Any Poorer Than Dead

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ I Am the 99%

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Fri, 04 Nov 2011 13:52:00 +0000

Check out my latest post over at IMAGE's Good Letters blog. It's the most explicit statement about poverty and creativity I've been able to muster yet. I don't know why, but my Midwestern upbringing always makes me pause before writing about personal finances. I was raised to believe--and I still believe this--that one should be thankful because there are always people worse off than you.

So, for what it's worth....

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ I Am the 99%

Revisiting Abu Ghraib. This time in the class room.

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 13:50:00 +0000

This semester I'm honored to be teaching in Sweet Briar College's new Y:1 pilot program, a first-year seminar program that introduces students to the academic rigor we expect, while also helping them to become more digitally sophisticated. All of the students receive iPad2s for participating in the program, which they then must use to complete many of the course assignments.

I'm teaching a course titled "9/11 and the 'New Normal' Decade" with Spencer Bakich, a Professor of International Relations. He's a political scientist by training and I'm trained as a fiction writer, though my first book, A Good War is Hard to Find, (and second, which I'm finishing up now) are both nonfiction. So we both bring very different approaches to the table.

The theme for the Y:1 program is "Testing Tolerance," and so all four sections of the first-year seminar engage with it in some way or another. There's a course on the issue of Muslim immigration in Europe, Empire, and a course on the development of modern science, which covers a many of the foundational discoveries by Middle Eastern thinkers.

In order to drive home some of the larger themes that cut across all four sections of the seminar, we have programmed a film series. Tonight we will be showing Errol Morris' Standard Operating Procedure. I will introduce the film and lead discussion afterward.

It's been five years since I published my book on Abu Ghraib, and so returning to the incident and the issues that it raised (and still raises), has been surprisingly unsettling. Re-watching Morris' film last night, I felt a familiar outrage creeping in, a feeling that is very difficult to control. I'm going to do my best this evening to present the case of Abu Ghraib in as objective a light as possible, but I make no promises. It's even clearer to me now, eight years after the incidents took place, that the abuses inflicted by military police and interrogators was not the work of a "few bad apples," but driven by policy authorized by the highest levels of government.

It is also clearer to me now that close scrutiny of the motives for taking the hundreds of photographs which fueled the scandal are, as Susan Sontag wrote in her essay "Regarding the Torture of Others," a reflection of American cultural values that exist just beneath our otherwise benevolent surface. This is not to say that America and Americans are evil, but it is to say--and Morris' film reveals this over and over--that America's moral courage has been degraded.

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ Violence...Transferred

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Fri, 27 May 2011 04:35:00 +0000

Check out my latest post over at Image's Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog. This one is on Rene Girard, collective violence, scapegoats, and how they all relate to the killing of bin Laden--"Violence...Transferred"

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ Homemaker

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Sat, 26 Mar 2011 17:39:00 +0000

It's been a while, folks. This most recent post over at Good Letters will give you a sense as to why.

I've also been working on this: http://www.sbc.edu/blur

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ Homemaker

Marilynne Robinson talks writing and theology

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 02:20:00 +0000

Heart be still...

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ The Tablet and the Field

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 15:14:00 +0000

Check out my latest post over at Good Letters: The IMAGE blog. This is one is adapted from an essay I'm working on for my book, Pyramid Scheme: Making Art and Being Broke in America.

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ The Tablet and the Field

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ Confronting My Poverty

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 02:03:00 +0000

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ Confronting My Poverty

Check out my latest post over at Image's Good Letters blog. It's about my book-in-progress, or should I say book-STILL-in-progress.

Pictures of the Floating World: On the Occasion of the 65th Anniversary of the Bombing of Hiroshima

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Fri, 06 Aug 2010 20:28:00 +0000

Hard to believe it's been 5 years since I wrote this essay about Hiroshima and John Hersey's masterful book dramatizing the lives of some of the survivors. Here's the original essay. It never appeared in any journal or magazine because I wrote in very late in the process of writing the book.

More Orwell (Kind of like more cow bell)

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 01:01:00 +0000

Look, please indulge me while I just type out some more of the parts I have underlined in Down and Out--it's helping me get inspired to finish revising:

And there is another feeling that is great consolation in poverty. I believe everyone who has been hard up has experienced it. It is a feeling of relief, almost of pleasure, at knowing yourself at last genuinely down and out. You have talked so often of going to the dogs--and well, here are the dogs, and you have reached them, and you can stand it. It takes off a lot of anxiety.

