Does Aquinas Really Say That?

I found myself reading back through some threads of Commonweal posts -- I'm not sure why these fits of madness take me at times, but they do -- and I stumbled across this Cathleen Kaveny piece where she's arguing that Catholic schools should not dismiss teachers who turn up pregnant out of wedlock.

There are real issues to discuss on the topic, and I don't think there's a single one-size-fits-all answer, but predictably Kaveny's reasons are pretty bad. One bit in particular stuck out to me, however. She says:

Everyone knows that St. Thomas Aquinas says that an unjust law is no law at all, but rather an act of violence (actually, Aquinas’s reasoning is much more subtle on this question, but that is for another day). But he also says something that gets far less attention: a law that imposes a burden unequally upon members of the community is also an act of violence–even if it furthers the common good.

Now, I have a pretty good idea how she's getting to the former, but I'm rather mystified as to what in Thomas she's working off of to get to the latter. I'm certainly not prepared to make a claim that he doesn't say that. I haven't read all of Aquinas and I don't consider myself enough of an expert on him to have an unerring sense for what he would say, but it does seem rather off to me such that I'm skeptical. She provides no citation or elaboration. Does anyone know what she may be referring to?

Perhaps it's my post-enlightenment views about law and government cropping up, but it seems to me that most laws probably impose a burden unequally upon members of the community. Indeed, I would imagine that Kaveny herself supports a number of such laws. For instance, very few people want to play around with trading billions of dollars in risky financial investments, and thus necessarily any laws we impose to prevent such people from inadvertently crashing our banking system would disproportionately burden that small group of people able and eager to do such things. However, I don't think that Kaveny would suggest that the fact that these laws burden those few while not touching people like her or me would make them unjust. Indeed, she'd probably argue that if such laws protect the common good they are morally obligatory.

Of course, what she probably means is laws where the unequal burden falls upon groups that she perceives as oppressed. But if that's the case, it's hardly a general principle. And either way,
I'm a little skeptical that she's pulling this from Thomas -- if only because she is phrasing it in such a modern way.

Harsh Imprisonment Norwegian Style

If you thought that the countries formally dominated by the fierce Norsemen has lost their toughness, think again. Apparently the Norwegian government is being unimaginably savage in its treatment of Anders Behring Breivik -- one of the most prolific mass murderers in recent civilian history, who killed 77 people in a bombing and shooting rampage (mostly shooting down fleeing teenagers at a youth camp) in 2011.

Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik threatened to go on hunger strike for better video games and other perks to alleviate his "torture"-like prison conditions, in a letter received by AFP Friday.

And from another source:

Norwegian tabloid VG, which said it had acquired a copy of the letter, quoted Breivik as saying he was allowed to use only a soft and bendable safety pen described by its manufacturer as "stab-resistant" because it yields at the slightest pressure and cannot be used as a weapon. Breivik was seen making avid notes with it during his 10-week trial at the Oslo District Court that ended in August.

He has said he wants to write books in prison, but claims the special pen cramps his hand, describing it as "an almost indescribable manifestation of sadism," VG reported.

I hope Amnesty International gets right on this before things get even worse.

The Immediate Book Meme

photo by Evan Laurence Bench

There are plenty of memes that want to know all about your book history and your all-time greats and your grand ambitions, but let's focus on something more revealing: the books you're actually reading now, or just read, or are about to read. Let's call it The Immediate Book Meme.

1. What book are you reading now?

Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson

2. What book did you just finish?

Mirrors to One Another: Emotion and Value in Jane Austen and David Hume, by E. M. Dadlez

Cupid and Psyche ~ A New Play in Blank Verse: The Bad Quarto Limited Edition, by Emily C.A Snyder
(Emily was a drama major with me at Franciscan University of Steubenville, and Cupid and Psyche just finished an off-Broadway run.)

Cruel Beauty, by Rosamund Hodge

3. What do you plan to read next?

The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club: A Lord Peter Wimsey Mystery, by Dorothy Sayers

4. What book do you keep meaning to finish?

Poetics, by Aristotle
The Four Cardinal Virtues, by Josef Pieper

5. What book do you keep meaning to start?

The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, by Laurence Sterne

6. What is your current reading trend?

books about philosophy in Jane Austen

We Hope Because We Believe There Is An Outside

Brandon at Siris posted this quote from Gabriel Marcel which has seized hold, rather firmly, of my imagination:

During the last war I devoted much thought to the characteristics of hope and to the tragic state of prisoners of war. I concluded by asking myself whether in the last analysis hope might not always be looked on as an active reaction against a state of captivity. It may be that we are capable of hoping only in so far as we start by realizing that we are captives. Our slavery, moreover, may take very different forms, such as sickness or exile. (This will help us to understand why it is that in some countries where social technique is over-developed, in which a sort of ease is assured to everyone, hope fades and withers, and with it the whole of religious life. Life stands still and there is nothing that does not labour under an invincible boredom. This seems to be so in Sweden, to a large extent.) From this it would appear that at the back of hope lies some sort of tragedy. To hope is to carry within me the private assurance that however black things may seem, my present intolerable situation cannot be final; there must be some way out.

This comes from The Mystery of Being, Chapter IX.

A friend suggested a very apropos quote from Lord of the Rings, The Return of The King:

“There, peeping among the cloud-wrack above a dark tower high up in the mountains, Sam saw a white star twinkle for a while. The beauty of it smote his heart, as he looked up out of the forsaken land, and hope returned to him. For like a shaft, clear and cold, the thought pierced him that in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”

Pope Francis's Valentine's Day Message

The modern development of Valentine's Day as a quintessential Hallmark Holiday is perhaps rather silly, but that's no reason not to co-opt this feast of greeting cards and chocolates to good purpose. Pope Francis took the occasion to address a crowd of engaged couples in St. Peter's square, talking about marriage and love:

“Today many people are afraid of making definitive decisions, that affect them for all their lives, because it seems impossible … and this mentality leads many who are preparing for marriage to say, 'We will stay together for as long as our love lasts'. But what do we mean by 'love'? A mere emotion, a psycho-physical state? Certainly, if it is just this, it cannot provide the foundation for building something solid. But if instead love is a relationship, then it is a growing reality, and we can also say, by way of example, that it is built in the same way that we build a house. And we build a house together, not alone! … You would not wish to build it on the shifting sands of emotions, but on the rock of true love, the love that comes from God. The family is born of this project of love that wishes to grow, as one builds a house that becomes the locus of affection, help, hope and support. Just as God's love is stable and lasts forever, we want the love on which a family is based to be stable and to last forever. We must not allow ourselves to be conquered by a 'throwaway culture'. This fear of 'forever' is cured by entrusting oneself day by day to the Lord Jesus in a life that becomes a daily spiritual path of common growth, step by step. Because 'forever' is not simply a question of duration! A marriage does not succeed just because it lasts; its quality is also important. To stay together and to know how to love each other for ever is the challenge Christian married couples face! … In the Our Father prayer we say, 'Give us this day our daily bread'. Married couples may also learn to pray, 'Give us this day our daily love', teach us to love each other, to care for each other. The more you entrust yourselves to the Lord, the more your love will be 'for ever', able to renew itself and to overcome every difficulty.”

