Grim's Hall Book Club: Franklin/Wife of Bath's Tale

Grim's Hall Book Club: The Fraklin's Tale and The Wife of Bath's Tale by Geoffrey Chaucer

We looked at The Franklin's Tale and The Wife of Bath's Tale as well this week.

I wanted to include these because there was so much interest in Chaucer associated with our discussion about the descriptions of women in The Knight's Tale and The Miller's Tale. One of the things that you may not know about Chaucer unless you read the whole of The Canterbury Tales is that he chases the questions of men and women all the way around, trying to view them from every side. So, you have loyal wives and disloyal wives; you have devoted husbands and scoundrels; you have tales of courtly love, and ribald stories; you view it from the perspective of the Church, and from very earthy perspectives.

The Wife of Bath's Tale shows some signs of being among Chaucer's favorites. For one thing, he gives her an extraordinary prologue! It's as long as some of the tales by itself, and contains a remarkable number of well developed theological arguments. It also includes some ribald "advice" on how to chew up a husband who gives you trouble, although it advises also that you accord with one in peace once he stops trying to boss you around. That last bit of advice is the most important, and makes up the subject of the actual story.

The story is Arthurian, and treats the question of "What women want most." What it proves that they want most is sovereignty: in Chaucer's version of this story, over their men as well as themselves. This is not the only version of this story, however, and in many versions it is simply to be sovereign over themselves.

Since we all read Cassandra as well, I'd like to mention this piece, which was a guest post at the blog of the lady who wrote the 'frigid wife' piece she cited earlier this week. The man who wrote the guest post took his lady up on the challenge to read some romance novels, which would explore the same question -- "What do women want?" He discovers that what they want is men who are "tall," who "can't be bald," who "move in without invitation and touch" (though noting that only the hero is welcome to do this! The same quality that makes the hero more attractive makes the villain wicked and hateful), be "preternaturally competent and successful at everything," "Have money," etc. But then he gets to this one:

2. Let her rescue herself.

This surprised me. I was under the impression that the hero’s role in romances was to rescue the heroine. But in all of these books the heroine has the most significant role in her own triumph over adversity.

Ah, well, that's the real trick, isn't it? The male figure in this story isn't the hero. He's the love interest. The damsel in distress is still the damsel; but the difference between a story written by a man and a story written by a woman is that in the women-written romances, the woman rescues herself.

What is the man for, then? He's the love interest. That's all, really; love is important enough that he doesn't need to do more than love and be loved.

The Wife of Bath's Tale puts the lady in the role of the rescuer, even of the knight. In learning to serve her and be guided by her, the knight -- it is usually Sir Gawain, in this tale, though Chaucer doesn't name him -- finds a lady love who is both beautiful to him and faithful, though at first he took her to be rather otherwise.

In The Franklin's Tale, we have a story with some resonance today: it is the story of a military wife whose husband is deployed, and who finds herself being pursued by a young squire who develops an ardent fascination with her. She is loyal to her husband and true, but finds herself responding to his flirtation with a playful promise she takes to be impossible. The squire arranges to have a wizard and illusionist make the impossible appear to come true, and then reminds the lady of her promise to give her love to him.

The lady's response is virtuous: she considers, but rejects, suicide, and instead confesses everything to her husband so they may think about the matter together. The knight who is her husband takes her honor to be as important as his own, and says that she must keep her word having given it. In spite of the sorrow and pain he feels, and the shame this will bring on him, he counsels her to be as bound by her word as he would be by his own.

She goes to do this, but is so upset by it that the squire is moved by her pain and love for her husband to release her from her vow. The wizard, in return, is moved by the squire's mercy, and releases the young man from his debt. The tale ends:

"Masters, this question would I ask you now:
Which was most generous, do you think, and how.
Pray tell me this before you farther wend.
I can no more, my tale is at an end."

