My 15 minutes lasted 15 seconds

Late at night

I have so much to say and no time to say it.  Everyone wants a piece of me.  Could someone please remind me why I agreed to be chair?  Oh yes!  I had no choice.  And as soon as my slightly junior colleague gets tenure — haw haw — it’s hers. Payback for those nice departmental letters.  Meanwhile, I pay for mine.

All I want to say now is boo hiss to anyone who is too snobby to admit that Puccini is the master.  Too crowd pleasing, they say.  Too sentimental.  What absolute rot!  I sit alone in the evenings, listening to Madame Butterfly, and I cannot get over it.  A world where this didn’t exist would be ridiculously poorer.

Mio My Son/ Brothers Lionheart

Of all the chapter books we read this summer, the strangest two were by Astrid Lindgren.

Lindgren wrote Mio My Son in 1955.  It involves what Freudians call a “family romance,” which means a child’s fantasy that his parents are imposters and that he has real (and likely royal) parents elsewhere, who will eventually come for him.  Apparently lots of children fantasize along these lines from time to time, but there are two ways to put it into a story.  One is to tell a story in which the hero leaves home and finds his real family, or his proper place in the world – a buildungsroman would be a loose example of a family romance especially if, as in Oliver Twist and many other novels, the hero does eventually find a rich relative.  The other is to tell a story in which the hero has the fantasy.  This is what Lindgren does in Mio My Son.  Except that we don’t actually find out until the last page.  We have hints of it, yes.  But it’s not until the final paragraph that we know for certain that the boy has been sitting the whole time on a bench in the park, unwilling to go home to his truly awful life.

“Perhaps that’s where [Aunt Hulda] thinks I am, watching the houses where there are lights in the windows and children are having supper with their mummies and daddies.  And I suppose she’s cross because I’m so long coming home with those buns.  But Aunt Hulda is wrong!  She’s absolutely wrong!  There’s no Andy on any seat in the park.  He’s in Farawayland, you see.  He is in Farawayland, I tell you. He’s in a place where the silver poplars rustle… where the fires glow warm at night… where there is Bread that Satisfies Hunger… and where he has his father the King who loves him and whom he loves.  That’s how it is.  Karl Anders Nilsson is in Farawayland with his father the King, and all is well with Mio.“

It was heartbreaking, for me, though Eila didn’t notice;  she was still caught up in the real story, which is excellent though also a wee bit sappy and the-stars-are-god’s-daisy-chain-ish.

Then, twenty years later, in 1975, Lindgren decided to do it over again and produced The Brothers Lionheart.  In many ways it’s a better book.  The adventure, though pretty much exactly the same, is more exciting, and all the sappiness is expunged for a hard-hitting, forthright tale of danger and honour.  But here’s the thing.  The new book is the other kind of family romance.  The boys (there are two this time) really are there, really having the adventure.  And why?  Because they are dead!  They have died in our world, and gone to Nangiyala, which is a lot like Farawayland only real.  It still works for readers as a family romance, only now it has a religious overtone:  Nangiyala is some sort of heaven.

For all I liked Brothers Lionheart, I can’t help thinking that Lindgren got mixed up somehow.  I don’t think you can fight evil tyrants after you die.  I don’t think you can die after you die.  I think she’s been misled by a religious allegiance to pretend to a concreteness that can only serve to confuse.

Identity and morality

I present Eila with a couple of those little philosophical problems involving identity.  “The philosopher breaks the handle of his axe,” I tell her, “and replaces it.  A few years later he breaks the blade and replaces that.  Is it still the same axe?”  Eila says, without a moment’s thought:  “no.”  “Theseus has a ship,” I say.  “We’ll call it The Ship of Theseus.  Over the years, he replaces each plank, throwing the old planks overboard.  They all wash up on an island where a master ship-builder is marooned.  Once the master ship-builder’s got them all, he builds a ship in which each plank ends up in exactly the same spot it held in the original, and sails away.  Who is now sailing The Ship of Theseus?”  She answers immediately: “the master ship-builder.”

She’s consistent, eh?  And she has a proclivity for the consistency of things.  Not to mention their materiality:  a thing is the sum of its material parts.  Lots of good common sense there.

On a roll, I decided to try her on the problem of Heinz.  Heinz’s wife is sick, and needs 1000$ for medicine, but they don’t have any money and the druggist refuses to sell it for a lower price.  Does he steal the drug?  According the Carol Gilligan, boys faced with this puzzle play by the rules, arguing either yes or no, while girls refuse to play by the rules and seek other solutions.  After her answers to the other two puzzles I thought Eila would be decisive and boy-ish.  But she took her time, and finally suggested that the people at the bank probably had a lot of money and should be made to give some to Heinz.  Very girlish, and nicely philosophical.

Wha?

Where did the summer go? I was just getting set to blog on how baggage handlers stole 150$ worth of plamobil from my suitcase on the way to Canada — more fool me for putting it in a ziplock bag — when I see it’s time to start packing to go back to California. Maybe it’s because it rained the whole summer. Time passes strangely in the rain. I always feel like I’m waiting for something.

Whatever it is, I’ve certainly been a little out-of-it the past few weeks. This morning, for instance, I got to the supermarket, pulled out my list, and noticed that one of the five items I’d written down to buy was “shopping.”

Evil doers should read more children’s books

There’s a sweet little line somewhere in Harry VII when Dumbledore, instead of telling us once again that Voldemort never saw the importance of love, tells us that he never saw the importance of children’s stories.  Dumbledore explains:  had Voldemort read the Tales of Beedle the Bard, he would have sought immortality through the Hallows, a much healthier route than Horcruxes.  The underlying message is that children’s books teach us how to live well, and I agree, even if I’m a little dubious of JKR’s conviction that teaching us how to live well involves making us think a lot about eternal life or life after death.  In any case, her little plug for the genre in which she herself writes is charming.

