It certainly took me a long time, but I finally finished reading Jeffrey Stout’s political, theological, and philosophical tome, Democracy and Tradition. In the work, Stout sets out to defend a pragmatic approach to building a democratic society that takes seriously each citizen’s right to reach decisions via whatever means or commitments they deem important as well as all citizens’ responsibility to offer reasons to others for their conclusions. Democracy happens in the confluence of peoples’ beliefs and reason-giving. For Stout, democratic pragmatism is not merely a label that best describes how we interact with people who hold different ideals and beliefs than us, but it is a tradition in and of itself that deserves thought, defense, and promotion. America is in danger, he warns us, if the citizens of the United States do not take seriously the fact that we are all in this thing called democracy together. Stout, a self-labeled atheist, shows great appreciation for religions and religious people and articulately defends their right to use religious reasoning to shape their beliefs and ethics. (I reflected on some of the book earlier here.)

Stout critically engages liberal secularists like John Rawls on the one hand and the New Traditionalists within Christianity like Stanley Hauerwas and Alistair MacIntyre on the other as holding positions that do not help democracy. Though his two main interlocutors see each other as opposites, Stout points out that they actually share very similar views of what democracy actually is. His main argument against the liberal secularists is that we cannot guard the public square with rigid demands of what counts as reasonable data for democratic decision-making. The social contract theory of Rawls does not accurately describe how democracy has functioned, nor does it offer a hopeful vision for a pluralistic society in that it seeks to keep religious reasoning either out of the discussion altogether, or to be seen as weaker evidence. For those who say religion should not be involved in democratic reasoning, Stout not only says that ideal is unrealistic given the passion people have for their religions—how does one cast aside their deepest commitments that shape their ethics and values?—but he also says it is inherently undemocratic to do so. American democracy has benefited largely from religious reasoning—he cites the abolitionist sermons of the 19th century, Abraham Lincoln’s second inaugural address, and Martin Luther King’s speeches and sermons as high points in both religious and democratic thinking in America.

As seen above, Stout agrees with many of the New Traditionalists’ critiques of the social contract theory. He thinks, however, that the New Traditionalists have bought the line that this theory encapsulates modernity, pluaralism, secularism, and democracy. The New Traditionalists see democracy as a child of modernity that emphasized the individual over and often against community. They do not see how this system can engender virtues or community and thus it can hardly be described as a tradition in a classical sense. By its nature, democracy leads us towards an atomized society, they argue. They wonder if it is in their tradition’s (i.e., Christianity’s) best interest to continue to participate in democracy given the negative affects that system has had on their community (i.e., the Church). Stout pushes back against the New Traditionalists by saying democracy, which for better or worse, is our society’s system of organization, is not made better when groups of its citizens, whether they are Christians or Black Nationalists, decide to remove themselves from it. Nor are those other traditions improved by interacting only with others in their enclave. Again, he cites the religious reasoning of Lincoln, King, and the abolitionists to show religion’s positive impact on democratic thinking.

Juno (2007) is a warm blanket of a movie. The more I think about it, the more I like it. I remember whole scenes, lines of dialogue, songs from the soundtrack, and looks on the actors’ faces and they make me smile. The movie works on all cylinders, but the true power comes from the triumvirate of screenwriter Diablo Cody, director Jason Reitman, and star Ellen Page as the title character.

Juno tells the story of the 16-year old girl Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) who becomes pregnant after enlisting her friend Paulie Bleeker (Michael Cera) to try sex. Juno then sets up an adoption with Vanessa (Jennifer Garner) and Mark Loring (Jason Bateman), a yuppie couple who hasn’t been able to conceive. The rest of the story follows Juno’s pregnancy as she tries but is unable to maintain her distance from her situation. We witness some predictable scenes, such as Juno telling her father and step-mother (wonderfully played by J. K. Simmons and Allison Janney, respectively) that she’s pregnant, but these scenes don’t play in a predictable way. After Juno informs them, Mac, her father, says to Bren:

Mac: “Did you see that coming?”
Bren: “Yeah, but I was hoping she was expelled, or into hard drugs.”
Mac: “That was my first instinct too. Or a DWI. Anything but this.”

