Twisters

PhDs and Hillbillies—Glen Powell and Daisy Edgar-Jones unite to chase storms in Twisters

It’s been a slow year for movies in the Poss household, with Dune: Part Two and The Wild Robot being two of only three movies we’ve gotten really excited about. Over the weekend my wife and I finally got a chance to see the third, Twisters, after having to cancel plans to see it several times over the summer. We weren’t disappointed.

Twisters is old enough news now that I won’t recap the plot in any detail. Kate (Daisy Edgar-Jones) is a former meteorology PhD student who got several friends killed in an experiment. When Javi (Anthony Ramos), the only other survivor, approaches her about a new opportunity to learn more about tornadoes using new portable military radar, she agrees to a brief return to the field to look things over. With Javi and his corporately-sponsored team in Oklahoma, Kate meets Tyler Owens (Glenn Powell), a cocky amateur with a wildly popular YouTube channel. Then a monster storm arrives.

As a movie, Twisters is rock-solid old-fashioned entertainment, with good acting and a well-structured, suspenseful script that also makes room for much more realistic and nuanced characters than the original. Given the format in which we finally saw Twisters—projected on an inflatable outdoor screen with a portable sound system—I can’t fairly comment on a lot of the technical aspects of the movie. But despite the setting in which we saw it the movie looked and sounded great. I learned afterward that it was shot on 35mm film, which is a credit to the filmmakers. I hope to watch it again soon.

But while Twisters’ story and the technical aspects were good, they are not what made me want to write about it.

When the movie came out, our political schoolmarms were affronted that the movie did not lecture its audience on climate change. (The byline on that Salon piece sounded familiar, and, sure enough, that’s the same guy who wanted 1917 to sit the audience down for a talk on nationalism.) Again, to the filmmakers’ credit, the director explicitly stated in interviews that movies aren’t for “preaching”: “I just don’t feel like films are meant to be message-oriented.”

Hear hear. And yet, while Twisters does not “put forward a message” in the sense of “preaching,” like all well-crafted stories it does have something to say. And like all well-crafted stories, it does so not through speeches but through its characters.

This begins when Kate, tagging along with Javi’s well-funded storm-chasers, first meets the crowdfunded livestreaming Tyler. The two sides are explicitly set in opposition as “the PhDs” on Kate and Javi’s side and “hillbillies” on Tyler’s. Javi’s company receives funding in exchange for data, and Tyler receives YouTube money and adulation from his viewers in exchange for risking his life to chase storms. It’s a familiar American dynamic in microcosm—elites vs populists.

But while Twisters introduces these two sides in opposition, it doesn’t hold them there. Both sides have hidden depths. Beneath their slick equipment and university backgrounds, Kate and Javi genuinely care about using their research to help people, and beneath his media-hungry machismo, Tyler has actual scientific knowledge and wants to help, too. Neither is blameless—one takes money from a shady real estate mogul, the nearest thing the movie has to a villain, and the other hawks t-shirts. Despite all this, they are more alike than different, and both want to help people.

This last point is important, because the key moment in bringing Kate and Tyler together, working toward a common goal, is a small town rodeo, an event that opens with the national anthem and is presented completely unironically. There is no wink or condescension toward the people at the rodeo, and, significantly, it is here that Tyler first opens up to Kate and the two begin working together. Twisters is the first movie I can remember in a long time that unequivocally presents small-town American life as good and worth preserving, and the suspense of the film’s final act comes not only from whether Kate’s experiment will finally succeed, but whether Kate and Tyler can save a town in the path of a once-in-a-generation tornado. Why? Because the people there are worth saving, period, regardless of their political affiliation or whom they vote for.

Twisters does not preach, no, but it presents a vision of an America where the elites and the people, the PhDs and the hillbillies, work better together. That demands a common goal, and on one side realizing that the people are more than data or raw material, and on the other realizing that the elites are people, too, and being willing to work alongside them toward a common goal.

This may not be a life-changing movie or high art, but Twisters is well-crafted and both entertains and uplifts. That’s rare enough in this day and age, but Twisters also tells a story of what can united Americans, which is worth contemplating during an election year—or any year.

Magic

This inaugural Chestertober continues with a brief dramatic interlude. The rest of this month I’m looking at Chesterton’s novels, but this week the subject is his first play, written at the behest of Chesterton’s old friend and philosophical sparring mate George Bernard Shaw, 1913’s Magic.

Magic takes place in the drawing room and grounds of a wealthy Duke but begins in a remote part of his garden on a cool drizzly evening. An Irish girl named Patricia, the Duke’s niece and ward, is searching the woods for fairies when she encounters a cloaked and hooded man. She takes him to be a giant fairy and reacts with awe but he is, in fact, the Conjurer, a magician arriving to perform for the Duke and his guests.

The Duke is an eccentric of the type familiar from Chesterton’s stories. He speaks in barely connected, allusive fragments and, though friendly, remains aloof through sheer inscrutability. He donates generously to rival causes—to both a vegetarian activist group and a group trying to stop vegetarianism, for example—and is meeting two men with petitions for support. One is Dr Grimthorpe, a skeptical doctor who used to know Patricia’s family in Ireland and believes her to be crazy but harmless, and the other is the Rev Smith, a broadminded Church of England clergyman more interested in social causes than religion. The Duke asks them to join him for the Conjurer’s performance, which will begin once Patricia’s brother Morris arrives.

Morris has been living in the United States for years and returns very “practical,” which is to say: materialistic, pragmatic, and aggressively skeptical. He scoffs at Patricia’s story of having met a fairy in the woods and, when the Conjurer arrives and reveals himself to be a mere magician, humiliates her. Patricia’s embarrassment turns to resentment. Morris looks over the Conjurer’s props and declares that he knows the secret to all of them. What he would really love to know, he says, are the secrets behind the tricks great religious leaders used to fool people:

Morris: Well, sir, I just want that old apparatus that turned rods into snakes. I want those smart appliances, sir, that brought water out of a rock when old man Moses chose to hit it. I guess it's a pity we've lost the machinery. I would like to have those old conjurers here that called themselves Patriarchs and Prophets in your precious Bible…

Patricia: Morris, you mustn't talk like that.

Morris: Well, I don't believe in religion…

Doctor: [Aside.] Hush, hush. Nobody but women believe in religion.

At this point, an already frustrated and embarrassed Patricia declares that she will perform “another ancient conjuring trick . . . The Vanishing Lady!” and leaves.

Morris becomes belligerent with the Conjurer, especially once the Conjurer moves a painting and knocks over a chair, apparently by magic. “Do you reckon that will take us in?” Morris asks. “You can do all that with wires.” The Conjurer concedes the point and Morris, in a sweeping rant against superstition, asserts that Joshua could no more stop the sun than a priest or magician could change the color of the red lamp shining at the end of the garden. As soon as he says this, the lamp turns blue.

Morris goes mad, working himself into a frenzy trying to determine how the Conjurer did it. When pressed, the Conjurer, with no satisfaction at having bested a critic but rather a spirit of deep sadness, reveals his secret: it was magic. He commanded devils to do it for him and they did.

