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Kim Thúy, Ru. New York: Translated from the French by Sheila Fischman. New York: Bloomsbury, 2012; originally published in French in 2009.
This is a lovely short novel, organized as a series of interconnected (but mostly capable of standing alone) short chapters that look on the page like prose poems or flash pieces.
Ru has the gravitas of a personal nonfiction account. I found it completely absorbing on a first read and can imagine combing through it again soon to see what I missed.
"I came into the world during the Tet Offensive, in the early days of the Year of the Monkey, when the long chains of firecrackers draped in front of houses exploded polyphonically along with the sound of machine guns." (page 1)
An Tinh Nguyen, the main protagonist, is born in Saigon. French and Vietnamese culture are strong in her childhood years, even after the American War when the country is unified. Eventually, she escapes with members of her family to Malaysia, until they are taken in by Canadians and relocated to Quebec.
I appreciate the fact that Ru is mostly neutral on the opposing sides of the war and its aftermath, allowing the reader to focus instead on what it's like to be a war child and refugee.
Throughout Ru, we are taken as if by the hand to see conditions in Vietnam during and after the American War, in boats and refugee camps, and in a new, unfamiliar land -- Canada. We see the family of An Tinh Nguyen and come to understand something of its structure (Aunt Seven, Step-Uncle Six, Cousin Sao Mai, etcetera), and see what it's like to become accustomed to a new country, while still yearning for the old.
Deft and memorable.
Today's Rune: Initiation.
Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War / Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války / Los destinos del buen soldado Švejk durante la guerra mundial / Les Aventures du brave soldat Švejk pendant la Grande Guerre / aka The Good Soldier Švejk / (1921-1923).
Hašek conveys meaning by contrasting the absurdities of treatment based on rank, social class and ethnicity. The distinctions of rank are well epitomized in this brief passage:
"The silence of the night was reigning over the military camp in Most. In the barracks for the troops the soldiers were shivering from the cold and in the officers' barracks they were opening the windows, because it was overheated in there."
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book Two. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň, AuthorHouse, 2009, page 122.
Colonel Schröder is bonkers, but because he's in charge, everyone has to endure his ravings. In this, Colonel Schröder is a stand-in for every madcap, idiotic control-freaking boss anyone has ever had to suffer through. Furthermore, an amazing truth is not the alternating prevalence of SNAFU and FUBAR within any bureaucracy, but that anything functions at all.
"He was making no sense, mixing things five after nine, talking about how two months ago the front down below and in the east too had halted, about the importance of exact connection between individual detachments, about toxic gases, about shooting at the enemy airplanes, about supplying the troops in the field, and then he transitioned to the internal situation in the military . . . The majority of the officers was thinking at the same time, 'when is the old geezer going to stop driveling,' but Colonel Schröder was babbling on about new tasks of new march battalions, about the fallen officers of the regiment, about zeppelins, Spanish riders, the oath . . ."
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book Two. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň, AuthorHouse, 2009, page 186.
Today's Rune: Gateway.
Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War / Osudy dobrého vojáka Švejka za světové války / Los destinos del buen soldado Švejk durante la guerra mundial / Les Aventures du brave soldat Švejk pendant la Grande Guerre / aka The Good Soldier Švejk / (1921-1923).
Sometimes, even in a morass of bureaucracy, a soldier lucks out. Not everything turns into a Kafkaesque nightmare, right? Take the case of "the hoodlum Marek" at his military sentencing.
"'One-year volunteer Marek is being sentenced to 21 days intensified regimen and, after having served out the sentence, into the kitchen with him, to peel potatoes.'"
"And the hoodlum Marek stood next to Švejk and was wearing a countenance of total satisfaction. It could not have turned out better for him. It is decidedly better to be peeling potatoes in the kitchen, sculpting bilbouny, idiot-size fruit dumplings and picking a rib than to be hollering, with the pants full, under the tornado of enemy's fire: 'Single file! Attach bayonets!'"
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book Two. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň, AuthorHouse, 2009, page 81.
The military train carrying Švejk and comrades arrives in Vienna. War weariness has set in after the initial excitement. Hašek renders a heartbreaking panoramic view of the scene, all the more bittersweet for its satirical flashes. A short sampling of the longer description:
". . . it wasn't like the beginning of the war anymore, when soldiers on the way to the front overstuffed themselves at every railroad station and where they were being welcomed by bridesmaids in stupid white dresses and even dumber faces and . . . an even sillier speech of some dame whose husband now acted the tremendous patriot and republican."
