Bookworm reviews a review from George P. Wood of Springfield, MO

Reviews of reviews are all the rage these days, and all the cool kidz are doing it. So it is satisfying to read a review of a review of Rod Dreher's new book which is itself a massive review of Dante's famous work, The Divine Comedy which, I should say, I highly recommend reading for those with immortal souls.

Reviews, reviews, out the wazoos....

(OK, here's the review, without further ado.)

George P. Wood of Springfield, MO reviewed Rod's book on Amazon and explains to everybody what the problem was. George is a pretty impressive guy with some impressive degrees and obviously knows a lot about a lot of things.

[Link to review from George P. Wood of Springfield, MO]

"The problem was that Dreher had left Starhill for a reason: The inability of his family—especially his father, but even Ruthie herself—to understand any way that wasn’t their way."

See, that's the problem with folks around here, and George P. Wood of Springfield, MO knows it. Just close minded people. It wasn't Rod. George P. Wood of Springfield, MO just explained to the world why it wasn't.

And so when Rod came back, believe it or not folks were still that way. Unable to understand any way that wasn't their way, especially Rod's way. And that flaw in them made Rod physically sick.

Folks just can't get any lower or meaner than that, making other people physically sick by being unable to understand any way that isn’t their way.

“Well,” his rheumatologist told him,“you have a choice. Leave Louisiana, or resign yourself to destroying your health."

"Dreher felt that wasn’t a choice. There must be a way to stay put and find inner peace."

And sure enough there was. Write another book about how folks around here make other people physically sick by being unable to understand any way that isn’t their way. You heard it from George P. Wood of Springfield, MO himself, and so did the rest of the world.

I admit that on many occasions in the past I've been enraged by Rod Dreher. But this fellow Bookworm provides a great example of why I'm no longer angered by him. Everyone save a few weirdos is onto him at this point. He has sunk so low that he has had to invent academic sock puppets to encourage him and to beg him to write books and so forth. His publisher is basically an opportunistic soft-core peddler who made sure there was T&A on his book cover. He has blamed his poor health on people not liking him. He has clung bitterly to this Bunker Option thing even though it has proven to be nothing more than raving. He deplores our plastic disposable hedonistic society and then commits selfie-abuse amid piles of restaurant food.

No one I care about is giving this guy any respect anymore, and that's the way it should be. I just loaded that ridiculous pic into How Old -- here's the result:

When robots think you look like a 49-year-old woman it's time to pull a makeover or put the camera away. Or both, dude.

Yes, sir, you may have another

(or, as they say, an UPDATE to my post right below)

Well, the Plato of St. Francisville wasn't content with the episode of self-abuse I just posted about below, so he went for a double here.

In both posts there is a conspicuous commenter you may recall not only from my post about her here, particularly since many of you gallantly came to her support and defense.

Why is Erin significant here? Because what still hasn't happened to her shows us that our perception of Plato SF isn't just an aberration from having chased that egg salad and kosher dills with shots of a suspect tequila but is instead a real thing that continues to stink up the real world.

Many of you will remember that Erin has been with Dreher since back in the Beliefnet days, loyal as a dog. He even had her fill in for him there when he went on vacation and may or may not have covered her efforts with some babysitting pocket change. You know her most recently with respect to Dreher as one of the namesakes of his Evans-Manning award, a prize he awards, as far as I can tell, to keep commenters coming back in the hope that they may not only receive one but may also be so lucky as to have a new award named for them, too.

Well, as it turns out, Erin is a book writer in her own right, and even before she took issue with Plato's platitudes here and here, she had already self-published two young adult science fiction novels of her own, The Telmaj and her most recent A Smijj of Adventure.

Here she solicited honest reviews for her newest book from her friends (yo, Plato, flush the rest of the sammich down the toilet; that's you, dude) and family.

Now, what does the world know about Rod Dreher's family from his unbridled oversharing? That's right: they're young kids, all under 14, and geeky science fiction types - the ideal market for Erin's YA series. But no David Brooks generosity for Erin from Rod. Nope. Nada.

There are two types of people in the world: the self-annointed Platos and the hoi polloi, and, really, no one expects the former to consume the pathetic discharges of the latter, I mean, do they? There's a reason Dreher worships Downton Abbey the way he does: it reminds him never to dirty his hands by associating too closely with the help, so whatever Rod Dreher considers Erin, his blog bitch or his blog fluffer, it's unmistakeable from what he could easily do but has demonstrated now, twice, that he won't that the one thing he doesn't count her as is his friend.

We can see that even he recognizes what an exploitative little worm he is in all that he contritely doesn't say in the epic, Odyssey-length NFR he felt compelled to attach to Erin's comment here.

