Culture – Page 16 – Into the Woods

Dune ★ ★ ★

Updated below

Though it’s two and a half hours long, this is a bare bones, abbreviated Dune. Much of what makes the book such a classic had to be left out — for example, the politics, including the intricate political scheming of the Bene Gesserit witches and the wickedness of House Harkonnen. The dialogue, though good, is remarkably spare. There is character development for only two of the characters — Paul Atreides and his mother, Jessica. Those who have read the book will be able to fill in the gaps. Those who haven’t read the book will become acquainted with only two parts of the Dune story — the character Paul Atreides, and the planet Arrakis.

Thus the camera is often in Timothée Chalamet’s face, and he is a good enough actor to handle it. The deserts of Arrakis are lavishly presented as a vast sea of deep sand, sand which, when roiled by the giant worms, rolls up in massive waves and crashes against skelligs of rock like a stormy North Atlantic against the western coasts of Ireland and Scotland.

Though there is just enough narration at the beginning of the film to set up the plot for those who haven’t read the book, the film never tries to explain anything, leaving time to focus on: Paul Atreides and the planet Arrakis. That probably was smart. It would take many hours of cinema time to tell the full story. And since that could not be done in two and a half hours, why not do the key parts of the story well. The film ends, by the way, before the book does. No doubt there will be a sequel.

My only complaint about this version of Dune is that, once again, when the film industry gives us the science fiction and fantasy blockbusters that so many of us crave, it’s stories that we already know. Part of the awesomeness of Star Wars was that it was a new story, with new faces and new characters like Luke Skywalker and Princess Leia. Dune gives us an old story and the stars du jour — Chalamet, Rebecca Ferguson, Oscar Isaac, Jason Mamoa. Must they be in everything? The faces of familiar actors inevitably evoke memories of their recent roles, creating friction for suspension of disbelief and immersion in the story.

Dune is in theaters and can be streamed on HBO Max.

Update:

The Washington Post here touches on my complaint about the Hollywood star system and how the same faces keep appearing in different roles in quick succession. My complaints are two: First, that our ability to lose ourselves in a story is impaired by famous familiar faces that remind us of what we just saw them in. And, second, that re-employing popular actors again and again and again deprives us of seeing brilliant new actors of the sort that Game of Thrones introduced in droves.

The Washington Post story is here: Welcome to our future of omnipresent Timothée Chalamet. It’s not that I have anything against Timothée Chalamet, who is a brilliant young actor. It’s that I’d rather see Chalamet go do the stage for a while so that we can bring some new stars on line at the cinema.

The moral status of animals

The gorilla Ndakasi, shortly before she died in the arms of her keeper, Andre Bauma. Source: Virunga National Park via Twitter.

Ndasaki was 14 years old when she died, after a long illness, according to the BBC. When Ndasaki was a baby, her mother was killed by poachers. Andre Bauma, who remained her keeper at a gorilla orphanage, rescued Ndasaki, who was clinging to her mother’s body.

Every culture that I am aware of teaches that animals are a lower form of life than human beings. The life of any human being, no matter how vile or violent that human life may be, is held to be of more value than the life of any animal, no matter how rare or intelligent or majestic that animal may be.

Most of us, I feel sure, have loved animals whose lives we valued much more than the lives of many — or most! — of the humans around us. It’s only because we are never forced to make a trade that this attitude is never put to the test.

Societies are increasingly squeamish about our treatment of animals. However, a serious rethinking of our treatment of animals has yet to occur. A week ago, there were reports that the president of South Korea is considering a ban on eating dogs. Worsening environmental problems, along with the development of “cultured” meats, are encouraging us to rethink our costly habit of eating meat. But this is not happening fast enough. What government wants to be the first to start regulating and closing down the meat industry, while mandating the substitution of cultured meats? The uproar will be horrendous, most of it coming from the sort of people who consider even mask mandates during pandemics to be a heinous offense against their liberty.

A better sort of human beings will have two choices of philosophical reasons for not eating animals and switching to cultured meats.

The first is the utilitarian case: Our planet can no longer handle the inefficiency and filth of the meat industry. Though the cost of imitation meat is much too high today, that cost will surely come down as the cultured meat industry develops and scales up. At some point, cultured meat should cost much less than “farmed” meat, because it is much more efficient. Philosophers tend to use longer words when smaller ones will do. “Utilitarian” just means “useful.” It would be useful to human beings if their burgers were cheaper and just as good, and if human communities were less polluted by vast hog farms, massive chicken operations, and cattle feed lots, all of which are disgusting to human beings and turn the human stomach for the purpose of making human food.

The second is a moral case, rooted in the rights of animals: the right to habitat, the right to life and to live according to their instincts, the right not to be incarcerated and treated cruelly, and the right not to suffer and die for the sake of human dinner plates. This is their planet, too. Dare I suggest, to use a loaded term, that animals have natural rights? I do.

