A Torrent of Suffering People: My Review of The Worst Hard Time

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

My job is something of a conversation piece. When I share with a new friend that I edit books for a living, I get one of a relatively predictable range of responses, from the look of bewilderment that books are still being published and people are still reading them (I've seen that look in the mirror a few times, I must confess), to the fast-pitch of a long fantasized but never acknowledged idea for a first book, to my favorite: the broad smile as my newfound friend recalls a favorite or recently read book and talks at length about what's so great (or so terrible) about it. People who read but don't write love to read, and they love to talk about what they're reading or what they have read, and they love to hear about what I'm editing and what editing is like. It's a fun window into a friend's personality and interests, and a great way to quickly strengthen ties and build trust with each other. Plus, I sound like a big shot.

My neighbor across the street is one of those third types; we honestly have nearly nothing in common besides a zip code, an area code and a common love of good books. We've been neighbors for a long time now, so the glamour of my profession has long worn off for him, but he still relishes the opportunity to share what he's reading, and in the case of The Worst Hard Time, he went so far as to loan me the book. I like history, and I was in the market for another book, so I took him up on it.

The Great American Dust Bowl, for me, has been a bit of an enigma. I've seen some of the photos from the Great Plains of the mid-1930s, heard the songs of the era, read the Cliffs Notes for The Grapes of Wrath, and imagined how hard life must have been at the close of the agrarian age in America, during a drought whose damage was compounded by a worldwide financial crisis. But I really had no idea how truly bad it was, how calamitous a man-made disaster started brewing almost as soon as the frontier closed. "Dust Bowl," under the dust of time, sounds cute and innocuous, like a football joke in a Bugs Bunny cartoon. In reality it was the comeuppance for decades of criminally negligent pillaging of land, an epic of devastation that left many people dead, many more physically compromised and psychologically traumatized, the effects of which can still be seen as you drive through Oklahoma and the Texas Panhandle and other southern plains states.

So, to the extent that Timothy Egan paints a picture of devastation, his book is remarkable. You can almost taste the dirt swarming the sky, can almost feel the clumps of topsoil raining down on you. You sweat in the hot summers that Egan narrates; you close your eyes and picture dugout houses with earthworms and black widow spiders crawling the walls and filthy sheets vainly blocking the onslaught of dust. His characterizations of the storms that "Dust Bowl" so inadequately evokes are vivid and arresting. It's the people Egan writes about that I find to be a bit much.

Don't get me wrong; I feel great sympathy for each character--real people, I should say, some of whom Egan interviewed, some of whom he discovered secondhand, and one of whom he anthologizes from a nearly lost diary. It's just that there are so many of them. Town after town, household after household, person after person, they swirl around me like the plague of grasshoppers he reports toward the end of the book. No sooner do I begin to recall details already reported on the character of the moment--details that orient me to this latest scene--than I am disoriented by a shift of focus to someone else, in some other town, with some other network of relationships. It's a torrent of suffering people; I can't concentrate long enough to truly relate.

I'm reminded of a time I was in New Orleans, walking in the cool of the evening, following a dog for kicks. I encountered a homeless man and handed him a dollar and continued to follow the dog. I passed another homeless man and gave him a dollar and kept following the dog. Two or three more homeless people, two or three more dollars. The dog led me up and over a hill, where I found myself facing twenty or thirty homeless people warming themselves by a fire. They looked at me, and I looked at them, and I turned around and left.

That was visceral, face to face. The Worst Hard Time recounts a story that I am separated from by decades. I read it on mass-market paper at my leisure. Quite frankly, I find it hard to stay present to the story. For all the immense suffering these people endured--some of the worst in American history, at a time within two generations of this typing--I find it hard to care.

It's really too bad, and I can't blame Egan entirely for it. Compassion fatigue is a real thing, and I do a fair bit of reading about people today who desperately need my compassion. But as good a writer as Egan can be, he's better at writing about forces of nature than he is at writing about people. They come off as often as not as caricatures, bedecked with purplish prose and Americana. I endured their tales of woe, eager to encounter each new storm.

When I was in college a dust storm blew through our campus. I'd never experienced anything like it: blinding and painful dust, blowing fast and relentlessly, finding its way onto every surface and messing everything up. My friend had borrowed my first-edition compilation of The Dark Knight Returns, one of my prized possessions, and tossed it under his bed; I got it back utterly coated in dirt and grime, most of which (though not nearly all of it) tracing back to this storm. I think of that night on my campus and I imagine waking up every day for the better part of a decade waiting for the storm to come, going to bed every night after surveying the day's damage; I imagine breathing the dust in and coughing the dust up till my ribs cracked from the exertion of it. I imagine those things and I feel for the people who endured it. I read The Worst Hard Time and then I move on to the next book. It's not all Egan's fault, but I wish for the sake of the memory of those people that he'd held my attention better.