"The welcome in Vienna [now] consisted of three female members of an Austrian Red Cross association and two female members of some war association of Viennese matrons and young ladies, one official representative of the Viennese magistrate, and a military representative."
"In all those faces one could see fatigue. The trains with the troops were running day and night, the ambulances with the wounded were passing through every hour, they were switching cars loaded with prisoners of war . . . It went on one day after another and the original enthusiasm was changing into yawning . . . from the cattle cars were peeking out soldiers with an expression of hopelessness such as seen on those who are going to the gallows."
~~ Jaroslav Hašek, The Fateful Adventures of the Good Soldier Švejk During the World War, Book Two. The Samizdat edition of the new English rendition, translated by Zdeněk "Zenny" Sadloň, AuthorHouse, 2009, pages 120-121.
Today's Rune: Defense.
"The mystic chords of memory, stretching from every battle-field, and patriot grave, to every living heart and hearthstone, all over this broad land, will yet swell the chorus of the Union, when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature." ~ US President Abraham Lincoln, First Inaugural Address, March 4, 1861. Full text here.
Memory, like dreaming, is often highly emotionally charged. There's the Proustian memory trigger -- a deep memory surfaces due to a scent, a sound, a person who resembles someone from the past (or future, if it's a premonition); or the memory reminder, like a photograph, journal entry, memory-laden discussion, written communication or voice mail. Often just a person's name or thinking about a certain time or place will conjure up a memory, or a slew of them.
Memories often conflict or prove paradoxical. I recently finished Ian Gibson's Federico García Lorca: A Life (New York: Pantheon Books, 1989) and what was made very clear in it is that different people remembered Lorca differently, even from the same event, based partly on how well they knew him, how they felt about him, how much time had elapsed, and what they wanted to remember about him.
So I thought I'd post a sampling of remembered people, times and places. If the context of a situation is not viscerally recalled, the details seem vaguer. Let's give it a try, shall we?
When I was a teenager, I met Ariana Bracalente at an amusement park in Virginia -- not randomly but through Marc Pinotti, a mutual friend. She was a little older than I was, an exciting development at the time. She was smart, astute and interesting; her mother was a nurse and they were Catholic. We were close for some time, and wrote lots of letters. The last time I saw her was at a football game, also in Virginia, and she was taking pictures with, if I remember correctly, a Nikon with zoom lens. Ah, youth!
In my early twenties, I met a handful of much older German fellows at Normandy, in France. They were celebrating their "alive day." On June 6-7, 1944, then draftees in the Wehrmacht, they rather wisely surrendered to Canadian assault forces as fast as they could and, obviously, survived the war. With some college friends from Chapel Hill, we shared bottles of wine and were all singing by the end of the night. Though we only saw them over a period of two days, they made a lasting impression. Three names stick with me: Willi Wiederstein from near Düsseldorf, Karl and Helmut. Luckily, I'm still excellent friends with one of the American college students who also experienced this exchange firsthand.
When I was living in Philadelphia, while a graduate student at Temple University, I came to know a number of intelligent and fun people from Vietnam, China, India, Germany, Russia, Canada, England, France, Spain, Italy and Thailand, among other places. One of the many, Nga Mai, an edgy (and rather striking in appearance) entrepreneur and restaurateur, hired me occasionally to cover her Diva Café, right across the way from my apartment at 1225 Spruce Street; sometimes we'd play chess and talk about Hannah Arendt or Camille Paglia, who was teaching nearby at the University of the Arts. Nga and her two sisters had come to the USA with their Catholic mother, starting in Omaha, Nebraska; their father remained in Vietnam after the Americans departed. We stayed in touch for a while after I left the city, after she closed Diva and opened up a couple of new places over by Rittenhouse Square. At Diva, she would explain to people how to remember conceptualizing and spelling her first name: "like National Golf Association." (Which in turn reminds me of Stuart Basefsky, a librarian mentor from Duke University, now at Cornell University's School of Industry and Labor Relations, who would say his last name to newcomers and explain, "like Base and Sky with an F in the middle." Like I sometimes say, when people ask, "Erik with a k.")
Also in Philadelphia, I unexpectedly came to know Lu Ping from the People's Republic of China in a history class. She was an English teacher when back in China. Her stories about her father, who was very old by then, and his experiences during the Long March were remarkable. Only later did I realize that her name could be better understood in reverse, as Ping Lu.
