Writer of Fancy: The Playful Piety of Jane Austen

Solomon Among the Postmoderns

The Baptized Body

1 & 2 Kings
Brazos Theological Commentary

The Promise Of His Appearing: An Exposition Of Second Peter

A Great Mystery: Fourteen Wedding Sermons

Deep Comedy: Trinity, Tragedy, And Hope In Western Literature

Miniatures & Morals: The Christian Novels of Jane Austen

The Priesthood of the Plebs: A Theology of Baptism

A Son To Me: An Exposition of 1 & 2 Samuel

Against Christianity

From Silence to Song: The Davidic Liturgical Revolution

Ascent to Love: A Guide to Dante's Divine Comedy

Blessed Are the Hungry: Meditations on the Lord's Supper

A House For My Name: A Survey of the Old Testament

Heroes of the City of Man: A Christian Guide to Select Ancient Literature

Brightest Heaven of Invention: A Christian Guide To Six Shakespeare Plays

Wise Words: Family Stories That Bring the Proverbs to Life

The Kingdom and the Power: Rediscovering the Centrality of the Church

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Media: Screen friends

The redoubtable Caitlin Flanagan has an insightful and funny review of Edward Kline’s biography of Katie Couric in the current issue of the Atlantic.  Part of the review details Flanagan’s own “friendship” with the Couric of the Today show, but Flanagan characteristically goes beyond autobiography to explain Couric’s appeal.  She found Today most  necessary during the time when she was at home raising twin toddlers; Couric provided adult company after all the other adults had left the house:

“It is into this emotional void that the Today show’s second hour comes to the rescue, trumpets blaring: out with the first hour’s reports on war and politics and economic trends, and in come pieces on family and shopping and decorating.  ‘The men are gone,’ the show seems to tell us.  ‘Now we can talk about the things we love’: the exact way to sneak vegetables into the diet of a finicky toddler, the trick to putting aside a little money for a family treat, the essential components of a first-aid kid for the car - all the minutiae of running a household, presented without irony or scorn by hugely compensated media celebrities. . . .

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Media: Attributed Celebrity

Chris Rojek describes celebrity as “the attribution of glamorous or notorious status to an individual within the public sphere.” He recognizes there are other forms of celebrity: the “ascribed” celebrity of inherited status (Prince William, eg), and the “achieved” celebrity of an accomplished musician or writer or actor or sports figure.

But attributed celebrity is a “cultural fabrication,” constructed by “cultural intermediaries who operate to stage-manage celebrity presence in the eyes of the public,” mediators such as “agents, publicists, marketing personnel, promoters, photographers, fitness trainers, wardrobe staff, cosmetics experts and personal assistants. Their task is to concoct the public presentation of celebrity personalities that will result in an enduring appeal for the audience of fans.”

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Media: Scenes of free speech

The first rule of Adcult, Twitchell says, is “Speech is never free.” For example:

“In 1986 the [Reader’s] Digest turned town an advertising supplement on heart disease and cigarette smoking prepared by the American Heart Association.” The Digest had never printed cigarette ads, but they turned down the supplement because “The RJR Nabisco and Philip Morris companies not only make cigarettes, they also package food stuffs through their Del Monte, Nabisco, General Foods, and Kraft subsidiaries. Those foodstuffs are a major source of the Digest’s advertising revenue.”

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Media: Eat Popcorn

In his highly entertaining history of American Advertising (Adcult USA) James Twitchell summarizes the dubious contribution of James Vicary to our understanding of subliminal advertising. Vicary claimed that by inserting subliminal messages to “Eat Popcorn” and “Drink Coke,” he had caused movie audiences to increase popcorn consumption by 57.5% and Coca-cola sales by 18.1%. Vicary never divulged how his experiments were controlled, or where he conducted them. Twitchell says he made them up.

In January 1958, Vicary flashed his “Eat Popcorn” sign before “an audience of members of Congress, bureaucrats from appropriate agencies, reporters, and broadcasters.” An advertising magazine, Printer’s Ink, summarized the results: “Having gone to see something that is not supposed to be seen, and having not seen it, as forecast, the FCC and Congressmen seemed satisfied.” Senator Charles Potter commented afterwards, “I think I want a hot dog.”