The plot is anything but straightforward and I’ll leave most of the surprises intact for you. Suffice it to say, we deal with real emotions of the characters, not with Hollywood cliches of characters in similar situations. Juno understands that she’s not ready to be a mother, so her connection with her child is not the guilt of giving it up, but the worry that a healthy, stable, and loving household could actually exist for her baby.

Across the Universe, director Julie Taymor’s 1960’s musical featuring only The Beatles’ songs is perhaps the most mixed bag of a movie to come out in 2007. I wanted to like the film more than I did, but its whole is not greater than the sum of its parts. The visuals are stunning and whole scenes work extremely well, reinterpreting many of the songs and drawing the audience into the characters’ world. On the other hand, there is no narrative drive connecting those scenes and the story is predictable. It feels like watching a string of extremely well-made music videos (I’ve put some links in this post, and if you follow them, you’ll see YouTube clips of the songs in the film). At moments, the film comes across as an interesting experiment trying to create a world from within The Beatles’ music and at other moments those same interesting bits feel a tad too clever, with heavy-handed homages. For example, any named character in the film gets that name from a person in a Beatles song. Jude (Jim Sturgess) and Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood) are the protagonists fighting to stay in love. Their friends include Prudence (T.V. Carpio), Sadie (Dana Fuchs), Max (Joe Anderson), and JoJo (Martin Luther). If those names pique your interest, or if you just rolled your eyes at the same idea, it may be a sign of how well this film works for you. For me, I kept expecting Eleanor Rigby to appear. (She doesn’t.)

In her graphic novel memoir Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi tells a poignant and wrenching tale of alienation. As she grows up in Iran under the Shah, during the Islamic revolution of the late 1970’s, and the subsequent war with Iraq, Satrapi witnesses the country she has always known morph into a state that as an intellectual young woman with Marxist tendencies, makes her a stranger, an exile within her homeland. Her parents send her to Austria as a teenager (an age in which alienation is something of a baseline experience) where she never quite fits with the Western kids. In Iran, her infatuation with American culture (punk music, blue jeans, etc.) makes her too Western for the newly radical Islamic state. In Austria, her Persian culture makes her too Middle Eastern to truly relate to her misfit gang of teenage pseudo-philosophers.

Satrapi’s simple black and white drawings add poignancy to the books, though I would argue that the first book is stronger. Persepolis 1 tells her story as a child and the drawings reflect a simple way of looking at an increasingly complex world. Persepolis 2 relies a bit too much on narration rather than on dialogue and feels incomplete, but that is a minor quibble given the place in life on which it ends.

Stories from within Islamic states seem to be in vogue, and for us in the West, hearing these voices are necessary. I imagine some will embrace Satrapi’s criticism of the horrors enacted by the fundamentalist Islamic regime that overtook Iran, but will also feel uncomfortable with her Marxist criticisms of Western culture. That is to say, the books’ simplicity in their lines and inking and in their dialogue and narration surprises readers with a complex view of a young woman’s life that belies simple categorization. Her experience, while I don’t imagine is entirely unique, is not one we often see in portrayals of Middle Eastern Islamic states.

I have become more of a fan of graphic novels in recent years. With storytellers like Satrapi, the genre certainly receives help and credibility. The wonder of Persepolis is that Satrapi has not made an adaptation of a work that might work better in prose, but she uses the medium in such a way that her story needs to be told in graphic form.

A man and his son walk along a road in the midst of ash-covered desolation. That is the central image of Cormac McCarthy’s wonderfully haunting novel The Road, for which he won a Pulitzer Prize. McCarthy creates a post-apocalyptic world in which the majority of humanity and nearly all animal and plant life have been destroyed. The Sun and Moon are nearly always obstructed or at least dimmed by dust in the air. When snow falls, it is gray. Clocks froze at 1:17. McCarthy never tells readers what caused the destruction, but because of the lack of vegetation and abundance of ash, we can guess that something like a nuclear holocaust happened. The worst horrors of the story do not come from trying to piece together the annihilation, but the image of life left in its wake. Governments have fallen and roaming gangs of cannibals rule the roads. The man and the boy—we never learn their names beyond those titles—consider themselves “the good guys” because they do not resort to the evil actions of the gangs. This tiny family are the carriers of the fire.