It's a good question. Is the knight the most generous, to put his lady's honor at the level of his own? Is the lady the most generous, to have loved her husband so much as to trust him with her sorrow? Is the squire the most generous, to lay aside his claim on the lady in honor of the truth of her heart? Or is it the illusionist, who has a legitimate claim on the squire that the squire brought on himself by wickedness, but who lets it go when he sees the squire abandoning his evil?

Nelson Lee

Grim's Hall Book Club: Nelson Lee's Three Years Among the Comanches:

Quite a story! The most memorable scene for me is the shipwreck, early in the tale, where Lee describes hanging from the mast and watching the swirling waters below. What was the part that sticks with you?

The question attending Lee's book is whether or not it is legitimate. It would be welcome, in a sense, to suppose that it wasn't: then we could dismiss the various cruelties, especially toward babies, as being simple legends. Indeed, one of the oddities is the cruelty toward babies; we see that with tales about the Comanches, but normally frontier stories suggest that the Indians kept captured children and raised them, even if they slaughtered adults or traded them as slaves.

So is it legitimate? The Handbook of Texas, Online, says:

Of this probably spurious classic work, Walter Prescott Webb stated that "there is no better description of the life of the Texas Rangers than that of Nelson Lee." The book has since been a source for several writers about Comanche culture. But in 1982 anthropologist Melburn D. Thurman called Lee's account of Comanche ceremonies "blatantly erroneous" and demonstrated that Ernest Wallace and E. Adamson Hoebel's discussion of the "Comanche" Green Corn Ceremony in The Comanches: Lords of the South Plains (1952) employed questionable data from Lee's book. Though noted Indian scholars have long identified the Comanches as a nonsedentary and therefore nonagricultural people, Lee narrated to his New York editors that Comanches planted corn, beans, and tobacco. Other wildly erroneous claims abound. Lee said that the Comanches wrote hieroglyphics on tree bark; built villages with central squares, streets, and houses of important men located on the squares; and resolved irreconcilable differences between two adversaries by lashing them together with a cord and requiring them to fight to the death. Accordingly, Thurman and other specialists of Plains Indians disputed Lee's captivity claims and, by extension, other claims he makes concerning his exploits.

I'm left admiring the quality of the tale, but I think we have to believe that some of the wilder stories were put in to make it salable.

Yet the Rangers have always liked this book, and still like it, as evidenced by the fact that it's posted on their website. What do you think?

Star Wars in Old Norse

Tattúínárdœla saga:

Via Lars Walker, a highly unusual saga in Old Norse:

After this killing, for which Anakinn’s owner (and implied father) refuses to pay compensation, Anakinn’s mother, an enslaved Irish princess, foresees a great future for Anakinn as a “jeði” (the exact provenance of this word is unknown but perhaps represents an intentionally humorous Irish mispronunciation of “goði”). This compels Anakinn to recite his first verse:

Þat mælti mín móðir,
at mér skyldi kaupa
fley ok fagrar árar
fara á brott með jeðum,
standa upp í stafni,
stýra dýrum xwingi,
halda svá til hafnar,
hǫggva mann ok annan.

There are quite a few more posts on the blog, with most of the text being in the Old Norse. It's a fairly plausible bit, actually: the dialogue is just what the sagas should contain.

Honor is Absent

The Absence of Honor:

Perhaps Dan Riehl qualifies as a "conservative blogger" in some sense, but not in any sense that matters to me. If you're willing to dispense with the idea of not calling for the death of the injured wives and children of your political foes, you've already walked away from everything I ever wanted to conserve.

In his comments section, Riehl justifies himself: "I've been watching you high-minded twirps get your lunch money stolen by the Left for years."

That's not true: who won the fight on Iraq, and on holding out in Iraq long enough for the good to come? It was those who fought with honor, and who by honor won the victory both here and in Iraq itself. We sometimes fought hard, against our foes; we didn't wage war on their wives and children.

Yes, the opposition does; we've seen just such war waged on then-Governor Palin and her children. Perhaps in part due to such tactics, Obama won an election. That happens; you can't win 'em all. Neither Obama nor his allies nor his policies will last more than a brief season -- if he manages to enact any policies at all. His ideas were exhausted when he arrived, and they have already been broken by the change in economic fortune. These policies are in rapid retreat across the world. This is the end of the age of his kind; you will soon see the last of them, whatever you do.