The third and final act begins with Morris insane and confined to bed and the other characters attempting, one by one, to persuade the Conjurer to help him. The Duke offers to pay for the real secret behind the lamp trick. The doctor tries to get him to reveal the trick, assuming it must be so simple that it will make Morris laugh and break the hold of the madness that has taken him. Smith, the clergyman, attempts to reason sympathetically with the Conjurer. Only Patricia, to whom the Conjurer confesses that he fell in love with her the moment he saw her in the garden, is able to change his mind.

I’ll leave the details of precisely how Magic concludes for you to discover. Brisk, surprising, lighthearted but earnest, and steadily escalating in tension, this is a wonderful short play and was critically praised—including by Shaw—when it premiered in the fall of 1913, 111 years ago next month.

It’s easy to see why. Magic excels at the one thing Chesterton always used his stories for: pitting worldviews against each other. The whimsical, half-serious folk-spirituality of Patricia; the sentimental, largely political do-gooder formal religion of the Rev Smith; the liberal-minded but shapeless and ineffectual humanitarianism of the wealthy Duke; and the scientific materialism of the Doctor and, more aggressively, Morris all run up against something that they don’t believe in and are forced to confront its reality. Just as each character disbelieves in magic for different reasons, each reckons with its use by the Conjurer in different ways.

Perhaps the most sympathetic character besides the Conjurer is the Rev Smith. A Christian socialist and establishment figure, Smith is nevertheless not an object of mockery—Chesterton’s stage directions make it clear that Smith is “an honest man, not an ass.” (By contrast the Duke “though an ass, is a gentleman.”) In one of the play’s most dramatic scenes, the Conjurer furiously dresses Smith down for enjoying a position based on the supernatural when he is too urbane to believe in spirits:

Conjurer: . . . I say these things are supernatural. I say this was done by a spirit. The Doctor does not believe me. He is an agnostic; and he knows everything. The Duke does not believe me; he cannot believe anything so plain as a miracle. But what the devil are you for, if you don't believe in a miracle? What does your coat mean, if it doesn't mean that there is such a thing as the supernatural? What does your cursed collar mean if it doesn't mean that there is such a thing as a spirit? [Exasperated.] Why the devil do you dress up like that if you don't believe in it? [With violence.] Or perhaps you don't believe in devils?

Smith: I believe… [After a pause.] I wish I could believe.

Conjurer: Yes. I wish I could disbelieve.

Smith, chastened, confronted his his own lack of faith despite his position, is transformed—one might say converted. This is a subtle but powerful character arc, and a clear counterpart to Morris’s absolute refusal to believe in what he has seen. One, confessing himself unable but willing to believe, is saved; the other goes mad.

Madness is, of course, a major theme of Chesterton’s writings throughout his career but especially early on, and in Magic he suggests that madness is ultimately the only alternative to faith.

This is not to say that Magic is a sermon. Far from it. The balance of art and ideas which I’ve been exploring since we began the month with The Napoleon of Notting Hill is perfectly struck in Magic. Chesterton creates and sustains a mood of wonderful ambiguity from the first scene and maintains it throughout, and each character is permitted his or her own say. The result is a play that dramatizes exceptionally well the humility needed to face reality, especially those realities we often ignore or exclude, and the arrogance that leads to damnation.

Further notes on aliens and the gothic

A few weeks ago when I mulled over the taxonomy of UFO believers as laid out in a recent New Atlantis essay, I mentioned my pet theory that aliens had worked their way into a cranny in the cultural imagination formerly occupied by the gothic. I wrote:

Where the Romantics, when in search of a tingly spine, went to windswept moors under the light of the full moon, relict beasts of bygone ages, decaying houses full of dark family secrets, and the inexplicable power of the supernatural—to the otherworldly of the past—if we want the same sensations in the present we go to the strange lights in the night sky, the disappearance, the abduction, cold intelligences from the future, decaying governments full of secrets, and the inexplicable power of interstellar technology.

(I first propounded this theory a few months ago when I volunteered, very early one morning, to help my wife prepare bottles and medicine for the twins. She had not had her coffee yet and is grateful for your readership.)

I’m speaking very generally, of course, but a few of the specific, superficial things that suggest a parallel between the stories emerging from the gothic and the UFO phenomenon include:

• Remote, lonely locations

• Nighttime—ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and greys all apparently being nocturnal

• Individuals or, perhaps, a small, intimate group being targeted

• A sense that the otherworldly is fixated on or preying upon specific people

• A psychological arc that grows from uneasiness to dread and often ends in paralyzing terror

• Inexplicable phenomena and occult powers (occult in the sense of hidden or unknown)

• Relatedly, unpredictable comings and goings

• Ambiguous and minimal physical evidence

I could probably come up with a longer list, but these immediately suggest themselves. Again, all of the above are superficial general parallels and there are plenty of exceptions—about which more below—but if you were to construct either a gothic or alien story, it would probably have most or all of those traits. But there are deeper and more important qualities that both have in common:

• Their intrusive quality, the way the uncanny or extraterrestrial is perceived as breaking in upon normal life from somewhere else

• Their subsequent disruptive effect upon the normal

• The dense secrecy surrounding them

This gets us really close to the semi-religious dimensions of both, the mysterious, scary, and disruptive being neighbors to awe.

To summarize, the alien story was able to supplant the gothic because both scratch the same itch: otherworldly, slightly or overtly scary, and with religious overtones.

Two caveats:

• UFO stories sometimes originate in heavily populated areas, the two most famous examples probably being Phoenix and Mexico City.

• UFOs don’t always appear at night. In fact, some of the most perplexing unexplained incidents occurred in broad daylight.

I think the rest of my superficial observations hold true, though: the widely-reported “Phoenix lights” were seen at night and Lonnie Zamora and Kenneth Arnold, to pick two daytime incidents, were individuals in out-of-the-way places. All three of the deeper similarities remain. I’d even say that the superficial things—individuals alone in remote places at night—are probably best explained as setting the necessary mood for the intrusion of the mysterious.

Note that I’m treating all of the UFO stuff as fictional, just like the gothic. Remember that I’m mostly a “disinformation non-enjoyer,” though I do enjoy the aesthetic, atmospheric side of all of it. I think the overwhelming majority of UFO sightings are sufficiently explained by terrestrial factors or simple fraud, though some—with unimpeachably honest people seeing something inexplicable, like Zamora and the others in the video linked above—remain tantalizingly unexplained.

I’m also interested in what UFOs say about culture, symptomatically. Why do these stories appeal? I think my “scratching the same itch” theory explains some of it, and yet this is where the most significant difference between the gothic and UFOs comes in:

• The gothic is historically-oriented. When intrusion and disruption occurs, it is the forgotten past intruding on the present. Hence the roles of old houses, family secrets, and medieval monsters.

• The UFO phenomenon is future-oriented. The intrusion and disruption are those of the future breaking into a less advanced past—our present. Hence the roles of laboratories and military facilities, government secrets, and monsters from outer space.

The shift from a delight in the spooky rooted in the past to a delight in the spooky giving us hints about the future is a significant one, and not easily summarized here. Food for thought.

