From Spiritual Hunger to Obesity Epidemic

cactus

Spiritual Sunday

My wife Julia has been telling me about a book that she’s reading, Geneen Roth’s Women Food and God: An Unexpected Path to Almost Everything.  The thesis of the book seems to be that overeating, like other compulsions and obsessions, is a means of escaping a spiritual emptiness.  Or to put it another way, some people fill up that emptiness with food, others fill it up with work or meaningless activities.

I’m interested in the way that Roth turns to literature to capture this idea.  For instance, she turns to a line from the James Joyce story “A Painful Case” in Dubliners to capture the sense of alienation people feel: “Mr. Duffy lived a short distance from his body.”  Mr. Duffy is a colorless bank cashier who, when tenderness and love finally do enter his life, turns his back on them.  The sentence, Roth says,

perfectly expresses the mass twenty-first-century evacuation from our bodies.  We think of ourselves as walking heads with bothersome, unattractive appendages attached.

To counteract spiritual emptiness, she looks for guidance to a Mary Oliver poem and a Nikos Kazantzakis novel:

Read More »

Posted in 20th Century, Novel, Religion | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , , | Leave a comment

Using Beowulf to Defend Lebron

james

Sports Saturday

Lebron James has been taking a lot of heat recently for joining the Miami basketball team.  (Did you catch the pun?)  This past trading season was termed “the Lebron Sweepstakes,” and teams from around the country trekked to Cleveland to play court to “King James.”  James made the occasion particularly gaudy by persuading ESPN to hold an hour-long special where he would announce his decision.  Of course, by the end of it all Miami was ecstatic and everyone else, especially Cleveland, was . . . not.

Predictably, the attacks flooded in.   People complained that, by joining with two excellent players (Chris Bosh and superstar Dwayne Wade), James was manufacturing a dream team.  Michael Jordan commented that, when he played, the point was to play against the best, not join with them.  Others said that, for the sake of a championship, Lebron was giving up his leadership status and joining Wade’s team.  How could he ever be a contender with Jordan or Kobe Bryant for “greatest of all time” if he went that route?

Putting aside the fact that Jordan was and Bryant was and still is supported by far better players than those surrounding James in Cleveland—teams that were assembled, albeit by management rather than by players—I’d like to use Beowulf to defend James. (My sons Darien and Toby gave me the idea.)  At issue is the question of whether someone can be considered truly great if he has help. 

It’s important to note that, when Beowulf goes it alone, he almost destroys his society.  Only when he subordinates his ego and joins with another does he slay the dragon that is laying waste to the countryside.

Read More »

Posted in 8th Century, Epic, Sports | Tagged , , , , | 1 Comment

At Films Abroad, Why Do I Laugh Alone?

movie-audiences

Film Friday

Vic: What film are we talking about?

Lin: Does it matter what film?

Vic: Of course it does.

Lin: You choose then.  Friday night.  Not in a foreign language, ok.  You don’t go to the movies to read.

                                                                                Caryl Churchill, Cloud Nine

 In the spirit of summer travel, my Ljubljana colleague Jason Blake sent me this delightful essay on subtitling and other cross-cultural movie viewing experiences.  His stories bring back some of my own memories—for instance, attending silent Buster Keaton and Ben Turpin movies in the Paris Cinematheque when I was 13 (1964) and seeing titles that were written in Polish, Czech, or wherever else curator Henri Langlois had managed to salvage prints.  Also of being the only person laughing in a Ljubljana theater when I was watching Jim Jarmusch’s independent film Stranger than Paradise.  Enjoy Jason’s piece and, if it brings to mind memories of your own, please send them along.  Jason is the author of Canadian Hockey Literature (Univ. of Toronto, 2010).  

By Jason Blake, University of Ljubljana, Department of English

Here’s one for the bucket list: watch a subtitled Hollywood film in a foreign country.

This watching is list-worthy because you will learn something about yourself and your culture. Even if the flick is Sex and the City or some other puffball comedy, I guarantee an educational and entertaining experience. Not exactly drinking champagne in Champagne or running with the bulls in Pamplona, this is somewhere between learning a foreign language and once, just once, pampering yourself with an obscenely fine restaurant meal.

Of course, not all of Europe subtitles films, and most of the larger countries opt for “synchronization” or dubbing. This means that if you are in France, Italy, Germany or Poland, just finding a subtitled film can be a challenge – though it will still be a lot easier than finding one in North America. Scandinavia and many of the smaller countries go for subtitles, and this is why young people in those countries speak fluid, slangy English. Credit or blame years of movies and television for this second language proficiency.