From a section where Orwell and his friend Boris are looking for work. Boris gives him this advice:

"Appearance--appearance is everything, mon ami. Give me a new suit and I will borrow a thousand francs by dinner-time. What a pity I did not buy a collar when we had money. I turned my collar inside out this morning; but what is the use, one side is as dirty as the other. Do you think I look hungry, mon ami?"
"You look pale."
"Curse it, what can one do on bread and potatoes? It is fatal to look hungry. It makes people want to kick you. . ."
He stopped at the jeweller's window and smacked his cheeks sharply to bring the blood into them. Then before the flush has faded, we hurried to into the restaurant and introduced ourselves to the patron.

The Suburbs of Poverty

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 00:27:00 +0000

So, I'm working on the final edits to a chapter of my book-in-progress, and I've been dying to get this quote from Orwell's Down and Out in Paris and London into the chapter, but just haven't found the right place for it yet. It goes like this:

You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margerine in your belly, you go out and look into the shop windows. Everywhere there is food insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyere cheeses like grindstones. A sniveling self-pity comes over you at the sight of so much food. You plan to grab a loaf and run, swallowing it before they catch you; and you refrain, from pure funk.
You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like jeune squelette in Baudelaire's poem. Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a week on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.
This--one could describe it further, but it is all in the same style--is life on six francs a day. Thousands of people in Paris live it--struggling artists and students, prostitutes when their luck is out, out-of-work people of all kinds. It is the suburbs, as it were, of poverty.

"Cheeses like grindstones"? "A belly with a few accessory organs"? The "suburbs of poverty"? Orwell is one of THE best wielders of the English language, period.

One of the reasons it's been so hard, I think, to find a place for this quote is that it's so damn good that it will overshadow my prose. I guess that's always the risk when you quote or allude to other writers.

BTW, "jeune squelette" means "young skeleton" and comes from the Baudelaire poem "Spleen".

Here's the Baudelaire poem he references (thanks to the Brown Univ Library for the poem and translation)

I am like the king of a rainy country,
rich but powerless, young and yet very old,
who having tutors contemptuous of curvets
suffers ennui with hounds, as with other beasts.
Nothing can cheer him, not game, not falcon,
not his people perishing under his balcony.
A grotesque ballade from his favorite fool
no longer relaxes the brow of this cruel invalid;
his lilied bed becomes a grave and his ladies-in-waiting,
for whom every prince is a beauty,
can no longer dress indecently enough to draw a smile from this young skeleton.
The mage who makes gold for him has never managed
to expunge the corrupt element in his makeup,
and in those baths of blood that come to us from Rome
and which the powerful bring to mind in their final days,
he cannot rekindle that dazed cadaver
which runs, not with blood, but with the green waters of Lethe.

Baudelaire, Charles, 1821-1867. The Flowers of Evil, translated by Keith Waldrop. Middleton, Conn. : Wesleyan University Press, 2006.

And for you Frenchies:

Je suis comme le roi d'un pays pluvieux,
Riche, mais impuissant, jeune et pourtant très vieux,
Qui, de ses précepteurs méprisant les courbettes,
S'ennuie avec ses chiens comme avec d'autres bêtes.
Rien ne peut l'égayer, ni gibier, ni faucon,
Ni son peuple mourant en face du balcon.
Du bouffon favori la grotesque ballade
Ne distrait plus le front de ce cruel malade;
Son lit fleurdelisé se transforme en tombeau,
Et les dames d'atour, pour qui tout prince est beau,
Ne savent plus trouver d'impudique toilette
Pour tirer un souris de ce jeune squelette.
Le savant qui lui fait de l'or n'a jamais pu
De son être extirper l'élément corrompu,
Et dans ces bains de sang qui des Romains nous viennent,
Et dont sur leurs vieux jours les puissants se souviennent,
II n'a su réchauffer ce cadavre hébété
Où coule au lieu de sang l'eau verte du Léthé.

