Groundhog Day - An Existential New Year

I've posted about Groundhog Day the movie before, and it's this week's column for The Villager:

Ever since the 1993 film from Harold Ramis and Bill Murray, the term "Groundhog Day" has become synonymous with mundane repetition and mindless redundancy in our daily lives and jobs. The term has become the punchline for people describing the empty and repetitive nature of their jobs or even their lives. However, the film was never really about that. Instead, the message of the movie about weatherman Phil Connor is about rebirth and the chance every day to make our seemingly boring repetitive lives whatever we truly want them to be.

Let’s face it, by February 2, New Year’s resolutions are fading, fitness centers are back to the regulars, and we’re all bogged down in the drudgery of winter. These moments are ripe for a bit of pop culture existentialism, and the quirky film from Harold Ramis and Danny Rubin puts that long cold winter, the odd little holiday, and the repetitiveness of daily life in perspective. Watching the story of a disgruntled weatherman pondering the absurdity of a weather-forecasting rodent provides a second chance at mid-winter self-reflection and re-invention. The conceit of the film is not only the ridiculous holiday but also the inexplicable weirdness of Phil Connors’ predicament.

The film Groundhog Day is actually a wonderful primer for the wisdom of existentialism, and when I taught the philosophy in my college literature class, I would often lead or conclude with a viewing of Bill Murray’s brilliant portrayal of a man trying to bring some sense of meaning to a life that seems nothing short of absurd. Clearly, the idea of living the same day over and over again in an unfulfilling, mundane place and repeating the seemingly mindless tasks of a pointless job is portrayed as a curse and a cruel joke. That realization is actually at the heart of existentialism. Life makes no sense, and the absurdity of it all can lead us to feel our entire existence is meaningless. In the movie Phil spends many years in that disgruntled fashion, viewing his life as a cruel joke. However, the movie shifts when Phil considers his situation as an opportunity to get it right.

Granted, Phil’s initial reaction to his epiphany of a life without consequences is to indulge his most base fantasies. It’s understandable — who wouldn’t at least consider that? He seizes the opportunity, drinking to excess, smoking indiscriminately, gulping coffee and pastries, manipulating women, and even robbing an armored car. Of course, the freedom and control he ultimately achieves is freedom from and power over those primal and materialistic urges. Even hedonism and debauchery apparently becomes boring after a while. A pivotal moment finds Phil sitting quietly in the cafe reading, when he notices a piano playing in the background. Rather than simply enjoy the music, he seeks out a teacher and begins learning piano, offering his piano teacher “a thousand dollars if we could get started today.” He also masters other art forms like ice sculpting, but most importantly he learns deeply the details, hopes, and dreams of the people in his life.

Groundhog Day is a film with a message — each of us will wake up again and again to the same existence that at times seems pointless. The only point is that you have the rest of your life to make it exactly what you want it to be. Bringing meaning to our daily lives was a focus of the numerous American writers like Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, whose poem “A Psalm of Life” advised us that “neither joy, and not sorrow is our destined end or way, but to act that each tomorrow find us further than today.” The point is progress; the goal is getting better. What F. Scott Fitzgerald called Gatsby’s “Platonic conception of himself” was simply the eternal quest for the ideal, for striving to become our own best selves. Life is an endlessly repeating opportunity to improve. In Bill Murray’s role as Phil Connor, we can find a second chance at New Year’s resolutions and an opportunity to, in the words of Henry David Thoreau, “live the life you have imagined.”

Thus, rather than a sad story about emptiness, the film and the day are a great chance to re-think and embrace the rich potential of our lives every day we live. Think about it. And perhaps even consider watching Groundhog Day to brighten and warm up the dark days of winter.

Regis Jesuit High School Should Reverse & Rehire

Regis Jesuit High School in Aurora, Colorado retracted its student newspaper and fired the two staff sponsors following the publication of a pro-choice opinion piece written by a student. The following is my response and this week's column for The Villager:

Forgiveness is the heart of Catholic doctrine. It can also be the virtue least likely practiced.

