by Paul Eliefrom Georgetown University
Serious Piece = Long Shelf Life
Look past the silly man with a bushy mustache on the cover of the current Rolling Stone. (Will Ferrell – who is not actually funny but just pretends to be, if you ask me.) The new issue is chock full of ambitious, serious pieces: Bill McKibben on “Obama and the Climate,” Matt Taibbi on Camden, New Jersey, “America’s Most Desperate Town”; and Janet Reitman’s thrillingly strong double profile of Edward Snowden and Glenn Greenwald, the journalist who took the secret documents Snowden took from the National Security administration and made them public in the Guardian. The last is by far the best piece I’ve read on Securitygate – though Ryan Lizza’s conversation with Leonard Lopate about his piece on the NSA in last week’s New Yorker suggested that the piece itself is very strong.
Why the long-form seriousness around the holidays? My first thought is that these days we wear ourselves out with light entertainment during the year and so must take the holidays to recover.
Second thought: No, that can’t be, because there’s been serious long-form journalism at year’s end for as long as I can remember. Back in the mid-eighties, it was Esquire’s annual December literary issue and Cullen Murphy’s awe-inspiring cover story about the historical Jesus (in the December 1986 Atlantic) that made me want to be a long-form journalist in the first place.
Third thought: Oddly enough, long-form journalism, allows magazine editors to relax around the holidays. These pieces – detailed, meticulously constructed, with a long view built in – are less susceptible to the news cycle than slighter stories. Barring assassination, an end to global warming, or a sudden rush of hipsters to Camden, these pieces will be current straight through the holidays.
Buddhist Autobiography, Elevated
Benjamin Bogin is a fixture on the Hilltop as a professor of Buddhist studies in the theology department. But he can be forgiven for thinking that the Hilltop – the nickname for Georgetown’s main campus – is a misnomer. In an earlier life he spent six years in Kathmandu, Nepal – elevation 1400 meters — directing study-abroad programs in the Himalayas for students from American high schools and colleges.
The elevation of the Hilltop — at the Observatory near Yates Field House — is 52 meters.
Earlier this week Bogin gave a presentation from a new book of his at the Rubin Museum of Art in Manhattan – elevation 4 meters — which is to New York City what Leonard Cohen’s redoubt on Mount Baldy is to Los Angeles: a site where perceptions of Buddhism are projected and sharpened.
Bogin’s research deals with Tibetan Buddhist autobiography and the ways visual art, narrative, and sacred geography intersect in Buddhist cultures – and all these interests come together in the book, called The Illuminated Life of the Great Yolmowa. It’s Bogin’s English translation and explication of the autobiography of the seventeenth-century Tibetan Buddhist Yolmowa Tenzin Norbu — renowned as a tantric adept, teacher, author, and painter, but especially as the author of this autobiography.
And not just the author: Yolmowa illustrated the autography, and the illustrations (that’s one up top) are “the only known example of a Tibetan visual autobiography.” Bogin explains:
"These dynamic and colorful scenes provide a window into the world of seventeenth-century Tibetan Buddhism that differs greatly from the better-known religious histories and the static iconography of most thangka paintings. They are presented here for the first time.”
How many of us get the chance to present the work of a major thinker in a different culture for the first time, as Bogin did at the Rubin, and does in the book? Not so many.
The original manuscript is in the Tibetan exile community in Dharamsala, India — elevation 1457 meters.
Caffeine-Powered Literary Revival
It took nearly two hundred pieces posted here this fall — this one is number 196 — before a person in a position to know reminded me of a first principle of social media: use your site to point readers toward your work in other media.
I am lucky to have a number of pieces in other media just now, so I am going to be posting links to some of them in the days to come.
First up is an address at a conference on Walker Percy’s book Lost in the Cosmos, sponsored by the Walker Percy Center for Writing and Publishing at Loyola University in New Orleans. Video is here.
You can see in it how tired I was, which perhaps explains the exuberantly caffeinated answers I gave in an interview with Joseph O’Brien of Dappled Things just beforehand. The interview, artfully transcribed and introduced, is up on their site. A takeout:
DT: ”So taking our lead from Flannery O’Connor, what strategy ought the Catholic writer take in seeking to be published—and published widely?”