Because of the immediacy of the characters’ situation, much of the narrative focuses on their conscious actions. They search abandoned houses for cans of food, build fires, seek shelter and improvise shoes in order to stay dry over snowy mountain passes. They hide from the gangs. The characters do not have much space to pontificate or engage in philosophical discussions. The boy was too young when the cataclysm occurred to remember the world prior to this desolation. The man understands that what was the past is almost entirely lost. All he has is a future and that is his son. They are, “each the other’s world entire.”

McCarthy’s beautiful prose comprising quiet and short sentences draws the reader into this nightmare of a world. The prose-poetry does at times resemble dream narratives, but like the man and boy, the only dreams one has in a world such as this are nightmares. McCarthy’s genius lies in his ability to find glimmers of hope in the midst of the terror. These hopeful moments do not come across as a second thought of the author, as if he realized he painted a picture too bleak and felt like he needed to cheer things up to make the story more palatable. When the boy asks his father, “What are our long term goals?” we see that for the man, the hope for his world is in the love of his son, who, like all sons, will one day have to go into the future without his father. And because this novel works as a parable, we also understand that this is a question to us.

The Road was the first McCarthy novel I’ve read. In fact I first encountered McCarthy last year when I saw Joel and Ethan Coen’s brilliant film adaptation of McCarthy’s earlier novel, No Country for Old Men. I cannot wait to read more.

For every Horatio Alger-type story of rags to riches upward mobility, it seems that American storytellers have also wanted to remind people of Jesus’ great rhetorical question in Matthew 16.26: “For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul?” (NASB)

This past weekend my movie club (think of a book club, but without the literacy) and I watched Paul Thomas Anderson’s most recent film, There Will Be Blood. This movie has rightly garnered much praise and attention. I was excited because I knew it was loosely based on Upton Sinclair’s novel, Oil!, which takes place partly near Bakersfield. (Why must early 20th century American pro-worker novels take place near Bakersfield?) The majority of the film occurs in the fictional town of Little Boston and tells the story of Daniel Plainview, an oil prospector who possesses great geological skill and a sharp business acumen. He also has an avarice of the sort that hasn’t been rivaled on screen for decades. But he is no cardboard Scrooge-type character. Some reviews have praised the grand scope of the film, but its scale is not reminiscent of epics like Ben Hur or The Lord of the Rings. Rather, the scope, the breadth of the film lies within Plainview himself, within his psychology. The comparisons that come to mind are Orson Welles’ Charles Foster Kane in Citizen Kane, John Huston’s Noah Cross in Chinatown, or Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone in The Godfather, Part II. These are all men of insatiable appetites. They may be madmen, but their madness is focused, which makes them even more frightening.

Here is the paragraph that I will give some of the plot, with as few spoilers as possible, but if you don’t want to know anything, skip it. The film opens with Plainview mining alone for silver. This sequence of silence reminded me of the “Dawn of Man” scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey. We watch the beginnings of a man as he discovers his true passions. Plainview’s greed is for money and victory, or rather, the destruction of his opponents. As you have probably heard in the trailer, he coldly admits in the film, “I have a competition in me. I want no one else to succeed. I hate most people.” Those people he doesn’t want to succeed include competing oil companies, other prospectors, and even the people upon whose land he relies to do his drilling. Plainview’s main antagonist in the film comes in the form of Eli Sunday (Paul Dano), a young holy-roller preacher whose father owns much of the original land Plainview buys in Little Boston. Eli’s brother Paul (also played by Dano, in an initially confusing, but rewarding dual role) turns Plainview onto the prospects of oil out in California. Plainview sees Eli as a fraud, perhaps just as he understands that he himself is a fake when he casts to the townsfolk his insatiable drive as loyalty and an industrious nature. Both men at different points feign confessions that belie their stated convictions, or so we initially believe. Anderson’s genius is in that we as the audience cannot tell how much of their confessions are true. Day-Lewis and Dano play their scenes with a tension that is at once both vulnerable and guarded. Mixed in with this is Plainview’s adopted son, H. W. In a terrifying accident we see Plainview make his decision about what he wants more in life. Is H. W. truly an object of Plainview’s love and care, or is he merely a marketing ploy? We, like Plainview himself, may never know. The film drips with religious imagery such as a “baptism” of the infant H. W. using crude oil. Plot discussion is over.