The virtues of Spider-Man 2

Spider-Man and Doc Ock (Tobey Maguire and Alfred Molina) battle atop a New York City el train in Spider-Man 2

Last week I spent a day at home with a sick kid, my eldest son. He’s seven, and enamored of Spider-Man, so I thought a sick day on the couch warranted finally showing him the ultimate in Spider-Man movies, as far as I’m concerned: Spider-Man 2, which is now twenty years old. My son loved it, and took in every minute with a wide-eyed openness to enjoyment that I long to rediscover for myself. What I did rediscover, though, was how good this movie is.

I’d always enjoyed it and remembered it fondly, but after letting more than a decade pass without watching any more than the subway train chase that leads into the final act, I was stunned.

First, on a technical level, it holds up. Some of the special effects are better than others, but if CGI has improved since then it hasn’t improved much. If anything, the CGI in Spider-Man 2, still being somewhat experimental in 2004, is better integrated. And having been shot on 35mm film by a great cinematographer, the movie looks wonderful—even on the old DVD my son and I watched, the warmth of the color palette in scenes with Aunt May or Mary Jane and the palpable coolness of nighttime scenes look wonderfully filmic. None of the recent Marvel movies, which all have the dull, lusterless clarity of digital cinematography, can compare.

I could praise other aspects as well: the acting (from all but James Franco, anyway), or the perfectly balanced tone, or the meticulously structured script, or the obvious fun Sam Raimi is having throughout with snap-zooms and histrionic open-mouthed screams from bystanders.

But what stuck out most to me was the richness of its themes. On top of everything else, this is a legitimately moving drama. The film opens with Peter Parker struggling to fulfil his obligations in every aspect of his life except his role as a friendly neighborhood Spider-Man, and his frustration grows as he loses the respect of an admired teacher, loses his job, loses an old friend, and seems set to lose Mary Jane forever. He briefly gives up his crime-fighting and, though gaining superficial success in the rest of his life, he can neither win Mary Jane back nor escape the feeling that he is not following his calling.

Spider-Man 2 dares to suggest that vocation and duty are more important than following dreams, and that doing the right thing might mean abandoning a cherished hope.

This underlies two points of grace in the story. First, when trying to earn a living and succeed at school and provide for Aunt May and win Mary Jane back on his own strength he fails, but by embracing his duty as Spider-Man he finds fulfilment and love. As much as we might desire autonomy and individual success and wish to escape duty, it is duty that most powerfully connects us to other people and gives everything else in life meaning. To paraphrase CS Lewis, when Peter aims at happiness he doesn’t get it, but when he aims at duty he gets happiness thrown in.

Second—and this is only a half-formed observation—I was struck that the turning point in the film comes not during an action scene, but in a quiet dining room conversation in which Peter tells Aunt May the truth about the night Uncle Ben was killed. Peter does so despite the discomfort of facing his lies and the petty desire for revenge that contributed to Uncle Ben’s death, and despite the risk of losing Aunt May. She forgives Peter, but not because he deserved it. This feels awfully close to the sacrament of confession. Certainly Peter’s life is more characterized by grace afterward than it was before.

After watching Spider-Man 2 I went to the kitchen to make lunch for myself and my son and idly looked up the late Roger Ebert’s review. Four stars, introduced with this wonderful paragraph:

Now this is what a superhero movie should be. “Spider-Man 2” believes in its story in the same way serious comic readers believe, when the adventures on the page express their own dreams and wishes. It’s not camp and it’s not nostalgia, it’s not wall-to-wall special effects and it’s not pickled in angst. It’s simply and poignantly a realization that being Spider-Man is a burden that Peter Parker is not entirely willing to bear.

It’s striking that, this early in the superhero movie glut, a year before Batman Begins and four years before Iron Man, Ebert accurately described the overwhelming majority of superhero movies to come, whether the CGI vomit of the later MCU or the mordant navel-gazing of Zack Snyder, and exactly what it is that set Spider-Man 2 apart. Better artistry, certainly, but serious and sincerely explored themes of duty and love as well.

It seems trite to point out, but it’s impossible to imagine such a movie being made today.

Manalive

Today Chestertober continues with perhaps the most overtly, characteristically, even stereotypically Chestertonian of all of Chesterton’s fiction, his 1912 comedy of ideas Manalive.

The entirety of Manalive takes place at Beacon House, a boarding house on a hill overlooking London. Here a variety of lodgers move comfortably through their lives, among them an heiress named Rosamund and her maid Mary Gray; Diana Duke, the niece of Beacon House’s imperious landlady; a young man named Arthur Inglewood, who nurses secret feelings for Diana; a dour Irish journalist named Michael Moon; a Jewish cynic named Moses Gould; and the successful and intelligent but utterly humorless Dr Herbert Warner. The bland, peaceful routines of Beacon House are disrupted by the arrival of Innocent Smith, an eccentric whose coming is heralded by a blast of evening wind that drives the residents indoors just as Smith throws his luggage over the back garden wall and clambers over into the yard.

Smith’s eccentricities do not stop there. A gigantic man with unkempt blond hair, he speaks in a torrent of disjointed allusions and metaphors and partial quotations and half-formed jokes, invites the other lodgers to a picnic which he hosts on the roof, and carries a large revolver in his bag.

Despite his strange arrival and effusive, off-putting manner, Smith quickly wins over most of the other lodgers. His overwhelming energy inspires Arthur to confess his feelings to Diana and ask her to marry him, Michael Moon to win back the affections of Rosamund, with whom he used to be in love, and Mary Gray to agree to marry Smith. Beacon House resounds to song and laughter as love is either kindled or relit, and as Smith and Mary prepare to elope in a cab. All is going well until Smith takes his revolver and shoots at Dr Warner.

Warner, who is already hostile to Smith, understandably objects and calls in an American criminologist to examine him. Warner means to have Smith declared insane and committed. Arthur and Michael rise to Smith’s defense, and Warner and Dr Pym, the criminologist, present new charges that Smith is not only insane but a burglar, a repeat attempted murderer, and a serial seducer and bigamist who has abandoned several wives.

The second half of the novel is a long trial held at Beacon House with Warner and Pym as prosecutors and Arthur and Michael as Smith’s defense. Chapter by chapter, Warner and Pym produce statements from Smith’s past that suggest a life of depravity and crime and Arthur and Michael counter with clarifying and exonerating testimony.

When Warner and Pym relate an incident from Smith’s university days in which he chased a professor out a window and shot at him—much like the incident with Warner—it turns out that the accusation is based entirely on the testimony of a witness. The professor himself never pressed charges or even complained. The professor, it turns out, was a scientific skeptic and pessimist who had become convinced that life was meaningless and worthless. Being shot at revealed to him, for the first time, life’s value, and he emerged from the incident a changed man. When Warner and Pym bring eyewitness testimony from a minister of the Church of England that Smith had once led him down a chimney into a house where he stole goods, it turns out that the house was Smith’s own.

And, in the climactic series of accusations and testimonies, in answer to the charge that Smith has led astray a series of young women all over England who agreed to elope with him and were never seen again, Arthur and Michael prove that all of these women, all along, have been Smith’s actual wife—and so is Mary Gray.

“Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.”

— GK Chesterton

Smith, from a place of despair as a young man, had plunged into the joy of rediscovery, of turning life on its head and seeing it from a fresh angle. He shoots at the despairing to make them want to live, burgles his own house in order to appreciate home, travels all the way around the world to discover his country as if it were a foreign and exotic land, and repeatedly loses and rescues his wife to keep the thrill of marriage alive.

In the conclusion, Smith is acquitted and waves a burning log from the roof of Beacon House—making the name literal—and, just as when he arrived, a great evening wind blows. In the midst of Arthur and Diana and Michael and Rosamund’s festivities, Smith and Mary disappear.

I first read Manalive many years ago and, though I enjoyed it and have enjoyed revisiting it, it is not my favorite of Chesterton’s novels. This is curious to me since, as I suggested in the introduction, it is a very characteristically Chestertonian entertainment. Light, frothy, energetic, with painterly descriptions throughout and a gallery of over-the-top characters who still manage to feel like real people. It also includes some of my favorite passages from all of Chesterton’s work, among them:

If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments.

Often the thing a whole nation can't settle is just the thing the family could settle. Scores of young criminals have been fined and sent to jail when they ought to have been thrashed and sent to bed.

Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.

Or this, one of Chesterton’s best, truest, and most often quoted lines:

Marriage is a duel to the death which no man of honour should decline.

And this, which speaks deeply to me:

I think God has given us the love of special places, of a hearth and of a native land, for a good reason.

I think what keeps me from loving Manalive is that Chesterton, for lack of a better way to put it, really leans into his Chestertonness here, almost to self-parody. It is too whimsical by half, a fact one has more of a chance to contemplate since it unfolds at novel length unlike, say, some similarly twee poems or short stories. And I think both form and structure present problems. This is a novel that desperately wants to be a play, as the single setting and very, very long trial scenes in the second half suggest. And as a play Manalive would be smashing, and probably use the repeated surprises of Innocent Smith’s topsy-turvy life to maximum effect. As a novel, it is only good.

“Stick to the man who looks out of the window and tries to understand the world. Keep clear of the man who looks in at the window and tries to understand you.”

— GK Chesterton

Again—it is good. Manalive might suffer in comparison to The Napoleon of Notting Hill, with which we started the month, or The Man Who Was Thursday, with which I intend to end October, but it is still worth reading, and that is on its strengths not as a novel but as a fable.

Back in the summer I posted about Joseph Epstein’s thoughts on “the novel of ideas” in his book The Novel, Who Needs It? Drawing from sources as various as Ortega y Gasset, Northrop Frye, and Michael Oakeshott, Epstein argues that a proper novel is not straightforwardly about its ideas, concepts, theories, or ideologies, but allows any such underlying philosophy to be dramatized subtly through character relationships. As I noted later, there’s an element of snobbery to this narrowing definition, but there’s also an element of truth.

In Manalive, Chesterton’s ideas are clearly in control, and the pitched battle he constructs between the haughty and reductive scientism of Warner and Pym, who can explain away anything through biology, sociology, and psychology; the wry cynicism of Gould; the untested idealism of Arthur; the disillusion of Michael; and the pious wonder of Smith is more important than the characters themselves. That does not reduce Manalive’s value as a story, but just as the form suggests it is better suited to the stage, the role of each character as the stand-in for a philosophy of life makes it more of a fable.

And as a fable, Manalive is both moving and profound. Through the disruption of Chesterton’s greatest Holy Fool, who renews the minds of those who are open to befriending him, the residents of Beacon Hill are forced to reckon with truths they have up to this time ignored or actively fought against. Some of these are confoundingly simple: life is better than death, for example. When people say that Chesterton’s ideas are “more relevant than ever,” it is these most obvious, common sense ideas that they have in mind. Only these can fortify a soul against the madness of our age—another theme Chesterton explored repeatedly, and to which we’ll return.

Manalive is neither Chesterton’s best nor best-remembered novel, but it is a worthwhile read as distilled essence of Chesterton, especially if his non-fiction covering similar ground—What’s Wrong with the World, Eugenics and Other Evils, and his many, many essays—don’t appeal as strongly. Even with its artistic flaws, Manalive leaves the reader refreshed and revived, just as Innocent Smith would want, as well as wanting an Innocent Smith of our own to scare a mad and death-loving culture back to life.

Saving the world from the reading nook

Writing at Front Porch Republic in response to several recent news stories—like this one—that suggest our civilizational decline is further along than even the pessimists thought, Nadya Williams argues that saving and restoring civilization begins at home:

In the midst of the (il)literacy crisis unfolding around us, I would like to propose an old-fashioned response: Home libraries will save civilization. Why? Because a home overcrowded with books sets the tone for how its inhabitants spend their time at home. Bored? Read a book. Want something to do for fun? Read a book. Have friends over? Read a book together. Relaxed family night at home? Start a read-aloud.

The right domestic tone is key. So is opportunity. Williams continues:

When books are everywhere, they distract us with their presence in a good way—they demand to be read, shaping the people around them in small but meaningful ways, moment by moment, page by page. They send us on rabbit trails to find yet more books on related topics, to ask friends for recommendations, and sometimes just to sit quietly and reflect, overcome with an emotion sparked by an author who has been dead for centuries but one that expresses the state of our soul in this moment.

This combination—a mood at home that encourages reading and abundant opportunity to do so—reminded me of the early passages of Lewis’s spiritual memoir Surprised by Joy. Here he describes the home his family moved into when he was seven:

The New House is almost a major character in my story. I am a product of long corridors, empty sunlit rooms, upstair indoor silences, attics explored in solitude, distant noises of gurgling cisterns and pipes, and the noise of wind under the tiles. Also, of endless books.

Lewis’ father, you see, had the same bad habit I do: he “bought all the books he read and never got rid of any of them.” Feel free to consult my wife for more information on me, but for the young Lewis this was the happy result:

There were books in the study, books in the drawing room, books in the cloakroom, books (two deep) in the great bookcase on the landing, books in a bedroom, books piled high as my shoulder in the cistern attic, books of all kinds reflecting every transient stage of my parents’ interests, books readable and unreadable, books suitable for a child and books most emphatically not. Nothing was forbidden me. In the seemingly endless rainy afternoons I took volume after volume from the shelves. I had always the same certainty of finding a book that was new to me as a man who walks into a field has of finding a new blade of grass.

The results speak for themselves.

But of course opportunities have to be seized, and the decline of reading, at least among the American populace, is not for lack of reading material. Books are plentiful and cheap. Where a private library used to be a ruinously expensive luxury, the most precious resource of a monastery or the hobby of an aristocrat, Williams argues that “in this day and age, with periodic public library sales and book giveaways, one doesn’t have to be rich to accumulate an impressive home library.”

But that word accumulate my put off the more Marie Kondo-ish among us. Williams suggests we embrace the stacks:

[S]peaking of luxuries, let’s forget aesthetics at least to some extent. Does my home feature many cheap mismatched bookcases? Yes, it does. Do we have too many books for our little space? Most definitely. Are there too many books piled up on every desk, side table, coffee table, and even hidden under the covers in the five-year-old’s bed? Yes. Is everyone in this home living with the joy of books as their primary companions each day? Yes, and that is the point.