Media: Instruments of torture

The “Middle Ages only had thumb screws, not the media.”

-Karl Kraus, early 20th century Viennese writer

Media: Means and ends

Thoreau wrote, “Our inventions . . . are but improved means to an unimproved end. We are in great haste to construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. . . . We are eager to tunnel under the Atlantic and bring the old world some weeks nearer to the new; but perchance the first news that will leak through into the broad, flapping American ear will be that the Princess Adelaide has the whooping cough.”

But once the cable’s laid, we’re faced with what de Zengotita calls the “Justin’s bike helmet” syndrome: Since it’s available, it seems that it’s better, on balance, to make use of it.

Media: Mediated

Instead of continuing to quote de Zengotita until I’ve transcribed the whole book, let me summarize: This is the best anthropology of contemporary culture I’ve ever read. Somewhat reductive - I’m not sure that everything is so shaped by media as de Zengotita suggests. Mostly he makes a very compelling case for tying in our politics, relation to time and things, our habits of thought and feeling to the fact that (in one of his most succinct formulations) we live “in a world that is made up of a flattering field of represented options.”

He offers no “solutions.” In some ways, this is one of the strengths of the book. He suggests that the expectation of “solutions” is itself a media-induced expectation, one of the genre conventions of cultural commentary - a demand that leads to what he calls “bogosity.” Yet, not responding is impossible; not responding is a response, a decision to go with the flow. But if de Zengotita makes one thing clear, it’s that any real response or stance toward this world has to be a communal one, taking the form of a counter-culture.

Media: Predictable surprise

De Zengotita again, commenting on how lame action/sci fi movies have become: “There’s this very specific phase in so many of these films, a phase that’s so marked I bet there’s some insider lingo for it. It’s when the suspenseful set-up phase - which is often pretty good, very atmospheric, intriguing character foibles - ends and the resolution phase begins. At that point, everything seems to go on automatic, and the rest of the movie spins out flat and formulaic, but really loud and fast, as if hoping to distract you from the vacuity. It’s like the writer and director just give up. They somehow manage to make their endings old hat and over the top at the same time. A weird combination.”

In short, mediation has “achieved predictable surprise.”

Media: Mediating the Other

De Zengotita notes the paradox of modernity/postmodernity’s affirmation of the Other: “instead of treating the Other as an alien something - threatening in some cases, alluring in others, but in all cases an object, whether of conquest, exploitation, proselytizing, study, or tourism - instead of that, you recognize in the other an autonomy and agency equal to your own and place yourself in a reciprocal relationship of dialogue with the Other, etc. This is the most visible, the postive, aspect of the otherness trope. The cardinal rule is to acknowledge the Other as other; that is, as categorically different from you. But that’s a good thing; difference is good.”

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Media: Mediated

Mediated by Thomas de Zengotita (Bloomsbury, 2005) comes highly recommended from Ken Myers. No wonder. This is a very thoughtful book, written with great energy. Every paragraph is quotable, and has the effect of holding up a mirror to the way we live now. For instance, comparing our penchant for “capturing the moment” in pictures with someone obsessively pulling the lever on a slot machine, de Zengotita says, “It gets like that with cameras on vacations, but not because of intermittent reinforcement. It’s because you don’t want to miss anything. Just seeing something counts as missing it. . . . The result is that you don’t really see anything. You either skim over it because it isn’t worth taking a picture of, or you take a picture of it. When you take a picture of it you feel as if you have it forever so you don’t have to really look at it. You are free to move on, looking for the next thing you can’t afford to miss.”

Media: Community and New Communications

Mark Poster points to a tension between the modern institutions of production and the postmodern technologies of communication, particularly as they impact the formation of the self: “If modernity or the mode of production signifies patterned practices that elicit identities as autonomous and (instrumentally) rational, postmodernity or the mode of information indicates communication practices that constitute subjects as unstable, multiple and diffuse. The information superhighway and virtual reality will extend the mode of information to still further applications, greatly amplifying its diffusion by bringing more practices and more individuals within its pattern of formation.”