The pacing of the film is deliberate. Some in the movie club found certain sections overly slow, but I thought the pace worked given the bleak landscape. I couldn’t tell where the movie was going, but as the credits rolled, it was obvious that the film ended in only the way it could. With the title of There Will Be Blood, one would expect a very violent film, but it isn’t necessarily. There are a few graphic, but quick scenes of violence. The blood of the title works on many other levels than just violence.

Like the other Anderson films I’ve seen (Magnolia and Punch Drunk Love), There Will Be Blood is not necessarily an enjoyable film. It is, however, especially remarkable and moving. Anderson doesn’t make films that make me feel good. He makes films that make me feel like I went nine rounds in a boxing ring with a heavyweight champion and somehow emerge thankful for the experience. Unlike the other films I mentioned, There Will Be Blood is perhaps his most conventional use of plot and cinematography. We don’t deal with multiple narratives or MTV style slam zooms and editing. Also gone is Anderson’s trademark use of pop music. In its place is Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood’s perfect and disconcerting score.

Daniel Day-Lewis’ portrayal of Plainview is the type of performance that evokes great praise and superlatives. Our movie club scores each film on a five-star rating. People were giving the film four and a half stars on Day-Lewis’ performance alone. We all agreed that he should win this year’s Oscar for best actor. I joked that his performance was so big and terrific and terrifying that one Oscar may not be enough—the Academy should give him other Oscars, maybe for sound design, short documentary, or some of the technical awards given out before the show. Put quite simply, Day-Lewis’ portrayal of Plainview goes into the pantheon of great performances alongside Robert Duvall’s Sonny Dewey in The Apostle, Francis McDormand’s Marge Gunderson in Fargo, and Marlon Brando’s Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront.

I recently failed to complete two novels: James Michener’s The Source and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow. I didn’t finish The Source because I was reading it at the time of my father’s death. Afterward I couldn’t concentrate on it. As of now I don’t think I’d be able to read certain sections of it without hearing in my head the phone ring and my mother’s voice telling me that she was driving to the hospital. There were large sections of Gravity’s Rainbow that I loved, but there were also sections I found horribly impenetrable and frankly overwritten and obscene. Even Freud didn’t call everything a phallus. I was sad to put it down because the parts that worked did so at a level few novels can reach. I just wish Pynchon did some more editing. Perhaps I’ll return to both of these novels one day.

I did recently finish J. R. R. Tolkien’s posthumous Middle Earth narrative, The Children of Húrin. His son, Christopher Tolkien, edited the work as he has done to all Tolkien publications since his J. R. R. Tolkien’s death in 1973. The basic story of The Children of Húrin has been published before and I read one version in The Silmarillion. But knowledge of The Silmarillion is not necessary as Tolkien had planned on fully elaborating this narrative along with a few others before he died.

The Children of Húrin tells the story briefly of Húrin, and focuses more on his children. For the fans of The Lord of the Rings, the characters here are far different. The races are the same: elves, men, dwarves, orcs, etc. The geography is different for the story takes place in Middle Earth before the great flood that destroyed much of the land and shaped the Middle Earth with which most people are familiar. Christopher Tolkien has written an excellent introduction, guiding fans of the trilogy into the larger history of Middle Earth, but the beginning of the novel feels like one is entering entirely new ground. All the names are different and readers cannot initially anchor themselves onto familiar characters or places such as Bilbo or the Shire (Hobbits don’t even appear in this tale). It is worth it, however, to make it through these initial difficulties for the story of Túrin and his sister Niënor is grand and tragic. Tolkien shows us again how indebted we are to his vast imagination. The story sits well with our ancient myths: it feels both old and extremely immediate at the same time. The Children of Húrin revisits important themes of Tolkien’s works: the worth of valor and loyalty, the evil of pride.