When I heard of the controversy regarding Regis Jesuit High School’s decision to fire two staff members over publication of a pro-abortion-rights editorial in the student newspaper, my first inclination was to support the action taken by the school administration. Regis is a private Catholic institution whose position on abortion is very clear. If students and teachers don’t agree with, support, and adhere to the guidelines and expectations, then they are free to attend and work elsewhere. However, upon closer examination of the story and their clearly stated guidelines regarding student media, it became obvious the administration of Regis is clearly wrong in this case.

In a recent piece of commentary for the Denver Post, two former Regis students criticized and challenged the school’s action as both inappropriate and inconsistent with stated policies and precedent in the school’s student media program. Harvard University student Madeline Proctor and Seattle University student Sophia Marcinek were editors-in-chief of Regis Jesuit’s Elevate magazine when they attended the school. As has been widely reported, the students explained how Regis High School’s clearly stated policy establishes that “school officials… shall not practice prior review or to censor any student media.” Yet, following the publication of an opinion piece supporting the “right of choice,” school officials violated their own policy, recalling the entire magazine and firing the two faculty sponsors. Such action is not only hypocritical but an egregious overreach of power and a betrayal of trust between the school, its students, and the staff.

As a former altar boy and a graduate of Catholic education, I understand and believe deeply in the institution of faith-based school. For a brief time in my adolescence I considered pursuing the Jesuit path. A key to that interest was an advisor who explained to me how the Jesuits are scholars. First and foremost, the Jesuit order is pious and devout in the Catholic faith, but it is also an order committed to academic and intellectual rigor. The Jesuits are not afraid of debate. The Jesuits do not hide from intellectual challenge. The Jesuits embrace the pursuit of scholarship and inquiry. Clearly, the Jesuit history of practicing and deepening their faith through education in the arts, sciences, and philosophy would seem to indicate an openness to debate and discussion. Nothing could be more important and relevant to cultivating young minds to be astute thinkers.

Thus, the Regis administration’s reactionary response is all the more problematic for its abdication of the spirit of education and the tradition of the Jesuit Order. An equally troubling condition of the current censorship is the school’s hypocritical rejection of not just its policy regarding student media but also the contradiction of the values and practices the school publicly preaches and promotes. In the Denver Post, Proctor and Marcinek point out how the school’s own website claims “We do not teach our students what to think; we teach them how to think.” That’s a dubious promise at best. The school also establishes as its mission the responsibility of being “called to create environments in which our students may encounter and engage multiple points of view that are presented thoughtfully and respectfully.” Clearly, nothing could be more blatantly inaccurate in this case.

In the 1990s a popular fad among Catholic and Christian young people was the wearing of bracelets which asked “What would Jesus do?” It was a reminder that the Christian faith is not simply a label – it is an expectation. Especially in the case of Catholic dogma, the Church expects the faithful to follow the path of Christ in their actions, choices, and daily living. Faith is more than just claiming belief and attending weekly services. It’s a way of life. We should, to the best of our ability despite our inevitable and inherent flaws, try to live as He lived.

So, in the case of a ninth grade student who writes an opinion piece for her school newspaper advocating for the right of choice, what would Jesus do? In response to that column which was cleared for publication by two staff members who simply followed established school policies, what would Jesus do? I’m fairly certain Jesus would never stifle the thoughts, ideas, and questions of students. And, other than the money lenders in the Temple, I’m positive Jesus wouldn’t fire anyone.

Schools are in crisis -- and always have been

This week's column for The Villager:

"Everything about American education is getting bigger all the time: the number of students enrolled, the amount of dollars it spends--and the vast amount of pedagogical gobbledygook. As it gets bigger, more and more people are insistently asking: is it any good? The complaining voice is not that of a few carping malcontents but a multitude of doubters deeply skeptical of what is being produced in the way of a people who should be personally content, socially responsible, and politically effective. Thoughtful parents – often aghast at what is being done and not being done – organize, agitate, protest and petition.”

