Lying and counting the inexplicable

The Messenger, Luc Besson’s brutal, ugly, inaccurate, and very very late 90s film about St Joan of Arc, is a terrible movie, but it has one brilliant scene that I’ve reflected on since the one time I watched it more than twenty years ago.

Late in the story, as Joan sits in prison awaiting trial and sentencing, she is visited by a character played by Dustin Hoffman called “The Conscience.” The Conscience has a literally satanic role as an accuser, introducing doubt where Joan has heretofore felt only conviction. His interrogation eventually centers on Joan’s sword, which she miraculously found in a field, an event she took as a calling from God. The Conscience seizes on this, pointing out that it is not self-evidently a sign, but simply a sword in a field. In an increasingly rapid montage, the Conscience suggests many possible ways the sword could have wound up there that did not require God placing it here for her to find.

Having run through several scenarios in which the sword is dropped during combat or simply lost by accident, the Conscience says, “And that’s without counting the inexplicable.” Whereupon we see a man trudging through the same field carrying the sword, which he throws, entirely unprompted, into the tall grass. He doesn’t even stop walking.

The scene is clearly meant to mock supernatural belief—and it doesn’t even get St Joan’s history with that sword right—but that penultimate image of “the inexplicable” makes a valid, important point.

A young true crime YouTuber got me thinking about the Conscience and the inexplicable again. In my constant search for another Lemmino, I’ve tried out a lot of documentary channels on YouTube. Sturgeon’s Law being what it is, most of them aren’t very good. But in the course of finding a handful of decent documentary YouTubers to listen to or watch as I do the dishes or make the kids’ lunches, I’ve noticed that even the best of them have a persistent flaw.

The YouTuber in question is a college graduate with a degree in history. He’s smart, funny, and clearly paid attention in his historiography classes, as he demonstrates a good historian’s grasp of how to gather and assess evidence—most of the time. Faced with contradictory or irreconcilable details in whatever evidence he’s gathered (usually on old missing persons cases), he is far too willing to declare that someone is lying. Not mistaken, ignorant, misremembering, or misinformed—lying.

Part of this may be generational and cultural. I’m a geriatric Millennial from the Deep South, where accusing someone of lying is still serious business, and he’s a northern Zoomer. But it’s also a historiographic problem.

The accusation usually stems from discrepancies in whatever evidence is available—note that—and unacknowledged subjective impressions of the people involved. Discrepancies, in true crime theorizing, offer the same incentive that “anomalies” do to the conspiracy theorist. Our YouTuber falls into this trap whenever he takes discrepancies as evidence of willful deceit.

A lightly fictionalized version of a real example:

Two tourists disappear while hiking in Central America. Their diaries, when found, include a final entry on Monday, April 20. Locals confirm this date. But another tourist who briefly got to know them before their disappearance later recalls seeing the two tourists on Tuesday the 21st. But when first asked about the missing tourists by the police, the records show she stated this happened on that Monday. Why did she change her story? Why is she lying?

The most likely answer is that she didn’t, and she’s not.

Imagine meeting two strangers in a foreign country. You see them again sometime later. Being recent acquaintances, you notice them, but you’re busy with your own business. When they disappear, it turns out you’re one of the last people known to have seen them alive. Suddenly, details of that day take on a significance you never could have anticipated, you’re forced to try to recall things you never knew you would need to remember, and you may not have learned about the disappearance for days or weeks after it happened.

You’re interviewed by local police and by investigators from the tourists’ home country. You return to your own country and your previous life, and years go by. The investigation is reopened several times and you are interviewed again at some point in the process. How well will you remember these things this time? How well did you remember them in the first place?

No one in this scenario is lying, covering things up, or changing their stories. People make mistakes, misremember things, have their memories tainted by bad information relayed from someone else, or simply don’t know. None of this is “lying.”

This is where the inexplicable comes in. Without even factoring in these faults and flaws of memory, how well can you account for your own behavior, even in ordinary circumstances? People do things they can’t even always explain to themselves—out of habit, or intuition, or boredom, or a myriad of other barely conscious non-reasons. To paraphrase a meme, you do just do things.

But imagine a single day of yours is, for reasons beyond your control, placed under a microscope, with the authorities—and YouTubers and podcasters and a legion of other amateurs—poring over your every movement. Who wouldn’t end up looking a little suspicious, especially after being run through a strong rinse of insinuation, as the true crime and conspiracy folks are wont to do? Who couldn’t be accused of lying when forced to remember details you may have forgotten or simply can’t explain?

A few good rules of thumb for sifting evidence:

• Always assume there is information you don’t have, especially when dealing with incomplete evidence. You can only work from what’s available. It’s irresponsible in the extreme to speculate on casefiles that are still partially classified, but guess what you’ll see on almost every true crime YouTube channel?

• Even if you have a complete set of the available evidence, remember that the evidence is not a complete account of reality. Every piece has its own built in biases—limitations in the kind of evidence it’s designed to gather—and will leave things out.