For 2007, I decided to keep the same year-end picks format that I did last year. That is, I differ from magazines and websites whose year-end picks rate media produced that year. My picks are those items I read, watched, or listened to during the year and were new to me, regardless of the year they were produced or released. And since there’s still time left in the year, the list is subject to change. Without further ado…

“How can a train be lost? It’s on rails.”

—Jack, The Darjeeling Limited

Carey and I recently saw Wes Anderson’s latest work of brilliance, The Darjeeling Limited (I have a giant soft spot for Anderson’s films). The movie is about three estranged brothers going on a spiritual quest in India a year after their father’s death. I could say much more about the film’s merits, but for now I am thankful for its wonderful timeliness in coming into my life. This is a film I could feel writing itself onto my soul and bones and I could hear God speaking to me in my grief.

In my previous reflection on my dad I mentioned that I wished my culture had a set and more communal mode of grieving. The Darjeeling Limited highlighted that gap in my culture. In the film, the three brothers encounter another death in India and stay within the community through the initial mourning and funeral processes. We see women mourning together. We see the family prepare the body of the deceased for the funeral. The deceased’s family actively participates in the funeral and lights the pyre. The community surrounds the family and gives them space. All this in a culture where Hinduism is the dominant religion—a religion whose goal it is to leave the material world behind. It is a remarkable and moving sequence of filmmaking.

Dad died at 3:16am on September 12. Carey and I raced up to Clovis a few hours later as we were in no condition to drive immediately after the death. There was some doubt as to whether we would be able to see Dad prior to cremation—in a matter of hours, a Byzantine bureaucracy grew, involving the hospital, the county coroner’s office, and the burial society my parents had hired. I frantically called these agencies trying to arrange a viewing for Carey and I. The person I spoke with at the hospital told me that my father was still at the hospital, but I couldn’t see him. “You wouldn’t want to see him like this,” the woman said. That infuriated me. How dare she tell me what I wanted at that moment. I wanted to see my father, period. No matter what state he was in. He had endured several procedures, so I understood that he would have looked bizarre from all the needle pokes and tubes placed in him, but I would have wanted to see him had he been maimed, because having that moment of physical connection would have been better than the void. We were finally able to see Dad days later by setting up a viewing with the burial society for two hundred bucks. They wheeled him out with a sheet tucked underneath his chin. After a few meaningful minutes with him, we left, and the funeral home workers wheeled him back out for further storage and eventual cremation. All this in a culture where Christianity—with its robust views of God calling the human (body and all) “very good” and the bodily resurrection—is supposed to be the dominant religion.

What has happened? Why isn’t the family more involved in the touch and presence of our loved ones’ bodies? Why were we not present at the cremation, which instead of being done in the messy presence of the community, is shopped out to some sanitized business who takes care of that detail for the bereaved? I fear it is because, as Harold Bloom has observed, Gnosticism, with its pseudo-Christianity and hatred of the body and all things material, is the “real” religion of the United States. We deny and fear death in this culture. We work hard to avoid it, we separate ourselves from getting our hands dirty in death and suffering so that we feel we must avoid any reminder. We don’t know how to die well because we don’t want to even acknowledge death’s existence.

Since we don’t know how to die well, those of us who remain after a death, don’t know how to mourn or be with people mourning—of course, Job’s friends didn’t know how to be with him either. If someone violently wails, some may say that he isn’t handling the death well. On the other hand, if someone shows little to no emotion, she is being strong. Mine is a culture that has retarded itself when it comes to mourning. Sure, we have funerals or memorial services, wakes and viewings, and the wonderful generosity of cooked meals and flowers. But we have undercut our ability to truly deal with death or mourning. The commodification of death and mourning seems to be a culprit, though I don’t intend to condemn funeral homes, undertakers, or greeting cards, even if I am concerned about some of the messages and assumptions conveyed.