Artifacts as Book? Anne Carson’s “Nox,” review: newyorker.com

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 09:18:00 +0000

Check out Meghan O'Rourke's review of Anne Carson's new book, Nox, in which Carson mediates on mourning through a notebook she kept following the death of her estranged brother:

“Nox” is as much an artifact as a piece of writing. The contents arrive not between two covers but in a box about the size of the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible. Inside is an accordion-style, full-color reproduction of the notebook, which incorporates pasted-in photographs, poems, collages, paintings, and a letter Michael once wrote home, along with fragments typed by Carson. The reproduction has been done painstakingly, and conjures up an almost tactile sense of the handmade original. A mourner is always searching for traces of the lost one, and traces of that scrapbook’s physicality—bits of handwriting, stamps, stains—add testimonial force: this person existed.

(click on the image to see more views of the book)

Carson's book, O'Rourke writes, is about mourning: Why do we do it? What good is it? Where does this impulse even come from? It seems that maybe "reading" Carson's "book" might be a great exercise for a civilization that currently seems so numbed by a seemingly never-ending cycle of war, natural disaster, eco-disaster and scandal that we just don't know how to respond. Should we mourn? Should we soldier on as though none of this is happening?

The mourning process for Carson comes not just through sifting through notes, photos of her brother and the rare letter from him, but through the translation of a Catallus elegy (Carson is a classicist as well as a poet). For Carson translation is, as O'Rourke puts it, about "retrieval" and "renaming."

Carson's "book" has come at the exact right moment for me because I've been thinking about how I could include the memo/story my grandfather wrote (see my previous two posts) into the book I'm writing. I take lots of notes when I read, and I don't throw anything away, so I have dozens of yellow legal pads and composition notebooks that are jammed full of ticket stubs, bar napkins, and scraps of paper with notes on them. I've been thinking about how all of these things might be arranged/presented to a reader--not all of them, of course, just the stuff that is pertinent to my project, like the lengthy handwritten transcript I took of a Jean Luc Godard film in grad school, and which is the basis for another chapter I'm working on. (I'll scan the transcript and put it up here for you to see--it's very Unabomber looking and gives great insight into my mental state in my last year of grad school.

As a college English major in the mid-nineties it was cool to go around quoting Eliot "we gather these fragments against our ruin"--at least I thought it was cool. Eliot's Modernist lament for tradition lost struck me as noble and profound. Nowadays, there's nothing noble about gathering fragments, it's just what you do all day long. There's no "ruin" that we're looking to stave off because as a culture (civilization?) we have come to accept that there is no capital "T" truth, or capital "T" tradition, it was always already just a bunch of fragments that had been smashed together and made to agree by dint of some patriarchal will to impose order.

I'm on a BIG tangent here--"skylarking," my 6th grade teacher Mr. Garner would say--but I think there's a way that a project like Carson's doesn't lead to some post-modern despair for how truly impossible it is to truly know anyone or anything. (Do people even despair anymore? Despair seems to be as passe these days as Tradition and Truth.) Instead, I think seeing book as artifact, or artifacts as book, returns us to an ancient frame of mind, a mind that might help us to see that the world and our experience in it has not really changed that much. Technology has certainly altered the ways in which we are able to search/ seek out truth, tradition, connection, happiness, etc., etc., but technology and scientific discovery have not so radically changed the human condition that we no longer yearn for these things at all.

Perhaps Carson's "book" is a necessary return to basics. After all, what is writing if not translation--finding the words that correspond, that vocalize the tangle of thought and feeling deep within us. Gathering the fragments of the world before us and trying to retrieve some meaning from them is an ancient and important practice, truth notwithstanding, because it creates in us a space for reflection--a place that is not reachable by search engine. This seems like very good thing because it asserts our independence from the machines and media that we seem so dependent on to help articulate what we're feeling.

The Barber of Peru (a draft submitted for your comments/suggestions)

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Sat, 10 Jul 2010 11:03:00 +0000

As promised, here is an excerpt of a draft of an essay I'm writing that reflects on the short story/memo my grandfather, Gerald Griffith, wrote titled "An Evening In Geneva, Indiana." My grandfather always dreamed of being a writer, but he spent his entire life working for the railroad. Check out his story here.

I've decided to try out some funky document design elements for this essay, because I think the subject (as hopefully becomes clear in the essay) lends itself to messing with the field of the page.

I would love to hear comments, suggestions and complaints about this, since I'm really sleep deprived right now and could be having delusions of grandeur. So, it might be WAY too indulgent, or it might be just what the essay calls for. But bear in mind that it is only an excerpt of a draft.