The Pope also had a bit to say about wedding ceremonies:

[T]he Holy Father commented that marriage should be a celebration, but a Christian rather than a worldly one. He offered as an example Jesus' first miracle at Cana, when he transformed water into wine when the latter appeared to have run out, thus saving the celebrations. “What happened at Cana two thousand years ago, happens in reality at every wedding feast. It is the presence of the Lord, who reveals Himself and the gift of His grace, that will render your marriage full and profoundly true. … At the same time, it is good for your wedding to be sober and to emphasise that which is truly important. Some people are more concerned with external signs, with the banquet, the dress... These are important aspects of a feast, but only if they are able to indicate the true reason for your joy: the Lord's blessing upon your love. Ensure that, like the wine in Cana, the external signs of your wedding feast reveal the presence of the Lord and remind you, and all those presence, of the origin of and reason for your joy”.

It's been striking me lately that the outsize importance of wedding ceremonies (at least in modern America, I don't know if this applies to the rest of the world) is beginning to overshadow marriage itself in some ways. Our WSJ subscription provides a sometimes humorous view into the world of secular elites, and one of the things that has struck me increasingly in recent years is the number of stories they carry about the amount of legal and financial work people put into living together as if married without actually being married. (This weekend there was one about couples over fifty dealing with the financial implications of cohabiting when you have separate sets of heirs.) Among the people I know at work, with the relationship conservatism of the upper middle class, the progression seems to be: get engaged, move in together, save up for several years, get married when you can afford a huge party and a long trip together. Getting married has gone from being a sign of commitment "we have decided to live together for the rest of our lives and build a family together" to an addendum "and now we can afford the big party to celebrate that".

I enjoy a good party as much as the next fellow, but perhaps we need a new trend towards small weddings to remind society that marriage is itself the commitment to form a family together. It's not a party to celebrate that commitment after the fact.

Sartorial Saturday: Polish Your Shoes

It seems like it's time for a new regular feature around here -- something other than posts about World War One and my half finished thoughts on various topics not much connected with the every day. That or, the stats would indicate, it's time to take this aging blog out to the back pasture and give it the coup de grace.

For this first time out, it's time to tackle the basic male duty of polishing leather dress shoes. I say male, because if your wife has black pumps or boots that are actually of a sort to take polish (many women's shoes are not) you should of course polish them for her. This is not only because then your wife won't have bits of black or brown polish on her hands for several days, not because she will be terribly grateful (though this may come) but simply because shoe polishing is one of those basic manly duties which has belonged to men since the days when Ogg was rubbing mastodon fat into his cracked and hairy feet. Of course, if you are a English country gentleman with a large establishment, you can employ a bootblack rather than doing this yourself. (You should also invite the Darwin clan to come stay with you for the weekend.) But what you may not do is leave your wife to polish her own shoes, much less your. It simply isn't playing the game.

Alright, so your shoes could use a little freshening up.  The first question is: Are these the sort of shoes that can take polish?  You cannot polish fake leather (look for the old "man made uppers" notation on the tag), patent leather, suede or other rough finish leathers.  You should not polish shoes that have a wax finish and/or detailing which will be ruined by being covered by colored polish.  Thus, for instance, these Allen Edmond's McTavish shoes should simply get rubbed down with a colorless leather notion -- using black polish on them would obscure the contrasting color stitching.

The shoes I'll be working with today are an old pair of Florsheim Imperials that I've had for going on nine years.  If this were a post on selecting good mens dress shoes, I would not necessarily recommend the modern successors to these.  Florsheim has gone down hill a lot in quality in recent years.  However, I bought these off Ebay for $50 a number of years ago and for many years they were my only pair of black dress shoes.  These days I mostly pull them out of the closet when it's slushy outside and I don't want my newer shoes exposed to salt and water.  These have been re-soled at least four times and the leather is starting to crack and wear through.  Having been worn almost constantly for the last month of winter weather, they're looking decidedly dingy as you can see:

Step one is to assemble your materials. You will need a tin of shoe polish of the appropriate color. Real, shoe polish paste, not the kind that you squeeze out through an applicator sponge. Not the kind that sprays out of a can as foam. Those may be good enough to polishing up your kids Stride Rites, but they're not right for your mens dress shoes. Here I've got Kiwi polish. You'll also need an applicator brush (that's the small one). Use a different applicator brush for each color of shoe polish you use -- don't mix black and brown. Then a buffing brush (the large one.) I think it's also a good idea to have a different one for each color -- which unless you're an over-achieve means one for black and one for brown. Finally you'll need a rag for polishing (and old bit of towel or undershirt can do) and some newspaper to keep the mess off the floor. I recommend the financial section since it makes boring reading anyway.

Wipe off any dust and grime with the rag. Then use the applicator brush to apply polish over the whole shoe. Make sure to rub it in especially well on any areas that are in really bad shape. In my case, this is the right heel where the shoe rubs against the old matting of the car while I drive. The shoe will darken up as you apply the polish, but it won't look at all shiny now. Indeed, those areas that retained shine will go matte. You don't want to apply so much that you see gobs of it on the shoe (you'll just end up wiping it off if you apply too much) but you definitely want enough for coverage.

Let the shoes sit for a few minutes (5-10 at most) to give the polish a chance to dry on a bit.

Now put a shoe on your hand and give it a vigorous buffing with the buffing brush. The purpose here is to buff the polish into the leather, and produce a smooth, shiny finish. Work around the shoe slowly. It's going to take a good bit of vigorous buffing to get a good polish. I spent 10 minutes or so on the pair of them. The more brushing, the better the polish. On that troublesome heel area I actually put on a second coat of polish and buffed it again. Depending on how good a polish you get with your brushwork, you can buff further with the cloth. Usually I end up doing that, but in this case I felt like I got a good enough polish just using the brush that I skipped buffing with the cloth. Here's the result:

Still definitely an old pair of shoes, but much more respectable looking.

New Worlds To Explore in Publishing

I'd been intrigued by a review I read last week of The Martian by Andy Weir, but I was even more fascinated reading this WSJ piece on how the novel came to prominence and then publication:

He got the idea for "The Martian" in 2009, and spent three years working out the details of the story. He drew on a real NASA proposal for a Mars mission called Mars Direct, which involves sending supplies in unmanned ships to Mars ahead of the crew, then sending astronauts in a lighter, faster ship. He'd been rebuffed by literary agents in the past, so he decided to put the novel on his website free of charge rather than to try to get it published. A few fans asked him to sell the story on Amazon so that they could download it to e-readers. Mr. Weir had been giving his work away, but he began charging a modest amount because Amazon set the minimum price at 99 cents. He published the novel as a serial on the site in September 2012. It rose to the top of Amazon's list of best-selling science-fiction titles. He sold 35,000 copies in three months. Agents and publishers and movie studios started circling.

