Year: 2013

by Matt Sitman

In a review of Miles Hollingworth’s recent book, Saint Augustine of Hippo: An Intellectual Biography, Joseph Bottum sizes up the Christian thinker’s place in the history of the West:

To read The City of God is to realize Augustine was a great philosopher, of course. Maybe not quite in the absolute “A” class of Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, or Hegel, but not down at the next level, either—with the “B” class (but still great) likes of Marcus Aurelius, Francisco Suárez, and Friedrich Schiller. Call it the “A-minus” set of world-historical thinkers: Plotinus, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Hume, Wittgenstein, Augustine. But to read De Doctrina Christiana would convince anyone that Augustine belongs in the first gathering of theologians, the greatest of the many fine theological minds among the church fathers in Latin Christendom. There’s a reason, after all, that Thomas Aquinas and Martin Luther alike engage Augustine in a way they do no other theological thinker. Then, too, as the Confessions show, Augustine was among the last great classical stylists, trained in a rhetorical tradition that would cease to exist all too soon.

What’s more, he stood at the moment of the failure of Rome—dying as the Vandals besieged Hippo, his Roman city in North Africa—and he had the most significant historical event of 1,000 years to explain and translate into a lasting understanding of the human condition. But it’s somehow the combination of all this that makes Saint Augustine so central: What he wrote, joined with how he wrote, joined with when he wrote.

There is no Western civilization without him. He shapes our intellectual tradition in the way others who are so good they force themselves into our minds do.

(“The Conversion of St. Augustine” by Fra Angelico, via Wikimedia Commons)

by Jessie Roberts

Phil Hartman auditions for Saturday Night Live:

Excerpts from a lively oral history of SNL auditions:

JIMMY FALLON: In makeup, they go, “Hey, Jimmy, some advice: Lorne Michaels doesn’t laugh when you audition. So don’t let that throw you.” Then the audio guy, he goes, “Hey, little advice — Lorne doesn’t like to laugh.” I’m like, “O.K.” Then Marci [Klein, a longtime “SNL” producer] comes out: “Jimmy, they’re ready for you. But hey, a little advice for you. If Lorne doesn’t laugh, be cool.” I’m like, what is this guy’s problem? He’s doing a comedy show. Why does he not like to laugh?

CHERI OTERI: I felt good because I heard Lorne laugh a little bit. I saw him out of the corner of my eye, laughing his very subtle, subtle laughter. Almost regal laughter.

RACHEL DRATCH: I didn’t get it that year [of her first audition]. They hired Horatio [Sanz], Jimmy [Fallon] and Chris Parnell, and they said: “We’re not taking any women this year. But maybe next year.” I was at peace with it.

SETH MEYERS: They flew me all the way back to New York to meet with Lorne. I realized later that he was doing a final personality vet. He said, “Do you think you can live in New York?” And I thought, “Does anyone blow it at this stage?” Does anybody get this far in the process, and then is like, “It’s definitely New York? Well, if you guys can’t be flexible on that, I’m not sure if I can be flexible on that.”

WILL FERRELL: [Mr. Michaels] never really has a moment where he says, “So, welcome to the show.” He phrases it, “So, we’re bringing you to New York.” And I thought, God, another audition? And he goes, “Cheri’s going to be there, too.” And that’s when it hit me: Oh, my God. I got the gig. But I didn’t have a celebratory moment with him. Then I got self-conscious, like it came across that I didn’t care about getting the job. So I stood up real quick, and I’m like: “Well, gosh, thank you. I just want to shake your hand.” And he said, “Do whatever you have to do.”

A collection of audition tapes viewable online is here.

by Jessie Roberts

Loris Stein commemorates John O’Hara, whose novels, he says, “deserve to be much more famous than they are.” He describes the heroine of BUtterfield 8:

This heroine, Gloria Wandrous, is one of O’Hara’s true originals: a young woman endowed with beauty, a strong libido, and large sexual experience, who is neither a pornographic fantasy nor a femme fatale. To put it simplistically, Gloria is a sexual subject, not an object. Over the course of BUtterfield 8, we hear about threesomes, orgies, “Lesbians,” “fairies,” consensual rough sex, brutal sadism, abortions, even the new technique of artificial insemination—all from her point of view. Even more striking, we see Gloria in a close, erotically charged friendship with a man, Eddie Brunner, who loves her and is not her lover. Theirs is not the only such friendship in American fiction, but it is one of many touches that make the novel seem uncannily up-to-date, much more up-to-date than the “modernized” 1960 movie starring Elizabeth Taylor.

In the movie, Gloria is a call girl who wants to “go straight” and get married. But the Gloria of O’Hara’s novel is, crucially, not a prostitute, and she considers the prospect of marriage with deep ambivalence. Based on a real-life acquaintance of O’Hara’s named Starr Faithfull, Gloria is a creature of the great sexual revolution of the twentieth century—the one that occurred in the twenties, thanks to cars and speakeasies. To read O’Hara is to discover how much more people used to say and do, in private, than most novelists, even daring ones, could bring themselves to write. The publishers of BUtterfield 8 made O’Hara remove the word “fuck” from his manuscript (they seem to have replaced it with the phrase “stay with”). Even so, even now, you could hardly place the book on a high school syllabus.