An Evening in Geneva, Indiana

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 23:17:00 +0000

I've just uploaded a pdf (see above image) of a handwritten short story my grandfather wrote in 1968--well, it's not actually a short story, it seems to be more of a hybrid, a literary memo he wrote to pass the time while waiting to interview a man who had made what the railroad believed to be a dubious injury claim (my grandfather was a claims agent).

Whatever it is, check it out by clicking on the "An Evening in Geneva, Indiana" tab in the right column, or here if you're lazy.

I'm in the process of finishing a draft of an essay inspired by this story/memo titled "The Barber of Peru," as in Peru, IN, where my grandfather grew up. The title is a phrase that Groucho Marx coined during the writing of the 1931 Marx Brothers movie Monkey Business. According Turner Classic Movies' entry on Monkey Business, Marx coined the term as a way of explaining his problem with the script written by noted New Yorker writer S.J. Perelman:

Throughout Groucho complained that Perelman's writing was too literary. When he rejected a reference to the operetta The Student Prince, his comment was, "The trouble is that the barber in Peru won't get it," referring to the small town of Peru, Indiana.

Here's some Monkey Business for your viewing pleasure:

Reflecting on Google maps experiment and what's next

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Tue, 06 Jul 2010 03:09:00 +0000

I spent most of the weekend tinkering with the Google map companion to "Underworld," and I feel like I now have a better sense of the possibilities and limitations of the application for writers.

Possibilities: 1.) Google maps can be set up so that anyone can edit your map. I'm considering doing this with the "Underworld" map to see what locals and perhaps people who knew the murder victims might add. 2.) The Google Earth view of the map is mind blowing, especially on my iPad because the text from all of the map points floats like a word cloud over the city. The effect is that the city appears written on; that stories are embedded into the landscape. I like this idea and hope to riff on it more in future experiments. 3.) You can follow a map's RSS feed, so that any time the map is updated a new post is sent to your RSS reader. As my friend Wendy Sumner-Winter commented the other day, she liked the idea of a constantly evolving, constantly growing essay.

Limitations: 1.) The text boxes have limited space, so that rules out actually cutting and pasting the whole essay into the map point windows, which leads to 2.) What to write in these little boxes. Should I paste excerpts from the essay itself, or should this info be purely supplementary, bonus material?

One thing is for sure, the shareability of the medium helped make it very easy for my Facebook friends to recommend it to others. In fact, since the map and pdf of the essay went up on July 1st, the map has received 663 visits. 500 people have viewed the pdf of my essay, while 148 actually took time to read it.

Below are screenshots of the statistics windows on the Issuu site, which hosts your pdfs for free and connects you to a large network of artists, business people and publishers also sharing their work via Issuu.
The most interesting (and possibly concerning) stat is the second, which shows that only 28 people read the last two pages of the essay, compared to the high 80s for the first few pages. I'm hoping this has to do with people preferring not to read long documents on a computer screen and not that pages 6 and 7 suck.

But while knowing how many views you get is cool and all, I think this is just the beginning. The logical extension of this experiment is to embed the Google map info into the essay itself. Issuu gives you the html coding to do this sort of thing, but you have to use a program like InDesign or Quark, so I guess I'll be learning InDesign this week--or at least enough to be dangerous.

Tomorrow I'll be putting up the next essay from my book-in-progress. This one is titled "The Barber of Peru," and is still in draft form. The central feature will be the original handwritten manuscript of a short story my grandfather wrote.

Feel free to send comments, suggestions, complaints.

Fecundity: My latest post over at IMAGE's Good Letters

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Mon, 05 Jul 2010 13:27:00 +0000

Check out my latest post over at IMAGE's Good Letters blog. This is one is inspired by 5 am walks with 7 week old Alexander Day, re-reading Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and a site-specific performance of Hamlet performed by Sweet Briar's theater-troupe-in-residence, Endstation Theatre Company.

Here's a taste of that post:

Our habit is to next make a loop around the back of the barn where there is a rutted lane for farm vehicles and a couple old storage sheds. A visiting theater troupe is using this as the stage for an out-door performance of Hamlet. At night, standing on our porch, we can hear them rehearsing. The startled, incredulous voice of Hamlet himself rises above the low mumble of the other actors.