Mr. Weir signed with literary agent David Fugate, who sent 'The Martian' to Julian Pavia at Crown, pitching it as "Apollo 13" meets "Castaway" and Crown bought it last March for six figures.

Mr. Weir signed with literary agent David Fugate, who sent 'The Martian' to Julian Pavia at Crown, pitching it as "Apollo 13" meets "Castaway" and Crown bought it last March for six figures. The same week Crown pounced, Twentieth Century Fox optioned film rights, beating out several other studios and producers. Fox hired screenwriter Drew Goddard, who wrote the sci-fi film "Cloverfield," to adapt and direct "The Martian."

Mr. Weir says he never expected the audience for "The Martian" to grow much beyond the handful of fans who read it on his website. He's a bit stunned by all the hype. He's already got nearly 1,200 five-star reviews on Amazon.

"I keep thinking, is this some kind of long-term scam or con that someone's running on me?" he said. "If it is, it's a really bad one, because they keep sending me checks."

It's always kind of fascinated me that a lot of the great novels of the 19th century were written and published as serials and only then put out as a single book. The advent of the web means that now serialization is easier than ever, and it's also very easy for word to spread about something the people love to read, even if it's not out from a major publisher. Of course, the flip side of this is that there is a veritable flood of self-published works, whether published on the web or via ebooks or print on demand publishers, and the vast, vast majority of it never breaks out in the way that Weir's book has. Watching my sister's novel launch, I've been incredibly impressed with what a mainstream publisher can do in order to get a book talked about and visible.

However, since we've made our own little forays into serializing novels online, and I'm hoping to do the same in a slightly more organized and polished fashion with my next project, I can't help being deeply fascinated with the story of The Martian's publication history.

Getting Away from it All

There's something about the end of the week that sets one's mind wandering off through impossibilities.

This has been one of those weeks when Monday night MrsDarwin said, "It's been a long week."

"And it's only Monday," I said.

"Is it? I was thinking it was Tuesday."

That's how it's been.

Last night I was driving home, talking to MrsDarwin on the phone, and wishing that it was Friday instead of Thursday. We were outlining the things that had to happen that night -- enjoyable thing, but a full slate of them. "Maybe tomorrow night we can write," I said. "Or this weekend. There's not much going on this weekend. Except setting up the bunk beds. And some shopping. And cleaning the kids room..."

"Don't you wish we could get away from it all some time and just write?"

Getting away from it all is one of these ideas we cherish but never really pull off. It takes various forms. Second honeymoon. School planning retreat. Writers retreat. The common theme is going off somewhere, just the two of us, where we could sleep in late, have meals provided, and talk or work on things without feeling like we owed it to the trip to sight-see. And, of course, taking a break from shepherding the small persons who are dear to us but can be overwhelming at times.

We talked about doing some sort of get-away for our tenth anniversary, on theory that we hadn't been able to afford much of a honeymoon when we got married and now we could. But as it happened, our tenth anniversary was just a few days before Diana was born.

As that young lady weaned and became a big little girl (though we still called her "baby") we started to talk again about getting away from it all. But things came up and while we took several trips together for various events, the dream of going off together to "just get away" never seemed to fit in. And there's William, who will be a dear little cling monkey for the next year or so. Maybe by our fifteenth anniversary. Or our twentieth...

Someday.

Marching with the Dead

I've been reading All Quiet on the Western Front (as an audiobook) for the last week, and this morning I hit a piece that was particularly chilling in the light of later history. Half way through, coming out of a long stretch on the front lines, the narrator says:

And this I know: all these things that now, while we are still in the war, sink down in us like a
stone, after the war shall waken again, and then shall begin the disentanglement of life and
death.

The days, the weeks, the years out here shall come back again, and our dead comrades shall
then stand up again and march with us, our heads shall be clear, we shall have a purpose, and so
we shall march, our dead comrades beside us, the years at the Front behind us:--against whom,
against whom?
All Quiet on the Western Front, Chapter 7

Remarque's novel was published in 1929, four years before the Nazis actually took power, though the Nazis were already active and were among his fiercest critics. I have not idea what he was trying to evoke with this brief passage, or if it was simply a general observation, but it's chilling in retrospect because at least as much as any political or economic grievances over the first world war, the second was permitted by the fact that in Germany in particular there were millions of men who had fought in the first war who found themselves in the inter-war years seeking a sense of purpose. Men with an experience of violence and of the comradery of collective action who were now adrift. Unemployed or underemployed. In a country which felt that it had made huge sacrifices by which it had gained nothing.

The urge to march to some purpose was particularly strong in those circumstances, and many found it in marching either with the national socialists (Nazis) or the international socialists (communists).

Takin' up the Cup

A few months ago, I went to confession and was given the penance to say prayers of gratitude for all the good things the Lord has given me. It was a good penance, and I did it dutifully, and I meant it. I have lots to be grateful for, more than most people on earth, I think. But feeling grateful is another thing. As it happens, gratitude has not been my prevailing mode of late. I've been tied up tight in the grip of acedia.

You know acedia. It's a bitter, superior state. It's the hot knot of disgust in your gut for everything and everyone. It's "A pox on both your houses!"and "Lord, what fools these mortals be!" Max Lindenman sums it up nicely:

This is a kind of acedia, which, in the words of St. John Cassian, “begets aversion from the place, boredom with one’s cell, and scorn and contempt for one’s brethren, whether they be dwelling with one or some way off, as careless and unspiritual-minded persons.” I’ll admit, though I don’t have brethren the way a monk does, or claim the right to accuse even an orangutan of spiritual laxity, I do at these times tend to think of my fellow Catholics as Pharisees and fascists, along with some other bad things that begin with the same sound.

I take my acedia with a more ecumenical flair. Everything is fair game. Jokes are stupid, not funny; scholarship is dry and pompous; the inspirational is insipid and the enthusiastic is juvenile. It is dry and joyless, all the languor of ennui without the erudite French flavor.

St. John Cassian, whose writings on the Desert Fathers and their monastic practices laid the foundations for Western monasticism, discusses acedia in his Institutes. He equates acedia with the "noonday demon" of scripture, which makes sense. At noon, you're at the middle of your workday -- far enough in to look back and see how little you've accomplished; far enough away from quittin' time that the afternoon hours seem like an endlessly futile stretch of same old same old.