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Media: Telephone

Prior to World War I, Telefon Hirmondo, the telephone system of Budapest, was used as a broadcast system, with a published schedule of programs that were restricted to certain classes of people in Hungary. Only later did it develop into a communications system in which everyone could pass information to anyone.

Media: Art for Art

Adorno points out in an essay on television that “it would be romanticizing to assume that formlerly art was entirely pure, that the creative artist thought only in terms of the inner consistency of the artifact and not also of its effect upon the spectators. Theatrical art, in particular, cannot be separated from audience reaction. Conversely, vestiges of the aesthetic claim to be something autonomous, a world unto itself, remain even within the most trivial product of mass culture. In fact, the present rigid division of art into autonomous and commercial aspects is itself largely a function of commercialization. It was hardly accidental that the slogan l’art pour l’art was coined polemically in Paris of the first half of the nineteenth century, when literature really became large-scale business for the first time. Many of the cultural products bearing the anti-commercial trademark ‘art for art’s sake’ show traces of commercialism in their appeal to the sensational or in the conspicuous display of material wealth and sensuous stimuli at the expense of the meaningfulness of the work.”

Media: Circulation of opinion

Last week, The New Republic posted a lengthy article by Jerry Coyne on Intelligent Design (ID) on its web site, along with a brief piece by Leon Wieseltier. Yesterday, the local paper carried a brief excerpt from the Columbus, Ohio, Dispatch, claiming that ID should be recognized as veiled philosophy and religion rather than as science. Of course, the impetus for this flurry is the result of Bush’s favorable comments about ID, but the transmission is intriguing: From the Washington offices of TNR, to Columbus’s major newspaper, to Moscow in less than a week. It looks like a groundswell of opinion in opposition to ID, but it’s only Jerry Coyne and Leon Wieseltier.

Media: Power and Celebrity

In his 1999 book, How the News Makes Us Dumb, C. John Sommerville wisely notes the difference between power and celebrity. He notes that news is a product, determined by “what publishers think they can get us interested in and get us to pay for.” There’s no reason, then, to think that events in the news are the most important events taking place: “In fact, there is reason to doubt that. Important people don’t like to be in the news. Power could probably be defined as the ability to keep onself out of the news. Celebrities like to be in the news, and the media have found that we will pay as much to read about them as about important people. So we fill our minds with a lot of fun stories, while the powerful go about their business.”

Media: In Praise of Censorship

David Bentley Hart offers a lively and wide-ranging defense of censorship in an article in the current issue of First Things. He savages the standard arguments against censorship: the slippery-slope argument (Hart: “Apparently, as a society, we are poised precariously upon the narrowest precipice of a sheer escarpment as smooth as class, overlooking a vast chasm of totalitarian tyranny; so much as a single step towards censorship will send us hurtling into the abyss, and nothing will be able to stay our fall”); the fear that philistines will take over the censorship apparatus (Hart: “it is not necessarily a bad thing for the artist who wishes to treat of things usually left decently veiled to have to submit his work to the ordeal of prevailing moral prejudice”). In the end, he worries that there judicious censors can still be found: “I do not believe that, if we were to create some sort of board of censors, we would be likely to suffer the reign of the American equivalent of Soviet realist art; but this is in part because the persons we would choose for the office might not be sufficiently sophisticated to rise to so plausible a level of philistinism. Simply said, it may be that we no longer have enough civilization to save.”