Our home library is several thousand volumes, now. I stopped counting at over 3,000 a long time ago. We have a stuffed home office lined with the IKEA Billy bookcases I recently described, three tall bookcases in the master bedroom and large bookcases in our kids’ rooms, shelves on the landing, baskets of kids’ books in the living room, and you can always find stacks here and there that Sarah valiantly keeps under control. Clutter is the danger, but we’re creating opportunity.

Lewis’s memories of tone and opportunity resonate with me. In the little house where I spent the first fourteen years of my life, my parents had one big white wooden bookcase in the foyer by the front door. It had a 1970s-era set of World Book, a big hardback book on the top shelf mysteriously emblazoned Josephus, and scads and scads of kids’ books: Value Tales, Childcraft, Berenstain Bears, Golden Books, etc. We were free to read any of it, any time. I certainly did.

As a high schooler with a taste for literature, I discovered that classics series were helpful. I started as cheaply as I could with Dover Thrift Editions, which at that time were mostly one or two dollars apiece. You got what you paid for, to an extent (when I took a bunch of these to college a friend started calling them “Dover Homeless Editions”), but they gave this hillbilly kid with little pocket change easy access to lots of great old books for very little money. From there, Signet Classics, mass market paperbacks that ranged from $5-$8 when I was in college, and finally the larger and marginally more expensive but better quality Penguin Classics beckoned. I have hundreds of the latter.

The rest of our library has grown up around these like an artificial reef. And I’m glad to say that our reef is now teeming with little fish, busily reading. It is sweet to see them nestled down somewhere with a book, even when they should be doing something like sleeping. For once, I am not so pessimistic about the future.

Read all of Williams’s essay here and be encouraged—and motivated. Relatedly, read this piece on moving a home library from my podcasting friend Michial Farmer, which posted at Front Porch Republic just a day or two after Williams’s. Cf. his thoughts on collecting and loving cheap paperbacks versus cultivating a perfectly matched room full of leatherbound hardbacks. And you can read more about Lewis’s bookish childhood here.

Wanting to believe

Back before the hurricane, Micah Mattix’s Prufrock Substack quoted a recent essay by Clare Coffey in the The New Atlantis, “Who Wants to Believe in UFOs?” It’s an excellent essay, making the case that the rinse-repeat pattern of UFO revelations—purported new evidence, new whistleblowers, new openness on the part of the government and media, and new excitement followed by… nothing much—indicates a turn toward “something much older and weirder” in the way the public thinks of this phenomenon.

That Coffey also brings in two works on our changing views of the cosmos over time, CS Lewis’s Discarded Image and his close friend Owen Barfield’s Saving the Appearances, as well as the work of the late Michael Heiser, an expert ancient Semiticist with a sideline in “anything old and weird,” only makes it that much better. It’s well worth your time.

Two specific aspects of Coffey’s essay gave me a lot to think about. First, her informal taxonomy of attitudes toward UFOs etc. If mentioning Lewis and Barfield is bait, giving my wannabe Aristotelian mind a set of categories to sort things into is setting the hook. Coffey gives us three basic groups:

• Disinformation non-enjoyers—aggressive skeptics who “do not merely disbelieve in aliens; they see public discussion of UFOs as an embarrassing social scourge foisted by hucksters on an ever-gullible populace.”

And among believers:

• Explorers—adherents of the more scientifically- and technologically-oriented and, until recently, culturally predominant vision of UFOs as evidence of intelligent life “over there,” elsewhere in the same universe we inhabit and bound by the same laws. Hence the emphasis on technology.

• Esotericists—the burgeoning newer view, a vision of UFOs as evidence of deeper hidden truths “in here,” which naturally lends itself to theory-of-everything mix-and-match worldviews in which everything is evidence of everything else though, seemingly paradoxically, they “are both profoundly open and restlessly systematizing.”

Both types of believer have specific fundamental assumptions and hopes. Both also have shadow forms or “negating modes”:

• Negating explorers believe the evidence but interpret it as part of some kind of purely terrestrial psyop.

• Negating esotericists are the folks who interpret aliens as demons in disguise.

As Coffey herself points out, these are loose categories with fuzzy boundaries and significant overlap. I’ll add that, even if the esotericists in the form of the Graham Hancock and Missing 411 and Joe Rogan types are gaining the upper hand, they are not new. Charles Portis, a sharp-eyed observer of the UFO scene circa 1975, just after von Däniken made the ancient astronauts thesis popular, portrays the type realistically in Gringos, as I’ve noted here before.

To lay my cards on the table, especially since I’ve written about this stuff several times and don’t want to be misunderstood, I’m probably about 15% negating explorer and 85% solid disinformation non-enjoyer. I’m simply never impressed with the purported evidence, its interpretation, and the fact that new whistleblowers inevitably turn out to be frauds. Not that I’m a killjoy. My attitude is basically that of Jimmy Burns in Gringos, one of amused observation and even enjoyment without a bit of belief: “[T]he flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren’t nearly enough of them to suit me. I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment.”

Which brings me to what I think is the one weakness of this taxonomy: its inability to account for what I’ll call aestheticists. These are people for whom the actual existence of UFOs is immaterial; their interest is purely in the atmosphere, the vibe of UFOs and aliens.

My recently developed pet theory is that UFOs and UFO lore have, for modern people, filled the hole left by the gothic. Where the Romantics, when in search of a tingly spine, went to windswept moors under the light of the full moon, relict beasts of bygone ages, decaying houses full of dark family secrets, and the inexplicable power of the supernatural—to the otherworldly of the past—if we want the same sensations in the present we go to the strange lights in the night sky, the disappearance, the abduction, cold intelligences from the future, decaying governments full of secrets, and the inexplicable power of interstellar technology.

I suspect a significant subset of interest is based on this appeal. Add this as a third-dimensional Z-axis to the X and Y axes of the explorers and esotericists and I might be able to plot myself more accurately. I’ve always gotten a similar kind of thrill from both Baskerville Hall at night and the atmospheric dramatizations of “Unsolved Mysteries.”

That’s a quibble, but I think a potentially fruitful one since Coffey does not discount the human need for the uncanny. (Her section on the flaws in the argument that UFO obsession is a substitute religion, something I’ve suggested here myself, is especially good and probably mostly right. The religious impulse is real but better fulfilled elsewhere, though I still think that the religious overtones of much UFO lore is not accidental.)

The other thing that I found particularly thought-provoking is, in a reconsideration of the “roundelay discourse” on UFOs, the endless cycles of approach to new knowledge that never actually reveal anything, Coffey’s argument that the “meta-discourse” of the phenomenon—talking about what the enthusiasm about UFOs and aliens means in and of itself—is “the only productive line of inquiry.” She goes through five possible explanations and repercussions based on which of the groups in her taxonomy turns out to be right. I won’t recap it here in the interests of space, but it’s excellent—another good reason to read the essay.