(Image: movie poster for BUtterfield 8, via Wikimedia Commons)

by Jessie Roberts

Maria Popova digs up a 1974 interview with Ray Bradbury, above. One highlight, on writing:

I never went to college — I don’t believe in college for writers. The thing is very dangerous. I believe too many professors are too opinionated and too snobbish and too intellectual, and the intellect is a great danger to creativity … because you begin to rationalize and make up reasons for things, instead of staying with your own basic truth — who you are, what you are, what you want to be. I’ve had a sign over my typewriter for over 25 years now, which reads “Don’t think!” You must never think at the typewriter — you must feel. Your intellect is always buried in that feeling anyway.

by Jessie Roberts

Italian archaeologists are borrowing a page from Virgil and the ancient winemaker Columella in an attempt to make wine that tastes like it did in antiquity:

At the group’s vineyard, which should produce 70 litres at the first harvest, modern chemicals will be banned and vines will be planted using wooden Roman tools and will be fastened with canes and broom, as the Romans did.

Instead of fermenting in barrels, the wine will be placed in large terracotta pots – traditionally big enough to hold a man – which are buried to the neck in the ground, lined inside with beeswax to make them impermeable and left open during fermentation before being sealed shut with clay or resin.

“We will not use fermenting agents, but rely on the fermentation of the grapes themselves, which will make it as hit and miss as it was then – you can call this experimental archaeology,” said researcher Mario Indelicato, who is managing the programme.

by Tracy R. Walsh

Russell Saunders watched Peter Pan in its entirety for the first time and was shocked by its racism and sexism:

Popular media is full of beloved movies that are, in retrospect, embarrassing in some way. I remember a (straight) friend prevailing on me to watch Revenge of the Nerds with him (I’d never seen it), and then having to reconcile his remembered affection for the film with the offensively fey gay character, which he hadn’t really thought much of when he first saw it decades before. (I wasn’t all that worried about it.) Attitudes change, generally for the better in my opinion. Unless we want to constantly cull things from our culture (which I am loath to endorse), we have to address the mixed bag of good and bad that they will appear to be from the perspective of our contemporary vantage point.

But it still leaves me a bit stunned that something so obviously racist was made such a relatively short time ago and is still so universally embraced. For all the talk about whether or not Washington’s football team or Atlanta’s baseball team need new names, I would honestly have expected more attention paid to the much more overtly problematic content of a movie that has spawned a whole “fairies” franchise of its own. America’s attention to such things remains quite selective, it seems, and makes me wonder how much more attention I should be paying than I have up to this point.

by Jessie Roberts

Elizabeth L. Silver advocates the death of the ingénue in fiction:

I recently went to hear Isabel Allende speak about her latest novel, Maya’s Notebook. At the Q&A, a young aspiring female writer rose to ask a question that surprised a majority of the audience. “You write a lot of strong women in your books,” she said, before asking, “Has there been anyone who has influenced you?” Allende either didn’t understand the question or wanted to emphasize the lunacy of it, and after three attempts replied: “Do you know any weak women?” Needless to say, a resounding uproar of applause emerged from the previously unobtrusive audience. This is not a topic that is far from the consciousness of the literary establishment, nor is it one that should be. It is so prevalent on people minds and hearts precisely because of its relevance. Readers don’t want to see any more ingénues or stock characters. They want to see the people that they know, the strong women who populate their lives, because, as Isabel Allende so bluntly and perfectly stated, there really aren’t weak women.

I’m not naively suggesting that contemporary fiction has conclusively banished the ingénue from its pages; nor am I claiming that the character is close to her coffin in certain genres, but I am suggesting that that she should be. Fiction, as any vital art form, serves a purpose to reflect society in its emotional, environmental, and political nuances. It informs us, teaches us, reflects humanity in its reverie. If the ingénue, which may be dying in literary fiction, begins to fade in all genres of contemporary literature, if we accept the evolution of the young female protagonist in literature, we may stop expecting women off the page to play that stock role, as well. By exiling the word to the trash bin or perhaps feeling a little bit guilty whenever used, we might continue to represent women as they are – likeable or not. Powerful characters who sometimes want love, sometimes want power, ache with ambition and passion, refuse to be called ingénues, or any other pile of stock stereotypes. They are merely women who need no other label.

Update from a female reader:

Are Silver and Allende honestly trying to maintain that there are no weak women in the world? And therefore that modern writers know better than to create weak fictional women? My, my. I personally know a lot of weak women. Some of the even act like ingénues. To call them off-fictional limits is to degrade faction. And it doesn’t help women either. It’s not empowering; it’s patronizing, and I’m a little embarrassed that spokespersons like Silver and Allende are so lacking in confidence that they need to insist on valorized fictional females.