The desire to walk through their set is triggered by an odd impulse, one I don’t quite understand, but I think what I’m looking for are signs of transformation, some signs that the landscape is being altered by the troupe in preparation for the performance.

Each morning, as Alex and I walk through this narrow lane I am comparing what I see before me to the morning before. One morning I noticed a bench I hadn’t before. The next, noticing nothing different in the lane, I opened an old door rotting on its hinges to find a crutch and a medieval-looking wooden rake. Just yesterday I noticed several halogen lamps had been discretely installed under the eaves. Slowly, I am watching the stage being set.

The Future of Writing?

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Sun, 04 Jul 2010 15:35:00 +0000

I'm coming into the homestretch on my book of essays, Pyramid Scheme: Making Art and Being Broke in America--I have three chapters left to write, and I have rough sketches of all three. So, I've begun thinking about how to start generating interest in the book. I thought about using a combo of facebook and blog posts, along with a merciless Twitter bombardment, but I figured that wouldn't really do any good unless I have something to actually show off. This is when Richard Nash came to mind.

Richard is the former head of Soft Skull Press, who published my first book, A Good War is Hard to Find who has since moved on to start his own publishing concern, Cursor, which is launching very soon. Richard has been in the press for the last several months talking up Cursor (check out this article in the Utne Reader on what exactly he's up to). Long story short, Cursor, will not just publish books, it will be an on-line social networking platform for readers and writers to meet, build relationships, and collaborate. From what I understand, the publishing process will be on display, allowing readers to see drafts of books while still in manuscript form. Readers will have behind-the-scenes access to writers, as Cursor writers will blog and field questions from readers, making the relationship between reader and writer one with some give and take. And Cursor won't just publish paper bound books, but will release limited edition art pressings of all their titles followed by an e-edition.

Thinking about Richard and the potential of a more social publication process, I was inspired this week to begin offering excerpts (and some full-text) of my new book on my blog, along with interactive maps of the locales detailed in the chapters.

The first chapter of the book, "Underworld," which appeared in the fall issue of The Normal School, reflects on how the murder of four homeless men four blocks from our apartment in South Bend, Indiana affected me and my family. The map contains photographs of the crime scene and surrounding area that I took in the days after the bodies were found. In the three days since I put "Underworld" and the map up I've received over 500 views (Google keeps track of this), and over 100 people have read my essay, which I know because Issuu, the snazzy free pdf publishing site, gathers statistics on how many people have read your publication. It even tracks how many pages visitors read.

Click on the "Underworld" tab in right hand column to take a look. Click on the map points to see photos and find links to info about the crime. You can even click the "more" at the bottom of the pop-up window and see the "street view" of the area, which adds a whole other virtual dimension to the essay.

So, read the essay, check out the map and tell me if you think it adds anything to the reading experience. And stay tuned for more chapters.

View Map to "Underworld" in a larger map

My latest post over at Image's Good Letters

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Fri, 11 Jun 2010 10:40:00 +0000

I've been reading and meditating a lot about the future of art, especially writing, lately. This is partly because it's part of my job as a teacher of writing and as Director of Sweet Briar's innovative Interdisciplinary Bachelor of Fine Arts program--the only one of its kind in the country, I might add.

But another huge reason why I've been thinking so much about the future of art-making is because I now have an iPad. The College purchased it for me as part of a pilot program in which a group of us explore the possible ways that it can innovate teaching an learning. I've probably got several blog posts in me on how astonishingly cool (and addictive) the iPad interface is, but this one over at Image's Good Letters blog is more generally about what Neal Gabler called in his LA Times essay, published last week, "Wiki-culture," a culture in which there is no gatekeeper, no arbiter of taste except for the "like" or "share" button.

Charles Simonds is my new favorite artist

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Thu, 03 Jun 2010 05:13:00 +0000

Here We Go Again: The "New" War Between Science and Religion

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Wed, 19 May 2010 11:32:00 +0000

I ran across this article on the Chronicle of Higher Ed yesterday: "The New War Between Science and Religion" by Mano Sigham. In it Singham takes aim at what he calls the "accommodationists," those "who argue that science and 'moderate' forms of religion are compatible worldviews. . ."