When I moved to Detroit, there were additional new waves of people to meet. Like mustard seeds, some took hold and some didn't. I remember early on, upon the first occasion of meeting David J. Thompson, an English instructor then and a wandering poet and photographer now. This is primarily because of the specific context: I was seated at his flimsy card table, slowly sinking into wet clay, enclosed within a Japanese-style courtyard designed in the 1950s by Minoru Yamasaki. Thompson had on the table a 1995 book, which I asked about: Dennis Covington's Salvation on Sand Mountain, a fascinating memoir about snake-handlers and old time religion in the American South. (Side memory: for some reason Thompson hated Abraham Lincoln). The last time I saw him was at Steve's Back Room, a Middle Eastern Restaurant in Saint Clair Shores. By this time, several years after the first introductions, we both were working on laptops at separate tables, and I was moving to Texas; outside, there was snow on the ground.
Also in metro Detroit, there was another English instructor (among many) on another occasion -- a regular bar night for artists and educators -- that I recall, from a couple years later. In this case, it was the unusual name that stuck: Carroll Louis Goossen, Jr. I wondered why whoever was in charge of given names in the Goossen clan flipped the name from a literary salute to Lewis Carroll, author of Through the Looking Glass, to such an awful appendage? This to me was as strange as the Lu Ping/Ping Lu flip or Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue." Then again, the "real" name of Lewis Carroll was actually Charles Lutwidge Dodgson.
The last time I saw Cal was probably at Macomb Community College, where for a while I taught Writing, English, Poetry and the (International) Novel as an adjunct -- (I was working full time as a librarian elsewhere).
For now, I'll end with a relevant snippet about people's names from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking-Glass, and What Alice Found There (1871), Chapter Six:
'"My name is Alice, but — "
"It's a stupid name enough!" Humpty Dumpty interrupted impatiently. "What does it mean?"
"Must a name mean something?" Alice asked doubtfully.
"Of course it must," Humpty Dumpty said with a short laugh: "my name means the shape I am — and a good handsome shape it is, too. With a name like yours, you might be any shape, almost."' Indeed.
Dear reader, how do you remember people and their names?
Today's Rune: Strength.
Jody Agius Vallejo, Barrios to Burbs: The Making of the Mexican-American Middle Class (Stanford University Press, 2012).
Vallejo provides us with a straightforward look at middle class Mexican American life and the process of its formation, through a combination of extensive interviewing and analysis.
Vallejo's main focus is interesting, but for the purposes of this post, let's also consider American socio-economic class income and status in general.
Barrios to Burbs lays out the basic criteria and markers for defining middle class, or middle income. My variant response is that any three of the following four attributes will do the trick:
~~ College education (at least one member of the household).
~~Household income above national US median: $50,221 in 2009.
(Closer to $55,000 in 2015.)
~~White collar job or any-size business ownership.
~~Home ownership.
(Vallejo, p. 5).
Vallejo's conclusions about the Mexican American middle class include the following statement: "While some achieve rapid intergenerational mobility through business ownership, the majority in this study enter the middle class through the occupational advances that follow higher education." (p. 183).
It's interesting because 2016 Republican presidential contender Senator Marco Rubio -- in Vallejo's terms, a 2.0 generation Cuban American -- advocates vo-tech, i.e. vocational-technical education, as does Democratic President Barrack Obama, who might be considered a 2.5 generation American. Obama advocates for all types of education, including vo-tech, community college and four year colleges and universities.
American socio-economics are changing by generation. After the Great Recession of 2008, the importance of home ownership has declined in some spheres (at least culturally), while the idea of white collar jobs may also be morphing into other possibilities. Finally, it seems to me that one must cross-check household income with per capita income to locate a better sense of socio-economic class. For instance, a household of one to three people living within the means of a $55,000 household income threshold must be less challenging in terms of daily tradeoffs than a household of more than four or five people under the same roof, with that same household income.
As far as upper income levels, the top ten percent to the top one percent, one might consider a household income baseline of $500,000 per year.
The poverty line is a household income of about $25,000 per year, and a "living wage" is considered to be about $30,000 per year.
Going into 2016, there is a perfect set-up for the clash between hiking the minimum wage and "trickle-down" economics, in which leftover pocket change falls from the upper income classes like pennies from Heaven.
p.s. Everything is subject to change. Anyone trying to stop time is doomed to fail. Too, anyone trying to speed up time may be disappointed by the actual pace of things.
Today's Rune: Fertility.