Lots of the commenters reference Alinsky in support of Riehl's tactic. That's mere power worship, to say that it worked once, and therefore we "must" follow to compete. We need not. What will win the next election is the economy and the cancer of Federal spending promises; all the Alinsky tactics in the world will not save the candidate on the wrong side of that issue.

Alinsky dedicated his work to Lucifer. Take him at his word, and take his word as a signpost as to where his road may take you. The Devil is granted an hour now and then, but that doesn't mean he's won the war, or that it's time to change your flag. Do what is right, and have faith.

WTF? Jefferson

I'm Sorry, But This Is A Really Strange Thing To Do:

The Texas Board of Education drops Thomas Jefferson from its early modern political philosophy (folded into "social studies," in high school). They add in his place John Calvin, Blackstone, and St. Thomas Aquinas.

Now, obviously the point of this is to play down the importance of the Enlightenment, and to restore the position of certain religious thinkers, and of the powerful heritage of traditional British law. That's OK: we are probably at the right moment to rethink the Enlightenment's place in our heritage, and to perhaps revise downward its importance somewhat.

However, if you were going to do that, wouldn't you get rid of one of the other Enlightenment thinkers, given that you're teaching students who live in the United States of America? Does a citizen of the United States and the great state of Texas really need to know more about Charles de Montesquieu's thinking than he knows about Thomas Jefferson's? Really?

Dangerous Work

Dangerous Work:

Via Arts & Letters Daily, a story about working in the Arctic.

If something happens, and you leave your vehicle, you will not be rescued in time. You do not leave the road; to leave the road is to die. You are given an orange safety vest, so they can find your body, in case you don’t listen.

The road is usually a frozen river. To break through the ice and fall into the river is yet another way to die. Sometimes the road is the frozen-over Arctic Ocean. When you break through that ice, you sink. They say it’s the air bubbles in your decomposing body that cause it to float, and in the sub-freezing water of the Arctic Ocean, human bodies don’t decompose. If you fall into the Arctic Ocean, your corpse may be well-preserved, but no one will risk a life, or expend the cost, to retrieve it.

Suppose you do fall in. By the time you reach the surface, the hole you fell into may have frozen over already. If you can punch through ice with lungs full of 35° water, maybe you deserve to live, but then you’re soaking wet in subzero temperatures, and you will spend your last few conscious minutes too delirious with hypothermia to be thankful that your next of kin will have something to bury.

Once, I asked a guy who’d worked up there for twenty-five years if he’d known of anyone who’d fallen through the ice and lived. He could think of only two.... [one] rescued driver immediately went to the bar, where he wasted no time telling his story. A number of his listeners didn’t believe him and even took umbrage with the tale, at which point, the rescued driver became aggrieved, and a fight broke out. Less than twelve hours after he was submerged beneath the ice of the Arctic Ocean — a situation that no one in recent history had ever survived — the rescued driver was nearly beaten to death in a dingy bar. He was taken back to the same hospital he had just left, and this time, he was there for two months.

The story about walking to the Post Office is amazing, too. The description of the place as resembling the Moon reminds me of FOB Hammer; and indeed, it suggests that someday we really will go places like the moon, or Mars, to live and work. We already do.

Cooking with Cast Iron:

Instapundit links this enthusiastic chef on cast iron cooking.

Here at the Hall, I cook with little else. I have a few stainless steel pots that I use for things like warming sauces, but any serious cooking is done on black iron. I use it for roasts, steaks, etc., as everyone else does; but it also works extremely well for quesadillas and grilled sandwiches, any sort of frying, chili or stew, and so forth.

A recent discovery: cast iron works even better than having a pizza stone for baking deliciously crisp pizza crusts. Make your pie up in a skillet, and bake it in the skillet. It comes out perfect every time. You don't even have to oil the skillet -- just toss a bit of corn meal in the bottom so nothing sticks.