• Always assume there are things you don’t understand. This is especially important in highly technical cases like the radar, transponder, and cell tower evidence in the Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 case which—guess what?—our YouTuber, who doesn’t understand a lot about aviation, takes as evidence of the authorities lying. Aviation is a good example because it’s so obviously complex, but there are hidden technical pitfalls everywhere. In our lightly fictionalized example, consider the possible role of customs and immigration law in our tourists’ story, or unspoken local custom, or simple slang. These invisible technicalities can be the most dangerous. Just keeping Old and New Style dates straight in modern history can wreck your study of a specific event.

• Don’t let your prejudices influence your interpretation. This should be obvious, but how many of us consistently meet this standard? Our YouTuber hates the Royal Canadian Mounted Police and the FBI, so guess how evenhandedly he approaches reports, statements, or other evidence from these institutions? The FBI’s handling of Waco doesn’t mean they’re lying about a child who went missing in the Great Smoky Mountains.

• Always leave room for the inexplicable. Compare the Umbrella Man. And even if you carefully work through every alternative and can prove someone is lying, as the aforementioned Lemmino points out, you may never determine why they are.

• Above all, remember historian’s bias. Approaching any event in the past will give us a different perspective and sense of its significance from everyone who actually lived through it. This is especially important to remember for people called to give an account of something that wasn’t significant to them at the time, that might, in the moment, to have been able to turn out some other way.

I could go on, but these are handy and important and should remain at the forefront of your mind when doing research. And if these are still not enough to dissuade you from leaping to the conclusion that someone you don’t know, under circumstances you haven’t lived through, that you don’t and can’t ever have a complete picture of, is lying, at least have a high enough regard for truth that accusing someone of falsehood becomes a charge you hesitate to make. Your conscience, at least, should demand as much.

Obvious headline is obvious

Late last week I happened to see this front-page headline in the print edition of the Greenville News: “Fort Hill has ties to politics, slavery, founding of Clemson.”

Fort Hill is the name of the plantation house now situated on the campus of Clemson, a few hundred feet away from where I spent grad school in Hardin Hall. It belonged to John C Calhoun, one of the most influential politicians—and one of the only important American political theorists—of the Republic’s second generation. His son-in-law, Thomas Green Clemson, bequeathed the former plantation property to the state for the creation of an agricultural college, which was founded the year after his death in 1888. So one could rewrite the Greenville News’s headline like this:

Plantation house of former congressman, senator, Secretary of War, Secretary of State, and VP John C Calhoun on campus of Clemson University has ties to politics, slavery, Clemson.

The only headline I’ve ever seen that exceeded this one in obviousness was in the New York Times in 2021: “With the Suez Canal Blocked, Shippers Go Around Africa.”

My chief question when looking at the original headline was “Who is this for?” Anyone who attended Clemson (and cares about the university for more reasons than football) already knows this, as do locals and anyone interested in upstate history. The paranoid part of my mind, which I usually hold firmly in check, perked up: was this meant as some kind of agitation for the legions of outsiders swarming into the area? A certain kind of newcomer to the South, a devout worshiper at the altar of the genetic fallacy, loves to discover “ties” that they can be outraged about. I’ve seen it happen.

I actually drafted a version of this post sitting in my kids’ car line Friday afternoon, right after seeing this newspaper lying on a lonely shelf in a Spinx. But before I could post it I began to doubt myself. I had skimmed the article just enough to roll my eyes at the predictable appearance of the circumlocution “enslaved people,” which I’ve picked apart here before. Had I misremembered the headline? Was this actually a front-page, above-the-fold article, or had I seen an accidentally separated travel section?

Well, that newspaper was still sitting there Saturday when I stopped at that same Spinx on the way to the dump. I made a point of doublechecking: it was a front-page story, and I hadn’t misremembered the headline. But looking through the whole article, I finally discovered what it really was—a poorly put-together travel article for a USA Today history initiative called USA 250, assembled mostly from spare parts of previous Greenville News items. The online version of the article makes this clearer without the apparent intent to stir something up: “How to visit historic home at Clemson University.”

The paranoid part of my mind could be safely returned to its cage. The truth was both more mundane and sadder: that print headline was an attempt to inform trying a bit too hard to be interesting. (Though the same article, shared on the paper’s Facebook page, did attract the following comment from one Boomer: “Calhoun bigot and racist.” Speaking of the obvious and predictable.)

Nevertheless: a slow week at the Greenville News. And people wonder why newspapers are dying.

Bones and Berserkers

I mentioned in my recent review of Chloe Bristol’s picture book of The Raven that the Poe fan is chronically short of material making Poe accessible to kids. Her book was a welcome exception. Here’s another.

One of our family’s great favorites right now is Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales, a series of historical graphic novels aimed at eight- to twelve-year olds. Nathan Hale is both the author and artist behind the series and—in the form of tragically terrible spy Nathan Hale—the narrator of most of the books. Each book begins with Hale on the gallows with two other characters, the Hangman and the Provost, the British officer in charge of his execution. Hale, in order to buy time before his date with the noose, entertains the others with stories from history past and future.

It’s a fun concept and Hale—both of them—executes it brilliantly. All the stories I’ve looked at so far have been well-researched and beautifully designed and illustrated, and the Hale, Hangman, and Provost characters work as a kid-friendly chorus, popping into the scenes to comment on the action, ask questions, and provide comic relief from the frequently grim subject matter. Hale (the author) presents the stories faithfully, with charity and nuance but without blunting the truth. Since discovering them at our local library I’ve encouraged the kids to read them, and they’ve happily gobbled them up.