Margarethe von Trotta's Vision - Aus dem Leben der Hildegard von Bingen (2009) gives us a pretty good idea of what life was life in a cloister in the Middle Ages. It also brings into view the very interesting life's arc of Hildegard von Bingen (1098-1179).
Vision also brings in Brother Volmar, Hildegard's fellow Benedictine buddy and scribe.
Hildegard von Bingen was just sainted in 2012 -- some 833 years after her death. She has also been designated a Doctor of the Catholic Church.
By way of comparison, Hildegard was like a mix of Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. She was a Renaissance Woman well before the Renaissance. Botany, music, art, writing, and leading a social cohort -- she did it all.
Meanwhile, the USA has yet to elect its first woman president.
Vision: nuns with books in the woods.
Vision: nuns on horseback. Hildegard was very aware of the greater world of and before her time. At one point in Vision, she laments that she has only 400 manuscripts in her library, whereas the Caliph of Córdoba had access to 400,000 volumes. "Can you imagine?" she askes Brother Volmar. She could and she did. The Feast Day of Saint Hildegard? September 17.
Today's Rune: Journey.
The Maysles Brothers were major players in documentary filmmaking, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. Stylistically, their influence continues to rocket through the present and beyond us into the future.
Beyond Albert Maysles (1926-2015) and David Maysles (1931-1987) and "direct cinema," consider who they were lucky enough to work with: not only gifted editors like Detroiter Charlotte Zwerin (who in turn directed Thelonious Monk: Straight, No Chaser, 1988), but also John F. Kennedy, Jackie Bouvier Kennedy, The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Orson Welles, Marlon Brando and Truman Capote. Two of their most easily recognizable films are Gimme Shelter (1970) and Grey Gardens (1975). The latter, focusing on "Big" and "Little" Edie Bouvier Beale and their crumbling tomb of an estate, has attained cult status.
I have a copy of the Criterion Collection's edition of Salesman (1969) in the pipeline, and will likely post on it in the near future.
Joe McElhaney's Albert Maysles in the Contemporary Film Directors series provides a useful overview of the Maysles Brothers' work, historical context, and thoughtful consideration of the cultural impact of direct cinema / cinéma vérité.
Question: what's your response to documentary film? And, in the print world, how about creative nonfiction vs. fiction?
Today's Rune: The Self.
Paul Thomas Anderson's Inherent Vice (2014), an adaptation of the 2009 Thomas Pynchon novel of the same title, is a milieu film set in 1970 Los Angeles, California, and thereabouts. Ronald Reagan is the governor, Richard M. Nixon is the president and the US-Vietnam War is still dragging on and on. Hippies and squares vie for shrinking karmic space on the West Coast.
As Doc Sportello, stoner private eye, Joaquin Phoenix fits right in, as does Doc's frenemy, the other key character in this tale, flattoped LA Detective Bigfoot Bjornsen (Josh Brolin).
Inherent Vice: it's the ouija board, man! Obvious comparison points: the Coen Brothers, The Big Lebowski (1998) and A Serious Man (2009); Roman Polanski's Chinatown (1974); and so on.
Inherent Vice: It's the fog, man! Anderson proceeds at his usual grinding, discomfiting pace. Not as evil here as in There Will Be Blood (2007) or The Master (2012), still there are in Inherent Vice scenes both long and slow -- even unnerving. Overall, it's not as "heavy" a trip as the aforesaid flicks, not by a long shot -- which is a merciful thing.
Inherent Vice: Can you grok this, 1-Adam-12?
Today's Rune: Partnership.
Pedro Almodóvar's Los abrazos rotos / Broken Embraces (2009): stars Penélope Cruz and is set partly in Madrid and partly on the spectacular Canary Islands / Islas Canarias, off the northwest coast of Africa.
In this film, Almodóvar uses flashbacks and the present, bits of a documentary about another movie that is like but not exactly Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios / Women on the Edge of a Nervous Breakdown (1988), and that film itself, as if Mujeres was re-shot in a parallel universe and now called Chicas y maletas.
Broken Embraces: Lena (Cruz) and her obsessive, bad-tempered sugar daddy (a Howard Hughes type) about to exchange words -- among other things.
Lena prepares soon-to-be-spiked gazpacho for Ivan during a scene made for Chicas y maletas -- a sight as colorful and sharp as the full arc of the rest of the story.
Today's Rune: Movement.
Pete McCormack's Facing Ali (2009) is fantastic! Tonight, the fiftieth anniversary of the first Cassius Clay (soon thereafter to become Muhammad Ali) vs. Sonny Liston heavyweight fight in Miami, seems like a fitting time to cover it.