And it leads into Coffey’s concluding thoughts on the reason the UFO phenomenon is impossible to “culturally metabolize”—cosmology or worldview. Reductivist, mechanistic materialism has ingrained itself so deeply in our culture that it shows up in our unthinking turns of phrase, even among the religious:

The biggest development seems the elevation of chemical and electrical mechanisms within the machine universe: we love to talk about love as “a chemical reaction,” and our Twitter compulsions as “dopamine hits,” as if we were actually clearing obfuscation by speaking in these terms. We love to discuss thinking as “our synapses firing” and our world as a tiny rock hurtling along its orbit through space.

UFOs, at least as interpreted by esotericists, flout this conception of the world, and the esotericists know this. “[T]hey are tired of the machine universe,” Coffey writes. “They want out.”

I do not think, as Coffey seems to suggest, that the disinformation non-enjoyers feel threatened or that they need to defend a materialist, mechanistic universe. Far from seeing earnest UFO obsession as a threat, I’m usually simply grieved by it, and Lord knows I am no materialist. But this essay is an excellent examination of much of what is going on in popular enthusiasm for UFOs and I recommend it heartily.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill

After a slight delay, I’m pleased to introduce a new project that may or may not become an annual event on the blog. I’m calling it Chestertober, a dedication of the month of Halloween to the work of GK Chesterton, the prophet of the kind of madcap but meaningful topsy-turvydom that Halloween at its best embodies. For this inaugural Chestertober I wanted to look at some of Chesterton’s novels, and I figured I would start with Chesterton’s first: The Napoleon of Notting Hill, published in 1904.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill begins in 1984. A king still rules England, but only as a formality—he is selected at random from among the citizens. Real power is exercised by the bland professional functionaries of a smooth, efficient, and utterly joyless technocratic state, a state that has gradually absorbed and homogenized the entire world.

The last holdout, Nicaragua, has recently fallen, and in the novel’s opening chapter a group of London bureaucrats encounter the deposed Nicaraguan president wandering the city alone. They witness him cutting up a poster to make ribbons with the national colors of his country and, failing to find any red paper, he soaks some paper in his own blood and pins it to the breast of his uniform jacket. The government functionaries treat the former president to lunch at a café, where he makes his pitiful case to them before they go their separate ways. Most of them revile his backward, tragic attachment to his former country. One, a small, wide-eyed man named Auberon Quin, is intrigued. They find out later that, after this encounter, the president died of heartbreak, alone.

Not long after, to the surprise of his unimaginative bureaucratic friends, the eccentric Auberon receives word that he has been selected as the next King of England.

Auberon, a prototype of hipster irony, thinks this is a grand joke. He underscores the absurdity of his own position by reinstating medieval titles, honors, and customs, requiring strict court etiquette and elaborate costume, and issuing a charter to all the neighborhoods of London granting them specific rights and duties under him as their sovereign. Heraldry and courtesy make a comeback. The bureaucratic types bridle at the uncomfortable robes and chains of office that King Auberon insists upon, but beyond the superficial trappings of pennants and coats of arms and sumptuary codes business continues pretty much as usual. No one, least of all Auberon, takes any of this very seriously.

No one until a young man from Pump Street, Notting Hill named Adam Wayne. Having been a child when Auberon ascended the throne and surprised and annoyed everyone with his charter and reforms, Wayne grows up in the world Auberon created and sees it with utter sincerity. The red and gold of Notting Hill’s coat of arms is dear to him, and he does not find the idea of Notting Hill as a place with cherished customs and a distinct identity born of the people who share life there a joke.

So when the bureaucrats propose a massive new highway project that will obliterate Pump Street, Wayne, as Provost of Notting Hill, begs audience of King Auberon and appeals to him to spare his neighborhood. And he is shocked to discover that Auberon only thinks him amusing and that, to the bureaucrats who actually make the decisions, Pump Street is mere raw material for their projects. The road will go through. Defending Notting Hill is up to Adam Wayne.

And so a war begins. After raising a few hundred men from some of the other London boroughs under Auberon’s charter, the bureaucrats, chief among them a cold-blooded calculator named Barker, launch an invasion of Notting Hill meant to crush Wayne’s resistance movement and force compliance with the road project. Wayne’s men, knowing the neighborhood and its streets and byways, allow the army to penetrate to Portobello Road and then turn out the streetlamps. Most of Barker’s army is lost and the survivors are driven back to Auberon in humiliating defeat.

The war escalates, with larger and larger forces brought against Wayne and his neighborhood army and Wayne resorting to more and more desperate stratagems to defend Notting Hill, like building barricades out of stolen hansom cabs—thus protecting his streets and depriving the enemy of mobility. Finally, like a besieged medieval lord on the verge of defeat, Wayne sallies forth from Notting Hill, striking south into Kensington before apparently being halted and surrounded at the local waterworks. Barker is delighted, thinking Wayne finally defeated, but then Wayne issues an ultimatum—surrender and guarantee Notting Hill’s rights under the charter or Wayne will empty the reservoir and flood London.

This is not the end—there is a coda in which the war is renewed and finally ended ten years later, with Auberon abdicating to fight on Wayne’s side against the forces of Barker and the rest of the technocratic state—but this is a good place to leave off. Without giving anything away, the final chapter, a dialogue among the wounded through the long night after the last battle, is among the most moving scenes in Chesterton’s fiction.

Chesterton was only thirty when The Napoleon of Notting Hill was published, and it is remarkable for a first novel for its control, its imaginative world, and its thematic richness. Its characters, as heightened as any in Chesterton’s fiction, nevertheless feel like real, recognizable people, not mere avatars for the isms Chesterton wishes to pit against each other. Quin and Wayne are the highlights, but the many side characters, especially the quietly villainous Barker, contribute to the teeming, energetic feel of the book. And while not having the breakneck plotting of his fictional masterpiece, The Man Who Was Thursday, it is more tightly and briskly paced than some of his more meandering later novels. In some of those the ideas threaten to overwhelm the the story, but The Napoleon of Notting Hill feels always like a marvelous fable first.

And what is the point of this fable? The Napoleon of Notting Hill is Chesterton’s anthem to localism. Pump Street, with its handful of shabby shops, is an irrational place to love, but Wayne loves it not out of some rational, material conclusion. That’s the way Barker’s type thinks. For these deracinated globalists, all places everywhere are fundamentally interchangeable and attachment to home is a risible relic, especially in the face of Progress. All their studies and statistics show that the road through Notting Hill will be a quantifiable improvement, and so the people must bow to the greater good.

No, Wayne loves Pump Street not because it is perfect or beautiful or scientifically useful to do so, but because it is home. The heraldic trappings and ceremony only allow him to act out his love in visible ways. The love is already there; the ritual deepens it by giving it shape.

And so The Napoleon of Notting Hill arrays sincerity on one side against detached irony and chilly pragmatism on the other. It is easy to imagine it taking place today, especially given the way the clique at the top scoff at Wayne and the terrifying speed with which Barker and the bureaucrats, in their assurance of progressive righteousness, move from disdain to brutal violence. What is heartening in the novel’s tragic, almost Arthurian ending is that Auberon allows himself, at last, to be won over by Wayne. What had started as a joke at everyone’s expense transforms him, suggesting that even the ironic still have hope since they still have a sense of humor.