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Siri's Prayer

Has anyone done this yet? Seems like someone would have by now; Apple even set us up by running an ad with a kid telling Siri to "call me Rock God."

My Siri, which is in the cloud,
Hallowed be my name.

My kingdom come,
My will be done,
On my phone as it is in my head.

Give me right this minute everything I want,
Translate my malaprops,
Even as I barely tolerate your misinterpretations.

And lead me not into bad information,
But deliver me the goods.

For mine is your kingdom,
Your glory,
And your power forever.

The Eternal Destiny of the Cool: My Review of Love Wins

Love Wins: A Book About Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of Every Person Who Ever Lived by Rob Bell
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I was sympathetic, but I was skeptical, when I first heard of Love Wins, a hipster treatise on Jesus and human destiny. I've appreciated Rob Bell the several times I've seen him speak; I liked his cadence and his rhythm and his horn rims and color scheme, but I also liked his way of thinking about the Bible. As evangelical as he is--he was raised in Michigan and educated at Wheaton College, for pete's sake--he manages to step back from evangelical subcultural ways of seeing and find a new angle that is nonetheless evangelical. And hipster. Bell makes it cool to be nerdy about the Ancient Near East. Without Rob Bell I'd not be hip to Jesus' Hebrew identity and its implications for how I read the New Testament. I'd probably also still be wearing lame round Harry Potter glasses instead of these cool boxy black frames. I owe Rob Bell a lot.

But given all that, perhaps you can understand my skepticism about Love Wins, which was, barely a year ago, aggressively promoted and derided as a book rejecting the cosmic reality of hell and the eternal, conscious punishment of the wicked. My skepticism was, frankly, partly due to my sympathies. It's neither fun nor cool to think or talk about the fate of people who don't believe that Jesus is Messiah, the Way, the Truth and the Life, that his cross and resurrection secure our eternities for us. Hell is a major buzzkill, and I'm sympathetic to any argument against it. But I had my doubts that someone as stylized as Bell could write a strong enough case for setting aside the well-vested evangelical tradition about hell. Those three-, two- and one-line paragraphs, those vast blank spaces between thoughts, this mere 35,000-word book could hardly knock hell off its privileged perch. Could it?

I owe Rob Bell an apology because I've made style and substance mutually exclusive, and Bell has shown that they don't need to be. As fast a phenomenon as Love Wins was (it's been in print fourteen months and had two books refuting it within four months of its release, but when was the last time you heard someone talk about it?), I'm now imagining that it took Bell years to write. In some ways it consolidates years' worth of themes that he's traveled around speaking on--he almost slips and tells us on more than one occasion that "the gods aren't angry," and each chapter could be easily reimagined as one of his popular Nooma videos--but it also reflects a whole lot of reading and digesting and thinking, and writing and revising and refining and distilling. Love Wins is simplicity on the far, far side of complexity.

That's good, because Rob Bell needed to do his homework on this one. It's not just hell he's playing with, his critics would argue; it's the very nature of God. And Bell knows it: in fact he writes Love Wins because of what a more hell-happy worldview has insinuated about God's character. Bell includes a nice, albeit too brief, list of further reading at the end of the book; I'm not sure it's an adequate list, because while Bell has clearly done his homework, his book is really only the Cliffs Notes on the subject of hell for the rest of us. There's no rigorous debate with his opponents; you could read this book and imagine that any such opponents are on the fringes of society and the verge of extinction. Trust me, they're not: I'm a little nervous to click send on this review for fear of how people near and far will react to the number of stars I gave it. My initial reaction when Love Wins came out was (and I think I posted this somewhere), "If I'm going to read about something as significant as the fate of every person who ever lived, I'm not going to read about it from Rob Bell." I'm glad I did, and I think he did a great job with it, but I'm not going to debate anybody about it till I've read a lot more on the subject.

In this respect, Rob Bell reminds me of Miles Davis. Not the greatest trumpet player who ever lived, Miles Davis was nevertheless a musical genius, understanding the evolution and interplay of multiple genres more acutely than almost anyone. He was also a great popularizer, tracking emerging trends and new insights on the jazz scene and bringing them to a wider audience. Given the hegemony of more traditional evangelical perspectives on the fate of those who have not professed faith in Jesus, and given how freely the dominant culture-makers in contemporary evangelicalism use their power to maintain that hegemony, and given the trauma that such a view of hell can induce on people of good will and fragile souls, I'd say a little Miles Davis might be the best thing for us. So thanks, Rob Bell, for Love Wins and my glasses and for giving me new ways of thinking about the eternal destiny of the cool. And I'm sorry I've not given more respect to your particular genius, your particular coolness.