While the passage above would seem to be an accurate reflection of contemporary America in 2022, the words actually come from an article entitled "U.S. Schools: They Face a Crisis," which was published in LIFE Magazine on October 16, 1950. Though we like to look to the past with nostalgic rose-colored glasses, all was clearly not well in the post-war years portrayed so placidly in television shows such as Leave It to Beaver and Happy Days. So much for “the Golden Age” of America when all kids were above average. For as long as there have been schools, people have been complaining about them. The kids complain about the work. The teachers complain about the kids. Parents and taxpayers complain about the teachers. And everyone complains about “schools these days,” decrying the state of public education and offering dire warnings about the future.

As I’ve noted before, the education system is simultaneously a great American success story and an inadequate institution which regularly fails to meet the needs of its most vulnerable members. Every year when standardized test scores are released and seized upon by the print media and the talking heads of television, the country frets about the abysmal scores which would seem to indicate that few students can read. The literacy battles will continue to wage over theories and pedagogy with terms like phonemic awareness, whole language, balanced literacy, and calls to simply get “back-to-basics.” However, anyone criticizing literacy today might want to remember that Rudolph Flesch wrote and published Why Johnny Can’t Read back in 1951.

Of course, it’s disappointing to learn that as few as 40% of middle and high school students read anything outside of assigned schoolwork. But is that any surprise considering all the toddlers and pre-school kids out there playing with their parents’ cell phones and watching endless videos online and on television? Can schools really have that much influence on literacy rates when teachers may be the only people to ever tell kids to put the phone down, turn the TV off, close the laptop and pick up a book? In expecting schools to influence and change the behavior of students, it’s helpful to remember that between kindergarten and high school graduation, children will spend roughly 10% of their time in school and 90% of it elsewhere.

Obviously, schools and schooling are no guarantee of success and achievement. Educational institutions represent an opportunity for growth and learning. And while the opportunity must be guaranteed, the outcomes gleaned from students, families, and communities are generally commensurate with what they put into the institution. And that includes the faith, trust, and resources of stakeholders. With nearly fifty million children in K-12 education, the staffing of all those classrooms is no small task. Forbes and Bloomberg have recently reported on the coming crisis in education, as fewer people enter the field while an increasing number of teachers are leaving at a time the demands and expectations placed on schools increase on what seems like a daily basis.

The most important consideration is to be pragmatic about what schools can and should be expected to do, as well as acknowledging and accepting the limitations. Many of the controversies, concerns, and criticisms about schools today are simply distractions at best, as are warnings of a crisis. The very nature of schools can be messy and unsettling at times. In a column on education and the role institutions play in our lives, David Brooks discussed a Harvard study on the purpose of education. According to the report, “The aim of a liberal [arts] education is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

Schools may be in crisis, but no more or less than they always have been.

Serving Up the Best Education

This week's column in The Villager:

Serving Up the Best Education

I have two college degrees, two professional certificates, and I’ve worked in my field for nearly thirty years. Yet I still believe the best education I ever received were the years I spent in my teens and early twenties working in a restaurant.

The restaurant world is a job experience and an education quite unlike any other. There’s a special fraternity among workers who know the intensity of a dinner rush, the frenzied choreography of cooking on the line, the subtle ballet of taking orders and delivering dishes, the ordered chaos of clearing and resetting tables. And the camaraderie of a restaurant crew tends to create a tight bond, especially because the required hours often infringe upon the social lives of the workers. Still, I wouldn’t exchange the hours I spent peddling pasta for anything. Life on the restaurant floor taught me as much as any class.