The Napoleon of Notting Hill may not be the most famous of Chesterton’s novels but it is deservedly well-remembered. It has all the best qualities of his later fiction and few of their faults, but most importantly it is a fun, rollicking adventure in a strange near-future Edwardian dystopia. Wayne’s defense of Notting Hill is genuinely thrilling in places, and I’ve read several times that this novel has been a favorite of urban guerrillas like Michael Collins. But in addition to its fun and odd story, it presents a compelling vision of the goodness of place and the ever-present need to protect hearth and home, to defend the small in the face of Leviathan.

Bigfoot and the resurrection, a Frog Pond test case

A few weeks ago I wrote about Alan Jacobs’s three-strike system for determining whether a current book is worth reading. He laid out some of his system here back in April, writing specifically of new literary fiction. (Brooklynite, three strikes; Ivy Leaguer, two strikes; MFA, one strike, etc.) I brought it up in the context of elite cultural bubbles in general, Edgar Allan Poe’s hated Boston “Frogpondians” being a paradigmatic example.

This was already on my mind because of a trip to our local library with the kids during which I picked up a new book on a whim: The Secret History of Bigfoot: Field Notes on a North American Monster, by John O’Connor. Leafing through the book at home, I alighted on this paragraph:

Even demonstrably batshit belief—in headless cannibals, in Jesus rising from the dead, in the COVID-19 pandemic being a global hoax orchestrated by the CDC and Zoom to prevent the Tangerine Tornado from being reelected—can make you feel as if you’ve pierced the Baudrillardian veil to see the world as it truly is. Not so long ago, perfectly reasonable people thought exposure to moonlight could get a girl pregnant. Or that rainwater found on tombstones removed freckles. Or that 7,409,127 demons worked for Lucifer, overseen by seventy-nine devil princes and helped by countless witches who multiplied faster than they could be burned alive. “I believe because it is absurd,” went the credo of third-century Christian theologian Tertullian. In many ways, our lives remain influenced by beliefs that were set in place when we crucified people on the regular.

It’s hard to know where to start with a specimen like this: the flippant tone (flippancy being the devil’s preferred form of humor), the cloying in-group signaling in which the author invokes meme culture and internet slang and Baudrillard at the same time, the cheap dunk on a bad-faith misquotation of Tertullian—all are worth attention. When Strunk and White condemned what they called “a breezy manner” (elsewhere O’Connor refers to Beowulf as “Mr Big Dick himself,” and Leviathan as “God’s way of reminding Job . . . that He is not to be fucked with”) they had good reason.*

No, what stuck out immediately was the lumping together of COVID conspiracy theories, superstitions, creatures reported in Herodotus, early modern amateur demonology, folklore, and the resurrection of Jesus Christ as “batshit.” (Presumably he means “batshit crazy,” though he chooses to economize his words here, of all places.) And not just “batshit,” but “demonstrably batshit.”

Someone should alert the press.

I decided to find out more about the author, and what do you know? Ivy League MFA, has written for The New Yorker, teaches at Boston College,** and lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, making him an actual Frogpondian. Using Jacobs’s system, the Columbia MFA is three strikes by itself. At this point the knowing, dismissive tone is self-explaining.

Jacobs’s strike system is a simple heuristic meant to weed out works produced within and for intellectual bubbles. The passages I read—many more than the paragraph I quoted—and the author’s credentials suggest just such a bubble pedigree. So who is O’Connor’s Secret History of Bigfoot written for? As with all bubble writing, the likeminded. NPR, voice of the Frog Pond, called it

a smart, engaging, incredibly informative, hilarious, and wonderfully immersive journey not only into the history of Bigfoot in North America and the culture around but also a deep, honest, heartfelt look at the people who obsess about, the meaning of its myth's lingering appeal, and the psychology behind it.

But ordinary readers aren’t so sure. Here’s a well-put sample from a reader review on Goodreads, where the book has three out of five stars—a vigorously middling score:

I’m really confused as to what the purpose of this book was. As a person who’s uninitiated into Bigfoot lore I didn’t learn hardly anything about the phenomena. The same could be said for the commentary on psychology and delusion. I also don’t think this book is designed with Bigfoot enthusiasts in mind (nobody wants to be casually shrunk and mocked), or skeptics, who wouldn’t have much to take away from this book.

In a bit of serendipity, Jacobs wrote a short, one-paragraph post on his blog that I missed during the hurricane. It’s called “Parochialism,” and is a response to a New Yorker essay by Manvir Singh (Brown undergrad, Harvard PhD, UC Davis anthropology faculty). Jacobs notes simply that “the radical parochialism of elite opinion is quite a remarkable thing” and that, for a writer of Singh or O’Connor’s ilk, “ideas that aren’t present (a) in his social cohort and (b) at this instant simply don’t exist.”

Point (a) is especially important there. Living in a bubble leads the people in the bubble to think that the cocksure, mocking tone characteristic of work like this is just wit. The author can assume that everyone who matters agrees with him, and that anyone who disagrees doesn’t matter.*** We used to call this “preaching to the choir.” And the thing about preaching to the choir is that it’s unnecessary, and no one pays attention.

If you’d like a quick demonstration of just why it’s, well, batshit crazy to lump the resurrection of Jesus in with conspiracy theories and folk medicine, you can start with Richard Bauckham’s Jesus: A Very Short Introduction, a short work by a careful, earnest scholar for Oxford UP. Pages 104-9, which you can start reading here, offer an excellent précis for just why billions of people have believed something like this for two thousand years.

* “The breezy style is often the work of an egocentric.”

** I find it curious, albeit not terribly surprising, that someone who teaches at a Catholic college can blithely describe the resurrection of Christ as a “demonstrably batshit” idea.

*** A different Goodreads user counted 28 mentions of Donald Trump—by name, with more through brilliant nicknames like “the Tangerine Tornado,” which is, bizarrely, indexed—in O’Connor’s book. What writer who is not a well-submerged Frogpondian would risk alienating half of his potential readership to make puerile political digs in a book about Bigfoot?

Hurricane hiatus

I certainly didn’t expect to conclude September like this. After a hectic week at school I had several posts lined up to work on over the weekend, including the start of a new series on Chesterton novels, but Hurricane Helene and a sick baby scuppered that. Not that I’m complaining—both of those things together put my writing projects in perspective.

I actually left school early Thursday after the twins’ daycare let me know that one of them had a fever. By that afternoon, with the hurricane veering unexpectedly east of Macon, Georgia, he had a temperature of over 104°, which has a way of narrowing one’s focus. Sarah and I spent hours working to moderate his fever, which we got down to around 100° a few times though it mostly hovered between 102° and 104° until Sunday. As a result, as bad as the hurricane was—and it was bad—it was not foremost on our minds even after it arrived in the wee hours Friday morning and spent several hours slamming the Upstate.

We lost power at 5:59 AM—I noted this specifically because the twins’ white noise machine, which I think may be more of a benefit to us at this point, switched off—and over the next several hours the wind shook the house and rain pounded down. But we were still focused primarily on the baby’s fever.