PE: ”Instead of making blanket assumptions about what is possible and what’s not, you get in there and try to figure out how to get it done. You have to be savvy about what the obstacles are to getting your work read, but you have to ignore the big blanket statements about what you can or can’t do. Truly, it wasn’t any easier for Catholic writers in the 1950s. For every better aspect then, there were also worse ones in the culture. You had more believing readers, possibly, but you also had a lot of teachers pushing pious pap on people. You had Cardinal Spellman writing a novel (one Flannery O’Connor thought `pretty short’); you had Madame Bovary on the Index; and on and on.
"You’re getting me on one of my soapboxes here, but I prefer to work at a more specific level — whether it’s in The Life You Save or the Times essay. I prefer to say; Let’s look at the works and the twenty ways in which religious belief figures into some recent novels. Instead of saying that this stuff doesn’t exist, I’ll work through twenty examples of how it does appear, and then wind up by saying, `OK, but still: the central religious experience isn’t there in the way I yearn for.’ So what do we do? We look to non-fiction, other countries’ authors. We keep hoping. And we try to make the work ourselves.”
Dappled Things is a lively website devoted to Catholic literature and its revival.
Always With Us — But Why?
"I immersed myself in the project, going out almost on a daily basis and walking five, six, seven hours a day," the artist explains. "Once, I even walked 12 hours around the city – uptown to Harlem, East and West, downtown to Battery Park and back home to the East Village. I never took transportation anywhere because I felt that since the homeless live on the streets, I had to walk the streets like they do. After a while, a few said to me, `I’ve heard of you. You’re the guy going around buying signs. I was wondering if you were ever going to find me.’"
The artist is Andres Serrano, whose large Cibachrome photograph of a crucifix immerse in urine gained him notoriety twenty years ago. The project is Sign of the Times, in which he sought out homeless people on the streets of New York and bought their hand-lettered cardboard signs from them. He usually paid the people $20. He posted a piece about the project on Creative Time Reports, a website ancillary of the artists’ collective Creative Time that “aims to publish dispatches that speak truth to power and upend traditional takes on current issues.”
Serrano, a native New Yorker, says he “had never seen so many people begging and sleeping on the streets” as he saw this fall. If true — and I suspect that it is — this is surprising and appalling.
It might be said that Sign of the Times is merely provocative, as was said of “Piss Christ.” (I thought otherwise. I found it very powerful and wrote this piece in Commonweal about it.) But what does it mean to say “merely” provocative? Provocation has its uses. Last week the Times ran a multipart essay, with photographs, about a girl who is homeless in my own neighborhood — Fort Greene, Brooklyn — but I haven’t gotten around to reading it or writing about it. Then here comes Serrano with his sign project and suddenly I am thinking and writing about homelessness.
In an age that we are told is an age of smartphones and bitcoin, the very constancy of the materials of homeless people’s signs — cardboard and magic marker — says otherwise. It reminds us that the circumstances of everyday life change less than the trendspotters tell us. It reminds us of how little the astonishing economic “development” of recent years has touched homeless people or developed the stock of affordable housing.
To be homeless is still to be homeless. The streets are still the streets. A sign is still a sign. And even if, as we have on good authority, the poor will always be with us, the human responses to poverty and homelessness must always begin in something as simple as a feeling about a cardboard sign — in the feeling of shame that Kwame Anthony Appiah points out is the basis of social conscience.
My friend Rosanne Haggerty has spent her adult life creating housing for people who have been homeless. I am going to write to her and ask her what she thinks of Sign of the Times.
Season of Desire
For anyone who has read deeply in Thomas Merton – who has had his life changed by Thomas Merton, as some of us have – the Advent season brings to mind the Advent sequence from The Seven Storey Mountain, in which Merton gives away his possessions and writes farewell letters to friends and sets out from the Franciscan college of St. Bonaventure in upstate New York and takes a long train ride south and disembarks in Kentucky and catches a ride out to the country and goes to the gate in the wall (where it seems a monk has been waiting for him) and enters the Abbey of Our Lady of Gethsemani – and becomes a Cistercian, a k a a Trappist.