Pairings

Pairings:

Pairing one:

Gallup: more and more Americans think Global Warming is exaggerated.

TWS: A five page report on Climate Change fraud and error.

Pairing two:

In Kentucky, if you don't vote for 'revenue enhancement', your district doesn't get school money.

In Kansas City, bankruptcy concerns close half of the schools.

Death of Euro

The Death of the Euro:

The Economist has a five page article on the troubles in Europe. They call for a limited bailout, coupled with new regulatory powers that would keep Greece-type situations from recurring.

Arts & Letters Daily interprets the article thus: "The Euro is finished."

That's not what the article says; but it may very well be the truth. Arts & Letters Daily adds this and this to its reasoning.

Funny Dowd

The Funniest Thing She's Ever Written:

From Maureen Dowd, on her trip to Saudi Arabia:

Couldn’t Mecca, I asked the royals, be opened to non-Muslims during the off-season?

The problem with her being a print journalist is that there were consequently no cameras in the room. That would have been something to see.

Hooah!

Hooah!

Bill Whittle, in rare form -- as he might be, speaking of one of his own.

My brother Steve is a year younger than me. Right around age 13 Stevie used to take a tent, his dog and a shotgun and hitchhike from our home in South Florida out into the Everglades. He’d usually be gone or two or three days. Did my mom worry about him? Yes she did, but on some level I guess she preferred to raise an independent boy who was living his life to the fullest rather than perpetually trying to defend a life-long infant.

A few months ago I heard in passing that Steve had been on his way to work one morning when he passed a car that was on fire with the driver still inside. He pulled over, grabbed his crowbar, smashed the window and with the help of another passing citizen pulled her out and saved her life. He never thought to mention this to me.

Now that's the kind of boy a man could be proud to raise.

Correcting the Ill-Mannered

Correcting the Ill-Mannered:

I was visiting beautiful Athens, Georgia, today; and after I finished my business there I went to get some coffee. On approach to the coffee shop I noticed a homeless man sitting at one of the tables -- homeless, but with enough wealth to buy a cup of coffee, and therefore with every right to occupy one of their seats for a while.

Just as I was passing by, someone in a nearby car leaned on their horn in displeasure. As they stopped, the homeless man yelled out: "This ain't New York City!"

"Hear, hear," I said, and we exchanged a smile as I went to get my coffee.

So, I put it to you: is this a wonderful thing about America, where even the homeless may buy dignity for the price of a cup of coffee, and chide the wealthy for their rudeness? Or is it a wonderful thing about the South, where being downtrodden does not mean that you will suffer poor manners?

I suppose it could be both.

The Holmgang

The Holmgang:

Our friend Lars Walker has finished his series on the history of the Holmgang. You might wish to read through the three-part series:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

I do have one mild comment, wherein my understanding differs from our learned friend: Germanic society had both "duels" and "judicial combats." The duel -- whereby two men settle an affair of honor -- was known in every such culture except, oddly, the Anglo-Saxons (see Henry Charles Lea, The Duel and the Oath, p. 111 & 115). The judicial combat was to settle the truth of criminal charges: also called "the ordeal of battle" (or "wager of battle), it was a final appeal to arms in cases where a man felt he was being handled unjustly by the law -- or in cases too serious for the swearing of oaths by even the most honorable men to be considered adequate evidence.

I'll quote Lea on the Holmgang, simply because it will amuse some of you to see one of my earlier namesakes fare poorly in the test. (Not the earliest Grim, however!)