Favorite so far include Raid of No Return (Pearl Harbor and the Doolittle Raid), Alamo All-Stars (the Texas Revolution), Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood (World War I), Above the Trenches (World War I aviation), Lafayette! (the Marquis de Lafayette in the American Revolution) and Donner Dinner Party (self-explanatory). The kids not only enjoy them, they’ve learned a lot. Touring Patriots Point in Charleston over the weekend, my daughter recognized a life-size cutout of Jimmy Doolittle in the USS Yorktown’s hangar and demanded I take her picture with him. A proud dad moment.

Bones and Berserkers is the thirteenth in the series, and to mark the occasion Hale offers an anthology of thirteen short stories. A storm rolls in on Hale, Hangman, Provost, and Bill Richmond (a fourth narrator who becomes more prominent as the series goes on), who shelter under the gallows and build a fire to stay warm. This frame tale sets up an exchange of campfire stories—horror tales.

The stories range wonderfully. We get folklore like the Jersey Devil, the “demon cat” haunting the US Capitol, and the Gullah Geechee story of the boo hag, a woman who sloughs off her skin at night to drink blood from the living. The book includes true stories like Abraham Lincoln’s dream of his own funeral in the White House; Eben Byers, a golfer whose excessive use of radium-infused patent medicine disintegrated his jaw and left his corpse radioactive a century on; and the axe murder at Frank Lloyd Wright’s house Taliesin, which left Wright’s mistress, both of her children, and four employees dead and the house burned to the ground. Then there are uncertain blends of fact and fiction, like the well full of Confederate dead at South Mountain and the career of California bandito Joaquín Murrieta, both of which are true stories so heavily embellished that it remains impossible to say which details are accurate.

But the stories that first drew my attention are purely literary. The only story narrated by the Provost—who wants to prove he can tell a scary story—is an adaptation of the underappreciated Edgar Allan Poe tale “Hop-Frog.” Every word of the story in comic form comes verbatim from Poe, a wonderful touch, and the cruelty of the king’s court and Hop-Frog’s deliciously grotesque revenge are vividly realized. The other is a portion of The Saga of King Hrolf Kraki, an Icelandic legendary saga about a king reclaiming his stolen inheritance with a band of warriors, his chance encounters with Odin, and his eventual doom at the hands of his sorceress half-sister. Marvelous stuff, and a great kids’ introduction to both lesser-known Poe and the sagas.

All of the stories are excellent. The drawings are beautifully done, and Hale experiments a bit from story to story. Most of them have the series’ clean, energetic signature look, but Lincoln’s dream, a simple two-page spread in a charcoal sketch-like style, and “The Butler Who Went Berserk,” about the tragedy at Wright’s Taliesin, drawn in a series of geometric panels mimicking Wright’s style, are standouts. The characters in “Hop-Frog” also look a bit like 1930s Warner Brothers cartoons, with exaggerated round features and shiny eyelids. A nice choice for the heightened tone of the story.

And the care put into research is evident throughout, both in the art and the storytelling. Historical costumes look good in every story, especially the semi-legendary story of Hrolf Kraki, which has evocative Viking Age design (with at least one nod to pre-Viking Norse art). Hale also makes sure the context and details necessary to the story are clear, whether through the chorus of characters chiming in to ask, in-story conversation, or dedicated explainers, like a succinct one-page explanation of the berserkr of Norse legend. At the end of the book, Hale includes a page detailing which stories are true, which are fiction, and which lie in some uncertain place in-between.

It’s nice both to enjoy a book and appreciate the effort put into getting things right, but the stories and the dread and terror they offer are the main attraction. Hale promises spooks and horror and delivers. In the same way he doesn’t downplay or ignore difficult or uncomfortable details in his historical books, he doesn’t skimp on the atmosphere, the scares, or the gruesome details. It’s never gratuitous or excessive and Hale’s narrators offer expertly timed comic relief—including dashes of juvenile humor that I certainly enjoyed—but this book isn’t for the faint of heart, either. Really sensitive kids should probably skip it—something Hale’s characters themselves warn the reader about on the title page.

But if you think your kids can handle a good fright and want to expose them to a thrilling blend of legend, literature, and real spooky history, Bones and Berserkers is a fun and exciting read. I’d gladly recommend it alongside the other favorites in the series mentioned above.

Tron: Ares

Scientists at Disney generate a sequel to Tron and Tron: Legacy

I was one of the handful of people who saw Tron: Ares in theatres last fall. I love and enjoy Tron: Legacy beyond its merits and have shared it with my kids, who revere it, and if Tron: Ares had turned out to be good I planned to take them. I never did—not because it wasn’t good but because it was neither good nor bad enough for me to make up my mind about. I decided to give it another look at home when it came out on Blu-ray. That finally happened this month.