He goes on:

[A]ccommodationists . . . see[k] to carve out areas of knowledge that are off-limits to science, arguing that certain fundamental features of the world—such as the Heisenberg uncertainty principle and the origin of the universe—allow for God to act in ways that cannot be detected using the methods of science. Some accommodationists, including Francis Collins, head of the National Institutes of Health, suggest that there are deeply mysterious, spiritual domains of human experience, such as morality, mind, and consciousness, for which only religion can provide deep insights.

I don't really see any new thinking going on here, but I "shared" it to by Facebook page anyway, because this is the kind of story that I think we need to pay much closer attention to, especially the rhetorical approach taken, evidence provided, etc. so that we can avoid engaging in unproductive polemical grandstanding.

Later in the day, I took my four-year-old daughter to the public library. She chose Maisy Takes a Bath, Maisy's Bedtime, and Rumplestikskin. Waiting for her to choose her books, I sat at a computer terminal and searched the on-line catalog for books by Martin Luther King, Jr. I'm working on an essay for my new book that incorporates a number of excerpts from speeches King gave at the height of the Civil Rights struggle, and I wanted to try to track down some of these in print. So, on top of the Maisy books and Rumplestilskin, whose cover portrays the title character as a 70s pimp (big floppy hat with feathers) strutting through the woods, I checked out Strength to Love and Why We Can't Wait both by Dr. King.

I tell you all of this because this morning, drinking my morning coffee, reading Strength To Love, I ran across this quote regarding what he King describes as "the belief that there is a conflict between science and religions." What follows is from "A Tough Mind and a Tender Heart," a sermon King wrote sometime between July 1962 and March 1963 and delivered to his congregation at Dexter Ave. Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama:

. . There may be a conflict between softminded religionists and toughminded scientists, but not between science and religion. Their respective world are different and their methods are dissimilar. Science investiagates; religion interprets. Science gives man knowledge which is power; religion gives man wisdom which is control. Science deals mainly with facts; religion deals mainly with values. The two are not rivals. They are complimentary. Science keeps religion from sinking into the valley of crippling irrationalism and paralyzing obscurantism. Religion prevents science from falling into the marsh of obsolete materialism and moral nihilism.

What's even more wonderful about this passage is the larger context. The sermon is arguing for the importance of reconciling antitheses or opposites in one's character, quoting Hegel, ". . . truth is neither in the thesis nor the antithesis, but in an emergent synthesis which reconciles the two."

Indeed, it is the inbetween where we need to be focusing our attention.

Check out the sermon below:

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ A Boy Named Day

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Mon, 17 May 2010 12:19:00 +0000

An excerpt from my most recent post over at IMAGE:

On Thursday May 7th at 2:15 am, my wife gave birth to a boy: Alexander Day Griffith, 8 lbs. 8 oz.

Alexander is my middle name, so that requires no explanation, but “Day” is unusual, I guess, and so I’ve had many awkward phone calls with family and friends where at some point the person says, “now, ‘Day,’ is that a family name?”

Well, kind of.

“Day” is the Americanized spelling of “Dai,” which is a derivative of the Welsh “Dafyyd,” meaning “beloved.” And Dafyyd is the origin of my name (and my dad’s)—“David.” So, my son’s name is a roundabout attempt to pay homage to my dad, while also giving my son the opportunity to be not just another Dave.

But “Day” also has special meaning for me because it refers to Dorothy Day, the founder of the lay movement known as the Catholic Worker—one of the great American contributions to the Church, which, as of late, has been torn apart by scandal.

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ A Boy Named Day

Vindication: Nick Flynn's new book "The Ticking is The Bomb" comes to the same conclusion my book did

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 00:17:00 +0000

Sorry for the long title. At first I had "Nick Flynn Rips Me Off," but I'm not really upset or angry with him--it's just amazing that I came to same conclusions about Abu Ghraib SIX YEARS AGO in my book, A Good War is Hard to Find (see the browse-able Google book version in the right column).

Here's what Flynn says in an interview at Bookslut.com (who has published some of my reviews and did a feature on my book back in 2007):

At some point I realized that The Ticking is the Bomb was not simply about the “few bad apples” at Abu Ghraib, or even about those in the Bush Administration (basically the entire Bush administration) which ordered the torture -- none of that was, or is, very surprising. That Cheney would torture someone is not surprising. What was surprising was how quickly we Americans accepted it, so the book became more a study of the darker impulses in each of us, that led us to embrace torture. Maybe not all of us embraced torture (only 78% in one poll), but we all have darker impulses.

