by Paul Elie
from Georgetown University

Busboys & Poets Against the Death Penalty

     Washington, D.C., is not a City for Life – not yet.   Neither is Takoma Park, Maryland – not yet.   But on Monday night the Busboys & Poets on the D.C. - Maryland border was a café-bookshop-event-space for life, and against the death penalty, as three activists against the death penalty spoke about their efforts, joining with activists in 2,000 cities, from Berlin to Venice, Florida.

Cities for Life/Cities Against the Death Penalty is an initiative organized by the Community of Sant'Egidio and the World Coalition Against the Death Penalty.   On November 30, 1786, Tuscany became the first modern state to abolish the death penalty; and with that in mind, the last day in November is marked in cities which, by one or another form of decree, have become Cities for Life / Cities Against the Death Penalty.

I was invited to moderate the event because I wrote the afterword to 13 Ways of Looking at the Death Penalty, by Mario Marazziti, who has a central role in both Sant'Egidio and the World Coalition.   Truly, it was humbling to be in the company of the people there.    

Brian Stolarz, a lawyer based in Alexandria, worked for eight years to exonerate Dewayne Brown, a man in Texas falsely accused and wrongly convicted in the murder of a police officer.  On stage at Busboys & Poets, he showed us the decisive piece of evidence – a phone record, substantiating Brown’s alibi, that the detective investigating the case had obtained from the phone company and hidden in his garage.  

Dani Clark, who works with the World Bank in Washington, corresponds with Ivan Cantu, a man on death row in Texas who she (and many others) is convinced is innocent.   She brought some of their letters with her – “about half,” she said – and there were enough to fill a large Rubbermaid storage container.  

Art Laffin, a member of the Dorothy Day Catholic Worker community on Rock Creek Church Road, was always against the death penalty – but was moved to deepen his commitment after his younger brother was murdered by a mentally ill patron of the soup kitchen in Connecticut where he was volunteering.  

Art pointed the event outward in two directions, in my hearing at least. His presence put in mind the efforts of Dorothy Day, the Catholic Worker’s foundress,who died November 29, 1980 – thirty-five years ago last Sunday.  And his insights about “restorative justice” connected opposition to the death penalty with the Year of Mercy declared by Pope Francis, which begins formally on December 8.  By maintaining a “death row,” where prisoners’ time with other prisoners and with visitors is strictly limited, the state seeks to place them beyond mercy – beyond the encounters with other people that can be restorative for all concerned.    But it doesn’t work, and the activists at Busboys and Poets make that clear through their very personal encounters with people submitted to this frankly barbaric practice.

Thanksgiving in Nashville, With Ry Cooder and Friends

       This time every year I listen to the Last Waltz concert, which took place on Thanksgiving Day 1976 in San Francisco: the Band and friends – Joni, Neil, Bob, Muddy, Eric, Van, and the rest – celebrating the band’s history and saying a weird and needless farewell.  

Concert Vault has audio of the full four-hour-plus concert, including a bit of the “Canterbury Tales” read in Middle English and the Lord’s Prayer recited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, of all people.   Lately, it has added full video: a simple black and white feed probably used by the sound and light technicians to keep track of things.  (It’s available on YouTube, too.)   To see The Last Waltz in B&W is a strange, reverse effect; this concert, known first through a movie expertly filmed and edited in 70mm by Martin Scorsese and put out in wide release, is now a video bootleg, a concert seen through the keyhole.

That’s the effect of seeing so  many of the full-length concerts now posted on YouTube.   Once a home for short videos, the site now hosts dozens of shows that are seen as too long to support a commercial release.  The Tedeschi- Trucks Band’s full-concert reworking of Joe Cocker’s Mad Dogs & Englishmen is one.  

The Americana Music Association’s concert honoring Ry Cooder is another. It took place in September a year ago, but I wouldn’t have known about it except for YouTube.   I graze there for old slide guitar videos from time to time, and one night, there it was: a Last Waltz-style gathering of Cooder and his friends and associates from over the years – Flaco Jimenez, Loretta Lynn, Rosanne Cash and Rodney Crowell, Jason Isbell, Taj Mahal (doing a stage-shaking Statesboro Blues) and Jackson Browne (doing “Fountain of Sorrow”).  Through it all, there is Ry sitting on a chair stage left and working his rack of customized guitars: the sideman as star.  