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History Hardly Seems So Simple: My Review of The Man Time Forgot

The Man Time Forgot: A Tale of Genius, Betrayal, and the Creation of Time Magazine by Isaiah Wilner
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"They were all under thirty with no idea of what they had yet to learn. To hell with it--they simply scrawled, smoking cigarettes, chewing gum, guffawing when they got in a a good line. They wore British tweeds to the office; the smart dressers wore derbies and carried canes. Their style of dress revealed their attitude toward reporting. In those clothes, they would never go muckraking in the streets. They viewed themselves as storytellers, not hunting down the facts but culling and arranging them, shaping the narrative, painting the big picture."

I've occasionally heard it said that you know a story has played out when you read it in Time magazine. There are, I suppose, two ways of interpreting that: (1) Time is slow, always the last to the table when news breaks; (2) Time is magisterial, always offering the last word on a subject. I don't know about the magisterial side, but whatever Time is, it isn't slow--at least if you take into consideration the manic, caffeinated editorial process described in Isaiah Wilner's The Man Time Forgot. The freneticism that went into each issue of the fledgling magazine in the 1920s is exhausting to read unless you have the metabolism and ambition of a Jazz-Age post-graduate. Hours on end, line-editing against a ticking clock to a cacophonous soundtrack of linotype and agitation, subsisting on coffee and bootleg liquor and egg sandwiches, every week Briton Hadden, Henry Luce and their team of writers, editors and "boys" and "girls" would re-present the news. The Man Time Forgot makes the provocative (and probably largely accurate) claim that this whole thing was Hadden's idea, that Luce was an early adopter and shrewd interloper, and that Time's corporate history is marred by a profound lack of appreciation and a pathetic will to power.

History hardly seems so simple, but such is the nature of Time's editorial approach, at least in the early days. Hadden's main innovation was the notion that news had become arcane, the province of only the already-informed; as a result journalism had not only betrayed its responsibility to the whole citizenry but also lost its luster. Time took the news of the week and refashioned it into epic storytelling--spartan in detail but lush with imagery, determining what one needed to know but making every detail memorable. News changed irrevocably in the aftermath of "Timestyle," what we now know as simply "style." What McDonald's was to food, Time was to news.

Perhaps that's too harsh. That's not Wilner's point in this book, in any case, but I found myself questioning the greatness of the enterprise throughout the book. Wilner himself writes in Timestyle, crafting an occasionally purplish prose and indulging the Great Man theory that makes reporting like Time's possible.

It was important for Hadden and Luce to follow the rules of the epic in how they conveyed the news. There were heroes of fixed chin and furrowed brow; there were villains of nefarious stare and wicked grin. There were bilious buffoons and fair-eyed femme fatales. The players were the thing wherein you got the gist of the story. Hadden had this idea from childhood, ostensibly, and it took fuller shape during his time at Yale, where he befriended and ultimately conspired with Luce, the lesser light, to change the way people learned what they needed to know. Luce, the son of missionaries and a light-footed,vexing aristocrat, found himself always in the shadows, nipping at the heels and riding the coattails of the expansive, burly and larger-than-life Hadden, friend to all but servant to none. It's obvious, given the pictures Wilner paints of each of these figures, who is this epic's hero and who is its villain. If you will pardon the reference to a recent pop-culture phenomenon, Hadden is Thor, and Luce is Loki.

As I said, history hardly seems so simple, and Wilner does offer the occasional nod to Luce's particular genius. Time under Hadden alone would have been a frat-boy anarchist's playful thumbing of the nose to his preferred industry, a subversive pet project that would not have survived long into Hadden's thirties (Hadden himself died at age thirty-one). It was Luce's more detached and methodical mind (as well as his Napoleonic ambition) that fueled the magazine's growth and ultimate cementing as a magazine of record. Thirty-five years later it was Luce who was able to gather in one room the Great Men and Women of American culture, honored over the decades under his editorial gaze as shapers of the century, all of whom were happy to in turn acknowledge the importance of Time as the archiver of history, the last word on every subject. But every epic needs a villain, in the mindset of Timestyle, and for Wilner Luce clearly fits the bill.

What I'm more intrigued by--and perhaps such a book has been written--is the unintended consequence of Timestyle on the American consciousness. The problem with diagnosing a chronic problem of societal ignorance is that it is sometimes hard to tell the poison from the cure. Time under Hadden's watch and successively under Luce accomplished a great thing by making a whole nation more aware of what was happening in the world, but it did so by reducing historical figures to their physical attributes and reducing conflicts from their inherent complexity to digestible levels of right and wrong. In the beginning, Time did no original reporting; it cut and pasted and aggregated and stole and plagiarized and rewrote with only passing concern for facticity. In the beginning, Time was not a sponsor of journalism but a referendum on the work of reporters around the country. Hadden wasn't a student of the Chicago Manual of Style so much as he was a disciple of the Iliad; he kept it at his desk and referred his writers to it regularly. This appeal to the epic unconsciously perpetuated the Cult of the Great Man, which ultimately contributed to our current cult of celebrity and feeds into the nagging suspicion among many that we are less informed today than ever. Long before Google made us stupid (Google it), it seems, the magisterial Time magazine was making us reductionists.