Restaurant jobs are, of course, part of the service industry, and the term server is now synonymous with waiter and waitress. Waiting on people is still the essence of service, which means restaurant work requires an inner calm that can test the patience of anyone. Yet, it can also be quite rewarding. In the classic comedy Arthur, the title character played by Dudley Moore tells his date, “Aren't waiters wonderful? You ask them for things and they bring them... It's the same principle as Santa Claus.” There is a unique pleasure in providing customers with a pleasant dining experience, and we learn a lot about life and ourselves when we do it.

Much of what students learn during the course of a K-12 education is actually quite arbitrary, even trivial, and not necessarily applicable to what we call real life. In fact, the answer to the age-old question of students, “When am I ever going to use this?” is likely, “Never.” Education is not a utilitarian practice of job training skills. However, the soft skills that come from attending school are indispensable to living a successful life. Organization, time management, communication, collaboration, and personal responsibility are not generally listed in any syllabus or curriculum guide. Yet they are as integral to education as books, and those skills are the essence of the service industry as well.

Many educators, researchers, and employers agree that the EQ is more important than the IQ in predicting success. That term EQ refers to the “emotional quotient,” as opposed to the standard but somewhat ambiguous IQ as a measure of intelligence. There are many highly intelligent people who never quite achieve the success commensurate with their test scores. Other highly successful people who lack academic credentials often achieve because of qualities developed in the workplace rather than the classroom. My Dad was fond of saying, “there are many people who are far smarter than I am, but you won’t find anyone who works harder.” The spirit of hard work has a special meaning for people who can calmly weather a Saturday night dinner rush. Business writer Daniel Pink has written extensively about the value of the non-academic skills necessary to success. Whether it's The Power of Regret or the importance of Drive, the soft skills of service work can be uniquely relevant to success.

Over many years in education across numerous school systems, I always notice and appreciate what I like to call the “wink-and-a-smile kids.” They might not be the best students from a purely academic standpoint. However, they are the kids who improve a class simply by being there. These are the people I would want on my team, regardless of the task and often in exclusion of any academic qualification like test scores, GPA, or even a diploma. These are the people who could sell me a car or a steak dinner just based on character and hard work.

Working a restaurant floor truly can be the best education. I’d even go as far as saying everyone should work in a restaurant at some point, if for no other reason than to develop a sense of respect for the jobs and empathy for the people who do them. Restaurants are so pervasive in our experience that it’s hard not to believe we could even paraphrase the classic essay from Robert Fulghum about kindergarten and instead say, “All I really need to know about how to live I learned while working in a restaurant.”

Sync Gallery in Denver

Visiting art galleries is truly one of my great joys. And the Denver metro area is a wonderful place to experience art. Recently I visited Sync Gallery, an art cooperative located in the Santa Fe Arts District. The gallery and the visit inspired me to write up a profile of the current show, and it was recently published by 303 Magazine.

"Sync Gallery Brings Connection to Denver's Art Community"

The gallery experience is all about making a personal, even physical, connection with art. As digital mediums provide non-stop access to images, and as artists reach an ever-widening audience via pictures on Instagram, there’s still no substitute for entering an art space, getting up close with the creations, examining and appreciating paintings and sculptures from many angles. That experience, personally connecting with art, can be found in abundance when wandering into Sync Gallery on Santa Fe Drive.

....

Shovel

I've blogged this idea before, and in response to the first serious snowfall of the year, I'm revisiting it for my column in this week's Villager

I shovel.

This weekend Denver woke, finally, to several inches of snow which had accumulated all night and continued through the early morning. Because the wonderful white flakes fell on a weekend during winter break from school, there was no need to debate the granting of snow days for school districts. And, with so many people on vacation, city plows were free to clear the streets. So, as the kids slept, and the buses stayed nestled in their lot, I sipped my coffee and skimmed the paper while warming up and preparing for the task that awaited – shoveling the driveway and the sidewalks.

On each snowy winter morning, the scene is always the same. With my snow pants and boots, my heaviest coat and gloves, a bit of chapstick, and a giddy sense of anticipation, I stand on the garage stairs as the door slowly rises on command, and I get the first glimpse of the powder just across the garage threshold. It's always a bit different than it looked from the upstairs window. And as I step forward and push the first little path to check the depth, the weight, the water level, I always smile to see the darkness of the wet concrete reveal itself.