Meant as an ending, The Last Waltz was the beginning of something: it was the concert that carried the old-time musical revue (perfected at the Grande Ole Opry) into the age of the multiplex, whence it has migrated to YouTube.

The Americana concert is here.   Happy Thanksgiving from Ry Cooder and company.

Eric, Call Yo-Yo; Tell Him Robert Johnson Sent You

     Yo-Yo Ma and Eric Clapton are destined to play a concert together.

Why those two?  Because they are, as artists, fundamentally alike: virtuosic, personally expressive, musically curious, willing to place their musical core (the classical cello for Ma, the blues guitar for Clapton) at the center of all manner of musical surroundings; prodigies who were all grown up from the beginning and who have aged gracefully over long careers.    

Why destined?   Because there’s a breathtaking precedent for it: the span of time seventy-nine years ago (November 23, 1936) when Pablo Casals and Robert Johnson commenced their most famous recordings on the same day – Casals’s recordings of Bach’s cello suites at Abbey Road Studios in London, and Johnson’s recordings of his blues at the Gunter Hotel in San Antonio.  

It’s as amazing a synchronicity as any in the history of recorded music.  On the same day, in Europe and in America, two extraordinary musicians, each a man in a room playing a wooden instrument without accompaniment, made sounds that are still present to us, undiminished and unsurpassed, most of a century later.  

I figured out the coincidence while reading liner notes as I wrote Reinventing Bach, and I tell the story there.   When he heard about it, my friend Joe Richman, creator and producer of NPR’s Radio Diaries, pricked up his ears – and then made an extraordinary program telling the story with commentary by everyone from Pablo Casals’s last student to Robert Johnson’s last surviving rival to Billy Gibbons of ZZ Top.  The program is up now as a podcast on the Radio Diaries site.

Casals’s cello suites and Johnson’s blues recordings are arguably the two greatest and most consequential solo recordings ever made.  Together, they sit in apt counterpoint: Europe and America, classical and “folk,” white and black, the one an interpretation of a great composer and the other a performance of songs composed by the performer himself.  

A joint performance of the two works by Yo-Yo Ma and Eric Clapton would be epochal: a musical conversation between two great artists, pointing Bach’s cello suites and Robert Johnson’s blues forward for the next seventy-nine years.    

If you happen to know Yo-Yo or Eric, will you pass this on?

Don DeLillo, Reader in Small Room

      I am reading The Tin Drum, by Günter Grass, in the Ralph Manheim translation – and in the Vintage mass-market paperback, silver cover, block type, with a lithograph of Oskar Matzerath and his drum on the front.  There is no bar code or ISBN number, just a catalog number, V-560, and a category: Literature.  

I like to think that Don DeLillo has the same edition on a shelf in the room where he keeps the paperbacks he has worked through as a reader during his extraordinary life as a writer.

DeLillo described the effect of some of these classics in a conversation with Tom LeClair in 1982:

The books I remember and come back to seem to be ones that demonstrate the possibilities of fiction.   Pale Fire, Ulysses, The Death of Virgil, Under the Volcano, The Sound and the Fury – these come to mind.  There’s a drive and a daring that go beyond technical invention.  I think it’s right to call it a life-drive even though these books deal at times very directly with death.   No optimism, no pessimism.   No homesickness for lost values or for the way fiction used to be written.   These books open out onto some larger mystery. I don’t know what to call it.   Maybe Hermann Broch would call it “the word beyond speech.”  

DeLillo’s work follows the movements of men in small rooms, and in New York the other night, accepting a National Book Award citation (and a medal) for his distinguished contribution to American letters, DeLillo spoke of his experience in a small room full of books.  

. . . DeLillo talked fondly of old, cheap paperbacks he read by beloved authors many years ago, telling the audience that he paid 50 cents for Dostoevsky’s The House of the Dead, a Dell paperback from 1959. Speaking of being surrounded by books, he said: “Here I’m not the writer at all.  I’m a grateful reader. When I look at my bookshelves I find myself gazing like a museum-goer.”

I am sitting in a small room full of books, and just to my right is the paperback of White Noise, one in Penguin’s Contemporary American Fiction line, white with deep purple drop-out display type, excerpts from reviews in the Chicago Tribune and The New York Times, and a terse biography characterizing DeLillo as “the author of many highly acclaimed novels.”  I weigh it in my hands, the way Oskar Matzerath weighs the “hard, flexible ream” of virgin paper on which he will write the story that is The Tin Drum, one of those books – White Noise is another – that demonstrate the possibilities of fiction.  

