pities his buddies for going tangent; The Acidic Jew meets The Hebrew Hammer

A Plea to Stop the Bickering

Here is a letter to the editor (assuming, of course, that this paper actually employs editors) exactly as it appeared this morning in the Cedar Rapids Gazette.

Middle East fighting not needed in America

If the Jews and the Muslim’s want to enter into the Middle East conflict, they should go back to their so-called mother country and do it there. This is America, we do not need this bickering going on here.

The next thing you know it will escalate in this country and they will be fighting here. We have enough problems on our own. If you want to be an American, then be an American.

Glenn Suchomel
Chelsea

I’ve never been to Chelsea, but Wikipedia tells me that, “like many rural Midwestern towns, [it’s] in decline. The few businesses left include a saloon and an oat processing facility. As of 2006, the city is awarding free residential lots to qualified people in a bid to attract residents.”

I imagine Glenn sitting in that saloon, out of work and sipping from a sweaty bottle of Genuine Draft, nodding in agreement as he watches clips of the Congress debating same-sex marriage on FOX News.

“It’s part of God’s plan for the future of mankind,” says Rep. John Carter of Texas. Bob Beauprez of Colorado sees “the very hand of God” at work. “We best not be messing with His plan.” Man and wife “wasn’t our idea,” Mike Pence of Indiana reminds his colleagues. “It was God’s.” “I think God has spoken very clearly on this issue,” says Phil Gingrey of Georgia, and when someone begs to differ, he replies, “I refer the gentleman to the Holy Scriptures.”

This is America, after all, and we need this kind of bickering here. The Washington Post, meanwhile, reports that “Democrats and a couple of sympathetic Republicans wondered whether . . . their colleagues were fiddling while Beirut burns.”

IMAGE: Lebanon, drawn by W. H. Bartlett, steel engraving by W. Floyd (1836)

Superheroes. Religion. Sex. (A Primer)

I happened upon artist Orna Wind’s series of paintings juxtaposing iconic Western women (like super-slash-action heroes Lara Croft and Jessica Rabbit) against a backdrop of explosions, hurled stones, and pillars of smoke. The 2004 exhibit, at the Rosenfeld Gallery in Tel Aviv, concluded with images of veil-covered Muslim women.

Superheroes. Religion. Sex. Where I have seen that before?

Oh, yeah. Go to a website aptly titled The Religious Affiliation of Comic Book Characters (“If people can’t stand cartoons about religion, they’ve got a problem.” – Frank Miller). There you’ll find an exhaustive and sometimes exhausting compilation of theo-geek trivia, the highlights of which include the fact that Superman is Methodist, Spider-Man Protestant, The Thing Jewish, and Elektra Greek Orthodox.

Some of these affiliations are rather more obvious (Warrior Nun Areala leans Catholic) and predictable (Son of Satan’s a former priest); some are silly (The Acidic Jew); some are confusing (Batgirl is listed as being “religiously untrained; potential Christian”); and some, like Captain Hero, are many if not all of the above.

He’s listed as Jewish, despite the fact that his name is, shall we say, non-denominational (compare with The Hebrew Hammer, Menorah Man, or Greenberg the Vampire). But he’s also listed as GLBT, which is not, strictly speaking, a religion. A handful of Catholics are listed as such and it turns out they’re stuck inside “socially relevant” Catholic comic books. Captain Hero, on the other hand, is/was stuck on Comedy Central. What’s his deal? His link leads to a Wikipedia entry with a helpful section on his sexuality, which unnamed experts have deemed “debatable.”

Some argue he could probably best be described as pansexual, because while Foxxy Love is bisexual, showing attraction to both men and women, Hero seems completely indiscriminate, possessing more of a “jump on anything that moves” attitude (and even a few things that don’t). Others believe he shows signs of internalized homophobia, indicating he may actually be simply gay, or in denial of the homosexual aspect of his sexuality. Hero has a variety of paraphilias, including pedophilia, bestiality, and necrophilia.

The anonymous Wiki author wisely concludes that the “question of whether Hero is gay or straight is an extremely complex issue.” Notes attached to the Wind exhibit, meanwhile, note “the Hollywood-like atmosphere emanating from the paintings, an atmosphere typified by a cross between the glamorous and the dark” and which portrays sexuality as “lacking a formed shape.”

So there you go.

Superheroes. Religion. Sex. Any questions?