Flynn's book has been on my the floor near the bed for a month now. I tried reading it when I first bought it, but I didn't make it past page 2 because I quickly realized that I was not ready to read anything more about Abu Ghraib. The time that I spent researching and writing my book was enough thinking about torture to last me a life time, but now that I've read this interview and see that his thesis is so close to mine, I feel compelled to read it.

BTW, here's what I said when interviewed by Bookslut back in March of 2007:

Americans tend to be very persuasive when it comes to using and endorsing violence as a means of conflict resolution,” he wrote me recently. “Iraq and the War on Terror are examples of this, but I also see it reflected in what passes for entertainment and culture in America. As Flannery O’Connor said, there’s a kind of obscene sentimentality that arises when a person or people argues for their own innocence when it’s clear that they are anything but innocent. O’Connor’s work illustrates this again and again and it can be seen as a comment on the post-WWII culture she was living in, a culture that believed it was beyond the pale because it had rid the world of fascism and through the economic boom created a nearly classless society. I don’t deny that the U.S. did a necessary thing by taking down the Nazis, but to then allow that victory to overshadow the social reform desperately needed in America, especially in terms of race, is the height of hubris. I think we’re in similar times as far as sentimentality and hubris goes, although it seems with each American soldier’s death more and more people are seeing that such sentimentality is the path to annihilation.

The Death of Critcism?

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 01:12:00 +0000

The long-running "At the Movies" (aka "Siskell and Ebert")has been canceled. The NYT's A.O. Scott reflects:

So was “At the Movies” — which was also called “Sneak Previews,” “Siskel and Ebert,” “Ebert and Roeper” and other names during its long, storied run — the start of a slippery downward slope or the summit of the critical art? Neither, of course. The circumstances in which the art of criticism is practiced are always changing, but the state of the art is remarkably constant.

Which is to say that, from a certain angle, the future of criticism is always bleak and the present always a riot of ill-informed opinion and boisterous disputation. Some gloomy soul will always wish it otherwise and conjure an idealized picture of decorum and good sense. Early in the last century, T. S. Eliot wrote that “upon giving the matter a little attention, we perceive that criticism, far from being a simple and orderly field of beneficent activity, from which impostors can be readily ejected, is no better than a Sunday park of contending and contentious orators, who have not even arrived at the articulation of their differences.”

A hundred years before Eliot, Samuel Taylor Coleridge thundered that “till reviews are conducted on far other principles, and with far other motives; till in the place of arbitrary dictation and petulant sneers, the reviewers support their decisions by reference to fixed canons of criticism, previously established and deduced from the nature of man; reflecting minds will pronounce it arrogance in them thus to announce themselves to men of letters, as the guides of their taste and judgment.”

Both Coleridge and Eliot, who were writing about print, sound uncannily like ranters against the Internet and television. And, like present-day old-media scourges of the blogosphere, they had a point. But they were also projecting an impossible and self-undermining wish, because it is only through the confusion and noise of the public sphere that criticism has advanced, discovering its principles and best practices, preserving tradition and embracing the new.

I have to say, I love reviewing and writing criticism. I don't know that there's any better way to decide what you like (or don't) and why you like it (or don't). In some ways it's like a good, old-fashioned examination of conscience. Reviewing and critiquing allows me to reflect on my motives for liking something, motives which are not always sound. In my book, "A Good War is Hard to Find," I discovered, upon returning to "Pulp Fiction"--a film I revered as a college freshman--that it had some serious problems involving its moral calculus. That may sound laughable--to look to the director of "Reservoir Dogs" and revenge film "Kill Bill" for a morally emboldening film--but I was revisiting the film ten years later in light of Iraq War II and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal photos, and its winking, blinking, po-mo irony left me cold. However, revisiting "Deliverance" and Lynch's "Blue Velvet," I found that they still stood as great works of art.

I also love a good take down--a review that calls a spade and a spade and doesn't make any apologies, like David Foster Wallace's deliciously savage review of Updike's 1997 novel "Toward the End of Time."