Here I’m not a writer at all.  I’m a grateful reader.  

Sanders at Georgetown: Socialism for Thanksgiving

     “Ideology,” anyone?  

At Georgetown yesterday, Bernie Sanders gave the most consequential address of his political life, taking time and care to explain (as Mother Jones put it) that “yes, he is a democratic socialist, and you should be, too.”  

Habitually extemporaneous, to prepare for the Georgetown event he put his text through several drafts and used a teleprompter.  

It was an extraordinary address, one equally rich in video “bites” (such as these six on NPR) and extended historical analogies, such as this one, quoted in the Mother Jones piece:

Almost everything [Roosevelt] proposed was called “socialist.” I thought I would mention that just in passing. Social Security, which transformed life for the elderly in this country, was defined by his opponents as “socialist.” The concept of the “minimum wage"—that workers had to be paid at least a certain amount of money for their labor—was seen as a radical intrusion into the marketplace and was described as "socialist.” Unemployment insurance (the idea that if you lose your job at least you have something to fall back), abolishing child labor, the 40-hour work week, collective bargaining (the rights of workers to engage in negotiations with a union), strong banking regulations, deposit insurance, and job programs that put millions of people to work were all described, in one way or another, as “socialist.” Yet as you all know, all of these programs and many more have become the fabric of our nation and in fact the foundation of our middle class.

Sanders represented socialism as thoroughly in the American grain, a rich compote of national traits akin to the ones we celebrate at Thanksgiving.

By now it seems obvious to say that our political system has truly passed through the looking glass when Sanders is derided as a fringe candidate while half a dozen half-cocked extremist Republicans are seen as representing the views of “ordinary Americans.”

But alas, the point needs making.  Even as they presented Sanders’ address appreciatively, both NPR and Mother Jones referred matter-of-factly to his “socialist ideology,” with all the connotations – of rigidity, militancy, state repression – that the word carries even today.

It’s as if they didn’t hear a word he said.   And if NPR and Mother Jones can’t hear Bernie Sanders clearly, who can?  

The Good Book: Read, Type, Reflect

     The Good Book is out this week from Simon & Schuster.  I mean The Good Book: Writers Reflect on Favorite Bible Passages, an anthology edited expertly by Andrew Blauner.     

With publication have come all the multimedia expressions that books today carry into the marketplace – or is it vice versa?   A Twitter handle.   Tweets, suitable for retweeting.   Videos (I made one; so did Rev. Al Sharpton) of authors discussing their essays.   An On Being episode featuring Adam Gopnik (who wrote the introduction to the book) in conversation with Krista Tippett.   

My own essay – about a brief passage in John’s gospel and the significance of narrative time that it implies – was published on the cover of Commonweal and online.  It’s proof that Commonweal cover placement + Caravaggio illustration = boosted readership for a literary-exegetical essay.   Among the many responses so far, I’ve gotten a phone call from a reader in El Salvador who was distressed that my paraphrase of Jesus’s farewell discourse – “I am the Father and the Father is in me” – placed me among the heretics.  It was a typo; I meant “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.”

As a contributing author, I feel an obligation to put all these accompanying materials – the tweets and videos and excerpts – in circulation, and doing so would probably increase my following on Twitter.  Maybe I’ll do so over the weekend.  For now, though, I am going to spread the word about the book the old fashioned way – by reading it and quoting it.   Should I quote Alec Wilkinson on wisdom, or Ian Caldwell on the torture of competitive swimming, or James Parker on the panic attack on the Underground that reoriented him to religious belief, or Lydia Davis on the literary structure of Psalm 23, or Michael Eric Dyson on the story of Abraham and Isaac as a story of corporeal punishment – of child abuse?

They’re all worth reading and quoting.  But I am going to quote a striking passage from Ian Frazier’s essay about the Syrophoenician woman (in Matthew and Mark) who puts herself in Jesus’s way and begs him to heal her daughter:

I think every word in the Bible was meant to be pushed against so that we can see how it pushes back.  The Syrophoenician woman, who approaches Jesus in suffering and fear, interacts with him at first against his will.  By her pushing, she comes maybe as close to comprehending God as a human being can get.    

To read that, and then to type it into a document, is to place myself in the long line of reader-scribes for whom the copying of the Good Book was a religious encounter in its own right.

In Paris, a New Reign of Terror?