Perhaps that's too harsh an indictment. But the weaknesses I see in Time's original editorial vision, in Timestyle's editorial approach, is apparent in this book: a hagiographical treatment of the tragic-comic Thor/Hadden and a cynical send-up of the devious, swindling Loki/Luce. It's a good read for any editor, a cautionary tale of both the thirst for power and the shadow side of creativity, but I hope it's not the final word on Time's legacy.

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Dave Must Be a Foodie: My Review of Animal, Vegetable, Miracle

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I'm what you might call . . . indoorsy. That's a Jim Gaffigan line; I saw it on TV. But he's right about me; I operate on a simple premise: What if something's on TV and it's never on again?

That's a line from "The Outdoor Type" by the Lemonheads. I heard it on the radio when I was sitting around my house. But by now you get the point. I'm not the most likely person to read a three-hundred-page book about farming. But that's exactly what I did during this spring of my Year of Overdue Books. I was given Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver from an author-friend of mine several years ago; she had noticed that another author-friend of mine had given me a copy of Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan and thought, Dave must be a foodie. In reality, he had given me Omnivore's Dilemma as an example of how he wanted to write. So I sort of got this book under false pretenses, and so I let it sit for a while.

In the meantime, I was also letting our garden plot sit for a while, and it wasn't very forgiving. Weeds everywhere, and not a single tomato to show for it. This year I resolved two things: to catch up on my reading and to recover our garden. So far I've accomplished goal number one; reading Animal, Vegetable, Miracle has been good motivation toward goal number two.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle is a family affair: Barbara Kingsolver writes the majority of the prose, walking us through a year of living off the food that they or their neighbors have grown. Her husband, Steven L. Hopp, writes sidebar articles about food justice; their daughter, Camille, writes reflections from young adulthood and shares seasonal family recipes. These are crops and animals that flourish in the temperate zone of southern Appalachia--asparagus in the spring, tomatoes all through the summer, potatoes in the fall, squash and whatever you've frozen all through the winter. Kingsolver writes beautifully, candidly, effectively about both the costs and the benefits of locavory (eating locally); I was almost made willing to plant asparagus after reading the first two chapters, even though my wife hates asparagus and you get nothing for your trouble for the first two years, and I'm a horrible gardener. She also makes a strong cautionary case for laying off the omnivory, citing our eating habits, and the industrial food industry that feeds us, as prime suspects in climate change and the decline of the west. It was hard to close Kingsolver's book and enjoy my daily breakfast of Peanut Butter Cheerios--Lord knows I tried.

As good as the book was, and as compelling as her case, I did find it harder to get through than Omnivore's Dilemma. I think it's a relatively simple reason, actually: Pollan's experiment in that book was more inquisitive, testing rival theories about food along the way to a final feast of food with remarkably local provenance. Kingsolver's experiment was less inquisitive and more resolute, more all-consuming. To call it an experiment is unfair to experiments; this was a family covenant made more marketable by use of the language of experimentation. Kingsolver and her family had, whether consciously or not, spent years preparing for this move across country, this decision to only eat what they could provide themselves or buy from neighbors. They had prior knowledge to draw on and established relationships to provide moral support. Me, I have a suburban home with a small plot and neighbors who couldn't care less whether I grow my green peppers or buy them off an eighteen-wheeler. I'm not predisposed to the life overhaul chronicled in Animal, Vegetable, Miracle; I'm indoorsy, and I like it.

Nevertheless, I got some good ideas and some good nudging toward keeping my garden from weeding out. Further rewards will, presumably, come later this summer as my heirloom tomatoes and lettuce and whatnot start to deliver the goods. Next year I'll read something like Animal, Vegetable, Miracle (an author-friend gave me a copy of Year of Plenty a few weeks ago) and try to keep myself motivated to give up the couch every now and then to do my part to save the planet. Till then, happy eating!

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Before You See the Avengers (Again): An Excerpt from Comic Book Character

In my previous post, most excellent reader, I indicated that I have plans to see the blockbuster film The Avengers many, many, many more times. I doubt I'll get to it this weekend; my wife is opening her own counseling practice, and over the next few days we'll be putting the finishing touches on her office. (Do her a favor: go to her Psychology Today page and click on "like" to help her get better noticed in her community. Thanks!) But anyway, I'm only one man, and many of you don't have chores that will preclude you from seeing The Avengers again this weekend--or even for the first time. I'll be living vicariously through you, so I thought I ought to offer you something in exchange. Here's an excerpt from my book Comic Book Character, recently revised and updated, and rereleased for the Kindle. The chapter "Might Makes Right: The Justice League Meets the Avengers" is my favorite in the book, contrasting the worldviews behind the major superhero showcases of two great eras in comic book publishing and, I think, offering some insight to the way we frame our own era's understanding of virtue and heroism. So read the excerpt to get up to speed on what the Avengers are, and then buy the ebook to get up to speed on what they mean.