I’ve just finished the much touted Mysterious Benedict Society, by Trenton Lee Stewart.  It was also sweet in its way, and I’ll admit I found it hard to put down, but I’m afraid it was awfully formulaic.  Like Jenny Nimmo’s Charlie Bone series, it aims to appeal to Potter fans with fast-paced action set in a school for children of exceptional abilities, the difference being that in Benedict and in Bone, unlike in Harry, the schools (the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened and Bloor’s Academy, respectively) are brainwashing prison-camps fronting for Evil, and the children have to subvert or destroy the schools to beat the bad.  In Bone the bad is magical;  in Benedict it is technological – the villain, Ledroptha Curtain (Iron Curtain maybe?), is trying to take over the world using subliminal messages delivered in children’s voices filtered through a machine called ‘the Whisperer.’

Which leads me to back to Dumbledore’s advice to super-villains:  do your reading!  Had Ledroptha Curtain read Charlie Bone he would know that a school for children with exceptional abilities is a bad front for evil because the children Have Exceptional Abilities (duh!) and therefore three or four of them can put their heads together and defeat you.  And only slightly more cultural awareness – say, of Spy Kids, or Pinky and the Brain – would have told him that the old subliminal message gag fails every time.  Sweet, like I said.  But also boring.

Free-range kid?

I don’t understand why some people complain about the bad language the kids pick up in the car. There is nothing more likely to give me a spurt of joy than hearing Eila holler out from the backseat, MOVE ALONG YOU BASTARDS, THE LIGHT IS GREEN! It’s so frolicsome. I get a kick out of just knowing how much she’s enjoying herself.

Which reminds me of something I just read: bad mom/ good mom quoting Roger Ebert on how children are overly sheltered these days and why can’t we all run through ravines in thunderstorms any more and all that. I totally agreed with everything, until I was thrown for a loop by this:

…we boys would pee behind trees, shrubbery, or garages (“If you run home, your mom might grab you and make you do something”). I forgot to mention that one of the reasons we needed to pee is that when we got thirsty we drank out of garden hoses–our own, and anybody else’s.

Whoa. Do boys not pee behind shrubbery anymore? Because I pee behind shrubbery, and Eila pees behind shrubbery. And when did the memo come out about the garden hoses? We are drinking out of hoses all the time! Are we going to come down with some grotesque disease? Is there a difference between the hose and the tap?

I’m serious. I’ve got the rest of Ebert’s over-protective-lament list covered. Child car seats: check! Bike helmets: check! Bottled water: check! Security guards: I don’t hire my own, but I’m good with them, so check! Sunblock: check! Hand sanitizer: okay, no, unless we’re at the petting zoo, but in that case, check! And childproof bottles: Eila can open them, but sure the house is full of them, so check! But what is this with peeing and hoses? I guess maybe I am raising a free-ish-range kid.

A loosely connected thought. I’ve just completed my annual reading of Pride and Prejudice and my new insight – which seems to me breathtaking though it only concerns me – is that I like Lydia Bennet. Not that I’d want to be Lydia, or even spend much time with her, and not that she could ever replace Lizzie in my heart. I’ll admit she’s pretty stupid. But she is so tremendously good-humoured, and she breezes through life with such a savage sense of fun. And even her narcissism is so unconscious — so artless Austen would say — as hardly to be narcissism at all. She’s like a puppy or something, and who doesn’t like a puppy?

Other new interests (or addictions) around here? Eila: poptropica. Me: Jonathan Goldstein.

Translations from Californese: An occasional series, starring Andy

Eagleton/Dawkins

My conferences last week were fantastic.  I was equally pleased by the way some academic acquaintances might be turning into friends and by the fact that no one said anything, for five days, about Michael Jackson – not even when I got a bit tipsy and starting barking about an existential connection between karaoke and Dostoyevsky was he mentioned.  I remain convinced that I am the only person on the face of the earth who thinks his life is the only interesting thing about him, far more interesting than his music which bores me unspeakably.   But for this contention I gleaned no support from the Levinasians, among whom his name did not arise.

I did, however, work out how to put my thoughts about the Dawkins/Eagleton debate into a nutshell.  It’s like this.  Eagleton, who knows the history of theology well, believes religion is more philosophically subtle and true than Dawkins knows.  And I have a large stake in this argument, as it’s religion of this complex, nuanced, insightful kind that is the basis of my thinking life and academic career.  But the problem comes when I find that I have to explain this marvelous concept of religion not only to atheists like Dawkins, but also to regular Christian believers.  And when I find myself in this position, I start to think there’s a lot to what Dawkins is saying.

A correlative argument occurs in some thinkers as a distinction between Christianity and Judaism.  Christianity is, by this way of thinking, the childish, old-man-in-the-sky religion that Dawkins reasonably attacks, while Judaism is a “religion for adults” – it is the best realisation of the subtleties that Christians (like Eagleton) have been picking up from the Jews and using to make their religion more philosophically worthy.  Once again the whole paradigm falls to bits when one speaks to actual, synagogue-attending Jews.  The theory we do is great, but it doesn’t pan out in the institutions.

In the end I’m tempted to say that those of us who have staked our lives on this higher, more philosophical theology should be prepared to cut bait.  Religion isn’t what we say it is, and we’d be better off reading straight philosophy.

Captain Oonapants

is off to battle a couple of Levinas conferences.  Tra la la!