He reserves the worst argument for last: That censorship denies people what they want. “To find this a compelling argument,” Hart points out, one must already be convinced of the inalienable sanctity of choice, over against every other social good, and convinced, moreover, that freedom and choice are more or less synonymous.” The real problem is not censorship per se, but perverse ideas of liberty. Freedom, he argues, is not the ability to do whatever we choose, but is about the ability to flourish fully as the kind of thing it is. Freedom in this sense is not opposed to restraint; freedom in this sense requires restraint. Restraint of action and passion for the sake of honor or virtue liberates “from the momentary impulses and vain promptings of the will, and arrives at what can truly be called one’s essence.” True freedom is perfect restraint - Augustine’s non posse peccare. On a larger level, a society devoted to the preservation of libertarian freedom “must of necessity progressively conclude that all things should be permitted, that all values are relative, that desire fashions its own truth, that there is no such thing as ‘nature,’ that we are out own creatures.” Any society that “refuses all censorship is in some very crucial sense extremely unjust.”

Hart began his essay saying that “things could conceivably be far worse,” but the thrust of his analysis is that things are going to BE worse. And they could be worse because the apparent battle lines between the purveyors of indecency and the advocates of decency is a blurry one: Referring to Janet Jackson’s “costume malfunction” at this year’s Superbowl, Hart speculates, “I suspect that among those who professed their dismay at the halftime show there are many who as a rule are willing to tolerate most of the corrosive influences that invade family life - from advertising, films, popular music; the Internet, video games, the language we have all become accustomed to hearing every day ?Eso long as those influences continue unobtrusively to operate in their ‘proper’ places.” He suggests that “the true depth of our social division is . . . difficult to ascertain.” It is “only when we honestly ask ourselves what remedy we are willing to contemplate” that it becomes “clear whether as a people we are truly engaged in a ‘culture war’ . . . or are simply witnessing the effects of a genuine but transcient tension between more refractory and more energetic elements within a single cultural process.”

What to do? Hart suggests withdrawing from the bombardment of indecency that comes through the media, home-schooling and Christian schooling, cultivating “archaic enthusiasms.” And this: “Probably the most subversive and effective strategy we might undertake would be one of militant fecundity: abundant, relentless, exuberant, and defiant childbearing. Given the reluctance of modern men and women to be fruitful and multiply, it would not be difficult, surely, for the devout to accomplish ?Ein no more than a generation or two ?Ea demographic revolution.” This would place constraints on income and time, but “if it is a war we want, we should not recoil from sacrifice.”

Media: McLuhan and Teilhard

Tom Wolfe has a fascinating sketch of the life and work of Marshall McLuhan in the Spring 2004 issue of The Wilson Quarterly. McLuhan converted to Catholicism during his studies, and Wolfe suggests that McLuhan’s greatest inspiration was a hidden one, Teilhard de Chardin. Wolfe writes, “Regardless of what anybody thought of [Teilhard’s] theology, the man’s powers of prediction were astonishing. He died in 1955, when television had nly recently come into widespread use and the microchip had not even been invented. Computers were huge machines, big as a suburban living room, that were not yet in assembly-line production. But he was already writings about ‘the extraordinary network of radio and television communication which already links us all in a sort of “etherised” human consciousness,’ and of ‘those astonishing electronic computers which enhance the “speed of thought” and pave the way for a revolution in the sphere of research.’ Ths technology was creating a ‘nervous system for humanity,’ he wrote, ‘a single, organized unbroken membrane over the earth,’ a ’stupendous thinking machine.’ ‘The age of civilization has ended, and that of one civilization’ ?Ehe underlined ‘one civilization’ - ‘is beginning.’ That unbroken membrance, that noosphere, was, of course, McLuhan’s ’seamless web of experience.’ And that ‘one civilization’ was his ‘global village.’” McLuhan avoided mentioning Teilhard’s influence publicly, Wolfe suggests, because there were questions about Teilhard’s orthodoxy, and because secular social scientists would have looked askance at McLuhan’s work if he had revealed the theological inspirations behind it.