     The age of terror has come emphatically to the heart of Europe.    That is the thrust of the weekend’s articles – the ones I read, at any rate – about the terror attacks in Paris.  ISIS is not confining itself to Syria.   The Paris attacks, an attack in Beirut, and the downing of a Russian jetliner over Egypt are parts in a single scheme.   Unlike the Charlie Hebdo attacks, which targeted foes of radical Islam, these attacks targeted the pleasure-seeking French bourgeois, so as to induce unremitting terror in the city and in Europe as a whole.  

All true – but it seems to me to miss a crucial point about terror and Paris, namely, that terror hasn’t lately arrived in Paris – main non: Paris is where terror in the modern sense began.

Twenty years ago, if you asked a liberal arts student to name a city associated with terror, it seems to me you’d have gotten Paris as your first answer (with Jerusalem and Tehran second and third).   The reason, of course, was the French Revolution.   It was in Paris that French revolutionaries carried out the Reign of Terror, so well known to so many through Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities. It seems to me our use of the term “terror” to describe acts of disordered violence against civilians goes back to 1789 and stops there.  

The Reign of Terror lasted eleven months in 1793 and 1794 – just about as long as the eleven months from the Charlie Hebdo attacks to the attacks Friday evening.   But this is not to say that this year’s terror attacks in Paris are akin to those of the Reign of Terror.   It’s to say the opposite, in fact – if Philip Bobbitt’s arguments in Terror and Consent are to be credited.  

Bobbitt, in a giant 2008 book (which I know only through thorough and exacting reviews) argued that the “war on terror” was different from previous wars, and that as the era of the nation-state was characterized by “nation-state wars,” so the era of the market state is characterized by “market-state wars” – otherwise known as wars of terror and wars on terror.  Here is The Independent: 

For Bobbitt, we live in a time of market states, when we are leaving behind the constitutional order of the nation state in favour of an era of opportunity, entrepreneurship and globalisation. But the same forces shaping this agreeable destiny “are also empowering the forces of terror, rendering societies more vulnerable and threatening to destroy the consent of the individual as the essential source of state legitimacy”. The book is “not so much about al Qaeda as about the larger phenomenon of 21st-century terrorism of which al Qaeda is only a herald”: namely, the groups for whom terror is a “permanent state of affairs”, whose genius is to “copy the decentralised, devolved… and privatised market state of the 21st century”. With both “states of consent and states of terror… evolving into market states”, the central question is which version will succeed. So historians “may one day see the Wars against Terror as an epochal war, an historical and constitutional characterization that can only be made retrospectively”.

1775 to 1789 was a period of fourteen years.   2001 to 2015 has been fourteen years.    If it can be said that we are now in an age of terror akin to the “Age of Revolution” Eric Hobsbawm saw beginning in 1789, it may turn out that what happened in Paris in 2015 stands in relation to what happened in America in 2001 in the same way that happened in Paris in 1789 stands in relation to what happened in America in 1775.  

In any case, if we are going to understand the age we are in, we need to consider the two events together, the way the American Revolution and the French Revolution are best considered together.

Scannone: Jesuit Who Know Francis When – and Set Him Straight

     When I saw the Rolling Stones play at the Carrier Dome in Syracuse in 1981, the saxophonist Bobby Keyes came out to play the solo on “Brown Sugar,” and I thought to myself, “Wow – he’s the guy who played the solo on the original record!”  Of course, the other guys onstage – Mick, Keith, Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts – had played on the original record, too: they were the original Rolling Stones.   But for some reason the sideman, the ordinary man, had greater aura, and gave off greater reality, than the Stones themselves.

I felt something like that when I met Juan Carlo Scannone at Georgetown the other night.   Fr. Scannone, an Argentinian Jesuit, was at the university to deliver the keynote address in Georgetown’s third conference – that’s right, its third – marking the first half century since the Second Vatican Council. At the reception afterward, I had a chance to meet him, and to feel the aura – because Fr. Scannone, author of nine books and co-author of twenty others, was also the Jesuit who more than any other taught Jorge Mario Bergoglio at the Jesuit seminary in that country. Scannone taught Bergoglio Latin and ancient Greek (“ancient Greek not so good, Latin pretty good”), theology, and literature.  With casual authority he spoke of the time a few years later when Bergoglio, by then a teacher himself, asked his “disciples” – his students – to write essays on some short stories by Jorge Luis Borges, got Borges to read them, and then brought Borges, a family friend, to meet the students in class.