It also makes the man lazy and sluggish about all manner of work which has to be done within the enclosure of his dormitory. It does not suffer him to stay in his cell, or to take any pains about reading, and he often groans because he can do no good while he stays there, and complains and sighs because he can bear no spiritual fruit so long as he is joined to that society; and he complains that he is cut off from spiritual gain, and is of no use in the place, as if he were one who, though he could govern others and be useful to a great number of people, yet was edifying none, nor profiting any one by his teaching and doctrine. He cries up distant monasteries and those which are a long way off, and describes such places as more profitable and better suited for salvation; and besides this he paints the intercourse with the brethren there as sweet and full of spiritual life. On the other hand, he says that everything about him is rough, and not only that there is nothing edifying among the brethren who are stopping there, but also that even food for the body cannot be procured without great difficulty. Lastly he fancies that he will never be well while he stays in that place, unless he leaves his cell (in which he is sure to die if he stops in it any longer) and takes himself off from thence as quickly as possible. Then the fifth or sixth hour brings him such bodily weariness and longing for food that he seems to himself worn out and wearied as if with a long journey, or some very heavy work, or as if he had put off taking food during a fast of two or three days. Then besides this he looks about anxiously this way and that, and sighs that none of the brethren come to see him, and often goes in and out of his cell, and frequently gazes up at the sun, as if it was too slow in setting, and so a kind of unreasonable confusion of mind takes possession of him like some foul darkness, and makes him idle and useless for every spiritual work, so that he imagines that no cure for so terrible an attack can be found in anything except visiting some one of the brethren, or in the solace of sleep alone. Then the disease suggests that he ought to show courteous and friendly hospitalities to the brethren, and pay visits to the sick, whether near at hand or far off. He talks too about some dutiful and religious offices; that those kinsfolk ought to be inquired after, and that he ought to go and see them oftener; that it would be a real work of piety to go more frequently to visit that religious woman, devoted to the service of God, who is deprived of all support of kindred; and that it would be a most excellent thing to get what is needful for her who is neglected and despised by her own kinsfolk; and that he ought piously to devote his time to these things instead of staying uselessly and with no profit in his cell.

Acedia is, in short, wanting anything and everything other than what you have.

AND whenever it begins in any degree to overcome any one, it either makes him stay in his cell idle and lazy, without making any spiritual progress, or it drives him out from thence and makes him restless and a wanderer, and indolent in the matter of all kinds of work, and it makes him continually go round the cells of the brethren and the monasteries, with an eye to nothing but this; viz., where or with what excuse he can presently procure some refreshment. For the mind of an idler cannot think of anything but food and the belly, until the society of some man or woman, equally cold and indifferent, is secured, and it loses itself in their affairs and business, and is thus little by little ensnared by dangerous occupations, so that, just as if it were bound up in the coils of a serpent, it can never disentangle itself again and return to the perfection of its former profession.

It manifests in two extremes of idleness: either in an extreme indolence and lethargy, in stupor of mind and soul; or in a manic desire for activity, any activity so long as it's something different and distracting and shared with someone "equally cold and indifferent". (It's as if Cassian could see, 1700 years in the future, the advent of the internet.)

ALL the inconveniences of this disease are admirably expressed by David in a single verse, where he says, "My soul slept from weariness," that is, from accidie. Quite rightly does he say, not that his body, but that his soul slept. For in truth the soul which is wounded by the shaft of this passion does sleep, as regards all contemplation of the virtues and insight of the spiritual senses.

Cassian gives the remedy as being "patience, prayer and manual labor", and not just any labor, but exactly the wearisome labor which you are supposed to be doing, no more, no less. No grandiose spiritual exercises or expensive equipment required: the daily grind, which would seem to be the cause of acedia, is actually the cure. The antithesis of acedia is constancy and faithfulness.

Since receiving my penance of gratitude, I keep returning to these verses from Psalm 116: "How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the good he has done for me? The cup of salvation I will take up, and I will call upon the name of the Lord." This cup is the joyful eucharistic chalice, but also the chalice of suffering which even Jesus himself begged might be taken from him, if it was the will of his Father.

In my case, I believe the cup of salvation is my vocation, my daily work, which is filled and drained every day, and refilled the next day, and sometimes dumped on the floor or spilled all over the table. So I take up the cup of salvation, and I put it in the dishwasher again.

And then there's this.

Gratuitous baby picture of smiling William in a dino onesie.  

Art, Truth and the Great War

2014 is the hundredth anniversary of the Great War, which raged from July 28, 1914 through November 11th, 1918. The war is widely regarded as the starting point of the 20th century and it's legacy remains controversial. At the beginning of this year, British Secretary of Education Michael Gove gave an interview in which he complained that the war had become unrealistically stereotyped in the popular imagination be television portrays such as the satirical Blackadder Goes Forth. Art columnist Jonathan Jones rejoined in The Guardian, demanding to know if Gove was going to accuse the art produced during the war of being mere anti-war propaganda. He says:

The centenary of the outbreak of the first world war has kicked off with a fight. Self-styled patriots and provocative military historians claim that our image of the war that killed eight million men between 1914 and 1918, and left 22 million wounded, has been distorted by poets and TV comedy writers. Wilfred Owen and Blackadder have apparently conned us into thinking the great war was futile, when in reality it was a "just" war provoked by German aggression.

The pettiness of this rightwing revisionists' saloon-bar view of modern history is so tragicomic it is tempting to just go and watch Blackadder to calm down. But clearly it needs refuting.
...
Even without that foreknowledge, the people who defined the war as inhuman and beyond any meaningful justification were not Blackadder and Baldrick – they were the soldiers and civilians who endured it. If the eloquence of the war poets is now to be discounted as sentimental, will art be accepted as evidence?

Michael Gove needs to get to Tate Britain quick and censor its pictures. What if children were to take their view of the first world war from William Orpen's painting Zonnebeke? They might think that its despairing image of muddy, meaningless battlefield devastation is somehow the truth of the war. Instead, kids should be looking at propaganda posters I suppose.

Orpen painted this dismal view of war's landscape in 1918. Two years later, Charles Sargeant Jagger cast a bronze image of soldiers suffering in No Man's Land. They hang on the wire as if crucified. Jagger was no pacifist. His memorial, on view at Tate Britain, reflects how everyone involved, left and right, saw this war – as an inexplicable tragedy.

Art has an outsize influence on our view of the Great War. In one sense, that as the still scarred battlefields are all that is left at this point, when all those who participated in the struggle are dead. Another reason is that the Great War produced some truly amazing writing, poetry and art -- much more so that other wars before or after. Poet Ian McMillan writes at the BBC about how Wilfred Owen's poem "Dulce et Decorum Est" has to a great extent defined the war in the minds of people since the poem achieved a renewed prominence in the 1960s. This is not unjustified. Owen's poem is short and devastating:

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of disappointed shells that dropped behind.

GAS! Gas! Quick, boys!-- An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling
And floundering like a man in fire or lime.--
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.

In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil's sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,--
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Owen, who died in the very last days of the war, can be seen as a sort of spokesman for the "lost generation" who left their bodies or their sanity in the trenches. Shouldn't a voice like that be taken as the final authority on the war?