I don't understand people who don't shovel. What happened to shoveling? For as long as I can remember, shoveling is just something you do, like mowing the grass, getting the mail, and cleaning the dishes. But in many ways it's so much more. It'll certainly get your blood pumping, even as it brings a deep sense of calm and repose. The world just seems more alive at that time. Maybe it's the brightness across the drives, lawns, trees, and sky that accentuates angles you hadn't noticed before. At the same time, the calm muffled air relaxes the world and slows its pace. As the paths are cleared and the driveway comes into view, there’s a sense of order and accomplishment in a job well done.

Now, in the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit that last winter for the first time in my adult life, I bought a snow blower. It was during that stretch of spring snowstorms which dumped more than a foot over a couple days, and my wife and I decided it was finally time to rely on a bit of technology to assist in clearing the hundreds of feet of concrete in front of our home. We always shovel the driveway for our retired neighbor, as well as the short stretch of common drive that leads to the street. With all that square footage to handle, the possibility of two feet of powder motivated our purchase. And looking back, I don’t regret it a minute.

When we first moved into our townhouse eighteen years ago, our neighborhood seemed to care more about the responsibility and the opportunity that a snowfall provided. My neighbor and I across the way would be out soon enough working on the common drive and trying to clear it before too many cars packed the snow down, perpetuating the time it would take to melt later. Of course, we always cleared the sidewalks and made a path for the mailman as well. As the kids grew, it always became a family affair, with each taking shifts and sections. And that second cup of coffee or hot chocolate was so much better after coming in from a round of shoveling.

These days I still shovel, but I mostly take care of the common drive and the sidewalks alone. Most of the other driveways remain covered in snow, with either cars buried, or deep tracks from when the owner just tramped out through the snow to the car and drove away. And the peace that comes from shoveling is missed by all the people who take the weather event to spend even more time in front of their televisions or computers or phones. Kids don't seem to wander the streets anymore with shovels slung over their shoulders looking for some quick cash, or simply the chance to help an older resident. And the general consensus seems to be that if the car can drive over the snow, there's no reason to move it out of the way.

But, for me, there is still a reason. The reason is, simply, I shovel. Because that's what you do. When it snows, you shovel.

The Life You Have Imagined

As we approach the end of the year, it's time for the obligatory reflection on where we've been, where we're going, and how we feel about it.

Near the end of Walden, (Life in the Woods), transcendental writer and philosopher Henry David Thoreau advises readers to believe “If one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours.” As the world wraps up another calendar year, amidst a pandemic approaching its second year of disruption, we will all again take stock of our lives and our year as the clock ticks toward midnight on December 31. While the examined life is not always a satisfying experience, the inclination to reflect and even judge our lives is a natural feeling that is nearly impossible to ignore.

Thoreau’s advice in Walden is a reminder of our powers of self determination and our ability to not only chart our course in life but to also manage how we perceive it. It’s easy to feel a lack of control at points in our lives, and it’s even easier to fall prey to that inclination in times of crisis and uncertainty, like in a global pandemic that just won’t seem to end. Thoreau certainly faced his share of challenge and uncertainty, losing his siblings to disease early in life before succumbing to tuberculosis himself at the age of forty-four. Yet by all accounts, including his own extensive writings, he seemed to never miss a chance to live the life he wanted. Many other writers and artists have sought to explain the conundrum we all face in making sense of our daily lives. And sometimes the lessons can be found in the most unexpected places.