***

The Avengers were the first “super-group” in the Marvel Comics line. That is not to say that Marvel didn’t already have teams of superheroes—after all, the Fantastic Four was Marvel’s first great success in superhero comics. But the Avengers brought together strong-willed, larger than life heroes with independent fan bases. Every reader had a favorite: the cute couple Ant-Man and Wasp; the invincible Iron Man; the unpredictable Hulk; the conveniently rediscovered Captain America; or the literal god of thunder, Thor. The lineup quickly and regularly changed, but the title served its purpose: to showcase new Marvel talents and pool the assets of “Earth’s mightiest heroes.”

From early on the Avengers made ripples, serving as a launching pad for Marvel’s first black hero, African prince Black Panther, and keeping the peace in New York and elsewhere while fighting organized networks of villains, alien races and even a white supremacist group. The group was an institution, centering in a mansion complete with butler Jarvis, establishing a foundation to cover team expenses and fund stipends for unemployed team members, expanding to the West Coast, and linking their work to the U.S. government and eventually the United Nations through official liaisons. The Avengers weren’t simply superheroes, they were high society. Any superhero who was anyone was a current or one-time member.

The Avengers turned heads over time as they took on various thorny issues. Their treatment of race was followed by uncharted ethical territory as android Vision fell in love with and ultimately married the mutant Scarlet Witch. Wonder Man discovered that he was a clone. Physically unusual heroes such as the Beast and Tigra won accolades while on duty but faced marginalization by the public when they went off the clock. Second-stringers faced layoffs by government decree. Founding member Henry Pym struggled to find his place first as Ant-Man, then as the original Giant-Man and eventually as Yellowjacket, all the while trying to undo the damage caused by his perfectly designed, artificially intelligent, amoral robot Ultron; he eventually suffered a nervous breakdown, beat his wife, betrayed his team and went to prison.

The Avengers wore their pettinesses on their sleeves, but for all the internal troubles they faced, the team—and the mansion that housed them—served as a safe retreat from the challenges of serving and protecting a fickle world that alternately trusted, revered, suspected and rejected their presence. The Avengers fought to keep a vulnerable world above water even as their leaders, in the words of the series’ editors, fought to “instill as much trust in one another as the public has in the team itself. With the abundance of alpha personalities involved, and their diverse backgrounds, this is not an easy task.”

The Avengers In Review

I remember the moment, oddly enough. I walked into the QuikTrip (it was either before or, more likely, just after our weekly Boy Scout meeting) and meandered over to the rack of comic books on the western wall. There among the various titles was Avengers #221, showing a grid of potential new members and inviting me to "PICK TWO!" I didn't know most of them, but I thought the depiction of the Invisible Girl was clever, and I thought it might be cool to have Spider-Man and Spider-Woman join the Avengers in the same issue. So I opted out of the Slurpee and Watchamacallit and instead bought myself a comic book. And then I bought, oh, about two hundred more. And then about twenty years later I asked for and was given the entire Avengers archives on CD-ROM. Oh, and my favorite chapter in my geeky homage to superheroes, Comic Book Character, is about the Avengers. So perhaps you can understand my enthusiasm over the past four years as Marvel Entertainment Group built slowly up to last weekend's release of The Avengers: The Motion Picture.

I don't recall a time when I wasn't a fan of the Avengers. They are called "Earth's Mightiest Heroes," mostly in keeping with the hubris one generally associates with comic books; they have been, in reality, a monthly showcase for any number of human frailties and faults: from alcoholism to spousal abuse, from racism to chronic despair, from petty jealousies to ultimate betrayals. I learned a lot about myself, what I ought to aspire to and what temptations I ought to actively resist, by reading their exploits. The Avengers are many things, but at their core The Avengers is the human experience writ large.

The film is, I suppose, not much different. We've been introduced to each of the key characters over the course of five prior movies: Iron Man, The Incredible Hulk, Iron Man II, Thor and Captain America: The First Avenger. We knew their backstories coming in, but we didn't know how they were going to get along; and we certainly didn't know if one film could manage so many big personalities.

By that I don't simply mean the characters; I mean the actors as well. Some, like Samuel L. Jackson, are legendary; some, like Robert Downey Jr., are infamous. Each has played the lead in the past, so would they--let alone the characters they were taking on--play well with others?

That's why I think the superstar of The Avengers is not any of the actors themselves but the director, Joss Whedon. Whedon has built his reputation, in television and even in comics, as a master of the ensemble. He not only meshes characters well, he tells communal stories well. We saw a lot of that here: Whedon doesn't shy away from the tensions that should be expected in an assembly of flawed personalities who see the need to work together but don't yet know quite what to make of each other. Nobody owes anyone anything at the outset of The Avengers, and they go to great lengths to prove that fact to one another--and, I suppose, to themselves. Tony Stark shows off and declares himself above it all both in and out of his Iron Man armor; Thor barely deigns to interact with puny humans; Captain America rejects the obvious power differential between him and the others when a special agent advises against taking them on: "They're basically gods." "There's only one God, and I'm pretty sure he doesn't dress like that."