Now I don't have any kids and I don't read the sort of stuff Erin writes for them myself, but I bet some of you out there do have or know some kids who might like her stuff. So why don't you do Erin a solid, do what the Great Man, too busy stuffing buttered steak in his tum-tum, who only has the use for her a pimp would, won't do: spring for the $20 bucks or so to buy her books for your kids and review them for her. Even if you find something flawed in them, I'd bet she'll appreciate the feedback to help her improve in the future.

Given all the attention Dreher extorts from the world for himself, it's the least we could do for his unfortunate tool Erin: recognize her for the effort she's made and for whatever value she provides as a writer in her own right.

A narcissism so pure, so breathtaking

Given His resume, we might understand God being this narcissistic, but then we remember all that stuff about sacrificing His only begotten Son, so that then leaves us with the second runner-up, the one who wrote it.

1. People say to me a lot, “I have a book in me.” No, I want to say, you probably don’t.

I agree. I absolutely have nothing in the way of a Crunchy Cons or a TLWORL in me. Nor, as far as I can tell, any human bot fly larvae or anything else of the sort.

Most people lead perfectly ordinary lives. Or, to put a fine point on it, the lives most people can recall having led are perfectly ordinary, because most people are poor storytellers.

There's an arbiter for the good storytelling we need instead. Can you guess who it is?

I’ve been bored out of my skull listening to someone drone on about some adventure they had in an exotic locale, and I’ve been utterly captivated by someone talking about an ordinary event in a quotidian life. The difference is not the locale or the character of the event; the difference is in the discernment of the storyteller. You have to be reflective, and know how to tell the difference between meaningful details and mere clutter.

Most importantly, and none of us at this point can argue with the inescapable logic we've just been dealt: you have to be able to do this at the level of captivation, discernment, and reflection that have produced those two touchstone works of storytelling by the arbiter of storytelling himself, Crunchy Cons and TLWORL.

Someone here in my town expressed displeasure with The Little Way Of Ruthie Leming, saying that they expected it to be a book about Ruthie, not a book having much to do with me. I explained that in order for the power of Ruthie’s life and example to be made clear to readers who didn’t know her or have reason to care about life in our little corner of the world, I had to demonstrate the effect Ruthie had on those around her — her students, her friends, her neighbors, and most of all, her brother, who was very much unlike her (and whom she didn’t much care for)...

Because what sort of history would we have now if it were told by anyone other than the victors?

And now that Rod has given us his story of Ruthie filtered through a lifetime of their sibling distemper - a book deal that seems to have been being pitched before she was even cold in the ground - what are the chances we might get a second, different, possibly even more truthful and compelling look at the life of Ruthie Leming?

That's right: fat chance, dude. That's why some critters plug the female permanently shut after mating, so that what he wrote will be all that's ever wrote.

But of course you wanted to know, so here's how the magic happened:

The life I’ve lived — leave home, see the world, achieve worldly success — is the standard American narrative of our time. Ruthie’s life — stay at home, build a world on the foundation your family gave you, achieve within those bounds — is not. That I was able to see the true value of Ruthie’s way of life, and that her narrative had, in her death, enough power to trump the narrative I (and many, many Americans) embraced — well, that’s the real story here. That’s how Ruthie’s story becomes relevant to people who never knew her. She lived modestly and unfussily, but she had such an impact. You couldn’t look at Ruthie’s life and think of it as the kind of life that would make a dramatic story, standing on its own. The real story was the revelation, through her suffering with cancer and her death, of what kind of impact her modest, unfussy, but generous and constant presence had on her community and the people who lived in it. To have written a standard biography of Ruthie would have been possible, and would have meant a lot to the people who knew and loved her, but it wouldn’t have grabbed the attention of many people beyond our part of the world. In short, I told a story that helped people know about my sister’s character through the effects she had on the people around her. That was what was essential to her character, and her character was indeed her destiny.

Really, who but Rod, who lived apart from her antagonistically for most of their lives, could have told the story of Ruthie Leming? Her husband Mike? Her daughter Hannah? Any number of the students and others she touched so directly and importantly? Come on, really, having read Rod's account so far, why would anyone be so foolish as to think anyone else living in the wattle-and-daub village he now sounds as if he hails from can even read?

The only recourse is to call the one and only Village Scribe. Or, rather, don't make any sort of trouble that might be blogged around the world - in his words only - while the one and only Village Scribe proceeds to call himself. And, ultimately, how could anyone but Rod have written the story of Ruthie Leming that contained the appropriate amount of Rod?

Sadly, we'll probably never get a chance to know now. The one whom we can only hope will one day be seated somewhere far to the left hand of the Father, ideally well behind the heavenly potted parlor palm, next to the rest room, goes on the explain why, although it's important to refer to the writing of Homer, Plato, Tom Wolfe, Walker Percy, and Rod Dreher interchangeably in the same post, the last one still remains for the time being only potentially a Homer, Plato, Tom Wolfe, or Walker Percy

Wolfe is so, so right about learning to write by getting out into the crazy world and seeing what you see. That’s not the path I followed, by the way, because it was not the path open to me.