Among the heathen Norsemen, indeed, the holm-gang, or single combat, was so universal an arbiter that it was recognized as conferring a right where none pre-existed. Any athelete, who confided in his strength and dexterity with his weapons, could acquire property by simply challenging its owner to surrender his land or fight for it. When Iceland, for instance, was in process of settlement, Kraku Hreidar sailed thither, and on sighting land invoked Thor to assign him a tract of ground which he would forthwith acquire by duel. He was shipwrecked on reaching the shore, and was hospitably received by a compatriot named Havard, with whom he passed the winter. In the spring he declared his purpose of challenging Sæmund Sudureyska for a sufficient holding, but Havard dissuaded him, arguing that this mode of acquiring property rarely prospered in the end, and Eirek of Goddolom succeded in quieting him by giving him land enough. Others of these hardy sea-rovers were not so amenable to reason as Kraku. When Hallkell came to Iceland and passed the winter with his brother Ketel-biorn, the latter offered him land on which to settle, but Hallkell disdained so peaceful a proposition, and preferred to summon a neighbor named Grim to surrender his property or meet him in the holm-gang. Grim accepted the defiance, was slain, and Hallkell was duly installed as his heir.

This section goes on for about half a page, offering additional evidence; Mr. Walker alludes to it in his part three, where he speaks of a class of professional duelists who had so prospered. However, this was not the judicial use of combat: no one here was accused of a crime, or proving his innocence by ordeal of battle. In all cases, these fights were about settling a private dispute, not a public or criminal matter.

Snowmelt, Cherokee National Forest

Snowmelt, Cherokee National Forest:

Thor's Hall on Gun Mags

Thor's Hall on Gun Magazines:

It's not just gun rags that do this:

HOW GUN MAGAZINES WRITE ARTICLES

Instruction From The Editor To The Journalist:

Frangible Arms just bought a four page color ad in our next issue. They sent us their latest offering, the CQB MK-V Tactical Destroyer. I told Fred to take it out to the range to test. He’ll have the data for you tomorrow.

Feedback From Technician Fred:

The pistol is a crude copy of the World War II Japanese Nambu type 14 pistol, except it’s made from unfinished zinc castings. The grips are pressed cardboard. The barrel is unrifled pipe. There are file marks all over the gun, inside and out.

Only 10 rounds of 8mm ammunition were supplied. Based on previous experience with a genuine Nambu, I set up a target two feet down range. I managed to cram four rounds in the magazine and one in the chamber. I taped the magazine in place, bolted the pistol into a machine rest, got behind a barricade, and pulled the trigger with 20 feet of 550 cord. I was unable to measure the trigger pull because my fish scale tops out at 32 pounds. On the third try, the pistol fired. From outline of the holes, I think the barrel, frame, magazine, trigger and recoil spring blew through the target. The remaining parts scattered over the landscape.

I sent the machine rest back to the factory to see if they can fix it, and we need to replace the shooting bench for the nice people who own the range. I’ll be off for the rest of the day. My ears are still ringing. I need a drink.

Article Produced By The Journalist:

The CQB MK-V Tactical Destroyer is arguably the deadliest pistol in the world. Based on a combat proven military design, but constructed almost entirely of space age alloy, it features a remarkable barrel design engineered to produce a cone of fire, a feature much valued by Special Forces world wide. The Destroyer shows clear evidence of extensive hand fitting. The weapon disassembles rapidly without tools. At a reasonable combat distance, I put five holes in the target faster than I would have thought possible. This is the pistol to have if you want to end a gunfight at all costs. The gun is a keeper, and I find myself unable to send it back.

The Mystic and the Muse

The Mystic and the Muse:

Mr. Douthat, whom I first encountered only last week, has a most interesting piece on mysticism.

Mysticism is dying, and taking true religion with it. Monasteries have dwindled. Contemplative orders have declined. Our religious leaders no longer preach the renunciation of the world; our culture scoffs at the idea. The closest most Americans come to real asceticism is giving up chocolate, cappuccinos, or (in my own not-quite-Francis-of-Assisi case) meat for lunch for Lent.

This, at least, is the stern message of Luke Timothy Johnson, writing in the latest issue of the Catholic journal Commonweal. As society has become steadily more materialistic, Johnson declares, our churches have followed suit, giving up on the ascetic and ecstatic aspects of religion and emphasizing only the more worldly expressions of faith. Conservative believers fixate on the culture wars, religious liberals preach social justice, and neither leaves room for what should be a central focus of religion — the quest for the numinous, the pursuit of the unnamable, the tremor of bliss and the dark night of the soul.