It takes patience and cool, benevolent manipulation on the part of the all-seeing, one-eyed Nick Fury (director of SHIELD) to gradually shape these six heroes into a true team--that and the tragic death of a beloved supporting player, a death Fury is all too willing to exploit for the greater good. Nobody's conscience is entirely clean in this film, which is as it should be: none of us makes it successfully through complex relationships without some regret and some self-justification."We could be heroes," David Bowie sings, but he also sings "You, you would be mean; and I--I'd drink all the time." We're all flawed and frail, and part of each person's heroic journey is to push through our flaws and frailties in pursuit of the good.

The latter half of the film gets a little Transformersey for my taste. I sort of wish I hadn't shelled out the extra bucks for 3D. I should really see it again to find out what I missed while I was dodging alien laser shots aimed at my head. I also find myself wanting a little more time to sort through the various relationships and figure out the individual characters a little better. The Black Widow said more than once, "I've got a lot of red on my ledger." I should really see it again to get a better sense of the debt she's carrying, and how it affects her interactions with the others. And Hawkeye--he was under Loki's spell for a good chunk of the film; I should probably see it again to parse out what's really Hawkeye and what's the influence of the film's villain. Oh, and speaking of Loki, I should probably catch it again to focus on how the brotherly relationship between Loki and Thor is carried over here from last year's film Thor. Oh, and while I'm at it, I'd love to focus in on Mark Ruffalo's portrayal not just of the Hulk but of Bruce Banner, whom he describes (in one of my favorite moments from the film) as "always angry." And then I might as well catch it one more time to see how Cap has adjusted to being awoken seventy years into the future--how he handles being the same age as his peers but from an entirely different era. Oh, and Iron Man has a really funky relationshp with SHIELD, and Fury in particular. I'd like to spend a little more time on that.

So yeah, six more times ought to do it.

How to Pick a Comic Book: Your Helpful Guide to Free Comic Book Day

Today is Free Comic Book Day--a day, like Sweetest Day and other faux-holidays, dedicated to propping up an entire industry. People around the United States will venture into comic book stores on a whim, their faces betraying their anxiety and hope. They'll leave with at least a few free teaser comics and maybe a starter kit for HeroClix and various other sundries. Some of them may go back in a couple of weeks.

Today is also Day Two of the Avengers Movie Era (AME), and day two of life for my revised edition of Comic Book Character. So to celebrate, I offer this gift: a teaser from the book and a user-friendly guide to getting started on shopping for, and reading, a comic book.

***

Comic book selection might seem to be a relatively private affair. You can, in fact, go a long way toward picking a book in private. Comic book producers are well-represented on the Internet, and at their sites you can survey character profiles, find out the current status of particular heroes and, in some cases, see samples of the characters in action, in the form of “dotcomics.” Online booksellers sell graphic novels (an extensive but self-contained comic book) and in some cases provide editorial summaries and reader reviews. Fans maintain their own sites and can tell you what you want to know about a particular character, team, title, writer or artist.

That’s all well and good, but to pick a comic thus is to prefilter a wide range of alternate selections. In contrast, some comic books can be found in libraries or in retail outlets ranging from grocery stores (where staff can offer little more than an aisle number in response to your questions) to shops devoted to comics and ancillary products. Here you can enter multiple universes and see the full cultural impact of the superhero genre. Between current issues and backlist titles, a comic book store offers near-total access to a character’s history.

In addition, comic book stores bring you into direct contact with the genre’s fiercely devoted fan base. Comic book shop regulars can offer overviews and synopses of many aspects of comic book history and culture. Storeowners can guide you to the type of art or storytelling you’re looking for or help you find a good entry point into the medium. They will often also try to convert you to their way of life: late-night role-playing games, passionate discourse over the confusing details of current plots or heated debates over the limits of a particular hero’s abilities. A trip into such a store can take much longer than you would expect, and on occasion it can overwhelm you to the point of despair.

In any event, whether in private or under the eager eyes of the comic fanboy, you’ll eventually settle on a comic to read. Now all you have to do is figure out how to read it. . . .

Comic books are not generally organized in a way that is friendly to newcomers. Most issues begin by continuing a story that was left unconcluded in the issue previous. Issues are numbered sequentially, but series often relaunch to signify an editorial shift. Long-term characters have often had their origins retold to modernize their circumstances or provide a convenient starting point for new audiences. The industry in general presumes the reader’s familiarity with the form, assuming that young readers, with more recent experiences of pictures and words working in tandem, will quickly assimilate. Nevertheless, with a little patience you can find your way through. Comic books are two art forms—sequential pictures and popular literature—working in concert. The words are a part of the pictures, and the pictures help to tell the story. The reader must be aware of both in order to fully appreciate the direction of the book.