The plot, in brief: Tron: Legacy ended with the escape of a purely digital person into flesh-and-blood reality, and the new film’s very loose connection to that one is in the vast potential latent in the ability to transfer digital assets to reality. Kevin and Sam Flynn’s old company Encom is trying to develop this power to solve all the problems in the world. Old Encom rival Dillinger Systems wants to 3D-print weapons, vehicles, and expendable soldiers to sell to the military. Both are headed by Wunderkind CEOS: Encom by Eve Kim, who struggles to keep her idealistic sister’s dream of ending scarcity alive, and Dillinger by the ruthless Julian Dillinger, under the watchful but impotent eye of his mother Elisabeth.

Into this computer arms race steps the Ares of the title. Ares is a combat program created by Dillinger and trained on countless cycles of simulated combat, death, and regeneration. Dillinger shows him off to investors as the crowning achievement of his project. The problem is that Ares—and everything else generated from the system—only lasts twenty-nine minutes in the real world before disintegrating. This fact drives both Kim and Dillinger’s pursuit of “the permanence code.”

Through a little friendly corporate espionage, including the use of Ares to penetrate and exploit Encom’s servers in search of the code, Dillinger learns that Kim may have recovered it from old files hidden away by her sister. From this point forward it’s a race for Kim to bring the code safely back to Encom, for Dillinger to stop her and take it—through increasingly desperate means—and for Ares, who has begun questioning his programming, to decide what action to take.

Tron: Ares has a number of weaknesses, the chief of which is that the villain is much, much more interesting than either of the heroes. Eve Kim and friends are annoying do-gooders whom the screenwriters have worked too hard to make plucky and likeable, and Ares, as played by Jared Leto, is too convincingly robotic. Evan Peters’s Julian Dillinger, on the other hand, shows cunning and intelligence from his first scene and an amoral pragmatism barely restrained by the influence of his mother, played with chilly and ambiguous control by Gillian Anderson. The moment Julian has an opportunity to take decisive but irreversible action against his greatest rival, he struggles, but only so much. His lifetime of seizing every opportunity that will benefit himself has led to this, and even though he knows it’s wrong and we know that he’ll choose it, we see and feel the weight of the temptation crush him. Peters is likely the best thing in the movie.

This imbalance affects the entire film. It may be a cliche to point out how bad Jared Leto is since everyone online has been dogpiling him for months, but some cliches become cliches because they’re true. (My kids also insist I point out that he has weird hair. In a more artistic vein, my daughter noted that Ares, as a character, is more interesting in the first few minutes when he wears a mask. The moment Jared Leto’s vapid face is revealed, the mystery dissipates. A sharp observation, I’m proud to say.)

That said, the plot, which is simple but effective despite the banality of the movie’s heroes and escalates nicely heading into the final act, the production design and look of the film, the music, the special effects, and the action scenes make up for a lot. Despite the complexity of some of what the movie is offering, it’s intuitively presented—my kids had no trouble following it. I’ve seen director Joachim Rønning take some flak for Tron: Ares as an unimaginative hired gun, but I think the visual storytelling and style of the film serve the story well. I don’t find Nine Inch Nails’ electronic score as enjoyable by itself as I still do Daft Punk’s incredible Tron: Legacy score, but it works well within the movie.

No one should go into a Tron movie looking for deep ideas. As much as I love Tron: Legacy, its Kevin Flynn is given to some silly opining about how much his video game world will challenge the foundational thought of all of civilization. Spoken like a true techbro. Kim and Dillinger, at least, are less prone to philosophizing. (There is an irony in how this movie asks us to root for the good AI overlords against the bad ones; I found myself wishing both could fail. A touch of tonedeafness on the part of the producers.)

But Tron: Legacy and now Tron: Ares do deliver some great action. My kids found the buildup to the climactic sequence, in which Dillinger, having lost control of his own programs, sees his facility print and dispatch lethal weapons tech into the city in pursuit of Kim and Ares, unbearably suspenseful. It’s well-set up and well-executed, and the Terminator-like indestructabilty of Dillinger’s chief henchman posed an intense added threat.

Tron: Ares does not measure up to Tron: Legacy, but it tries to develop one small element of the latter in interesting ways and has satisfying, enjoyable Tron-flavored action. One can’t help but wonder how much better it might have been with a few tweaks, including someone in the title role with more visible depth than Jared Leto (which wouldn’t have happened, as he produced the movie). Having waited several months to rewatch it with my kids, I found myself liking it much more the second time around, not least since they responded so strongly to it.

Impressing kids is not everything, but it’s not nothing, and—following on from The Fantastic Four: First Steps—I’m pleased to have shared it with them. If there are more flawed but enjoyable and workmanlike adventures out there, we’ll take them.

Bad Southern accents and bad history

Earlier this week, as I wrapped up listening to the recent Rest is History series on the first and second iterations of the Ku Klux Klan, I joked on Substack that Tom Holland’s Southern accent “would count as a hate crime in many jurisdictions.”

That was just a couple days ago, so when Alan Jacobs posted yesterday that the accents and, finally, a remark about American cheese in the new samurai series—which I haven’t even started yet—had driven him to the nuclear option of canceling his Club membership and deleting the show, I was surprised by the coincidence and actually a little shocked that he had gone so far.