Seventy-some years later, Merton’s account of his first few days in the monastery is an Advent reflection to beat all: the sometimes schematic piety offset by the vigor of the writing, the monk’s ritual life made real and actual by the clear, tough description of a Kentucky winter (and by a perfectly apt piece of poetry):
“Liturgically speaking, you could hardly find a better time to become a monk than Advent. You begin a new life, you enter into a new world at the beginning of a new liturgical year. And everything that the Church gives you to sing, every prayer than you say in and with Christ in His Mystical Body, is a cry of ardent desire for grace, for help, for the coming of the Messiah, the Redeemer.
“The soul of the monk is a Bethlehem where Christ comes to be born – in the sense that Christ is born where his likeness is reformed by grace, and where his Divinity lives, in a special manner, with His Father and His Holy Spirit, by charity, in this `new incarnation,’ this `other Christ.’
“The Advent liturgy prepares that Bethlehem with songs and canticles of ardent desire.
“It is a desire all the more powerful, in the spiritual order, because the world all around you is dead. Life has ebbed to its dregs. The trees are stripped bare. The birds forget to sing. The grass is brown and grey. You go out to the fields with mattocks to dig up the briars. The sun gives its light, as it were, in faint intermittent explosions, `squibs,’ not rays, according to John Donne’s conceit in his Nocturnal on St. Lucy’s Day …
“But the cold stones of the Abbey church ring with a chant that glows with living flame, with clean, profound desire.”
St. Francis of Assisi, Inventor
Edmund Burke said that people don’t need to be taught so much as reminded. That’s the sense of it, as cited over and over again by Richard John Neuhaus in First Things. (Here’s the precise quotation.)
Now here is Andrew Sullivan — he who knows Burke — to remind us that, among everything else he did, St. Francis of Assisi came up with the Christmas nativity scene.
My book Reinventing Bach makes the case that Johann Sebastian Bach is best understood as an inventor of a kind, and something like the same is true for St. Francis. Sure, it’s strange to picture him clad in a lab coat and tinkering at a worktable, stringing pulleys Leonardo style, or grinding lenses à la Ben Franklin. But think about it. Francis invented the mendicant order; the vernacular devotional poem; the Christmas nativity scene; the whole scheme of affection for animals as we know it; and, indirectly, cappuccino. And lent his name to an inventive pope.
Where would we be without him? We would be poorer, and less poor.
Trending in Los Angeles: Coprolaliac Dog-Eat-Dog Buddhism
Walker Percy liked to say that there were no great Buddhist novels, and over the years Tom Wolfe has proposed that the great unwritten American novel is the one about Left Coast religion.
Well, Bruce Wagner is trying. His book Still Holding was received as “a weird, coprolaliac amalgam of Buddhism and Us Weekly”:
Sometimes, the horrors of this book are such that one is certain it’s hell, with all its circles of celebrity, Hieronymus Bosch in smoggy sunlight. But really, the effect is more like a Buddhist El Greco, a coil of figures spiraling awkwardly heavenward against a garish backdrop.
And his new book of twined novellas, The Empty Chair, apparently takes the axiom “if you meet the Buddha, kill him” as a formula for the practice of authorial omnipotence.
Kelly, “an ardent, even fanatical Buddhist” — according to Michiko Kakutani’s quote-fest of a review –
received a contract for a spiritual memoir that she thought of calling “Nirvanarama” or “Impermanence Rocks.” And she got into a sort of competitive rivalry with her former mentor Dharmabud over spiritual territory — like teaching Buddhism to elementary school kids. She was particularly enthusiastic — at first, that is — about doing “mindfulness workshops” at San Quentin prison.
“Part of the allure was ego,” Charley says. “It was kind of a trophy gig — frontline bodhisattva service. It was sexy.” Here was a woman with gumption enough “to suck it up and walk straight into the belly of the beast… for the enlightenment of others. I think she dug people at the Zen Center knowing too. Gave her a major uptick in the incestuous world of the sangha, where competition for humility was dog-eat-dog.”
The other day I posted a piece on the extraordinary longevity of the critics at the Times and some other big places. That longevity has been extraordinarily good to Wagner. A daily Times review is hard to get, a good one even harder — but Kakutani has reviewed his novels I’ll Let You Go, Memorial, Dead Stars, The Chrysanthemum Palace, and now The Empty Chair, all favorably.