Because, naturally, it was not the path open to him. Wait...really? Why not? Because right up above Rod's already told us the big difference between him and stay-at-home Ruthie - who, unlike him, achieved nothing, nothing beyond the bounds of the foundation her family gave her - was that he instead left home, saw the world, and instead achieved worldly success.

(Make a note of this one: "path not open to you". I can guarantee you that when it's mid-August and it's both cool inside and there's something cold in a glass and something good's playing on the big screen and my girlfriend wants me to mow her yard, there will be a path, around and around and around, simply not open to me. Sorry, hon'. Path just wasn't open to me.)
 
Of course

...my success as a writer came not as a reporter, which I never really learned how to be, but as an interpreter. I’ve been a critic and a columnist most of my career. I happen to live in one of the most interesting parts of our very interesting country, but it is hard for me to get out of my armchair and go see what there is to see around here, and write about it. Part of it is my chronic illness, but if I’m honest with myself, that’s only a small part of it. Mostly it’s because I’m a contemplative by nature, and because I’m lazy. Put another way, I’m far more inclined to be Plato, a contemplator of ideas, than Aristotle, an observer of phenomena. We need both, of course, but if I could get off my ass and be more of an Aristotle, I’d be a better writer. Heaven knows there are so very many great stories all around me, waiting to be told.

Including, no doubt, Ruthie Leming's, but that chance has already been pissed away on a quick and dirty "interpretation" for some much needed cash.

Now Rod's chronic illness, which, depending how open you as a reader are to suggestion, has plagued him either since birth or only in the last few years not counting Dante-relapses, has played a small part. But most of the reason seems to be because the would-be storyteller is, by his own account, a failed reporter content for year after year to have been a lazy, self-absorbed interpreter of reality as he encountered it on that basis. The important question: will Matthew McConaughey be available for the biopic?

Ah, Ruthie Leming, you lived and died, and it's almost a drop dead certainty we hardly knew ye, and probably never will. But just look at what we got in your name instead.

"All bad writers are in love with the epic."

A well-read friend sent this quote from Earnest Hemingway during an email conversation about so-called Mystical Journalism. I'm chuckling—I'm afraid I can't write that phrase with a straight face.

This too to remember. If a man writes clearly enough any one can see if he fakes. If he mystifies to avoid a straight statement, which is very different from breaking so-called rules of syntax or grammar to make an effect which can be obtained in no other way, the writer takes a longer time to be known as a fake and other writers who are afflicted by the same necessity will praise him in their own defense. True mysticism should not be confused with incompetence in writing which seeks to mystify where there is no mystery but is really only the necessity to fake to cover lack of knowledge or the inability to state clearly. Mysticism implies a mystery and there are many mysteries; but incompetence is not one of them; nor is overwritten journalism made literature by the injection of a false epic quality. Remember this too: all bad writers are in love with the epic.

OK, the friend was Pikkumatti. The quote is from Death in the Afternoon. With regard to false epic quality, Hemingway could have exhibited that by titling his famous book about Spanish bullfighting Death in the Afternoon and Me.

Flannery O'Connor on "Place"

Something to meditate on from the Queen of Southern Gothic.

“Where you come from is gone, where you thought you were going to was never there, and where you are is no good unless you can get away from it. Where is there a place for you to be? No place... Nothing outside you can give you any place... In yourself right now is all the place you've got.”

In yourself right now is all the place you've got.



True.

Since we're on the topic of Walker Percy

Chris Blogger posted this conversation with Walker Percy a few years back. I like it for two reasons: 1) Percy's sentiments match mine, and 2) reminds me of Dylan interviews where the interviewer is looking for the wrong answers and keeps getting the right ones.

Q: What kind of Catholic are you?
A: Bad.
Q: No, I mean are you liberal or conservative?
A: I no longer know what those words mean.
Q: Are you a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?
A: I don’t know what that means, either. Do you mean I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?
Q: Yes.
A: Yes.
Q: How is such a belief possible in this day and age?
A: What else is there?
Q: What do you mean, what else is there? There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behavioralism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhammadanism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.
A: That’s what I mean.
Q: To say nothing of Judaism or Protestantism.
A: Well, I would include them along with the Catholic Church in the whole peculiar Jewish-Christian thing.
Q: I don’t understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?
A: Yes.
Q: Why?
A: It’s not good enough.
Q: Why not?
A: This life is too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then to be asked what you make of it and have to answer, “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight, i.e., God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less.

Emphases mine. Percy was a true Catholic convert. Of course he wouldn't settle for anything less. As a convert to Catholicism myself, I considered Eastern Orthodoxy, but ultimately chose against it, even though I admire their traditions. Why? Because it's less than Catholicism.