Maybe the only thing the reader ends up appreciating about Ben Turnbull
is that he's such a broad caricature of an Updike protagonist that he
helps us figure out what's been so unpleasant and frustrating about this
gifted author's recent characters. It's not that Turnbull is stupid -- he
can quote Kierkegaard and Pascal on angst and allude to the deaths of
Schubert and Mozart and distinguish between a sinistrorse and a
dextrorse Polygonum vine, etc. It's that he persists in the bizarre
adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever one wants
whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair. And so, it
appears, does Mr. Updike -- he makes it plain that he views the narrator's
impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and
he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I'm not
especially offended by this attitude; I mostly just don't get it. Erect
or flaccid, Ben Turnbull's unhappiness is obvious right from the book's
first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he's so
unhappy is that he's an asshole.

Wallace, the great genius of his generation, does what so many of us dream of doing: giving the bird to great, seemingly unassailable, literary lions. He cuts the great Updike down to size; reveals him to be mortal.

Maybe this is one of the ways that criticism still matters: it puts the whole enterprise of making art into perspective, lest artists get too full of themselves.

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ The Patron and the Crocus

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:53:00 +0000

Here's my most recent blog post on IMAGE's Good Letters blog. It's dedicated to the memory of Eleanor Salotto.

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ The Patron and the Crocus

Blogging pays off

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:58:00 +0000

Below you'll find an exchange between myself and "Mary V" over my latest blog post on the Haiti earthquake, which appeared on Good Letters, the blog of the literary journal IMAGE.

You have to read it from the bottom up, and you should read the blog post first to get the whole context. This really emboldened my faith in blogging and the comment function on blogs. Now, if the conversations could be this productive all the time...

Name: Mary V

URL:
Comment:
Thanks for writing back, Dave. I was hoping you would. And thanks for your insightful post. I forgot to say that in the rush to get my own thoughts down. Some mornings it's hard to eat breakfast after reading the day's grim headlines. But of course, I always do. That's the dilemma. How should we then live?

2010-01-31 11:37 Permalink Reply
Name: Dave

URL:
Comment:
MV,

You're right, of course. Even if you did have French colonial forbearers it wouldn't be your responsibility.

And I'm not advocating for doing nothing. In fact, I don't know that I'm advocating for any plan of action here. This is the mistake that we often make about writers, artists and art in general: that they/it is telling you to live and behave differently. My interest here was to capture the frustration and despair I was feeling--the helpless feeling of knowing that you can't really do anything to turn back the tide of suffering. When I start thinking this way, though, I ultimately start meditating on what it would take for the situation to be different. Here, as with most tragedies, the answer is very, very complicated, and, I think, it involves not just those French colonists you spoke of, or the witch doctors, but a radically different way of living and relating to one another, period. In other words, I start to think about how things might be different if we actually were a thoroughly and authentically Christian nation. What would that mean? What would that look like? I don't know. But I think that's where my grotesque and somewhat apocalyptic imagination comes from. I can't avoid the ironies of 21st century American life. They stare me in the face all day long and I feel compelled to write about them to make sure I'm not going crazy; that this is really happening.

So, yes, we rush to the aid of those in need, guilt and all, but what happens afterwards? Are our lives changed by these encounters? If they have been, then I think we need to tell that story. So, I guess what I'm saying is that maybe art does advocate; it advocates for taking the long view. As Flannery O'Connor said, she was not a realist insofar as everyday families are murdered by escaped serial killers, but a "realist of distances." You strive to see near things as though far, and far things as though near.

2010-01-30 08:16 Permalink Reply
Name: MV

URL:
Comment:
Yes, Haiti has been there all along. And maybe it took an earthquake to wake the rest of us up long enough to remember that. I don't feel responsible for Haiti's misery, however, anymore than I feel responsible for the Holocaust. My forbears were not French colonialists nor Voodoo witch doctors, nor secret police operatives. When someone's house is falling down upon them, you don't stop to discuss who built the house, how long ago, and who was responsible for its collapse. You rush to their aid and help them survive, guilt and all.

2010-01-29 18:16 Permalink Reply

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ The Center Did Not Hold

noreply@blogger.com (Dave Griffith) — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:17:00 +0000

My latest blog post for Image's Good Letters--this one is on Haiti through the lens of WB Yeats, Joan Didion and the Biggest Loser.

Image ◊ Good Letters: The IMAGE Blog ◊ The Center Did Not Hold