Media: Scruton on Westernism

Roger Scruton reviews David Hurst’s *On Westernism* in the January 23 issue of the TLS. While challenging Hurst’s use of Richard Dawkins’s concept of “meme,” he concludes that it is an important book about the contours and imposition of the global ideology that Hurst calls Westernism. Here’s Scruton’s summary of Hurst’s central thesis: “we find ourselves in a world where ideas that have no intrinsic rationality have gained ascendancy over what ought to be, and once were, self-evident truths. For example, feminism has all but obliterated the knowledge that sexual differences are deep-rooted and unalterable. Multiculturalism has obscured the truth that mass immigration without cultural assimilation destabilized the host societies. liberalism has corroded the distinctions between criticism and treason and between innocence and guilt. Egalitarianism has taught ut to treat the raucous culture of television as a harmless diversion, comparable to the high culture that it has all but silenced. Socialism has promoted the view that state schooling can be devoted to social engineering and still be a form of education.”

As Scruton points out, the problem is not just that this collection of isms is widely (and sometimes contradictorily) believed. The problem is that they are enforced with all the intolerant zealotry of some narrow and bigoted religious faith. As he says, “a public critic of multiculturalism or feminism has little chance of promotion in the education industry, and witch-hunts and show-trials of those regarded as politically incorrect are now commonplace. . . . We are all familiar with the accusations of racism, sexism or homophobia against everyone who steps out of line, and the near impossiblity of obtaining a hearing (still less a fair trial) once such a charge has been laid. Moreover, such accusations seem to target the same broad class or people: those who exemplify or defend traditional forms of social order, and the once settled customs of our civilization.”

Media: Epstein on Steiner

Joseph Epstein goes to town pricking the inflated reputation of George Steiner in the Feb 16 issue of the Weekly Standard. Among his jibes: “I once, in print, referred to Harold Bloom as George Steiner without the sense of humor, which was, as Senator Claghorn used to say, ‘A joke, I say, that’s a joke, son,’ because more humorless than Steiner human beings do not come.” And, “Steiner’s pretensions are to polymathy. He claims just about all knowledge as his province. His reading is three stages beyond omnivorous ?Ealthough he might admit, on the rare occasion, to a bad conscience over not reading an eight-volume history of the French Revolution (by Georges Sorel) that you had not hitherto known existed.” And, “At one point in his text Steiner refers to ‘mandarin ostentation’ and at another remarks upon usin an ‘orotund flourish’ deliberately. But without mandarin ostentation and orotund flourishes, Steiner’s prose would not exist and he himself would be out of business.” And, Epstein remarks that in Steiner’s work “Things that are not iconic tend to canonic, and a vast number of things are ’seminal.’ Steiner, one begins to feel after reading him for many years, greatly underrates the power of semen.” And, “My friend Edward Shils once gave me a most useful clue to the best way to read Steiner. He claimed that many years ago he read a splendid parody of Steiner’s of the way a Soviet apparatchik thought. Steiner, he felt, was a marvelous mimic. And so, I have come to see, he is. What George Steiner has been doing, over the past forty or so years, is an incomparable impression of the world’s most learned man.” Ba-rump-bump.

Speaking as one who has read Steiner with awe, enjoyment and profit, Epstein’s pricks hit their target. In my mind, Steiner is not wholly deflated, but as I read Epstein’s review I was sure I could hear the hissing sound of escaping air.

I can’t resist adding Epstein’s reflections on his own teaching career: “I recently closed down a university teaching career of thirty years, and I would like to go on record as saying that I wouldn’t have done it for a penny less. Teaching is arduous work, entailing much grinding detail and boring repetition — a teacher, it has been said, never says anything once ?Einterrupted only occasionally by moments of always surprising exultation. And I should like to add that I don’t think I learned a thing from my students, except that, as one student evaluation informed me, I tend to jingle the change in my pocket.”

Media: James Welch

There’s an intriguing review of the work of James Welch in the January 26 Weekly Standard. Welch, who died last year, was a Montana-based poet and novelist, known as an “Indian poet” and “Indian novelist” for his focus on the lives and history of American Indians. The interest of the article is not only its introduction to a (to me previously unknown) writer, but also the fact that this appears in the Weekly Standard at all. What other DC-based political journal would have an article on a Montana-based writer written by a newspaperman from Pierre, South Dakota. But this has become fairly normal for this journal. Weekly Standard Books and Culture editor Jody Bottum should be commended for consistently seeking to represent the WHOLE of American life and culture in his section of the magazine.

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