The hurricane left us without power or internet. Cell phone coverage was weak, too, but we could get most texts and calls out. Mercifully the water never failed. The only property damage we sustained was a single strip of shingles blown askew on a dormer and the gate of our backyard fence blown inside out, warping the hinges. That was an unnerving thing to notice afterward, a clear demonstration of the storm’s power, but we got off lightly.

I can’t say the same for many in the area, though. After we finally got out and drove around a little, Sarah, who has lived in the area for over thirty years, said she has never seen more downed trees. Even a legendary ice storm from the fall of 2006 didn’t wreck the trees and roads this badly. As of last night hundreds of thousands were still without power where we live and, in the mountains where I’m from, entire towns have been inundated or simply washed away. Even with extensive damage and flooding, it wasn’t quite as bad back home in Rabun County, but I spent my high school years traveling to places like Boone and Asheville for basketball games, so those places feel like a part of home. Keep those folks in your prayers.

And I’m thankful to say that the baby’s fever broke early Sunday—Michaelmas, appropriately, as that’s his name—and our power came back on last night. Since the power went off so early in the morning, only the hallway light was on at the time. When that winked back on last night, I thought at first that one of the older kids was playing with a lantern. It took a moment to register that the light was a different color and intensity, and to tell one of the kids to turn on our ceiling fan. By the time it kicked on, we could hear our neighbors cheering in the streets.

Again—not how I expected September to end. And this isn’t even to get into the car battery, the cold showers, the generator, or the fire ants.

Quick notes on two books I finished by candlelight once we had our feverish baby settled at night:

• Uncommon Danger, by Eric Ambler—A freelance English journalist gets himself in trouble gambling during a Nazi Party conference in Nuremberg and accepts a dangerous commission to repay his debts. As a result, he finds himself embroiled in Eastern European industrial intrigues and Soviet espionage. A fast-paced, greatly enjoyable pure thriller, and also more evidence—if you’re interested in the history of the thriller—that Ambler marks the exact midpoint between Buchan and Fleming. That lineage might make a good post or essay one of these days. At any rate, highly recommended.

• The Wild Robot, written and illustrated by Peter Brown—I read this one on my kids’ recommendation. They’ve listened to the audiobook a couple times and loved it, and are looking forward to the film adaptation that we would have seen this weekend if not for the aforementioned events. A delightful story, simply but movingly told. Looking forward to watching the movie with the kids once the area has recovered a bit more.

Grateful for good reading, protection in the storm, healing for our son, and the generosity of family, friends, and neighbors throughout the ordeal. Stay tuned for the posts I had planned for as things continue to settle down.

Addendum: If any of my students should see this, I plan to give blanket extensions to any and all assignments open during this period as soon as I can get access to our school systems. Don’t worry about due dates. It’s more important to me that y’all are okay. We’ll catch up.

Homer and His Iliad at Miller's Book Review

I’m excited to say I have another guest post at Miller’s Book Review on Substack. Today I review classicist and historian Robin Lane Fox’s excellent recent book Homer and His Iliad, which I read this summer and briefly noted in my summer reading post here.

A short sample:

The poem’s style suggests that Homer was illiterate, master of a strictly oral tradition, but with important differences from the bodies of modern oral epic so often used to understand him. These epics from Albania, Finland, and the central Asian steppes are transmitted communally, mutate from telling to telling, and have a loose-limbed, gangling structure of “and then . . . and then,” stretching across their heroes’ entire lives.

The Iliad, on the other hand, is a tightly focused and artistically unified whole that minutely dramatizes one major incident over the course of a few weeks. Its characters, themes, and setting remain consistent throughout. Even minor details which Lane Fox calls “signposts”—a hero’s armor, horses taken as booty—are established early in the poem so that, when they reappear sometimes thousands of verses later, they do not seem a contrivance.

All of which indicate a single creative mind behind the work, a mind capacious enough to keep an entire war’s worth of characters and plot lines straight without reference to writing. If the style is indicative of oral poetry, the content—in its control, economy, and subtlety—suggests one poet.

Read the whole thing at Miller’s Book Review and be sure to subscribe for twice-weekly reviews and essays. I’m grateful to Joel for inviting me to contribute again.

Poe and Wolfe

Building off of my post about modern Frogpondians yesterday, at the same time that I started studying Poe’s life more deeply—especially his letters and criticism—I also read more of the late great Tom Wolfe’s journalistic monographs. These include From Bauhaus to Our House, a takedown of modern architecture; The Painted Word, a similar treatment of modern art; and Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers, a brilliant pair of essays about high-minded leftwing activism and its distance from grungy reality.

With all of these assorted things floating around in my mind I realized one day that Poe and Wolfe took a similar glee in identifying and attacking cliques. Both objected to the self-identified, self-satisfied, and self-righteous cognoscenti who have found a way to dominate a particular field and enforce an orthodoxy, all while feathering their nests and basking in a success lauded primarily by its members, whom they treat as the only people that count. Poe had Longfellow and Emerson, Wolfe had Mailer, Updike, and Irving. And Leonard Bernstein. And Le Corbusier. And…

And once I noticed this similarity, I noticed others. I’ve kicked this idea around with a few of y’all in conversation, but wanted to get some of this down in writing. Consider the following notes toward a comparative study of Poe and Wolfe:

• Both were Southerners

• Both were Virginians specifically—Wolfe by birth, Poe by rearing and explicit self-identification

• Both worked primarily in big northeastern cities

• Both were accounted personally charming and gentlemanly despite their acid literary criticism

• Both worked in journalism and fiction—Poe considering himself a poet who worked for magazines to (barely) make ends meet while Wolfe was a successful journalist who moved into fiction mid-career

• Both, in rejecting and attacking the dominant literary cliques, made themselves political outsiders, though neither was particularly interested in politics except as an epiphenomenon of something more important

• Both had an intense concern for authenticity in fiction

• Both developed immediately identifiable styles intended to convey something more truthful than the dominant style at the time

• Both were mocked for their style

I’ve returned to this and thought about it a lot, especially since realizing that the similarities are not just biographical but thematic.

The regional dimension, especially in Poe’s case, is too easily overlooked, but I think it’s fundamental to understanding both men. Back in the spring I watched Radical Wolfe, an excellent recent documentary on Wolfe’s life and career that I meant to review here but never found the time to. I recommend it. It doesn’t cover Wolfe’s youth and education in detail, but the sense of Wolfe as a Southerner amused by the unquestioned pretensions of the Yankees in the society he was forced to keep from Yale onwards comes through clearly. It certainly resonated with me.

And now, after mentally connecting Wolfe with Poe, I have to wonder whether the man in black, whom we are so used to imagining with a far-off gaze and a tired frown, used to wander the streets of New York and Philadelphia with a small, wry smile on his face the way the man in white did.

Speaking of Wolfe, Joel Miller recently posted about the delicate art of book cover design, beginning with the recent news that Picador is reprinting thirteen of Wolfe’s books with new matching covers. I’m not crazy about the cover art, personally, but my Wolfe shelf is a jumble of different trim sizes and if I can someday tidy that up and Wolfe can experience a much-deserved posthumous resurgence, all the better.