Yet by some measures, mysticism’s place in contemporary religious life looks more secure than ever. Our opinion polls suggest that we’re encountering the divine all over the place. In 1962, after a decade-long boom in church attendance and public religiosity, Gallup found that just 22 percent of Americans reported having what they termed “a religious or mystical experience.” Flash forward to 2009, in a supposedly more secular United States, and that number had climbed to nearly 50 percent.

In a sense, Americans seem to have done with mysticism what we’ve done with every other kind of human experience: We’ve democratized it, diversified it, and taken it mass market. No previous society has offered seekers so many different ways to chase after nirvana, so many different paths to unity with God or Gaia or Whomever.

He starts thus, but ends better: because his ending has a notion in it of what a mystic might really be.

...that at any time, in any place, it’s possible to encounter the divine, the revolutionary and the impossible — and have your life completely shattered and remade.

What would that mean? None other than that "the heaviest hind may easily come silently and suddenly upon me in a lane," as Saint Mary is reported to have said to King Alfred. It has its clearest expression in the myths of Arthur, where a knight hears a bell deep in a forest, and follows its sound to whatever adventure it leads; or he sees a white stag, and takes the chase to whatever destruction or rebirth it brings him. The mystic is at the root of the tales of Arthur, more than elsewhere.

It is, in other words, that singluar devotion to the chase: to the quest. It is that which leads you beyond the fields that you know, and to strange places that may remake you. That way lies Elfland; or stranger kingdoms, yet.

...the Red Cross Knight climbed with the hermit to the top of the hill and looked out across the valley. There against the evening sky they saw a mountaintop that touched the highest heavens. It was crowned with a glorious palace, sparkling like stars and circled with walls and towers...

To which St. George, in service to the Faerie Queene, might not yet ascend: for he had deeds to do in this world.

People scoff at these stories, as they do -- a bit -- at C. S. Lewis when he wrote in The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe of a professor who chided the children to use "logic!" when presented with the impossible. Lucy, the honest child, was the one who spoke of something that could not be; and her honesty should be a guide to the value of her testimony in the face of impossible things as well as with possible ones. In other words, we might yield up our ideas of what is possible in the face of the word of an honest woman, or even a very honest girl.

Last week I attended a lecture on metaphysical modal logic by Dr. E. J. Lowe, who is a fine man and a learned. Modal logic treats what is necessary and what is possible in the world. The good doctor asserts that what is possible and necessary can be understood by grasping the essential truth of the thing being examined; if you know what a thing essentially is, you will know what is necessary for it to exist, and what it may possibly do.

He mentioned bronze sculptures as an example. A sculpture is different from a lump of bronze in several ways; one of them is that its form may not change much if it is to continue being a sculpture. He contrasted a sculpture of Socrates, versus shooting two cannons full of bronze so that -- for an instant! -- they happened to form a similar picture of Socrates in the air.

I had a chance to question him. He agreed to my suggestion that one of the essential qualities of a sculpture was that it was put into a form by an artist (or, if you follow Aristotle, that a form was put into it). I asked him to imagine a case where the two cannons were full of hot bronze, being fired by Jackson Pollack. He takes the largest fused piece, and puts it on a pedestal, calling it his sculpture.

Randomness is not form: it is, logically, the opposite of form. Therefore, we are either mistaken in our definition of what is essential to sculpture... or our modal logic is lying to us about what is necessary and possible in this world.

The good doctor argued that we should simply refrain from calling this "sculpture," in order to preserve the definition. That is the one unsatisfying answer. Both of the alternatives proposed are true: human definitions cannot really capture the world, and therefore a logic based on human definitions cannot tell us what is necessary, nor what is possible.

Besides, Pollack's proposed definition of sculpture is contained within the definition: if sculpture means "having form," then it doesn't mean "without form." Pollack could draw the meaning from the negation of the definition. Modal logic, then, becomes not a proof, but a dare. "We say this cannot be done: prove us wrong." And so we ought to, if we can!