Anderson’s film reminds us that mourning cannot be prescribed. Psychologists have accurately outlined the five stages of grief (denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance), but the order and duration in which the mourner experiences them can seem random at best. When Dad died, I think I felt all five stages within a span of minutes. Some days and weeks now are spent in one of the stages. The characters of The Darjeeling Limited realize that following an itinerary of grief and spiritual awakening is a quixotic venture. They also learn that the frameworks other cultures set up for grief act as helpful guides through mourning. A dear friend of ours gave us the first in a series of booklets, Journeying through Grief written by Kenneth C. Haugk and published by Stephen Ministries. A Time to Grieve has been helpful for Carey and I in its short messages to the reader. It doesn’t tell you what to feel, but validates your emotions and experiences. It gives you space and helps you breathe. It doesn’t say any type of mourning is good or bad; it simply states that mourning is normal, natural, and necessary. I’m thankful for a resource like this, but am saddened that in my culture, the emotions of grief have to be affirmed. It is strange to think that someone needs to stand against the tide and say that grief is natural.

This morning I received my much-awaited link from Radiohead to download their new you-name-the-price album In Rainbows (you can go to this site for the download). After one listen I can say with all honesty that I enjoy it greatly. I’m offering my first impressions and make no promises to stick by these initial reactions. My favorite song so far is “All I Need.”

The band seems to have found their groove. They filled their first few albums with heavy experimentation that worked extremely well. A more straight forward and very well-crafted with hints of the future album, The Bends (1995), was followed up by the reinvention of rock on OK Computer (1997), and then the drop-kick to all pop Kid A (2000). Someone said that Amnesiac (2001) was Radiohead’s first album where they didn’t completely reinvent themselves between records, but that’s not entirely fair since they recorded Amnesiac at the same time as Kid A. I still don’t know why they didn’t just release a double album. Hail to the Thief (2003) was something of the Hegelian synthesis of OK Computer’s thesis and Kid A’s antithesis. Radiohead has mixed traditional and electronic/digital instruments to varying degrees on all their work. On OK Computer, guitars, bass, piano, and drums dominated the songs and the digital components filled out the sound. On Kid A, the traditional instruments took a backseat to the drum machines and synthesizers. On Hail to the Thief, all the instruments were layered so that just when you thought guitars had returned in full force, a synth loop led the next song.

In Rainbows also exists in the tension between OK Computer and Kid A, though it is a bit more terrestrial. (For what it’s worth, nearly all of Radiohead’s albums will likely be compared to those two seminal works of art. Also, does anyone really count Pablo Honey [1993] as part of the Radiohead canon?) On the first few bars of the drum beat of the opener “15 Step,” I actually had the sinking feeling that the band was repeating itself. But something is different about this album and it’s the prominence of Thom Yorke’s vocals. On Kid A, songs like “Everything in its Right Place” deconstructed the vocals into another instrument, especially since many of the lyrics were nonsensical and intended to fill the listener with a sense of anxiety and tension rather than describing Yorke’s dread. On In Rainbows, Yorke’s voice finds itself coming through with little modulation or effects. Also, this album seems to have more up-tempo songs. There were heavier rock songs on their last album, but the tempo there was still deliberate (see: “Myxomatosis. [Judge, Jury & Executioner.]”). As I said above, “All I Need” is my favorite song so far. You don’t know where it’s going and initially the song feels claustrophobic, but by the middle, it blooms into a wonderfully open orchestral space.

One of the ways I judge works of art is by the creative response I have to them. That is, does a painting, a movie, a book, or a song, make me want to create something? When I watch The Royal Tennenbaums I want to rush to my computer and work on that novel that I haven’t touched in weeks. When I listen to Bob Dylan’s “Shelter From the Storm” or Mozart’s String Quartet No. 19 in C major (“Dissonance”), K. 465, I want to write songs. Radiohead, for however much their artistry blows me away, has always inspired me to create even if my chances are slim of making something as beautiful and challenging as their music. I want to put In Rainbows on and see what comes out.

Perhaps it’s the postmodern nature of Radiohead’s and Thomas Pynchon’s works or just the similar titles, but I’d love to sit down and keep reading Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow with In Rainbows playing. Maybe I’ll eat rainbow sherbert and watch an episode of Reading Rainbow first.

That’s all for now. I need to listen to the album again. But you don’t have to take my word for it.

UPDATE: Reading Gravity’s Rainbow while listening to In Rainbows proved to be a fascinating experience. I hope to do it again soon.