In the film Stranger Than Fiction, the character Harold Crick played by Will Ferrell realizes his life is being narrated by some nameless voice, and he is actually the character in a story, one where he is going to die very soon. As Harold attempts to understand the voice and find some explanation for the dire fate that is quickly approaching, he begins to look at his life with fresh eyes and a sense of urgency. In a rather panicked conversation with an English scholar who has tried to discover the narrative Harold is living, the professor, played whimsically by Dustin Hoffman, advises him to simply live his life and accept the story as it is plays out. That somewhat dismissive advice is, of course, the same guideline we must all live by. Obviously Harold protests, saying “this isn’t a story to me or a philosophy or literary theory, it’s my life.” The professor smiles and tells him to simply “Go out and make it the one you’ve always wanted.” That guidance is the key to the film, and it is also the insight offered by Thoreau.

In many ways the movie Stranger Than Fiction and the advice from the English professor are a succinct reflection of the philosophy of existentialism. Life is basically what the individual makes of it, nothing more and nothing less. Starting with Soren Kierkegaard in the late nineteenth century and continuing with Jean Paul Sarte and Albert Camus in the middle of the twentieth, the existentialists addressed the challenge of living in a seemingly absurdist world, an increasingly apt description these days. At times it seems like the only meaning and purpose in our life is that which we individually and randomly assign to it. In his essay The Myth of Sisyphus, the existentialist writer Albert Camus ponders the absurd fate of the mythical Greek hero Sisyphus, condemned by the gods to endlessly roll a huge rock to the top of a mountain, at which point the stone would roll back down. Yet, in embracing a fate rather than lamenting a burden, Camus ends by asserting we “must imagine Sisyphus happy.”

So, as we continue to enjoy the holiday season, bidding farewell to one year while preparing to welcome another, we will again succumb to the irresistible need to reflect on the past and make resolutions for the future. As we seek to understand the lives we live, the benefits we enjoy, the opportunities we receive, and the challenges we face, we can look to Thoreau, we can commiserate with Harold Crick, we can ponder Camus and Sisyphus. And, as we do, looking back in reflection and forward with anticipation on the last day of December, here’s to imagining ourselves happy and living the lives we have imagined.

On Notebooks, Joan Didion, & Christmas Morning

On Christmas morning, I'm reading the paper and doing some writing and thinking of Joan Didion, who passed away this week at the age of eighty-seven. As the memories and reflections and tributes pour out, we can't help but reflect on her contributions to the simple act of writing down what we know, what we see, what we hear, and even what we wonder.

It was from Didion on keeping a notebook that many of us discovered the idea of writing down snippets of thought, phrases or references from an article, or perhaps dialogue overheard that isn’t really to include in pieces later as much to remind us of who we are, what our thought processes were, and what it means to simply notice and think. As I've been reading back through pieces about and by Didion and writing, I realize it's been  been officially a decade since I started keeping a notebook. It was the winter of 2011, sometime around Thanksgiving, that I started jotting down thoughts in a notebook. I also started walking regularly, perhaps to get out of the house and certainly to collect my thoughts. And I'm still collecting my thoughts, occasionally posting them here, or perhaps weaving them into a column for The Villager.

Perhaps I'll start second semester with Didion’s essay to set the tone for my students being writers of creative nonfiction, at least as long as they’re in my class, seeing the world like an artist.

Christmas Eve

“It's Christmas Eve. It's the one night of the year when we all act a little nicer, we smile a little easier, we cheer a little more. For a couple of hours out of the whole year we are the people that we always hoped we would be.”

— Frank Cross, Scrooged

The Novelty of Manners

A novel of manners has lessons on the novelty of manners. Here's this week's column for The Villager.

At times it seems we live beyond the pale.

In contemporary American society, crass, rude, and careless behavior too often masquerades as bold, assertive, and independent expression. The manners, traditions, and customs that once seemed so central to American life seem to fade on a daily basis, replaced by people acting on base instincts. The decorum that should be sacrosanct in institutions like Congress is no longer practiced, required, or even expected. The basic decency that should be standard in places like the schoolhouse and the church parking lot is embarrassingly absent. Sometimes I think contemporary American society needs a few more Lady Catherines.