Owen was a very good poet, and the horrors he described are real. But the sense of futility he felt was certainly not shared by all soldiers in the war. I've been finishing up a book published in 1918 A Solder Unafraid, which is composed of letters that Andre Cornet-Auquier (who started the war as a reserve lieutenant in the French army and died in 1916 as a captain) wrote to his family. Cornet-Auquier also writes about the horrors of combat:

July 13, 1915: At eight o’clock the inevitable happened; the fatal shell struck us like a waterspout. It was a big 130 and burst at a yard and a half from where we were, killing wounding and destroying everything and everybody almost. The death rattle of the dying and the shrieks of the wounded in the midst of clouds of smoke and dirt; it was simply horrible. We had five killed among whom was the commander of the battalion, five wounded and four untouched, I being one of these last. A telephonist was killed so close to me that my cap which had been knocked off was filled with the poor fellow's blood. Two of my subordinate officers were killed, but my cyclist was unhurt. As the shells kept on coming, we took advantage of the cloud which enveloped and hid us to stealthily decamp, one after the other, from this veritable hell. Our faces and hair were full of earth and blackened, our temples were running with perspiration, in fact we no longer looked like human beings. What a day. And it means furthermore the battalion without a head, a very heavy inheritance for me to assume.

But he retains a strong sense of purpose about the war, despite a several times repeat premonition that he will die in it. Here's part of a letter he wrote to his father (a protestant minister) in response to hearing that some in the congregation were questioning whether the war was worthwhile:

December 22 [1915] If I had a chance to address a Christian audience, or one calling itself such, this is about what I would say:

You believe in, or profess to believe in, God, in a God who is a Father. You have faith in His justice in His great kindness. You hold that nothing happens without His willing it, and this will is essentially holy, good and wise. Such being the case, you should have confidence in God and await with patience whatever comes to pass. Say to yourself that Justice will triumph, and that Right will finally vanquish brute force, because God has so willed it, because He so wishes it and because He will always continue to so wish it. The cause of Justice and Right is His cause and is ours. It is to us, the allied armies, that He has confided the task of making this cause triumph. It is we therefore who will be victorious in this struggle. When? How? I cannot say, and after all it matters little when and how. The final result is what counts. Don’t fear therefore, but believe. Stop being anxious and nervous; check all recrimination; cease every criticism. Don’t say: “If I were only Joffre or the Prime Minister!” You are not, thank God, either Joffre or Briand. If you tremble, it is because you do not believe in the final victory of Justice and Right, in the triumph of the cause of God on earth. Be logical then and say that God is not God and that for the past twenty centuries the world has deceived itself in believing in the law of love proclaimed by Jesus for, like Him, it is for love that the splendid soldiers of France die, and those of England, Belgium, Servia and Russia, too.

Soldiers who fought and suffered in the war were, like any other group of people, persons with a range of ideas and reactions to their experiences. A soldier like Andre Cornet-Auquier, who believed the war to be a just defense against German aggression, is no less worth remembering than Wilfred Owen, who came to see the struggle as futile.

You Don't Get Credit For Not Killing Someone

Yet again a Catholic school, this one in Helena, Montana, is in the news because it has dismissed a teacher for moral reasons. Shaela Evenson who has taught literature and PE to middle schoolers at Butte Central Catholic Schools for the last nine years has been fired because she became pregnant out of wedlock (a violation of the morals clause in her contract with the diocese) and an anonymous letter writer alerted the diocese to the situation. The diocese says that the policy applies to men and women who violate Church moral teaching, but acknowledge that they don't proactively investigate their employees lives and Ms. Evenson's situation is "much more evident" than a similar transgression by a man would be.

These cases are always thorny. I would hope that diocese and schools use some discretion in applying their policies, making some sort of good faith effort to understand whether they're dealing with a teacher who genuinely reject's Catholic teaching or is living with the consequences of an acknowledge lapse. People's natural assumptions start to come out in a situation like this. One group of writers seem inevitably to frame any such story as "vindictive authorities punish faithful teacher for her one moral lapse" while another group frame it as "school finally gets rid of teacher who doesn't accept Church teaching." Sometimes it may be clear whether Church teaching is accepted from the actions or statements involved, but other times it seems to be more a matter of people pouring their dispositions into a situation. It seems clear that, in the real world of real people, in some cases this will turn out to be a teacher who accepts Church teaching but failed to live by it (or was the victim of an assault) while in other cases it's a teacher who really does reject Church teaching and probably does a pretty bad job of trying to pretend when teaching it.

Be that as it may, there's one line of argument that seems to me completely off base. Voices of indignation often frame these stories as "teacher fired for being pro-life". The theory behind this is that if the teacher had had an abortion, no one would have been the wise. Thus, if a teacher is fired for having a sexual relationship outside of marriage which is discovered via her becoming pregnant, then implicitly she is being fired for not having an abortion.

While it's true that the teacher's transgression wouldn't have become known had she had an abortion, I think this approach is flawed, in that it implicitly moves abortion into the range of potentially acceptable actions.

Imagine the following case: A young man comes forward and accuses the priest who was his pastor when he was young of having sexually abused him. The priest is removed from ministry. Is there anyone who would mount the defense, "Sure, the priest sexually abused the young boy. But we should be very thankful that the priest did not then kill him and hide the body. If he had done so, we would never know of the crime, and the priest would still have his job. We're punishing the priest for choosing life!"

No. Indeed, the argument is on the face of it offensive and suggests that the abuse victim's life is somehow forfeit and that it's only by the generosity of his abuse that her retains it.

Similarly, arguing that the teacher is being punished "for choosing life" both assumes that the initial transgression is inevitable rather than being itself a moral choice, and also gives in to the idea that abortion is a "normal" response to being pregnant when you don't want to be.

I think one could make a pragmatic argument about incentives on somewhat similar grounds: that given the prevalence of abortion in our current society that it's important to try to avoid creating situations in which people face a consequence for giving birth to a child which they do not face for having an abortion.

But I think that it's unacceptable from a pro-life point of view to see this kind of situation in terms of "punishing someone for choosing life". If we take the pro-life point of view seriously, "choosing life" is a given.

A Drinking Wage -- Equality We Can Believe In

Perhaps you've heard of the Big Mac Index, which has been used by The Economist to measure the real purchasing power of different currencies. Now some clever folks have come up with an ideal way to look at the minimum wage: the drinking wage.

Numbeo, a crowd-sourced database of the price of goods around the world, maintains a comprehensive list of the average price of a domestic draft beer in different countries. And the International Labor Organization (ILO) maintains a vast library of minimum monthly wage data. So we combined the two—into a beer indicator, of sorts.

By dividing the average price a local has to pay to get a beer by the hourly minimum wage (assuming a 40-hour work week) a person makes in each country, we were able to approximate how long it takes someone making the minimum wage to earn enough to buy a brew at a local bar.

Given that throwing back a cold one after work is one of the more basic human needs, I can't think of a better way to measure the real minimum wage. The US stacks up pretty well here, with about 25 minutes of work at minimum wage paying for a beer, tying with Canada, Japan, Belgium and Germany -- though given the quality of domestic beer in Germany and Belgium versus the US they may have a better deal going there. The UK and Ireland trail at 30min while France edges up to 35 minutes.