I listened carefully, but to tell the truth, mainly I was taking in the aura – thinking: This is the man who was Bergoglio’s most important teacher … This is the man who set him right when he was wrong … 

The lecture was consequential.   In it Fr. Scannone spelled out the authentic “newness” of the Council – which, he proposed, offered a new paradigm, a new method, and a new “content” all at once – to ground the impulse called the “preferential option for the poor,” which emerged under that name at meetings in Latin America after the coucil, as an impulse fundamentally expressive of the Council and its aims.

That is to say, when Fr. Scannone’s student Jorge Mario Bergoglio – Pope Francis – said, “I want a Church poor and for the poor,” he was speaking with a sense of the Church grounded in Vatican II.

Seems to me the idea is a couple of millennia older than that, but people keep insisting otherwise – which is why it is so important that expositors like Juan Carlo Scannone are around.  

Zaleskis’ “Fellowship”: A Story with a Happy Ending

     Philip Zaleski and Carol Zaleski came to Georgetown last night to talk about their remarkable book The Fellowship, and we were able to pick up a conversation that began five years ago, when I arranged for the book to be published with FSG and gave them a few insights-from-the-far-side about group portraiture.    

It was apt that the book event was a conversation, because a theme of the book, one that shapes its spirit and its design, is that the Inklings – bound by Oxford, literature, Christian belief, deep English patriotism, and much else – were bound by conversation, and that the conversations that C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, and Charles Williams carried forth with a circle of friends over the decades were as fruitful as anything they wrote.

Our conversation wound its way through Inklings past (the theory that the group was actually in decline from 1945, before The Lord of the Rings and much of Lewis’s fiction was published) and Inklings present (the effort to found a C.S. Lewis University in central Massachusetts) to the Inklings’ shared understanding of the human story as one with a happy ending.   In The Fellowship, the Zaleskis set it out this way:

The Inklings were, one and all, guilty of the heresy of the Happy Ending. A story that ends happily is, some believe, necessarily a sop to wishful thinking, a refusal to grow up.   In “On Fairy-Stories” – the closest we come to a manifesto for the Inklings’ aesthetic – Tolkien turns this charge on its head, arguing that our deepest wishes, revealed by fairy stories and reawakened whenever we permit ourselves to enter with “literary belief” into a secondary world, are not compensatory fantasies but glimpses of an absolute reality.   When Sam Gangee cries out, “O great glory and splendour!  And all my wishes have come true!” we are not in the realm of escapism, but of the Gospel, in all its strangeness and beauty.

Yet although the Inklings were guilty of the heresy of the Happy Ending, they were not optimists; they were war writers who understood that sacrifices must be made and that not all wounds will be healed in this life.  Their belief in the Happy Ending was compatible with considerable anguish and uncertainty here below.  One may be as gloomy as Puddleglum or as convinced as Frodo that “All my choices have proved ill” without losing hope in a final redemption.  

And it is on the strength of this hope that the Inklings’ project of recovery continues to unfold.

It’s a strength of The Fellowship that the book looks forward, not back – that it looks to a time when what Lewis called “the discarded image” is recovered, and plays a part in the recovery.  

Our Kind of Spirituals, No. 63: Allen Toussaint, “Southern Nights”

Allen Toussaint was to play the Hamilton in Washington on November 30, and a plan was fallling into place for a group of us to go hear him after an event about the death penalty that day – which is the World Day Against the Death Penalty.  But Toussaint died earlier today, age 77, struck by a heart attack after a concert in Madrid; and with him two traditions – the tradition of pre-rock-and-roll New Orleans music, and the pre-rock-and-roll tradition (still going on in Nashville) whereby songwriters subsisted through royalties for versions of their songs done by other artists – go a little deeper into the grave.

It’s an apt coincidence – if not a happy one – that this post follows immediately on one about Elvis Costello, who collaborated with Toussaint in all sorts of ways in recent years – and who has done as much as anyone to carry forward Toussaint-style songwriting, at once direct, complex, and tender.

If you’ve never heard Toussaint singing his own song “Southern Nights,” do yourself a favor and click on this video.   It’s from Joe’s Pub at the Public Theater in New York, where Toussaint graced the city with several dozen Southern nights of solo performances after he was displaced from New Orleans by Hurricane Katrina.   On this video, Toussaint tells the stories of some of those southern nights, adding sound effects on the piano – with such easy elegance that you come away thinking we’ve lost not just one of our great songwriters, but one of our great storytellers, too.