Jane Austen’s timeless novel Pride & Prejudice is considered a novel of manners for its detailed examination of the customs, institutions, and culture of the time in which the story is set. The novel is also a rather intricate tale of relationships and traditions, as well as biting satire and social criticism of the society its characters inhabit. It is a wonderfully entertaining narrative as well a rich character study of numerous personalities inherent in regency England. One of those characters, Lady Catherine de Bourgh, is often perceived as somewhat of a villain, a snobby elitist member of the nobility who seeks only to destroy the inevitable union of Elizabeth and Darcy. And, of course, she is that and more. Her suspicion, judgment, and ridicule of the Bennett sisters is scathingly cold. Alas, it is also fair. Despite her callous contempt for people beneath her social class, Lady Catherine is also correct in much of her criticisms of the Bennett family. They are, at times, embarrassingly crass and inappropriate.

The true wisdom and beauty of Austen’s novel is that she simultaneously upholds the institutions and values of her society as she satirizes and criticizes them. The book is a novel of decorum and manners, two important tenets of civilized society. Both qualities are severely lacking in young Lydia Bennett, as well as the rakish Wickham who nearly destroys the Bennett family by stealing the virtue of their youngest and most naive daughter. Fortunately for Lydia, her older sister Elizabeth is not so crass and careless. And, it's Elizabeth’s inherent goodness which unites her with the gentleman Darcy who resolves the family drama with tact and discretion. Ultimately, when Elizabeth Bennett stands up to Lady Catherine, she actually represents all the poise, reserve, and class the rest of her family lacked. I can only imagine what the institutionally reserved Lady Catherine or the naturally refined Elizabeth Bennett might think of contemporary society.

In a recent column for The Atlantic, conservative columnist David Brooks laments a similar lack of manners and decorum in the nature of American politics. An erudite scholar and social critic in his own right, Brooks often looks to the great thinkers of the neoclassical era for insight into the human condition. Enlightenment philosophers such as David Hume were concerned that man’s faculty for reason was not strong enough to control his inclination to selfishness. As a result of Hume’s concern, and to an extent those of Lady Catherine, nineteenth century writers crafted their vision “about how we produce good citizens—people who are moderate in their zeal, sympathetic to the marginalized, reliable in their diligence, and willing to sacrifice the private interest for public good.”

Noting specifically the increasingly crass behavior among some members of the Republican party, Brooks fears the party has strayed far from the principles of conservative godfather Edmund Burke. In reviewing the writings of Hume and Burke, Brooks ponders how the country arrived at this point. Brooks reminds readers how Burke, in some ways a contemporary of the Lady Catherines in nineteenth century England, lamented an increasingly blunt and mannerless society and stressed the importance of dignified behavior in our leaders and citizens. “Manners are of more importance than laws'' asserts Burke, for “upon them, in great measure, the laws depend.” Clearly, the lessons of the nineteenth century are lost on many people today, including those at the highest reaches of society and government.

In discussing his novel The Lord of the Flies, William Golding once explained how the story’s moral “is that the shape of a society must depend upon the ethical nature of the individual and not on any political system, however apparently logical or respectable.” That ethical nature seems to be in short supply in a society looking increasingly beyond the pale.

Less Than Zero: a Gen X Christmas Movie

It's time for the annual debates about Christmas movies, and the non-Christmasy Christmas movies. Yes, maybe Die Hard, probably Die Hard. But if you're between the age of forty-five and sixty, you probably recall another holiday season film from 1987, Less Than Zero. 

The 80s film based on Bret Easton Ellis' first novel is truly a Christmas movie. I wrote about this a few years for Medium. Here are my thoughts on a GenX Christmas.