I am not, however, surprised by the annoyance. I was joking about Tom’s Southern accent and realize that it’s done at least partly in jest, but it is genuinely painful to listen to. And Jacobs points at a deeper problem evinced by Tom and Dominic’s resort to this kind of parody, what he describes as

a low-level but constant sniping and sneering at virtually every element of American culture. For instance: recently, in a series of episodes on the Ku Klux Klan, Tom decided that the Southern accent he wanted to imitate, in reading Klan speeches or newspaper editorials, was that of Cletus from The Simpsons, AKA Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel. A more pompous diction would’ve been more appropriate, but Tom wasn’t interested in reinforcing the point that these people were evil (which they were); instead he wanted to indicate that they were stupid (which, alas, they were not). I’m a Southerner, I’m used to this sort of attitude—it’s almost universal among non-Southerners, and especially common among Brits—but when it goes on and on and on, it gets wearisome.

Also worth noting: the second Klan may have started at Stone Mountain but was a huge Midwestern phenomenon. Tom and Dominic acknowledge this several times, but guess what kind of dialect they (attempt to) use for quotations? Per Drive-By Truckers, “it’s always a little more convenient to play [racism] with a Southern accent.”

Jacobs’s primary complaint is “the compulsive mocking” of American culture on the show. I don’t feel much of a need to stick up for American culture because “American culture” is so vast and I’m at heart a provincial, with a much narrower window of loyalties than anything “American.” You have to get more specific and intrude on my patch to rile me. But of course, being a Southerner with a chip on his shoulder, I have lots of opportunities to get riled.

I also haven’t had quite the experience Jacobs has with British attitudes toward the South. My interactions have been msotly positive. I’ve met Brits who love the South—or at least find it endearing—and even some who have noted the South’s vestigial affinities with the mother country: the fossil Englishness preserved in our dialect and culture. But there are exceptions that match Jacobs’s observations. One British literary guy I follow on Substack spent a good bit of a trip to Virginia expressing dismay every time he saw a house flying a Confederate Battle Flag. He never showed any curiosity about what these people meant by flying the flag and even wrote sneering rejoinders to commenters who suggested he may be overreacting.

What both British Lit Guy and Tom and Dominic show in these examples is an unrealized and therefore unexamined incuriosity. The easy mockery of the accents and the finger-wagging tourism reveal a blind spot; you can’t learn what you think you already know. That’s a flaw with serious repercussions for any critic or historian, and the episodes in which Tom and Dominic give in to the inclination to mock tend to be those with the least insight into whomever they judge the villain. Even the Klan deserves to be understood—dismissing or misapprehending groups like them is dangerous and results in bad history.

That’s the truly annoying aspect of all of this. As Tom and Dominic might say, they’ve let themselves down.

Read Jacob’s entire post. He has many more complaints, some of which I agree with, including the perceptible difference between topics in which Tom and Dominic are intellectually engaged and those in which they aren’t, though I am nowhere near ready to go as far as he did in remedying what to me are still minor annoyances. But he’s absolutely right that putting up with a lifetime of mockery of your home—whether you construe that as America or the South—gets old.

The Raven: The Classic Poem

A representative two-page spread from The Raven as illustrated by Chloe bristol

Opportunities to share Edgar Allan Poe, one of my favorite authors, with my kids are vanishingly rare. Even good modern works meant to make his stories accessible to new readers, like graphic novelist Gareth Hinds’s excellent collection of Poe stories and poems, skew creepier and darker than necessary. As a result, I’ve told my kids a lot about Poe, summarized some of his best stories for them, and we’ve listened to audio performances of some of his work, but I haven’t found much visual media that can introduce Poe’s work to them without inducing nightmares.

I was excited, then, to discover this hardback picture book of “The Raven” at our used book store over the weekend. The Raven: The Classic Poem is a single Poe work given a thorough artistic treatment. Beginning with the poem’s speaker—depicted as Poe himself—drowsing in his armchair, the pictures follow the events stanza by stanza as he first wakes to a tapping, investigates its possible source, and finally admits the raven, which flits across the study to perch on the bust of Pallas. First the name “Lenore,” her shadow, and finally her ghostly form emerge with the narrator’s ruminations, and the pictures leave the narrator at the center of a giant, abstracted black shadow with one burning red eye.

This sounds simple and straightforward, but illustrator Chloe Bristol’s pictures imbue the familiar refrains of the poem with great weight and establish a wonderfully spooky and mournful mood. I can’t stress enough the perfect balance she strikes: atmospheric without being scary, gothic without veering into self-parody, faithful to the words of the poem while still being inventive and surprising.

I found Bristol’s artwork so good and such a support to Poe’s own words that I bought a copy on impulse. I read it aloud to my three oldest that night, and they were suitably engrossed in the pictures and chilled by the poem without finding it disturbing. I enjoyed reading it—and appreciating, for the first time in a good while, what a good poem “The Raven” is for performance—and together we enjoyed talking about it. Bristol notes on her website that the project’s stated aim was to make the poem “digestible” for younger audiences. She did exactly that.

The book ends with a one-paragraph biographical sketch of Poe that emphasizes the role of “The Raven” in his late-career fame. This is the one place I wish the book included more detail, but that’s a niggle. There’s a note explaining or clarifying some of what’s going on in the poem that should be helpful for parents, educators, or precocious kids picking up the book. It also includes some insight into Bristol’s approach to the illustrations, some of which are based on the rooms at Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia, one of the handful of surviving Poe houses.