Music, Old Sport

We watched Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby last night. There was a lot of comment when it came out about the mix of modern and period styles of music, but I thought that the soundtrack blended nicely and captured the feeling of the time better than period music alone could. Roaring Twenties jazz isn't going to sound as racy to our ears as it did to contemporaries (though Scott Bradlee's Postmodern Jukebox is doing a good job of capturing the excitement of ragtime). If you've heard any of the sentimental popular songs from the period, you can imagine how the syncopated rhythms of ragtime, jazz, and the influence of black spirituals were a jolt of toe-tapping, pulse-pushing adrenaline.

Overall, I liked the movie, though the pacing of the first half was rushed almost to the point of caricature. (It didn't induce headaches like Moulin Rouge, though, for which I was grateful.) Also, Darwin said that it's a pet peeve of his when movies based on novels use the conceit of making the writing of the novel part of the movie. If you're writing as therapy in a sanitarium, you're not going to be turning out polished novel-quality prose fresh off the typewriter. If a screenwriter wants to use the author's words as narration, why not just include them as narration?

This was my favorite musical moment, though this particular version isn't available on any of the four or five Gatsby soundtracks.



ADDENDUM: Well. Scott Bradlee and Co. have done a cover of this song. I don't like it quite as well as the movie version above, but it has a charm.

Guilt, Shame, and Sin

To what extent should morality be re-enforced by the way that we think about or treat people who violate it's tenets?

Shame is typically considered the more primitive method of enforcing morality. Same categorizes the sinner according to the sin committed and applies some sort of punishment as a result. The examples that most readily spring to mind, for me, come from to miniseries based on classic literature that we recently watched with the kids.

In Bleak House, Lady Deadlock is terrified of the shame that will come upon her and her husband if it is ever discovered that prior to her marriage she had a child by another man. When the secret does look like coming out, she runs away in at attempt to shield them from the shame which she thinks must inevitably fall upon her. In Middlemarch, the somewhat less sympathetic Mr. Bulstrode, who has made himself unpleasant around town with his non-conformist moralizing, is in his own turn utterly shamed when it comes out that he got his money dishonestly (and then contributed to the death through negligence of the person who could reveal his past). She is shunned by everyone but his every-loyal wife and has to leave town.

Shame involves tarring the sinner's whole person with the brush of the sin. According to a shame-based way of looking at things, Lady Deadlock is not "a woman who had a child out of wedlock" but "a fallen woman", the sin defines the person and subsumes it. Shame is a powerful way of socially enforcing moral norms because it places a very heavy penalty upon the violation of certain norms. However, it is also an approach which leaves no room for redemption. Shame are a morality-enforcement mechanism sacrifices permanently certain identified sinners in order to serve as an example to others. In this sense it is a predatory means of social enforcement. The only way it can operate is by putting some people beyond redemption, making examples of them that others may not follow in their footsteps. This heavy threat does provide a strong reason not to violate the norms enforced by means of shame, but since the means of enforcement is public, it also creates a strong reason for secrecy. Thus, in both literary examples, Lady Deadlock and Mr. Bulstrode are willing to do almost anything in order to prevent their transgressions from becoming known, since shame only comes into play if the sin is known. Sin that is not known, if avoiding shame is the only way in which people think of sin, is no sin at all.

Guilt is a somewhat more complex approach to moral enforcement. If we think of shame as the idea that people who do certain things are unworthy of being associated with, guilt is the idea that certain actions are unworthy of us. According to guilt, if you commit a sin, you should feel bad about having done so. When morality is socially enforced by means of guilt, there may still be strong social sanctions placed upon someone who violates society's moral norms, but the sinner can redeem himself in the eyes of society by repenting of his sin. But more importantly, guilt is not primarily an external force, it is an internal force. Using guilt, society teaches us that we should blame ourselves if we violate certain norms. This enforcement thus operates whether the sin is known by others or not.

Because the terms are often used in a casual sense, I think they often get mixed up. We often hear people talk about the need to bring back shame -- that people should feel ashamed for doing certain actions. However, half the time what is meant is guilt rather than shame. Guilt is the personal belief, "That action was not worthy of me and I should never do such a thing again." Shame in the sense that I am speaking of here, however, is externally applied -- except perhaps in some sort of despair in which the sinner classifies himself according to the sin he has committed and rejects himself permanently as a result, holding that he will always be defined by that sin and so it hardly matters what he does from here on out.

At the end of the day, it perhaps doesn't matter much how we use the terms. But I don't bring up the matter to make an argument about correct use of terminology, but rather because I think that as those of us who adhere to traditional morality make the case for returning to a clearer sense of sin in society, it's important that we think about the traditional behaviors that we seek to bring back. A sense of guilt can be a very healthy thing, but shame in the predatory sense is not, even though one often saw it used in Christian cultures. Shame in the sense described here leaves no room for redemption, and redemption is, after all, the central message of Christianity.

Tune sans Tune

For the past two weeks, I had a tune in my head, and I couldn't remember where I'd heard it. It was from something I had watched, the theme to a miniseries maybe, but which series I didn't know. There it was, thrumming over and over again in my brain, something kind of Irishy with a martial drum beat, and fading away to some quick whistley notes. Darwin and I watch all the same stuff, so I hummed it to him, but our musical sensibilities weren't aligning and I couldn't get across the beat and the whistley notes.

And still I heard the tune. Friends online must have seen the same series, but how was I to ask them? The internet is still mainly a medium for written communication. If you remember a scene from a movie, you can describe it. Throw out a quote, and somebody will come back with the next line, the movie it's from, and a link to the IMDB page. Describe a painting, and likely someone will recognize it from words alone. But how can you ask about a tune in writing? "Something kind of Irishy with a martial drum beat, and fading away to some quick whistley notes" isn't much to go on, and could describe any number of tunes.

About ten years ago, when I was still playing the violin, I ran into a form of notation called ABC. I'd thought it was simply a way to transcribe traditional Irish tunes (see: 12 variations on The Irish Washerwoman written in ABC), but it turns out to be a whole programming language. Though it seems like it would be too tedious to write out anything much longer than a traditional 16-measure jig or reel, you could presumably program out Beethoven's Fifth without the benefit of a single staff.

So, here's my mystery tune in characters:

X: 1
T: Unknown
M: 4/4

DF3-|F4|FG3-|G4|Ac3-|c2d2|FG3-|G4-|
G2f2|e2d2|de3|c4|cB3-|B4|f2d2|c2G2:|

where X = reference number (required first field), T = title, M = meter, caps = the octave of middle C, lowercase = the octave above middle C, number = beats held, - = tie, | = measure, :| = repeat

The problem is that dropping this into a blog post or in a Facebook status is not going to garner you much help unless your audience understands the language, knows music well enough to apply it, and either has access to an instrument or has the ability to sight-sing.