This fascinating documentary looks at Ali from the perspective of ten of his major rivals in the ring. It serves spotlight cultural history, personal and sports history and riveting real life drama, woven together in a very cool, absorbing way (music and intertitles included).
Four of the ten participant boxers have since died, making Facing Ali all the more poignant and powerful.
The ten, each of whom has something major to say -- underscored by brief discussions of their backgrounds and aspirations -- respond to Muhammad Ali (b. January 17, 1942) in complicated ways, even as they go over their together time in the ring. In alphabetical order, they are:
George Chuvalo (b. 1937)
Sir Henry Cooper (1934-2011)
George Foreman (b. 1949)
Joe Frazier (1944-2011)
Larry Holmes (b. 1949)
Sonny Liston (ca. 1929-1970 -- archival footage)
Ron Lyle (1941-2011)
Ken Norton (1943-2013)
Earnie Shavers (b. 1945)
Leon Spinks (b. 1953)
Ernie Terrell (b. 1939)
I tell you, even if you have no interest in boxing, even if you hate boxing and think it's barbaric, this is an astonishing documentary. In fact, I just bought a copy on sale so I can see it again and spread the word.
Today's Rune: Fertility.
I'm about halfway through The Hardest Working Man: How James Brown Saved the Soul of America (2009), a stellar little book by James Sullivan. Very exciting stuff about James Brown, well-contextualized -- where he came from, what he did and how he did it. Sullivan structures the thrust of his chapters around the immediate aftermath of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., when the Hardest Working Man in Show Business helped stabilize the popular situation, which had been ruled by intense anger, riot and contagion.
In The Hardest Working Man, we learn a lot of unexpected things, like the apparent fact that 28-year old Barney Frank came up with the idea of broadcasting Brown's concert, something that quickly (and quite improbably) came to fruition as Live at the Boston Garden: April 5, 1968 (WGBH-TV).
The Hardest Working Man does a lot of other connecting of the magical dots -- even beyond the idea that anyone who puts their mind to it ought to be able to connect any point A with any point B, no matter how unrelated either may seem.
One connection to Brown's arc was none other than Sweet Daddy Grace, "a legendary charismatic figure born in 1884 in the Cape Verde Islands . . . A demonstrative preacher with a Daliesque mustache who prompted members of his congregation to speak in tongues . . . often accompanied by multiple bands 'to assure jumping dance music' . . ." (Sullivan, pages 56-57).
Brown seized upon some of Sweet Daddy's showmanship in developing his own stage act, and the rest is history . . . (to be continued).
Today's Rune: Breakthrough. And a Fine & Happy 60th Anniversary to my parents, Don and Barb France!
On seeing Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine (2013) a second time, in a separate venue, what drew me in this time was the character of Ginger, Jasmine's sister, impeccably played by Sally Hawkins. Every nuance seems effortless for this British actor, yet her dialogue, quips and movements go a long way toward infusing Blue Jasmine with needed warmth. Even when she mutters a response under her breath, she moves things along, reveals aspects of the social fabric, retains cohesion, even while Jasmine (Cate Blanchett, also wonderful, speaking with high society inflection -- is that an echo of Katharine Hepburn I'm hearing?) battles it out with or about Ginger's "loser" men Augie (Andrew Dice Clay), Chili (Bobby Cannavale) and Al (Louis C. K.), while trying to find her own way in the world.
I would never have guessed that Hawkins is British if I hadn't seen her in other films. In An Education (2009), for instance, she plays the wife of the Peter Sarsgaard character, which is especially pertinent here because Sarsgaard pops up again, too, in Blue Jasmine.
In sum, Sally Hawkins serves up a beautiful performance as Ginger, not the easiest job in the world, for sure. As for the details of sisterly dynamics (and sibling connections in general), I'll save that for a future post.
Today's Rune: Fertility.
Another post inspired by Sam Gosling's Snoop: What Your Stuff
Says About You (2008, 2009). Let's take the Big Five personality test. These help one focus on personality, with refining features. What is not clear to me initially is the variability of cultural impact on personality. Are there universal traits, across time and space? Yes and no. But we'll leave that for another time, in another space.
The Big Five:
Open to experiences.
Conscientiousness.
Extraversion-introversion.
Agreeableness-disagreeability.
Neurotic factor.
Two that jump out from personal observations: open to experience (vs. not). I'm off the charts with that one, but I also know or have known people who were absolutely opposed to new experiences. One (now deceased) was a historian-writer always to be seen at the same eatery at the same time, six to seven days per week, for most of his adult life.
