Start reading How Dante Can Save Your Life for free!
Google Play makes the first 45 pages of How Dante Can Save Your Life available for free. This is probably the only way I'll read any of it. Here's a teaser from page 27:
Suddenly Daddy and Ruthie were standing over me. “What’s wrong?” Daddy asked. “Are you okay? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” I said, looking up with a face swollen from crying. “I shot those baby squirrels. They were just babies.”
I looked up from the ground at my father and my sister. Ruthie burst into laughter. Daddy screwed his face up in disgust and growled, “You sissy .”
A thick iron gate slammed shut within me, and from behind it I regarded my father with cold contempt. He had struck me where he could do the most damage: my sense of manhood. I followed him and my sister out of the field, my face on fire, this time not with shame but with wrath. And from that moment on, I saw him not as my champion. I saw him as my adversary.
That's the funniest thing I've read today, including this hilarious review of Nocturna: Granddaughter of Dracula.
The tragic squirrel hunt story may have inspired this review.
RD: "my face on fire"
ReplyDeleteI don't know about you, Pauli, but I don't believe any of it happened, and definitely not the way he's describing it. There is just something about this passage that is too contrived.
Reading it, I feel like somebody's pants were on fire and that he was thrown up and is hanging on a telephone wire.
RD's track record has just as too many instances where the truth gets bent to advance the "narrative", which is one big reason why I have decided to ignore his books. I don't trust him as a writer, and definitely not as a "journalist".
Yes, I get the distinct impression that this passage and the memory it records have been worked over like a palimpsest. (The passage still desperately needs an editor; cold contempt doesn't set your face on fire, among other problems.)
DeleteWhat if anything actually happened, who can say?
For some reason, the face on fire made me think of the girl's "churning face" in "Good Country People." A gifted stylist knows how to do this stuff. A bumbler does not. Sorry if that's harsh.
DeleteThis story reminds me of something a priest said to a woman who came to him complaining about everything wrong with her husband. He said "if you confess his sins, you have to do his penance." She shut up.
ReplyDeleteYou'd think the subject of The Divine Comedy along with life-saving in general would provide enough source material to render stories like this unnecessary.
I am with you. The word I would to describe this story is a whopper. Jonathan Carpenter
ReplyDeleteBack in his NR days, Rod wrote a piece -- it might have been about something like the role guns play in Southern culture.I don't think I read it, but someone mentioned it to me as an example of how effective Rod can be as a writer.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, in that piece, Rod told a story about killing an animal while hunting. His father was pleased, but he himself was repulsed.
I don't remember it being a baby squirrel; my Pennsylvania-raised brain wants it to be a deer, but I do understand that Louisianans consider plinking vermin to be sport. So that NR story was probably about the same event as this, or maybe this one is a precursor to the story about hunting real animals told in NR. (I'm going off a 12-year-old memory of a second-hand account, so don't trust me on any details.) Someone who can work the NRO archives better than I can might be able to dig up the old article and check.
Either way, a successful-hunt-repulses-young-Rod story isn't something he invented out of whole cloth just for the Dante book.
Lagniappe: I just now checked the Google Reader link above to see how old Rod was when he shot those baby squirrels (ans: 14). For sheer comedic power, this is hard to beat:
"If I had never let my gaze meet the dying squirrel's, I don't know what the trajectory of my life would have been."
If you held a contest for Best New Story Containing This Sentence, how many entries do you suppose you'd get that were serious "door closed firmly on my childhood" ones?
Lol.
DeleteYou are quite correct. Louisianans do hunt squirrels. I'd forgotten all about that. When we lived in Natchitoches, the Kappa Alpha boys used to sell squirrel gumbo during the annual Christmas Festival. No, not making this up. We never bought any.
I always wondered whether squirrel was part of the mystery meat that went into Lasyone's legendary meat pies?
Deletehttp://lasyones.com/
BTW--The one and only thing I miss about Louisiana is the food. That's why I have a hard time swallowing (no pun intended) the infamous Bouilliabaise (sp?) Story. Louisianans, especially Southern Louisianans, are ALL about spicy, exotic cuisine.
Another big takeaway from this telling is that he waited for Ruthie to pass on before telling it in this way. That way she can't contradict him or give another side. Ray Sr. is old; he supposedly had some big reconciliation with him recently which, obviously, his dad values more than Rod-ray. So now he feels no fear of repercussions for plunging full-retard into vengeful writing about his family and how they wrecked his life.
ReplyDeleteTrue. But most of all, it's just squirm-inducing to see a man pushing 50 writing with such deadly seriousness about such an event. Sure, I can believe it hurt at the time. I did nothing but fume in barely contained adolescent rage at my parents through my teens. But all of my adult life, I've repented of holding such grudges against my parents, whose main "faults" were simply not being who I thought I wanted them to be when I was young. I've lived through varying degrees of success and backsliding with that repentance, but I would never hold up my anger at, say, 14 as anything that deserves such grave attention as something that directed my life. The only ways that my adolescent anger directed my life were all directions that needed correction in my adulthood and I'm not proud of them at all.