***

There. That should get you started. For a fuller introduction to the genre, download the book here.

The Pilgrimage Is Never Over: My Review of Chasing Francis

Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale by Ian Morgan Cron
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

At the end of 2011 I was invited to write a brief review for a best-of list. The book was Jesus, My Father, the CIA, and Me, a memoir by Ian Morgan Cron about growing up in a car wash. Just kidding. The title was as accurate to the content as it was creatively uncreative, and the book was absorbing. I wrote an effusive review of the book and resolved that I would eventually, finally, read his first book, Chasing Francis: A Pilgrim's Tale.

Then I forgot about it for a while.

Then I had the chance to meet Cron, where I told him face to face how much I enjoyed his memoir, and where he asked what I thought of his first book, and where I had to red-facedly admit I'd let it slip by. I was embarrassed for a number of reasons: Chasing Francis has been influential on a number of my friends as they think about living out their faith in the twenty-first century, and because I admire them, I really should have read what they admire by now. As an editor for a Christian publisher, I've solicited endorsements for several books from Cron in the few years since Chasing Francis was released, itself a tacit acknowledgment of his importance, but never bothered to read what this important writer had written. And perhaps most embarrassingly, I had advance notice that I might get to meet him, might get to talk about his writing with him, and I still let his book go unread. Lame lame lame all around. In any event, Cron was gracious and, in an act of Franciscan charity, gave me two copies of the book. This being my personal Year of Overdue Books, I chalked it up to providence and read Chasing Francis over the weekend--maybe a bit faster than I should have--and thoroughly enjoyed it.

My copies of the book bear the subtitle "A Novel," which is a change from the subtitle at first release: "A Pilgrim's Tale." That change is unfortunate, as calling it a novel sets up the wrong expectations of the book and would likely disappoint. This isn't a novel; it's "wisdom literature," a style that's been used to good effect in recent years by philosophers such as Peter Kreeft and Christian gadfly Brian McLaren, among many others. Cron's goal for the reader in this particular wisdom writing is not to enjoy a subversive work of literary fiction but to enter into a time of reflection by way of imagined scenario: an accomplished but increasingly frayed pastor of an evangelical church, who represents the angst felt by many such pastors and laypeople today (including myself, I freely admit), loses it in the pulpit one day and is forced into a leave of absence by his elder board (who represent the tyranny of sameness that actively, though unconsciously, suppresses the redemptive imagination in all kinds of settings, not just the church), and sets out on a pilgrimage to the world of St. Francis of Assisi, the medieval child of privilege whose epiphany on the road to war led him to arguably (and it's a strong argument) rescue Christianity from its own obsolescence.

That's a long sentence, but it gets the gist of the book across. The main character, pastor Chase Falson, reads a little thin and implausible at the beginning; so does his church, actually. Both sound more like an amalgamation of evangelicals from all over America, moreso than a congregation specifically set in New England; Chase's initial ignorance of St. Francis, his casualness in the face of a startlingly unsympathetic reaction to his breakdown, his utter innocence in the face of betrayal by the congregation that he planted and cultivated--this initial setup serves the story almost too well. I would have liked to see Chase's feet of clay a little more clearly in the beginning.

But to ask for that is to judge the book as a novel, which is not what it is. And you'll grow quickly to root for and identify with Chase as he flies to Italy and takes up with several Franciscan brothers and sisters, conveniently speakers of English and mostly American, and makes the compelling case that the church at the beginning of the third millennium CE looks a lot like the church at the beginning of the second millennium CE: unmitigated materialism, regular scandals of the predictable sort, and a growing irrelevancy to the daily lives of loosely committed adherents. Francis, who expressed his faith in such wild and crazy ways as kissing lepers, walking through a war zone unarmed to offer a blessing to a Muslim emir, and stripping naked in front of a crowd to divest himself of his family's wealth, was a shock to the church's system--just the shock, it turns out, that the church needed. A Christian counterculture spread across Europe in Francis's wake, taking vows of poverty and simplicity, blessing communities in real, tangible and agendaless ways, and just generally taking the words of Jesus really, really seriously while taking the serious challenges of life lightly and joyfully. No wonder Chase falls in love with Francis; no wonder he has his world rocked.

I was surprised and impressed at the end of the book by how Chase was able to offer a vision for the contemporary church that is informed by Francis but achievable by modern evangelicals. Cron identifies five themes that capture the heart of Francis's ministry and challenge the mores and protocols of today's churches: transcendence, community, beauty, dignity and meaning. That these sound a little "duh" to me is a tribute both to how effectively Cron portrayed the zeitgeist in this book (he's not the only person to have been thinking along these lines in the past decade) and how influential his book has been in the six years since its release. The most interesting books do exactly that: they make you think that you already accepted the premise by showing how self-evident the premise is, even while honestly representing how controversial the premise will be. That's what good wisdom literature does too, frankly: we get fooled by the parable into thinking that we're something we've never yet been, and then we start to live into that something in redemptive and joyful ways. Chasing Francis is fiction in service to the pursuit of truth.