What I read first today

...and what I will likely be thinking about for the rest of the day is Oengus Moonbones's latest work in progress, The Relics. For some reason, the man from the "Land In-between" just draws me into his stories. There's an honesty in his fiction that you don't always see in the non-fiction of others. Here's how The Relics begins:

The story I want to tell you begins with a funeral, my funeral actually.

It's funny how the end of your life can circle back around to near where you began. That was the case with me when they held a funeral for me at the Crystal Cathedral, over in Garden Grove. It is a nice town, much like the rest of the towns you find in southern California. When I was very young, my grandmother Edith would take me to Sunday school at a small church not far down the road from where the Cathedral is located. Back then I would never have dreamt that just down the street they would finally bury me. But I guess you don't think about those kind of things when you're little.

Anyhow, my funeral was a sight to behold. I mean it was a really big funeral, bigger than anything I could imagine happening. All sorts of people came. There were some that I knew in life, but most of the people who came I had no idea who they were or where they came from. Isn't it strange that when you're still around, not many people will even talk to you. Once you're gone, though, you discover you've got all these friends you never knew you had.

The story isn't finished, but I hope he writes more. I remember a few years back reading his quirky and very humorous Belinda at Starbucks, which I can't seem to find on Lunar Skeletons anymore. What's up with that, Oengus?

Another example of a strange habit

A reader pointed out this post on Mark Shea's blog to me. I read through it, looked at the comments and sort of rolled my eyes. Then this comment by a commenter named Esther caught one of my eyes mid-roll:

Do you know that when you now google “Perry Lorenzo,” two of the top four results are blog posts speculating about his sex life and eternal destiny in relationship to that sex life?

I’m sure his family is thrilled.

Good job, Mark.

Mark, I really think you should do an examination of conscience about this whole series of posts. They weren’t about Mr. Lorenzo. They were about you, and some bizarre desire to present your views on another person’s private and spiritual life matter as if the world should care what you think. In matters like these, I try to put myself in another person’s place. If my Mom died tonight, what would I think of a popular blogger taking her life and death, making them the center of several posts without my permission, and inviting the world to contemplate her flaws and sins for days on end?

Finally: it is not a Catholic thing to do to speculate on a person’s eternal destiny. It strikes me, actually, as a very Protestant thing – “Are you saved?” “If you died tonight….” To focus in on the congregation in front of you, picking out the saints and the sinners. If you reflect on the witness of the saints and great spiritual teachers, you don’t see that happening. That is not the language, nor the discourse. After a person dies, in particular, it’s not the Catholic Way to speculate in anyway on a person’s eternal destiny – it is the Catholic Way to pray for them, in hope. Period.

I know you are being hailed for this post far and wide, but I think it was a terrible, puzzling and even scandalous mistake, and an invasion of a deceased man’s privacy – not to speak of the privacy of the living, including his partner.

This more or less nailed my biggest problem with all these recent posts. It seems like a strange habit which some writer's possess, this opportunistic culling of information about a recently deceased person, especially material of a primarily speculative nature. Maybe a writer has a desire to be a biographer, but not enough ambition to write about someone famous. So they opt to be a hagiographer of someone personally known by them. The facetious line "I’m sure his family is thrilled" sums up a good enough reason to stay out of this business.

Eulogy-writing 101

Just got finished reading this fantastic obituary by Oengus Moonbones about his friend, Joseph Schooler. Wow. I loved its Christian simplicity and its American-ness. He should teach a class on how to write a eulogy; many could benefit. The ending was pure poetry.

In Genesee, the grain silos make their stand and pierce the blue sky as they had for many years. This place was as American as America can ever get.

Hope I can check out Idaho some day and look up at the sky from the Land Inbetween.

Ubiquarian presents "A Decade"

Owen White gives us ten points to ponder, or perhaps to chew on, over at his blog which has become regular reading for me. My guess is that Owen and I disagree completely on a long list of particulars which are all ultimately inconsequential, but that we are true brothers of the drinking variety.

My favorite points are numbers 3 and 6. Three because I can only think of certain topics through a Pieperian lens. Six because it's simply too accurate, like the archer who splits the arrow, and simultaneous laugh-out-loud funny, like maybe the arrow is wearing Groucho glasses, or lets out a fake fart noise... or something. Excerpt:

My favorite religious blog posts are the ones where some guy waxes on and on (drowning in the affect of a strained world weariness, even though he seems like the sort who would struggle to get through two beers and probably still feels all ex-Evangelical guilty when he swears) about the dangers of internet religious blogging - noting the irony that he himself is doing it, while admonishing presumably less wise readers as to what sort of things should be avoided. It reminds me of that time when I was a kid and Mac Davis sang Lord It's Hard to Be Humble on the Muppets.

But please read the whole thing. It's a keeper.