But the main draw is Poe’s poem, which Bristol’s pictures beautifully showcase. Whether you love Poe and want to introduce him to your kids with an appropriate amount of spookiness or you simply enjoy good poetry and good picture books, The Raven: The Classic Poem is ideal for both purposes and well worth seeking out. I’m certainly glad I stumbled across it.

Something special and small

I mentioned last month that I’ve been doing a leisurely reread of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy. I finished it last night which, being Maundy Thursday, the evening before Good Friday, turned out to be perfect timing.

I did a blog event I called Chestertober a couple years ago but wasn’t able to follow it up last fall. I’m considering reviving it this year. If I can manage it, Orthodoxy will be one of the major books I mean to review. It was my introduction to Chesterton twenty years ago—I recall reading it during the summer of what must have been 2006—and proved genuinely revelatory. It’s frequently quoted for a reason. I could pull out a dozen passages per chapter, minimum, and comment on them at length and still find more to consider and work through on another reading.

For now, as part of observing and thinking about Good Friday, here are two that leapt out at me in the final chapter last night.

First, near the end, as Chesterton ties together the book’s arguments, he narrows his focus briefly from broad philosophical and cultural conflicts to the mischaracterization of Christianity as “something weak and diseased” and the character of Christ himself, who has often been portrayed as “a gentle creature, sheepish and unworldly”:

“The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque”

Instead of looking at books and pictures about the New Testament I looked at the New Testament. There I found an account, not in the least of a person with his hair parted in the middle or his hands clasped in appeal, but of an extraordinary being with lips of thunder and acts of lurid decision, flinging down tables, casting out devils, passing with the wild secrecy of the wind from mountain isolation to a sort of dreadful demagogy; a being who often acted like an angry god—and always like a god. . . . The diction used about Christ has been, and perhaps wisely, sweet and submissive. But the diction used by Christ is quite curiously gigantesque; it is full of camels leaping through needles and mountains hurled into the sea. Morally it is equally terrific; he called himself a sword of slaughter, and told men to buy swords if they sold their coats for them. That he used other even wilder words on the side of non-resistance greatly increases the mystery; but it also, if anything, rather increases the violence.

A brilliantly concise summary of the moralistic “be nice” Jesus manufactured out of a variety of ulterior motives and the man we actually encounter in the Gospels. The contrast is perhaps most striking if one returns to the Gospels after several years, or reads them straight through in a reader’s Bible—a topic I intend to write about one of these days—rather than parceling them out in discrete episodes or tidied up storybook versions. And the “extraordinary” quality of Christ is nowhere more apparent than in the events of Holy Week.

Second, and most personally moving to me, was the book’s penultimate paragraph. Having considered the way paganism, for all its strengths and admirable qualities, still left men in despair, the state to which Christianity’s critics threaten to return the world, Chesterton closes Orthodoxy with his most important point:

The mass of men have been forced to be gay about the little things, but sad about the big ones. Nevertheless (I offer my last dogma defiantly) it is not native to man to be so. Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial. Melancholy should be an innocent interlude, a tender and fugitive frame of mind; praise should be the permanent pulsation of the soul. Pessimism is at best an emotional half-holiday; joy is the uproarious labour by which all things live. Yet, according to the apparent estate of man as seen by the pagan or the agnostic, this primary need of human nature can never be fulfilled. Joy ought to be expansive; but for the agnostic it must be contracted, it must cling to one corner of the world. Grief ought to be a concentration; but for the agnostic its desolation is spread through an unthinkable eternity. . . . Christianity satisfies suddenly and perfectly man's ancestral instinct for being the right way up; satisfies it supremely in this; that by its creed joy becomes something gigantic and sadness something special and small.

I did not recall this passage from previous readings; it had not stuck out to me or stuck with me. That changed this time.

“Man is more himself, man is more manlike, when joy is the fundamental thing in him, and grief the superficial.”

I’ve mentioned before the struggle that this winter and spring have been, of the insomnia and depression and paranoia and exhaustion. The melancholy of January grew so deep during our back-to-back weekends of ice and snow that I picked up Orthodoxy precisely because of its early passages on madness. Chesterton has a reputation for rescuing diseased minds from the brink and, though whatever I was going through wasn’t that severe, I reckoned I needed it. And it worked.

But to begin with madness—reaching for an old favorite as a comfort at a time when I felt like I was losing my mind—and to end with the above passage… that felt truly providential. Reading last night, I recognized myself from two months ago. Grief, melancholy, pessimism—these are my natural bent anyway but had somehow become “the fundamental thing.” Something had gone badly wrong. But far from mere description, this passage is also prescriptive. It can feel like this state lasts forever, but thanks to Christ these will only be temporary.

Already they have been lifting. Good Friday is a chance to remember that they will, if not now, be lifted forever. They’ve already been conquered, reduced to “something special and small.”