As a student in Berlin I once climbed suspicious-looking stairs up to what was advertised as a third-floor English-language cinema. I was sure those stairs would in fact lead to a sleazy tattoo parlor or something even edgier. But it was indeed a tiny cinema, with room for at least two dozen people. A half-secret den. Or “a violet by a mossy stone / Half hidden from the eye,” thought I. I was number 32 so there was no room with the in-crowd that night.

A year or two later, in Paris, I felt very arch and underdressed when a friend led me to see Gus Van Sant’s 1994 Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (en anglais) in a building older than Manhattan. The non-obviousness of these movie houses provided a sense of occasion and discovery, like hunting down a garage sale or finally locating the car keys.

Read More »

Posted in 20th Century, Film, Travel | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | Comments closed

Moments of Perfect Being

tumbledown1

Today we head home after having spent a delicious week in our Maine cottage with our sons Darien and Toby, along with our daughter-in-law Betsy and Toby’s girlfriend Candice.  We immersed ourselves in memory and tradition while we were here.  Portraits of my great-great grandparents John and Remember Berry Swett, are on the wall, as are the portraits of their daughter Sarah Berry Swett, who married Albion Ricker.  Sarah Ricker married Thomas Bates and they gave birth to my grandfather Albert who married Eleanor Fulcher, and they in turn gave birth to my father and two uncles.  There are also large group shots of family reunions, including the eleven first cousins and their 18 children (most no longer children).  The cottage, built by my great grandmother Sarah Ricker, stands atop Ricker Hill Orchards, which is still an active apple farm run by the Rickers, my third cousins.

When we come to Maine there are certain rituals that we follow.  One is a hike up Streaked Mountain to pick blueberries.  Another is a five-hour hike up and down Tumbledown Mountain, complete with hiking sticks carved by my grandfather and uncles (one of them over a hundred years old).  The latter hike, strenuous but satisfying, is what I want to focus on today.  It is special because, in addition to spectacular vistas, it has a pristine lake on top in which we sometimes swim.  Only those who hike up Tumbledown can enjoy it as there is no road.  The route we take, the Loop Trail, involves at one point clambering up four metal rungs set in the rock, shimmying through a crevice, and then crossing over a peak that looks down upon the lake, which mirrors the surrounding peaks.  It is as though we have been presented with a shining emerald for our labors.

Thinking about the moment that way brings to mind a passage from a Vladimir Nabokov short story.  “Cloud, Castle, Lake” (you can read it here) is, for the most part, a 1941 Kafkaesque allegory about a man forced to go on a “pleasure trip” and bullied into having “fun” with the rest of the passengers rather than follow his own private reveries. And yet, in the midst of the trip, he comes across a moment of startling beauty that promises to redeem his life.  Here’s the passage I remember:

Read More »

Posted in 20th Century, Nature, Short Story | Tagged , , , , | Comments closed

Gripped by a Tyrannical Love

steps

Since I am vacationing in Maine and spent time yesterday with my favorite cousin, who is a huge Edward Arlington Robinson fan, I devote a post to the state’s greatest poet.  Whenever I visit Dan Bates in Gardiner, we have to visit Robinson’s grave and look at his house.

My favorite Robinson poem is “Eros Turannos” (it’s Harold Bloom’s favorite as well).  It is a haunting work whose power, like much of Robinson’s poetry, lies wrapped up in its elegiac tone and suggestive mystery.  I offer it up to anyone who has been trapped in a hopeless relationship, feeling helpless in its stagnant grip and unable to end it. 

“Eros Turannos” doesn’t propose a way out.  Just the opposite.  By making poetic the women’s fatalistic acceptance of what may be her husband’s betrayals and abusive neglect, the poem may enable self-destructive behavior.  It also lends dignity to a desperate existence, however, and sometimes we need whatever consolations we can find.  That, at any rate, is how I read the poem, whose title can be translated as “love’s tyranny” (translating it, however, diminishes it).  You may well have your own interpretation.  Check it out:

Read More »

Posted in 20th Century | Tagged , , , , , | Comments closed

Mama Grizzly vs. Real Grizzlies

grizzly

Sarah Palin has been recently celebrating “Mama Grizzlies”—by which I think she means “women who are so mad that they’re not going to take it anymore.”  But has anyone noticed that she advocates policies that make life a lot harder for actual grizzlies? 