The second one is a neurotic element that Gosling nicknames "The Woody Allen Factor." I know people saturated with this personality aspect. "What they might do: Think again and again and again what his friend really meant by that remark." The other ones are pretty easy to figure out, too, at least in a general way.
In any case, here's a link to a Big Five inventory at the Personality Test Center for anyone interested. How can you resist?
Today's Rune: Wholeness.
Fun book: Sam Gosling's Snoop: What Your Stuff Says About You (2008, 2009). It's about a lot of things -- social psychology, persona, projection, paying attention, snooping and more.
Wherever you go, there you are -- but really? How well do we know ourselves? How do we maintain a persona? How much do we (or can we) change over time? What do we put on display for the world? What stories do we tell ourselves about our lives?
If there's a work office or equivalent space, what's put up? What's to keep our own moods "regulated" or us inspired?
If there's a house or apartment, which spaces are dolled up, which kept in reserve?
How do we individually handle social media?
Are we fancy, are we plain? And so forth. Fascinating. For artists, these are the details that can make or break characters, subjects, imagery. All groovy. There are levels of detail, too -- ranging from attributes to personality.
And what is personality? "An individual's unique pattern of thinking, feeling, and behaving that is consistent over time . . . For a behavior to be part of your personality, it should be something that you do repeatedly" (page 28).
Oh yes: All aboard for funtime.
Today's Rune: Wholeness.
The idea and example of Saint Francis of Assisi (ca. 1181-1226) makes many a person happy, and few angry. Why? Furthermore, he was fast-tracked to sainthood less than two years after his death by Pope Gregory IX.
Biographer André Vauchez contextualizes for us -- as translated by Michael F. Cusato -- in Francis of Assisi: The Life and Afterlife of a Medieval Saint,* Yale, 2012, pages 324-325:
"[T]he clerics of the thirteenth century, with only a few exceptions, mistrusted innovations, seeing in them only dangerous attempts to question, if not subvert, the established order. In their eyes, novitas was invested with a positive content only to the extent that it was based on the past and gave contemporary relevance to it. One could make the new out of the old only by breathing life into what already existed and by making reappear what had become dead or enfeebled." (Sort of like the idea behind perestroika, come to think of it).
Francis was more acceptable to the status quo than various "heresies," rivals such as the Cathari/Albigensians and subsequent "Protestant" sects -- that is, groups that wished to overthrow the Catholic hierarchy entirely.
Being kindly to animals and fringe elements is a "nice" alternative to heresy.
In the words of Saint Francis:
Where there is charity and wisdom there is neither fear nor ignorance. Where there is patience and humility there is neither anger nor worry. Where there is poverty and joy there is neither cupidity nor avarice. Where there is quiet and meditation there is neither solicitude nor dissipation . . . Where there is mercy and discretion there is neither superfluity nor hard-heartedness. "Admonitions, Rules, etc." as translated by Paschal Robinson in 1905.
Today's Rune: Wholeness.
*Originally published in 2009 as François d'Assise: Entre histoire et mémoire.
Amando Iannucci's In the Loop (2009): frenetic like Fawlty Towers, inventively invective-ridden like Deadwood -- imagine Basil Fawlty (John Cleese) and Al Swearengen (Ian McShane) playin' the Dozens. If that doesn't bring it home, maybe you've seen Wag the Dog or Wrong is Right? In the Loop has more snap. More bite. And here, we're talking about a devilishly blistering satire of the Anglo-American policy push for the Invasion of Iraq and resulting debacle, that crazy little thing called the Iraq War (2003-2011).
With In the Loop, we go behind the scenes, then watch with horror as VIPs and their attendants run amok, screaming on mobile phones, bumbling from one cock-up to another while fiendishly plotting behind each other's backs.
Besides the imagery of a blizzard of mobile phones / cellphones and tsunamis of insults, In the Loop delivers "the emotional truth" of the rush to war, sensible opposition to that rush, and -- if you stick with it all the way through -- a well-timed conclusion. The actors -- including James Gandolfini as an American general dubious of the rising chorus for war exactly because it's based on such a flimsy pretext -- are sharp, with a grand party mix of British and Americans. Welcome to the madhouse or, as Scotsman Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi, pictured in the Shepard Fairey-like "poster" above) puts it rather succinctly early on, watch out for "ass-spraying mayhem."
Today's Rune: Protection.