I hope this is an encouragement to y’all as it has been to me. If you haven’t read Orthodoxy, do so. I first picked it up because I had learned, somewhere, somehow, of Chesterton’s influence on CS Lewis. But I’ve read and reread it over the years on its own merits. Every time I enjoy my favorite parts again, and every time some part I had never noticed before touches something in me that I never knew needed help.

The art (and danger) of inference

I’m currently reading David Woodman’s new book The First King of England: Æthelstan and the Birth of a Kingdom. It’s excellent so far, despite Woodman having to do a significant amount of the endemic hazard of Anglo-Saxon history: parsing, in sometimes excruciating detail, the available sources, squeezing them for every drop of potentially helpful information. This is always a laborious bit of reading, but where some books make this a chore, Woodman keeps it moving and interesting.

One of the difficulties of reconstructing the past in a period like Anglo-Saxon England is the incompleteness of the literary record. The historian must place great weight on documents originally intended for specific limited purposes, like royal writs (letters to members of local courts), diplomas (short records of land grants made by the king), and law codes. Early in the book, Woodman points out that in the typical diploma

[t]hose who were present at the meetings of the royal assemblies at which various grants of land were made are listed as witnesses at the end . . . These lists are set out hierarchically, beginning with the name of the king himself, from the form of whose title (known as his ‘royal style’) various kinds of important information can be gleaned; then there follow, most often, the names of the archbishops of Canterbury and York, then the bishops of the kingdom, then the ealdormen and thegns (both types of royal officials). Because of this hierarchical structure, and because the diplomas themselves are dated, they provide crucial detail for the realpolitik of tenth-century England, of the peaks and troughs of individuals’ careers.

It is possible to note, for example, that a particular family member may be listed higher than another in a witness list in one year with their positions reversed later—or one of them disappearing entirely. This suggests—one can infer—a change of status or favor. Æthelstan himself shifted up and down in his father Edward’s lists, and Woodman gives attention to a bishop from the north who, judging from his presence in such lists and the broader political situation at the time, must have gone over to supporting northern rivals to Æthelstan for a time.

This kind of thing is not stated outright, of course. Woodman points out that, as important as Æthelstan’s reign is, there is no good contemporary narrative source for it. Much must be reconstructed from later sources—like William of Malmesbury, writing after the Conquest—or the spotty annual narrative of the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, or simply inferred from documents like these.

You can learn a lot this way. Inference is a powerful tool, especially with a large body of such legal texts to work from. But it also has dangers. Here’s Woodman later, first recapitulating the potential use of diplomas before exploring their dangers:

From the lists of attendees included in royal diplomas . . . quite a lot of detail can be reconstructed about the composition of the royal assembly, not least the peaks and troughs of individuals’ careers, since the lists are set out hierarchically according to status. But these lists require a certain circumspection. Most of the diplomas in question survive only in later copies, made long after the original grant of land had been issued. The copyists responsible could make mistakes—for example, in the spelling of names, in the order in which the names should have been listed, or in the omission of names that should have been recorded. We should also be aware that there may have been individuals present who went unrecorded.

One might also add: individuals who were not present but were still important.

The modern historian has a wealth of tools at his disposal, but his most important may be judgment. He can only infer so much from the composition of such a document, and he should not press his inferences further than the documentary evidence will allow. Less prudent historians have read entire imaginary histories into such sources. Woodman avoids that, which is one of the things that has, so far, made The First King of England a valuable read.

A good reminder of why, despite all the technical tools available now, history is an art, not a science.

Heir to the Empire

Well, here was a pleasant surprise. Though I’ve been aware of the legion of Star Wars novels that have been available since I was in elementary school, I’ve never read any, suspecting that their quality would lie somewhere between a Wookieepedia article and the usual movie tie-in novel. But over the years Timothy Zahn’s Thrawn Trilogy has gotten consistent enough praise for me to notice, and the strong recommendations of several of y’all whose taste I trust finally convinced me to check out the first volume, Heir to the Empire.

This novel picks up a few years after the original film trilogy ended. Han Solo and Princess Leia have married and are expecting twins. Leia, slowly undergoing her own Jedi training under Luke, learns that the twins will be especially strong with the Force. Luke begins the story troubled by the division with the Rebellion—now billing itself as the New Republic—especially internal factions attempting to assert themselves against the Rebellion’s more established leaders. Like many rebellions, success may prove to be the worst thing that could happen to it.

This vulnerability of the New Republic, struggling for both legitimacy and unified purpose as the Empire crumbles, arises as the Empire calls up a new leader to deal with the threat to its hegemony. Grand Admiral Thrawn, a blue-skinned, red-eyed being who has spent years campaigning in imperial backwaters, replaces Darth Vader. Thrawn views his predecessor as an unhinged mystic who catastrophically failed the Empire. He approaches defeating the New Republic with a combination of icy rationality and art. A connoisseur of painting and sculpture from worlds all over the Galaxy, Thrawn believes that understanding an opponent’s cultural background is as important in defeating them as pure logistics.

Not that the logistics don’t matter. The destruction of the second Death Star has created a manpower shortage across the Empire. Thrawn’s recruits are young and inexperienced, their training rushed and their discipline and protocol incomplete at best. Further, there is a shipping shortage across the Galaxy.