Preserving the concept at the expense of our actual experience is a lie. It is what Edward Abbey called "Indoor Philosophy": it defies the world, because the world won't live up to our ideas about how the world should be. Yet the world remains: and the very honest girl is honest whether she reports the mailman, or an angel.

Lamento di Tristano - La Rotta...

UPDATE: Related is this article on certain philosophers versus Darwin's evolutionary biology. Philosophy is very powerful, and I'm sure all of you know how devoted I am to the art; but you should always start your philosophy with experience and evidence. You should never start simply with concepts, and then instruct the world that it is wrong to behave differently than your reason says it ought to do.

Grim's Hall BC Followup

Grim's Hall Book Club: Next Work

When I first proposed the concept for the club, I had intended that the second book would be Nelson Lee's Three Years Among the Comanches. I haven't been able to find an etext version of that, however, and I'd like to try to maintain as much of the club as free and readily accessible online, to ensure we can all participate.

When we discussed it last, several of you endorsed Plutarch, and several Chaucer. I'm going to tap Eric to try to pull a few selections from the works of Plutarch online -- it's a very long work taken as a whole, but Eric's expertise in these things Roman will serve us well.

While he's doing that, why don't we go ahead and do a couple of the Canterbury Tales? Based on our recent discussion of Chaucer, I'd like to do The Franklin's Tale and The Wife of Bath's Tale. These are not so very long -- we won't need weeks to read them -- so why not try to aim for those for next week, i.e., a week from this Sunday?

Following that, we'll tackle Plutarch, if Eric has prepared for us a good selection of lives to consider.

A Clash of Foodstuffs

A Clash of Cultures:

Mr. Brooks says the Tea Party members are "Wal-Mart Hippies." I take it he thinks that's a clever line, because I heard him repeat it while watching that clip from the Colbert show a few days ago.

So, what does it mean to shop at Wal-Mart?

In the grocery section of the Raynham supercenter, 45 minutes south of Boston, I had trouble believing I was in a Walmart. The very reasonable-looking produce, most of it loose and nicely organized, was in black plastic bins (as in British supermarkets, where the look is common; the idea is to make the colors pop). The first thing I saw, McIntosh apples, came from the same local orchard whose apples I’d just seen in the same bags at Whole Foods....

I started looking into how and why Walmart could be plausibly competing with Whole Foods, and found that its produce-buying had evolved beyond organics, to a virtually unknown program—one that could do more to encourage small and medium-size American farms than any number of well-meaning nonprofits, or the U.S. Department of Agriculture, with its new Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food campaign. Not even Fishman, who has been closely tracking Walmart’s sustainability efforts, had heard of it. “They do a lot of good things they don’t talk about,” he offered.

Mr. Brooks is also wrong to say that the Tea Party has a 'mostly negative' agenda: it actually has a positive document that explains precisely how it wants the government to function. It's called "the Constitution of the United States." The thing is, these crazy Tea Party people take it seriously -- they really want the government to function just that way, Tenth Amendment and everything.

Jews/Tolkien Redux

Other Writers on the Jews and Tolkien:

We discussed this issue a few days ago. The main thing seemed to me that the Jews aren't really bothered by "medieval" swords' having been borne against their ancestors, but rather by what their ancestors did with swords during Israel's heroic age. After the Holocaust, their own heroic tradition must seem alien and alienating; whereas Tolkien's tradition, because it was the root of Just War theory and the idea that heroes should protect noncombatants, would only make more sense after World War One and Two.

A few more writers have considered the question since, and some of them (not really Wonkette) have serious thoughts about the issue.