Whether through calling for drilling in the Alaskan National Reserve, denying the global warming that is melting the ice, pushing aggressively for more development (including Alaskan roads to nowhere), or hunting wolves by airplane, Palin is no friend to the grizzly habitat.  I therefore offer up an ecological version of “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” that my father Scott Bates wrote in 1982.  Some of the topical allusions may be dated but it is scarily prescient and almost seems to have the former Alaska governor in mind.  It appeared in his ABC of Radical Ecology.  (Earlier we ran a poem from the same collection about Doctor Dolittle taking on an oil spill, which you can read here.)

Here’s my father’s account a modern-day Goldilocks and three annoyed grizzlies:

Read More »

Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments

Blaming Loved Ones in the Face of Death

Edvard Munch, The Sick ChildEdvard Munch, The Sick Child     

Imagine the following situation.  A couple has been married for decades but now he has contracted a terminal illness and is dying.  His wife has always prided herself on being there for him when he needed her, but now she feels helpless.  Meanwhile he is scared and angry and is thrashing around in a welter of conflicting emotions.  One of these is that he can no longer protect her, once a source of pride.  What do they do?

According to Lucille Clifton, they may blame each other.

I’m pretty sure that my former colleague is speaking from personal experience when she reveals this.  Her husband Fred died of lung cancer in his fifties (he did not smoke), and “husband and wife” must be autobiographical.  Writing the poem after Fred’s death, Clifton lays out some of the emotional dynamics of their ordeal.  Because of her uncompromising dedication to the truth, Lucille is able to talk about something that most would rather not.

In doing so, she gives the rest of us a gift.  We experience a wide range of thoughts and feelings when we encounter suffering and heartbreak, and some of these we are ashamed of.  We may even deny they are there.  Lucille, however, brings them out into the light so that we may confront them and figure out what they mean.  That is a necessary step if we are to move beyond them.

Here is Lucille’s poem:

Read More »

Posted in 20th Century, death and dying, poetry | Tagged , , , , , , | 7 Comments

Churchgoing: Delightful and Unexpected

Gerard Houckgeest, Old Church Delft (1654)Gerard Houckgeest, Old Church Delft (1654)

Spiritual Sunday

 Thanks to Garrison Keillor’s Prairie Home Companion for alerting me to this wonderful passage from John Updike’s “Churchgoing” (which appears in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, 1962):

 There was a time when I wondered why more people did not go to church. Taken purely as a human recreation, what could be more delightful, more unexpected than to enter a venerable and lavishly scaled building kept warm and clean for us one or two hours a week and to sit and stand in unison and sing and recite creeds and petitions that are like paths worn smooth in the raw terrain of our hearts? To listen, or not listen, as a poorly paid but resplendently robed man strives to console us with scraps of ancient epistles and halting accounts, hopelessly compromised by words, of those intimations of divine joy that are like pain in that, their instant gone, the mind cannot remember or believe them; to witness the windows donated by departed patrons and the altar flowers arranged by withdrawn hands and the whole considered spectacle lustrous beneath its patina of inheritance; to pay, for all this, no more than we are moved to give—surely in all democracy there is nothing like it. Indeed, it is the most available democratic experience. We vote less than once a year. Only in church and at the polls are we actually given our supposed value, the soul-unit of one, with its noumenal arithmetic of equality: one equals one.

I don’t have much to add except to second Updike’s reference to the democratic experience.  One thing I appreciate about my churchgoing is that it brings me into contact with people from communities that I otherwise would not interact with—with farmers, watermen, military contractors, airplane pilots, Navy officers, bankers, realtors, homeless men.  Our nation’s civic life has degenerated to such an extent that (at least in southern Maryland) we no longer gather in town forums unless there is an issue we are angry about, and the interchanges at those occasions are often divisive.  But in church we gather weekly to give ourselves over to a higher power.

Posted in 20th Century, Creative Non-Fiction, Religion | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Poker Adventures of a New York Novelist

poker

Sports Saturday

This past week my novelist friend Rachel Kranz was visiting after having busted out of the World Series of Poker tournament in Las Vegas. She made it to Day 4 (out of 9), which was pretty good considering that she has only been playing for three years. Still she was upset, as good competitors always are.

One of the benefits of Rachel playing poker is that she writes remarkable essays about her experiences, which can now be read on her website adventuresinpoker.com (which, I am proud to say, my son Darien designed for her). Even if you are not into poker (as I am not), you may enjoy reading her posts, which are aimed at a general reader. Most of them are little gems, filled with literary allusions and containing many observations about the writing process.