Talk about good karma.
Trending in Los Angeles: Coprolaliac Dog-Eat-Dog Buddhism
Walker Percy liked to say that there were no great Buddhist novels, and over the years Tom Wolfe has proposed that the great unwritten American novel is the one about Left Coast religion.
Well, Bruce Wagner is trying. His book Still Holding was received as “a weird, coprolaliac amalgam of Buddhism and Us Weekly”:
Sometimes, the horrors of this book are such that one is certain it’s hell, with all its circles of celebrity, Hieronymus Bosch in smoggy sunlight. But really, the effect is more like a Buddhist El Greco, a coil of figures spiraling awkwardly heavenward against a garish backdrop.
And his new book of twined novellas, The Empty Chair, apparently takes the axiom “if you meet the Buddha, kill him” as a formula for the practice of authorial omnipotence.
Kelly, “an ardent, even fanatical Buddhist” — according to Michiko Kakutani’s quote-fest of a review –
received a contract for a spiritual memoir that she thought of calling “Nirvanarama” or “Impermanence Rocks.” And she got into a sort of competitive rivalry with her former mentor Dharmabud over spiritual territory — like teaching Buddhism to elementary school kids. She was particularly enthusiastic — at first, that is — about doing “mindfulness workshops” at San Quentin prison.
“Part of the allure was ego,” Charley says. “It was kind of a trophy gig — frontline bodhisattva service. It was sexy.” Here was a woman with gumption enough “to suck it up and walk straight into the belly of the beast… for the enlightenment of others. I think she dug people at the Zen Center knowing too. Gave her a major uptick in the incestuous world of the sangha, where competition for humility was dog-eat-dog.”
The other day I posted a piece on the extraordinary longevity of the critics at the Times and some other big places. That longevity has been extraordinarily good to Wagner. A daily Times review is hard to get, a good one even harder — but Kakutani has reviewed his novels I’ll Let You Go, Memorial, Dead Stars, The Chrysanthemum Palace, and now The Empty Chair, all favorably.
Talk about good karma.
This Is What a Philosopher Looks Like
In December a gift book is circulated in the Georgetown community, and this year’s book is Justice: Faces of the Human Rights Revolution — a big book of portraits “highlighting the work of individuals making an impact across the globe. These individuals share a profound commitment to human rights and social justice.”
The photograph of Kwame Anthony Appiah caught my eye. He is a friend of the Berkley Center, and his work, well known today, will become even better known with the passing of the years — and through his new role as a global philosopher with NYU.
"Accompanying each portrait is a micro-essay exploring the life, legacy, and singular spirit of its subject,” as Maria Popova put it on Brainpickings, and the micro-essay alongside Appiah’s portrait is eye-catching for his succinct way of framing human rights in the vocabulary of morality without hectoring or harking back to the past.
Human rights, Appiah explains, are enshrined in law, expressed in culture, and tested in the shame we feel when such rights are violated — which ought to stir us to try to change things.
That process of cultural change means developing a sense of pride in the fact that we — we Pakistanis, we Americans, we Ghanaians — have a society that is respectful of these fundamental rights. People will then feel ashamed when they discover their country has failed to respect them. I feel a profound shame as an American citizen when I think about Guantánamo.
When he was the president of PEN, Appiah worked in support of Liu Xiaobo, the Chinese Nobel Peace Prize laureate who has been stifled by China’s government.
Not long after Liu got the Prize, I spoke to a Chinese exile in Washington, D.C., and, entirely unprompted, she spoke of the shame she felt about what her country was doing. Her shame at Liu’s imprisonment, mine at Guantánamo: we understood each other.
The sheep’s name is Daisy, as far as I can tell.
Il Papa della Scarfa
Last month I posted a photograph of Flannery O’Connor wearing a Georgetown sweatshirt, only to figure out a little later that it was a Georgia Bulldogs sweatshirt. But that photograph of the former Jorge Maria Bergoglio holding a Georgetown scarf is absolutely, positively the real thing.
John Allen posted this piece about the conference that wound up with some Georgetown colleagues of mine meeting the pope.