Gene Expression challenges the assertion that Jews don't write fantasy:

Is Christianity fundamentally more comfortable with the pagan than Judaism, as the author above asserts? I doubt it. The basics of Northern fantasy draw from a rich peasant cultural folk tradition which the Christian church ignored at best, and attempted to suppress at worst. The tradition was most robust in the regions which were Christianized last, so that relatively thick cultural memory remained from which to draw during the 19th century Romantic revival of national traditions. It is notable that Ireland in particular in the British Isles preserved its own mythic tradition; I chalk this up to the indigenous origins of Christianization, so that the culture-bearers of the past were not superseded by missionaries who dismissed the indigenous stories as being part & parcel of the pagan intellectual edifice. Tolkien was in part trying to create an Anglo-Saxon mythic cycle from fragments such as Beowulf and Scandinavian analogs. The Irish have no need of reconstruction. Culturally the Jews are very distant from their peasant origins, and naturally much more detached from their pagan past than Northern Europeans. For the past 1,000 years Ashkenazi Jews have been an urban minority, as insulated from the world of faerie as Christian priests. No wonder that Jewish authors, such as Neil Gaiman, draw upon Northern motifs. How popular is urban fantasy as a distinct genre anyway?

Russ Douthat of the New York Times asks why Jews would want a Jewish Tolkien at all.

But once you add up these insights, they jostle uneasily with Weingrad’s professed desire for a Jewish Tolkien, or a Jewish Lewis. What he seems to have demonstrated is that modern fantasy depends on Christianity, or at least a Christian-pagan synthesis of some kind, for its forms, conventions, and traditions. This suggests that you could write a novel that embodies a kind of Jewish critique of fantasy — in much the same way that China Miéville’s novels are a kind of Marxist critique of Tolkien, Marion Zimmer Bradley’s “Mists of Avalon” was a feminist critique of Arthurian-based fantasy, Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy is an atheist’s critique of C.S. Lewis, and so on. (And indeed, Weingrad’s essay reads Lev Grossman’s new novel “The Magicians” as a kind of crypto-Jewish critique of Narnia and/or Harry Potter.) But the genre itself will remain irreducably Christian, and a truly Judaic fantasy would have to belong to, or invent, a different genre altogether.

Those two posts seem to run straight at each other! So-called "urban fantasy" is a new idea, actually; we used to call that genre "horror," because it was meant to be horrible. Lately it has become fashionable not to dread vampires, but to envy them. The werewolf was supposed to be a symbol of what it would be like for man to lose his humanity, and be turned back into a beast without reason or self-control. It has been converted, lately, a symbol of what it might mean for a man to be more in harmony with nature. Today we are asked to imagine the joy of running down a deer under a full moon, and drinking its blood.

(Mark will thank me for not quoting Chesterton here, on nature religions: "A man loves Nature in the morning for her innocence and amiability, and at nightfall, if he is loving her still, it is for her darkness and her cruelty. He washes at dawn in clear water as did the Wise Man of the Stoics, yet, somehow at the dark end of the day, he is bathing in hot bull's blood, as did Julian the Apostate.")

That's fantasy, perhaps, but it's not heroic fantasy. It is the notion of heroism that bothers. It is interesting that so many would rather be monsters than dare be heroes. That says much about how difficult it is to be a hero, and how very difficult to believe in one.

It is harder, I think, for some people to believe in heroes than vampires. That is true even though they might meet a hero in the street, while vampires do not exist.

Americaland

Americaland:

When we lived in China, there was a theme park near Hang Zhou that was called "Americaland." It was supposed to be a place you could visit to see what that strange place called America was like. No one would ever give us directions as to how to get there, probably embarrassed about what the stereotypes would reveal.

It's not only the Chinese who have these dreams:

Americaland is real place for British writers, it is built from thousands of fragments of American TV, films, music, comics and other cultural artefacts. It’s a place filled with 1950’s dinners and long desolate highways among other things. And its just as imaginary as a Britain filled with red telephone boxes and bowler hatted business men.

And Swedes! I somehow entirely missed this band called "the Rednex," whom I found tonight entirely by accident while searching for a traditional tune. They are nothing except a Swedish projection on American mythology, especially the mythology of the West.





(The underlying tune is "Orpheus in the Underworld," which was used in Can-can shows across the West.)



(Note the rifles and dog sleds!)





This is a little bit shocking, like discovering that you've been made into a god by superstitious islanders in the South Seas.

A fertility god, at that!