IMAGES: Lara Croft by Orna Wind (Tempra oil on canvas, 2004); A Moslem Woman by Orna Wind (Tempra oil on canvas, 2003)

Odds & Ends

• AmbivaBlog quotes John Updike on the definition of a book. According to U, it’s “an elemental sheaf, bound together by love and daring, to be passed with excitement from hand to hand.” An AmbivaCommenter, meanwhile, wonders if the definition of a blog isn’t also pretty close to that: “An elemental series of posts, bound together by love and daring, to be linked with excitement from screen to screen.” I don’t know about the excitement part, but here are some links to further discussion. At if:book, for instance, they are considering the different ways computer and print books are navigated. Jeff Jarvis is less analytical and more pessimistic: “I have nothing against books,” he writes. “But the book is an outmoded means of communicating information. And efforts to update it are hampered because, culturally, we give undue reverence to the form for the form’s sake.” He’s right, except for the undue part. A response of sorts can be found at the conveniently titled blog What Is a Book?, which this week quoted Milton Glaser: “If one of the definitions we have concerning art is that it serves its public by reflecting and explaining the world at a particular moment in history, it is hard to believe that design does not serve in a similar way.” In other words, books are art in & of themselves. That seems reasonable to me.

• Mike Standaert has restarted Nipposkiss, on which he sprinkles everything from political warnings to photos of condors. His book about Tim LaHaye and the Left Behind series, Skipping Towards Armageddon, is out on Soft Skull. Why should you buy it? Because this is real [Mp3]. People actually believe this stuff.

• An alert reader wondered why, in a post on Law & Order, I didn’t mention that Michael Moriarty has an Iowa connection. It’s true: While I was an undergraduate in Iowa City, his first wife was a dance professor, his son a student, musician, and filmmaker. My senior year, Moriarty gave a 20-questions interview to Playboy, in which he disparaged his ex-wife sexually. That was pretty classy, I thought. BONUS FACT: Another Michael Moriarty with an Iowa connection hit the road and ended up in Torrance County, New Mexico. That was way back in 1887. The town of Moriarty is now named for him.

• Hidden away in the comments to my earlier Van Vechten post is Rick Zollo’s thoughtful reply, in which he asserts that Van Vechten was bi- not homosexual and asks that the man be considered with a shade more nuance. “Many of the most famous personages of the 20th century had complicated sexualities,” Rick writes. He then compares CVV’s career to that of the great jazz talent scout and producer John Hammond. I like it. Thanks, Rick.

• Finally, a belated reply to my post on the struggle of Maine Indian tribes to preserve their native languages. Thanks for reading.

IMAGE: A detail from Le bonheur de vivre (The Joy of Life)  by Henri Matisse

On Circumcision & Human Nature

AmbivaBlog has a beautifully written post on circumcision. There is a reason why I love Judaism: Through literature & ritual, it points unashamedly at the most painful, ambivalent, and difficult parts about being human and asks us not to understand them or to accept that something better must surely follow; it asks only that we honestly confront them . . . In this way I find I can be most fully human . . .

The hardest part of circumcision for me still to accept is the infliction of pain on a naturally trusting little being. I wonder, though, whether that isn’t exactly what the ancient Jews intended: to wound the instinct at its very foundation, because where there is pain there is consciousness. I wonder if the intent was to cut a hesitation and a questioning into male sexuality that might slow down its natural rush to self-gratification, and so make its uses potentially more conscious, reflective and directable.

One thing’s for sure: cutting the penis for God’s sake expresses a ruthless yet ultimately merciful sense of priorities. “This is not your god,” it says, “That is.” To put it in nondenominational terms, pleasure is not your be-all and end-all: consciousnessness is, love is. Judaism adopted (for it did not invent) a barbarously emphatic way of branding that priority into its newborn males rather than letting them grow up and choose for themselves. That doesn’t show much trust in “human nature,” but then if you read the Five Books of Moses, you’ll see that neither circumcision nor fire and brimstone stopped the Jews themselves from repeatedly making the wrong choice. The great divide between conservatives and liberals, between Burke and Rousseau, between the Founding Fathers and Marx, is over the question of whether “human nature” is spontaneously good, and requires only releasing from constraint, or whether it can go either way, and so requires shaping and directing. Who is right? Look at the historical record: “By their fruits ye shall know them.”

IN ADDITION: Listen to Laurel Snyder (of JewishyIrishy fame) comment on interfaith seders. I normally wince at the preachy & predictable NPR essays, but Laurel actually has something interesting to say. Now go buy her book.

Ready for Constipesach

Go to the Shabot 6000 site for a link to an article called “Matzah & Constipation: The Unspoken Passover Blues.” Meanwhile, our kitchen counter grows more crowded by the hour with seder goodies . . .

PLUS: The Two-Minute Haggadah.

CARTOON: “Constipesach” by Ben Baruch