Here’s a passage from “No-Limit Writing.”  Rachel finds herself in a bar talking with a woman about how one decides whether or not to write a book. The woman has said that she has an idea that won’t let go of her, to which Rachel offers the following extended analogy. It comes down to the difference between a passing fantasy and an obsession:

Read More »

Posted in 21st Century, Blogging, Sports | Tagged , , , | Leave a comment

The (Out of Control) Passion of Mel Gibson

Mel Gibson in BraveheartMel Gibson in Braveheart   

Film Friday

Mel Gibson is in the news again with recorded rants against his girlfriend that are so vicious that even his ardent supporters are backing away. (You can learn about, and even listen to, the rants here but I advise caution.)    I’ve never been a Gibson fan and this website ran an article critical of his Passion this past Easter.  But as one who teaches a History of American Film course, I’ve had to look seriously at his films.  What one discovers is that he is a very angry man who is obsessed with the theme of male humiliation.

I heard a paper on Gibson several years ago (at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference) arguing that his life is shaped by the same drama as his films.  He self-destructively puts himself in positions where the entire world will condemn him and then works to redeem himself.   The conference paper examined an incident where, after being picked up by the police for driving drunk, he launched into an anti-Semitic tirade.  Years ago South Park did a remarkably prescient satire of Gibson and The Passion where it exposes his anti-Semitism and his sado-mascochism.  You can watch it here

Christopher Hitchens argues that Gibson appears to have been warped by the fascistic Catholicism of his father.  The elder Gibson may well have been religiously abusive—by which I mean, enforcing in his son an unbalanced vision of himself as sinful and unworthy.  (Psychologist Alice Miller, examining Hitler and other Nazis, has written persuasively on the impact that such an upbringing can have.)  So maybe that’s where the anger is coming from.  At any rate, while Gibson appears to have a Catholic vision of human redemption growing out of extreme suffering, all his emphasis is on the suffering.

Think about the Mad Max and Lethal Weapons movies, where Gibson (like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwartzenegger, Chuck Norris, and Bruce Willis) plays the 1980’s hard-bodied hero. In “Race, Class, and Gender in the Male Rampage Film, ” film historian Fred Pfeil argues that male working class audiences identified with how these heroes are punched and gouged, which spoke to their own vulnerability in the 1980’s economy that was leaving them behind.  The broken male body was a metaphor for their own shattered psyches, and they could regain a modicum of dignity through imagining “payback” (the title of another Gibson film).  The final triumph of the hero’s hard body was assurance that they themselves would survive.

Gibson continued this theme of the suffering but triumphant male body when he became a director.  In Braveheart, Wallace is drawn and quartered but dies shouting “Freedom.” The Passion, with its hard-bodied Christ, surpassed all other Christ movies in its graphic violence, but we are reassured that he will rise again. Apocalypto revels in human sacrifice but the hero escapes and triumphs.

It is one thing to indulge in male rage in the movie theatre.  Maybe films provide us with a critical safety valve: we pay our $10, blow off steam, and then return to our lives.  But irresponsible politicians and pundits have tried to use that rage to their own advantage, and Frank Rich of the New York Times asks us to remember how Gibson used to be a “powerful and canonized figure in the political and cultural pantheon of American conservatism.”   For a while he was a used as a club by the Christian right.  The latest incident shows that we are playing with fire when we throw around intemperate words and give ourselves over to violent fantasies.  I’ve been arguing for a while on this website for less venting and more rational discourse as we confront the challenges of the 21st century.  Mel Gibson could be Exhibit A.  

Posted in 20th Century, Film, violence | Tagged , , , , | 2 Comments
  • Literature is as vital to our lives as food and shelter. Stories and poems help us work through the challenges we face, from everyday irritations to loneliness, heartache, and death. Literature is meant to mix it up with life. This website explores how it does so.

    For instance, at different points it has shown how Beowulf can function as a guide for managing anger, The Wife of Bath’s Tale as a workshop on dysfunctional relationships, Gulliver’s Travels as a handbook for social activists, Pride and Prejudice as a marriage manual.

    But literature only works this way if we refuse to put it on a pedestal, which is just a fancy way of marginalizing it. I’d love to hear your own reading stories: what are the novels, plays, short stories and poems that have impacted your life?

    Please feel free to e-mail me [rrbates (at) smcm (dot) edu]. I would be honored to be part of your conversation.