Thirty years ago, Clay came back to LA for Christmas, and the holiday movie was never the same. For Generation X, a group of people raised on disappointment, the cinematic version of Bret Easton Ellis’ novel Less Than Zero is a true Christmas movie exposing the hollow superficial excess of the holiday season and specifically the 1980s. A visually stunning film from cinematographer Edward Lachman, the movie captures and spotlights all the glitz of the holiday season, especially in Beverly Hills, while not looking away from the vacuous lack of substance behind the style, the holiday, and the state of the American family. Director Marek Kanievska created a haunting music video of a Christmas movie with film noir elements amidst the bright lights of holiday decorations.

This Thing We Call Literature

I've been reading much non-fiction about art and literature lately. Here are some thoughts from this week's column in The Villager.

In the teaching of composition and literature, I always remind my students that words have connotations in addition to their denotation, or dictionary definition. It's worth noting the word literature has a connotation as well. The general consensus is that literature is more highbrow than popular fiction, and it's almost expected to be less-than-accessible to the average reader. Literature is the long, complicated, sometimes boring stuff we read in school. The definition I've tended to use with my students is that literature is "the stuff that matters."

I always distinguish between good storytelling and literature. Stephanie Meyer's incredibly popular Twilight series from 2005, I’ve explained to my students, is a great story, but actually contains rather weak writing, and it certainly won't ever be studied, nor will it even be thought of a generation from now. Stephen King, one of the most successful and talented fiction writers of the contemporary age once made a similar observation of Meyer, noting she “can’t write worth a darn.” I tend to agree, though many readers of classic literature might make the same criticism of King. Of course, we could be wrong. And there are far more scholarly and erudite people to explain and resolve this. Arthur Krystal is definitely one of those.

Krystal is one of my favorite critics, writers, and thinkers, and I've lately been reading several of his books of essays and criticism, notably his latest work This Thing We Call Literature, which is the inspiration for this column. Krystal is, I believe, first and foremost an essayist, and he spends much of his practice in the form pondering the very nature of writing and storytelling. One of his targets in the book is the idea in contemporary society that literature is whatever we want it to be, or even worse, anything that is written. He draws insight and perspective from the theory posited in a book of literary criticism entitled A New Literary History of America, which makes the astute observation that Bob Dylan is potentially the most well-known and significant poet in America today. This perspective is, of course, validated by his award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2016. Add to that the 2018 awarding of the Pulitzer Prize for music to rapper Kendrick Lamar, and you can see the argument take shape.

Exploring the depths of my original comment about popular writers like Stephen King or Stephanie Meyer, Krystal's discussion of commercial or genre fiction versus literary fiction is the crux of differing views about literature. For example, he notes the significance of popularity in weighing a literary work's significance, and he concedes the obvious reality that the works of Charles Dickens were actually the popular fiction of their time, read by a public including many who had nothing more than an eighth grade education. I particularly enjoyed his reference to Edmund Wilson's classic New Yorker essay disparaging popular crime fiction, "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" When I ran across an excerpt from that essay years ago, it opened my eyes to the battle over literature and popular fiction. Certainly, popularity is not the barometer by which we measure quality - fast food and reality TV being examples of the flaw in that logic.

That said, Pop Culture has a distinctly different status than it did even twenty years ago. As Krystal notes: “If you think Buffy the Vampire Slayer deserves to be the subject of an academic dissertation ... then you are living in the right time.” No doubt. And I am certainly one to elevate Buffy to the body of work worthy of study. For years, I have half-joked to my classes that my first scholarly work of literary criticism will be centered on the three Bs of western culture studies: "The Bible, Beowulf, & Buffy." But I don't disagree with Krystal or Lionel Trilling or Northrop Frye or Harold Bloom that there are clear distinctions for that which we deem literature. I'd also agree that postmodern obfuscation of ideas like quality, morality, and truth are doing no service to culture. There's the good stuff that matters and won't soon be forgotten, and there's everything else.

Anyway, if you want to ponder some thoughts on language and literature, check out Arthur Krystal. Read some popular fiction as well. And then perhaps follow that with some classic literature. Having recently introduced my students to Jane Austen’s timeless classic Pride and Prejudice, I can’t recommend it enough.