DeleteI can't see into anyone's heart, and I really can't say how Rod or anyone should have dealt with their family disappointments, but, as long as we're not talking about actual abuse, I find Rod's very public melodrama distasteful and embarrassing.
...all of my adult life, I've repented of holding such grudges against my parents, whose main "faults" were simply not being who I thought I wanted them to be when I was young. I've lived through varying degrees of success and backsliding with that repentance, but I would never hold up my anger at, say, 14 as anything that deserves such grave attention as something that directed my life.
DeleteWell... yes, exactly. Very humble, honest and right of you, Anon.
Strangely enough, I grew up in western PA in the midst of a serious hunting community. One kid I knew -- about 15-years-old -- famously choked on his first deer-hunting excursion and was unable to shoot a deer at short range, drawing all kinds of mockery and opprobrium from his peers and, I remember someone telling me, his father and older brother who were renowned as great hunters.
This kid, who was really nice but overweight and slow in school, has no doubt gotten over this and is married and works as a supervisor at a local company. I'm guessing that many of the people reporting to him had "bagged their deer-b*ches" the first time out and had been told that they could play pro-football if they wanted to.
I'd guess that if he thinks about his first time hunting at all he probably smiles.
Maybe it's a Minnesota thing but "buck fever", as we called choking on shooting one's first deer, was pretty common if not expected from a youngster on his first time out. Certainly there was no shame in it, except maybe from the shooter shaming himself.
DeleteA couple things on Dreher's story come to mind. One is that his alleged reaction to Paw and Ruthie coming upon him seems entirely unnatural to me, as compared with how a normal 14 year old male (I know) would react. I'd think that the natural first teenager response would be ducking blame ("I was shooting at the big one" "I didn't mean to"), especially when it was in fact an accident. If not that, then you'd think any normal teenage male would do whatever it took no matter what to not appear to be a total wuss in front of Dad and Sis. Surely all of us with siblings have had to "shake it off" so as not to appear weak or be teased. So yeah, Anon, it sounds phony to me, too.
And even if it's not, it was 35 years ago for Pete's sake. Get over it already.
Actually, I meant Oengus, it sounds phony to me, too. And Anon, I agree with your take that Dreher's continuing drama over normal rebellion against one's parents is indeed embarrassing.
DeletePikkumatti: "it sounds phony to me"
ReplyDeleteYes, that was pretty much my original point.
For me, it comes down to about two possibilities:
(1) If I were to take the passage seriously, it strongly suggests to me that RD has some kind of serious psychopathology going on, especially if he has been nursing this kind of grudge for 35 years. Most healthy people just get over these kind of things when they grow up.
(2) On the other hand, one can decide not to take the passage seriously and conclude that it is mostly a embellished contrivance, a purple passage, that has nothing to do with reality. It is an artificial construct which RD invented (maybe crudely) for reaching that segment of the market that finds this kind of self-absorbed "psycho-drama" appealing. In other words, RD is really quite sane and rational in real life, in the sense that you can describe a cynical, con-artist as being "rational". For a con-artist, it's all about the money, nothing personal.
My preference is to lean to number 2. But it doesn't really matter a whole lot. Either way, I simply refuse to waste any more of my time reading his books. I am not interested.
....it is mostly a embellished contrivance, a purple passage, that has nothing to do with reality. It is an artificial construct which RD invented (maybe crudely) for reaching that segment of the market that finds this kind of self-absorbed "psycho-drama" appealing.
DeleteWell put, and in which case there is a place for this sort of thing: in the pulp fiction section. But he'd be buried by better fiction writers there. So he gloms his stuff onto serious material like Dante to give it more heft.
The reason I'm still going on about Rod Dreher is that people are still taking him seriously. The reason I'm pointing out this squirrel passage is so people who are excited when he starts going on about the Benedict Option will question whether he is someone to take seriously on serious topics.
Dreher is one phony among millions, but he preys on Catholics and other religious people who hang on his words for some reason. He left the Church years ago and has blasted the Church time and again and yet his ideas are adopted by a Catholic Priest, Father Longenecker, and he gets an interview with Raymond Arroyo. If anyone who hangs out over here can provide me with names of other people who fit this predatory profile, I will gladly diffuse the beam I shine on Dreher and all his works to include the others like him.
Predatory is the mot juste. Yes, he preys on hapless Catholics. Why they take him seriously is beyond me.
DeleteAnd the dude can't write. I'm sorry, but Tom is right. The passage about gazing into the dying squirrel's eyes (and thereby altering the trajectory of his life) is worthy of the Bulwer-Lytton Prize.
It sure is. That's the thing about the embarrassing quality of the passage. It's hard to decide which is more embarrassing: writing about a 35-year-long adolescent grudge with such grim seriousness, or writing about it so badly.
DeleteActually, if you want to read a shorter version of the important parts of Dreher's book, minus the autobiographical and self-serving parts, here you go. (on Ammoland Shooting Sports News, no less).
ReplyDeleteIt is a succinct, yet thorough and accurate, version of how Divine Comedy can guide your soul and life, much more so than what Dreher has to offer.