(For the sake of cheating, here's the ABC notation translated into a different, and more recognizable, code.)

In both of these, I've already communicated the tune. But can you convey a tune without a tune?

As an experiment, I used the vaguest of descriptors in referencing movies, books, and painting to Darwin to see if he could figure out what I had in mind, picking common works and not making any inside jokes.

1. It's that movie about a girl, and she lives in a big house, and there was a war, and she had slaves.

2. A painting of a guy holding his face.

3. A book about this animal, and he goes into a garden, and he can't get out.

Then I tried the same thing with a tune, without singing the tune.

4. First it starts, and then it goes down and down again, and then up and up again, and that note repeats twice. Dah dah dah dah dah dah daaah.

He answered 1, 2, and 3 correctly. 4, not so much. Perhaps I could have described it this way:

4. Note, whole step down, whole step down, whole step up, whole step up, repeat, repeat and hold.

That wouldn't mean much to Darwin, who is not conversant in the technical terminology of music, but it's informational enough that the musically-inclined might guess the answer pretty quickly.

Trying to convey a rhythm with words sometimes works, if the rhythm is distinctive enough:

dah dah dah DAAH, dah dah dah DAAH

As it happens, I didn't have to post any code to solve my problem. After being driven nearly to tears by the tune, yesterday evening I startled Darwin by shouting, apropos of nothing, "John Adams!" And sure enough, it was the title theme to HBO's miniseries John Adams, composed by Rob Lane. I had remembered it in pieces: my mystery tune starts at 0:50, and the whistley bits come at the end. 

I wasn't very eloquent in trying to describe a half-remembered piece of music, but how would  you put a tune into words? Here's a reviewer on Amazon summing up this piece: "The agitated fiddle dirge that forms the counterpoint for the main title is, perhaps, the most stirring, distinctly American title score I've heard since "Ashokan Farewell" in Ken Burns' THE CIVIL WAR." Very elegant and apt, but without having heard the tune, could you hum it from this description? Can you convey a tune without the tune?

Doing What You Love or Loving What You Do

Jacobin magazine has an article by Miya Tokumitsu attacking the work philosophy of "do what you love". As with many a polemic, it strikes me as having some hits and some misses. Tokumitsu's basic claim is that by suggesting that people should view work as a form of personal fulfillment, the DWYL philosophy both ignores the work of the majority who have less-fulfilling jobs and also opens those who believe they love their jobs to exploitation by suggesting that we don't just do it for the money and thus there should be no limits.

“Do what you love” disguises the fact that being able to choose a career primarily for personal reward is an unmerited privilege, a sign of that person’s socioeconomic class. Even if a self-employed graphic designer had parents who could pay for art school and cosign a lease for a slick Brooklyn apartment, she can self-righteously bestow DWYL as career advice to those covetous of her success.

If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves — in fact, to loving ourselves — what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.
...
No one is arguing that enjoyable work should be less so. But emotionally satisfying work is still work, and acknowledging it as such doesn’t undermine it in any way. Refusing to acknowledge it, on the other hand, opens the door to the most vicious exploitation and harms all workers.

Ironically, DWYL reinforces exploitation even within the so-called lovable professions where off-the-clock, underpaid, or unpaid labor is the new norm: reporters required to do the work of their laid-off photographers, publicists expected to Pin and Tweet on weekends, the 46 percent of the workforce expected to check their work email on sick days. Nothing makes exploitation go down easier than convincing workers that they are doing what they love.
...
Do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life! Before succumbing to the intoxicating warmth of that promise, it’s critical to ask, “Who, exactly, benefits from making work feel like non-work?” “Why should workers feel as if they aren’t working when they are?” Historian Mario Liverani reminds us that “ideology has the function of presenting exploitation in a favorable light to the exploited, as advantageous to the disadvantaged.”

In masking the very exploitative mechanisms of labor that it fuels, DWYL is, in fact, the most perfect ideological tool of capitalism. It shunts aside the labor of others and disguises our own labor to ourselves. It hides the fact that if we acknowledged all of our work as work, we could set appropriate limits for it, demanding fair compensation and humane schedules that allow for family and leisure time.

And if we did that, more of us could get around to doing what it is we really love.

I'm not sure to what extent I buy the claim that the DWYL approach is what results in checking email when sick or working on weekends. I think that tends to be more a matter of how technology and productivity tools have changed the share of work. On the one hand, my employer puts into my hands a company paid device which lets me check my email, Facebook, and my favorite blogs during dull meetings or scraps of free time. On the other, this puts me on the hook to answer questions at odd moments when they come up. My answering emails even on "off" hours makes it easier for me to have hours off, and means that there's less need to extra backup people to know everything that I know. Sure, we can imagine a slower paced world in which questions that get asked at eight o'clock at night simply wait till the next day (or never get asked until then) but that would potentially be a somewhat less productive and lower paid world. And the fact is, I kind of like my pay the way it is. (And my company iPhone.)

However, I do think that the author captures an obvious point which people need to think about more in relation to the amount of free or low paid work which is wrung out of people who desperately want to get into some coveted profession.

I don't work in the high flying world of fashion (and when I interviewed at Apple some years back I decided it was not the place for me) but having spent ten years or more in Marketing at this point, one thing I can certainly attest to is that within the greater world of marketing everything wants the "creative" jobs and few people want the analytical ones. This means that the creative people (even if "creative" only means overseeing sports sponsorships and redesigning the colors on product packaging) are subject to longer work hours and constant turn-over, while those of us who are willing to do the math and stick to telling people how the business works have comparatively sane existences.

If I were going to give advice on how to pick a rewarding and successful career, it would be: find something you're good at that lots of people need and not many people want to do, and do that.

Part of the problem that the DWYL folks fall into, I think, is in defining "what you love" very narrowly. A few jobs back, someone else on the team at work was describing how she'd got there by saying, "I knew that what I wanted to do with my life was work in analytical marketing, and _______ Inc. is one of the legends in doing that well, so I'd been looking for a chance to get a job here."

This struck me, because -- although I quite enjoy my job and find it very interesting, and haven't exactly be casual in pushing my career over the years -- I'd never say that marketing analytics, or pricing specifically, is "what I want to do with my life". Some of this is because it seems to me kind of narrow to define one's life so much by one's profession. But the other reason is that it seems to me that it defines the profession itself rather narrowly. The reasons why I enjoy my work could be listed off as:
- I enjoy work where I need to understand some complex topic, draw conclusions, and then teach what I've learned to others
- I enjoy work where I can work on projects for a while and then get them done and work on something else
- I enjoy doing work that involve inquiry into how things works and fixing problems
- I enjoy getting to understand the problems that people having and coming up with ways to solve those problems

Those are all very general things, but they're what cause me to enjoy my job. That they are so general means that, while having done pricing for a number of years not it makes a lot of career sense to stick with it going forward since I'm something of an expert at what I do, there are honestly an awful lot of things I could do which would provide somewhat similar challenges and satisfactions.