It’s this logistical problem that slowly becomes the center of the plot and draws the different characters together, as the New Republic dispatches Han to negotiate hiring smugglers as ad hoc transport—including some familiar characters from Han’s past—and Thrawn lays plans of his own for commandeering the vessels the Empire needs.

The one important plot element I haven’t mentioned here is the wild card: Mara Jade, a woman employed by one of the crime lords Han approaches about working for the New Republic. Mara is cagey about her past even with her boss, has an impressive breadth of technical skills she picked up who knows where, is familiar with the Force and lightsabers, and yearns to kill Luke Skywalker. But the less revealed about her, her background, and her quest to confront and kill Luke the better.

There’s much more going on in the story than even the above may suggest—including a trip to the Wookiee home world, a rogue leftover Jedi with a taste for mind control, and a race of brutal assassins Thrawn puts on the scent of Leia and her twins—and the richness with which Zahn evokes the world of the original trilogy is one of its pleasures. Heir to the Empire gives us a situation that believably continues that seen at the end of Return of the Jedi and introduces new complexity and depth to both the Rebellion and the Empire. But best of all, it provides an excellent villain. Thrawn is coolheaded, canny, skilled in both long-term strategy and tactical improvisation, and his insistence that culture matters combines menacingly with a typical Imperial willingness to use force. He proves a genuine threat to both the New Republic and to the familiar characters we care about.

But Zahn also manages to do what Disney failed at twenty years on: using the originals and their world to drive off in new directions that aren’t mere pastiche. Everything in Heir to the Empire feels truer to the original films and—perhaps even more importantly—plausible and true to real life than anything in the Disney trilogy. As I’ve noted elsewhere, it’s no wonder fans of books like this are ticked off with Disney.

But if Heir to the Empire stands out in comparison with something like The Last Jedi, that’s because it was already good in its own right. The quality of the writing itself is middling, improving over the course of the novel, but the plotting, characterization, and thoroughness of the world imagined by Zahn is outstanding. Heir to the Empire is solid genre fiction, which I’ve argued before no one should turn up their nose at, and enjoyable from beginning to end. I look forward to reading the rest of the trilogy.

The Fantastic Four: First Steps

Pedro Pascal and Vanessa Kirby as Reed Richards and Sue Storm in The Fantastic Four: First Steps

I recently watched The Fantastic Four: First Steps with the kids. It was okay—enjoyable without thrills, funny without big laughs, suspenseful without surprises. But it was also inoffensive, had a creative retro-futuristic look that took me back to The Incredibles, and had one compelling subplot that held the entire movie together and made it just a bit more than the sum of its parts. This won’t be a proper review of the entire movie, but a recommendation on the basis of its straight-down-the-middle quality and this one surprising aspect of the story.

The movie begins with husband and wife Reed Richards/Mr Fantastic and Sue Storm/The Invisible Woman discovering that, after two years of trying without success, they are finally expecting a baby. This might seem an odd place for a superhero movie to start, but the pregnancy and baby subplot—which I heard a lot about when the movie came out—turns out to be central to the story. The film’s villain, Galactus, who means to devour the Earth, offers to spare the planet in exchange for the Richards’s unborn child. They refuse. The public turns on the Fantastic Four.

This was a refreshing surprise for two reasons:

First, the baby, even before birth, is presented unquestioningly as living and important. The most moving scene in the film comes when Reed wants to scan the baby in utero and Sue, in an attempt to show that his science is distracting him from the truth of the situation, uses her powers of invisibility to reveal their son in her stomach. He squirms, kicks, and responds to them—all stuff I’ve seen on ultrasound monitors many times, that my wife has felt many more. In a culture that persists in dehumanizing the unborn—for pernicious, devouring reasons of its own—this lingering meditation on their life and value stunned me.

Second, the film explicitly positions the Richards’s refusal to give up their baby against a utilitarian, consequentialist ethic. Saying no to Galactus means he will eat the Earth. The fickle public, who adore the Four one moment and revile them the next, want to know why the fate of one baby should doom the entire planet. This is the Caiaphas argument: it is more expedient for one to die than the whole nation.

Reed and Sue steadfastly refuse to give in. It is wrong for parents to sacrifice the life of the child gifted to them. They won’t give up on saving the world, but that route—the path of least resistance, of giving in to the pressure of numbers and a short-term vision of salvation—is closed to them. I can’t think of the last time a film made such a deontological move, presenting something as morally wrong under any circumstances. Their refusal in the face of public pressure and the threat of Galactus makes them more heroic.

The latter aspect of the film not only drives the events of the climax, it reinforces the message of the former. If Sue and Reed, in their joy at the news, their preparation for the baby’s arrival, and their refusal to give him up show that life is too precious to bargain, the climactic action, in which all four demonstrate their willingness to die for the innocent, shows us that they mean it. Life is valuable. How valuable? This valuable!

Again, The Fantastic Four: First Steps is not an earth-shattering movie. It’s enjoyable entertainment with a unique aesthetic and more thought put into it than the last several Marvel movies combined—a low bar. What sets it apart is its wholehearted commitment to a vision of the value of human life—even in the womb—and its courage in allowing the characters to live that out without compromise. This was a great surprise, and I hope we can see more like this.