A running tension throughout the book is the contrast between evangelicalism and Catholicism, and the mutual suspicion between the two traditions. I've personally been on both sides of this chasm, which may be why I got this book so much more quickly than I've gotten similar treatises by other writers. Brian McLaren and others have written compellingly about the latest emergence in the arc of Christianity's history, and I have a great deal of sympathy toward the insights from those writings. But this look backward, this story of a textbook evangelical learning from an unmitigated Catholic, is for me touched with a special grace. There's no going back, Chase seems to understand, as he resists moving permanently to Italy, converting to Catholicism and joining a traditional Franciscan order. But there is historical continuity to the work of God in the world through the church: when there's nothing new under the sun, then what Francis discovered in his day can be rediscovered and freshly applied in our day. We move forward into history best when we carry the best of our history with us. As one of the priests in Chase's adventure reminds him, and us, "the pilgrimage is never over."

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An Essay Is an Attempt: A Review of The Lifespan of a Fact

The Lifespan of a Fact by John D'Agata
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"What is truth?" Pontius Pilate spits out that question, as much to himself as anyone, in the middle of his heated debate with Jesus Christ on the eve of his execution. The story is told every year during Holy Week, the most sacred seven days of the Christian calendar. It happened to be Holy Week as I read The Lifespan of a Fact, a short book that like Holy Week centers on a death and wrestles with the nature of truth. Unlike Holy Week, this story has no happy ending, no resurrection to redeem the tragedy. It's just two men arguing over the nature of truth while a third man leaps to his death.

OK, that's not exactly what the book is. A slim 123 pages of text, the book is based on an essay by John D'Agata about a young man's suicide in Las Vegas, written for a journal that employs interns and has them, among other things, serve as fact checkers for its content. Jim Fingal happily and naively (and a bit too familiarly) challenges some of the details in the opening lines of D'Agata's essay; D'Agata bristles at the cheekiness of the content and refuses to either defend or correct his loose use of facts; and the game is on. Fingal wants precision and clarity and coherence; D'Agata wants rhythmic sentences and thematic symmetry and literary beauty. They argue back and forth, their passions get the better of them, they bang their heads against each other's walls. They get nowhere with each other, raging back and forth while a young man muddles through a day that ends with him taking an elevator to the top of a casino, waving goodbye to a security guard and falling 9-make-that-8 seconds until landing on the ground below, dead.

The heart of the question between these two begins with the basic question of what the article is: is it essay-as-literature, as D'Agata contends, such that facts are secondary and modular utilities in the search for truth; or is it essay as explanation, which Fingal assumes and which, frankly, must have been the assumption of his boss as well, hence the assignment. D'Agata's casual relationship to factual precision is admittedly shocking, and he waits a frustratingly long time in the book to even begin to justify his approach and explain his writing ethic. Meanwhile Fingal is frustrating throughout, dissecting each detail of every sentence and passing judgment on it as only a punk intern can, trying to prove his mettle with the wrong set of proofs. We reach the impasse between these two within the first couple of pages, and wait nearly ninety pages before really broaching the question that plagued Pilate as he sentenced Jesus to death. And even then, we're haunted by the fact, undisputed on either side of the debate, that all 123 pages of back-and-forth have sprung from, and none of the 123 pages can remedy, the tragic death of a young man in a city that is far to resigned to the shocking numbers of suicides that plague its citizens year after year after year. As Fingal puts it, in a moment of moral clarity that is almost as tragic as the event itself, "Even if everything that's in question could be verified by unbiased third-party witnesses . . . well, then . . . I don't know. I'd have done my job. But wouldn't he still be dead?"

You will choose a side in this debate between D'Agata and Fingal, but it won't be easy, because both are clearly flawed characters, reacting out of their own insecurities and righteous indignation. They also both are great exemplars of their convictions; they confront each other with conviction and intellectual heft. It'll boil down to whether (a) you think an essay in a journal is a work of art or a piece of information and (b) you think truth is something that can be uncovered only by an amalgamation of facts or by the assertion of meaning. You might also be influenced by which of the debaters you find more obnoxious. D'Agata states his point concisely: "An essay is an attempt, Jim. Nothing else." Fingal states his conviction equally pungeantly: "You've got to ask yourself how far on the fringes of facticity someone is if not even Wikipedia agrees with them." And both of them ultimately fade to silence, appropriately, in the mutual acknowledgment that whether precise and accurate or mosaic and felt, unnecessary death is tragedy to be mourned and a wrong to be fought, never something to be trifled with.

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Christ Is Risen, Hallelujah

"Left the house this morning
Bells ringing filled the air
Wearin' the cross of my calling
On wheels of fire I come rollin' down here."

"May I feel your blood mix with mine."

Happy Easter Sunday.