Too often, I think people settle on one fairly exciting looking way of using their talents and providing a sense of satisfaction, and decide that doing that job is the only way for them to be really fulfilled. While if one takes a more general approach to "what am I good at" and "what gives me a sense of satisfaction" there are a lot of jobs that one could love.

The Steve Jobs quote which people often cite on this topic is:

Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do.

However I think there's a certain ambiguity there as to whether you need to figure out what you would love to "be" and go try to be that profession, or figure out what it is in your job that is loveable, and love it so that you will be motivated to do great work.

This also addresses Tokumitsu's point about unlovable work. There may be a lot of professions which few people want to do in some aspirational sense. But in just about any profession you can identify what it is that you are good at, and what it means to do great work, and focus on those things in order to provide yourself with the motivation to always do good work rather than just-get-by work.

Rowling Fanfics Herself

Harry Potter readers were abuzz over the weekend as news leaked out of an interview with J. K. Rowling scheduled to be published later this week in which the author says that she regrets arranging the relationships as she did in her bestselling books:

In a new interview conducted by Emma Watson, Harry Potter author J.K. Rowling drops a bombshell: She’s not so sure she should have put Ron and Hermione together.

The shocking revelation came in the new issue of Wonderland, of which Watson is a guest editor this month. The comments were obtained by The Sunday Times.

Rowling says that she should have put Hermione and Harry together in the Harry Potter series instead of Hermione and Ron, according to the publication’s headline, which reads, “JK admits Hermione should have wed Harry.”

“I wrote the Hermione/Ron relationship as a form of wish fulfillment,” she says. “That’s how it was conceived, really. For reasons that have very little to do with literature and far more to do with me clinging to the plot as I first imagined it, Hermione ended up with Ron.”

“I know, I’m sorry,” she continued, “I can hear the rage and fury it might cause some fans, but if I’m absolutely honest, distance has given me perspective on that. It was a choice I made for very personal reasons, not for reasons of credibility. Am I breaking people’s hearts by saying this? I hope not.”

Watson didn’t seem shocked by these comments and agreed with her. “I think there are fans out there who know that too and who wonder whether Ron would have really been able to make her happy.”

Rowling also says that Ron and Hermione would have needed “relationship counseling.”

It's not unprecedented for famous authors to make changes in their already published works, either for reasons of story continuity or due to the reaction of fans. Charles Dickens famously re-wrote the ending of Great Expectations to mollify fans who were incensed with the original, in which there was no sign of Pip and Estella ever getting together. Dickens substituted a new ending in which suggested an eventual happier outcome.

In a somewhat different example, J.R.R. Tolkien revised his already very popular The Hobbit while he was in the course of writing The Lord of the Rings, realizing that if the ring that Bilbo gets from Gollum were The One Ring, Gollum would not willingly give up the ring even if he fairly lost the riddle game. Tolkien revised The Hobbit for future editions, and included the change into the story by having Bilbo lie to Gandalf, and his own memoir, about how he got the ring.

Precedented or not, however, Rowling's revelation, and the reactions to it, bother me for a couple reasons.

First, it seems like a problematic way for authors to go about discussing their work. One of the things about fiction is, of course, the it involves things that didn't really happen. In the reader's mind, the characters have a sort of real, living existence. We fill them out based on the bits of their characters revealed in the text by the author, and thus give them a move fully rounded form ourselves. An essential part of maintaining this illusion is the author behaving as if the world of the story actually does exist in some sense, rather than simply being a working out of the author's whims and desires.

Of course, readers will often have their own ideas of how things should have worked out. But even this is, in a sense, an example of how what the author does show suggests a character which goes beyond the limited events and characteristics actually on the page. When Leah Libresco writes that Harry Potter should have ended up with Luna Lovegood, it's because each of these characters has become fully rounded enough in her own mind that she thinks she can see what would have been a more appropriate match -- just as many relatives are often at pains to explain who exactly they think their loved ones would have been better off marrying instead of the oafs and oaf-ettes they chose.

What bugs me with Rowling's backtrack is that it spoils the illusion of fiction by pointing out that, at the end of the day, the characters do whatever the author makes them do. When she says that she wishes she'd paired the characters up differently, and that the way that she did things was really just wish fulfillment, she makes the books seem less like a world and more like an elaborate role playing game.

Of course, this wouldn't be the first time that Rowling has addressed her own works as if the text doesn't matter. She is, after all, the one who created waves with the "Dumbledore is gay!" revelation, which constituted a revelation because however much it may have been in her mind she never bothered to include any hint of it in the text.

Secondly, on the merits, I have to say that I don't find the proposed change all that interesting. It's not that I'm deeply invested in the existing pairings of Harry Potter characters. The characterization of the books didn't strike me as at a level to give one strong feelings about which relationships "worked" and which didn't, unless it was because one identified with certain characters. But the sense in which the Ron-Hermione relationship worked in the context of the structure of the books is that one of the dangers the books always faced was that the entire fictional world was All About Harry. If, out of the three main characters (Ron, Hermione and Harry) you paired Hermione and Harry in a romantic relationship, this would make the tendency even more extreme and you'd find yourself wondering why Ron is bothered with as a character anyway. He'd become an accessory: Comes with loyal best friend!

The fact that Harry is an outsider to their relationship (and that his primary romantic connection is with a fairly minor character) helps to balance Harry's outsize place in the world that Rowling created. Make Hermione fall in love with Harry instead of Ron, and the books become more of an exercise in Harry-worship than an ensemble story -- with Hermione being validated as an important character by being allowed to pair up with Harry.

Cruel Beauty drawing winners!

I threw all the names into Diana's tasseled hat, and she and Isabel picked our winners.

Diana picked Melanie B.!
Isabel picked Kelly!

UPDATE: Melanie said that since she'd already bought a copy, she hadn't meant to enter, so the new winner is: Jenny!

Please drop us an email at darwincatholic(at)gmail.com, and we'll get your copies in the mail as soon as they're delivered to us. I just got a shipping confirmation email from the independent bookstore that was hosting the signing; I ordered them three weeks ago and I happen to know that they were all signed about a week ago. Meanwhile, my daughter is already playing Hanon's piano exercises from the book I bought off Amazon yesterday. And people wonder why small bookstores are in decline...

I Swear...

I need some author's guidance from people with extensive experience in other languages. I'm looking for an understanding of profanity/vulgarity in French, German and Russian, most especially if you can comment on profanity and vulgarity that would have been used 100 years ago (during the Great War.)

Thus far I've done a certain amount of reading around about this in regards to French, and my initial impression is that French does not have nearly as much variety of profanity or vulgarity as English. I came across "merde" and "zut", neither of which is apparently all that bad. Is there anything else out there? That seems pretty tame compared to English in which the world wars brought "fuck" in its many manifestations into general usage. (I gather the Australians are often blamed for this, but who is to say.)

What is out there for German and Russian? Am I simply spoiled by English? Do we have an unusual range of things to call people and exclaim?