Readers of this blog are aware that I am persuaded by John Rawls’ theory of justice and that I believe that Rawls has rendered the utilitarian moral philosophies of the Enlightenment now obsolete. In A Theory of Justice, Rawls was aware that many of the principles he lays out can be extrapolated to animals. As I read Rawls, he practically begs other philosophers to do the work of applying justice as fairness to animals, with any adjustments that may be necessary. Rawls says explicitly that he does not mean for his theory to apply to the question of “right conduct in regard to animals and the rest of nature.” The question, to Rawls, if there is a difference between the moral status of animals and the moral status of humans, is whether animals possess “the capacity for a sense of justice.” He writes, “Certainly it is wrong to be cruel to animals and the destruction of a whole species can be a great evil.” But otherwise Rawls steers clear and writes that the moral status of animals is “outside the scope of the theory of justice.”¹

As for utilitarianism, animals didn’t stand a chance, even to the best of minds. The kindly Edinburgher David Hume, writing in 1751 in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, has this to say in the section on justice:

“Were there a species of creatures, intermingled with men, which, though rational, were possessed of such inferior strength, both of body and mind, that they were incapable of all resistance, and could never, upon the highest provocation, make us feel the effects of their resentment; the necessary consequence, I think, is, that we should be bound, by the laws of humanity, to give gentle usage to these creatures, but should not, properly speaking, lie under any restraint of justice with regard to them, nor could they possess any right or property, exclusive of such arbitrary lords. Our intercourse with them could not be called society, which supposes a degree of equality; but absolute command on the one side, and servile obedience on the other. Whatever we covet, they must instantly resign: Our permission is the only tenure, by which they hold their possessions: Our compassion and kindness the only check, by which they curb our lawless will: And as no inconvenience ever results from the exercise of a power, so firmly established in nature, the restraints of justice and property, being totally useless, would never have place in so unequal a confederacy. This is plainly the situation of men, in regard to animals.”²

I have said that I consider utiliarianism obsolete. Many don’t. It’s almost certainly true that, as utilitarian philosophies were developed during the Enlightenment, they advanced the causes of fairness and justice. I would argue, though, that the faults of utilitarianism have been blocking human progress for a long time. Utilitarians — or some of them, at least — could find room in utilitarianism even for slavery, on the grounds that it is useful (and therefore good) to enslave the few if the many are better off for it. Right-wing political and moral philosophy today is deeply rooted in utilitarianism, though there is much deceit involved. For example, there is the constant argument that light regulation and the preferential treatment of the rich is just, even if it is unequal, because it “floats all boats.” Even if the utilitarian case is sound, the deceit destroys the right-wing case, because further enriching the rich does not float all boats.

One of the side effects of political turmoil in the U.S. is that it drowns out conversations about progress that we ought to be having. The European Union has invested modest amounts of public money in research on cultured meats. Singapore has already brought a product to market. The United States is lagging. Vox, in May 2021, wrote that animal agriculture is completely missing from President Biden’s infrastructure and climate plan. Even so, there was right-wing screeching about a Biden “burger ban,” just one example of how right-wing obstruction prevents us from having conversations that we ought to be having.

Why is gorilla poaching still going on in Africa, where deforestation and other factors have been so devastating? As far as I can tell, it’s partly because some people eat gorillas. Some are sold to go live in cages.

My personal position, I think, would be seen by many people as radical. I would start from the position that the moral status of animals is in no way different from our own, and then see who has arguments good enough to force me to retreat. For example, why might the moral status of an overpopulation of rats in the New York City subways be different from the moral status of wild tule elk at California’s Point Reyes? One might argue, for example, that where animal overpopulation is a threat to the health of human beings, human beings have a right to defend themselves, just as a brown bear has a right to defend her cubs from an overpopulation of humans. Nor would I argue that our partiality to dogs and cats is somehow hypocritical, because dogs and cats are compatible with human families and become members of human families. Having domesticated them and bred them to live in human families, we now have a duty to every cat and dog that is born to sustain them as lifelong members of human families.

Ndasaki’s life and her life story are important because she compels us to see things to which we are usually blind. Ndasaki’s story is much like the story of Cecil the lion, who was killed by poachers in 2015. Cecil’s death caused an outbreak of shaming in social media, along the lines of “how dare you be more concerned about the death of one animal than [fill in the blank with some other cause].” I wrote about Cecil here, arguing that we’re entirely capable of concern about more than one injustice at a time. The sad thing is that, because we are usually blind and distracted, people with causes must compete with other causes to draw attention to their own cause, as though caring about a lion or a gorilla somehow makes us care less about injustice against humans.

But the death of a gorilla does not distract us from other matters of justice. Ndasaki’s story doesn’t distract us from Cecil’s story; the death of a gorilla reminds us of the death of a lion. Ndasaki’s death reminds us that we have a lot to think about, a lot to talk about, and a lot of things to roll up our sleeves and do. And even where collective action remains obstructed by the kind of people whose uncaring attitudes and sorry thinking diminishes the moral value — not to mention the usefulness — of their own unexamined lives, we can still make changes in our own everyday lives that make the world a little bit better.

Notes:

1. Rawls, A Theory of Justice. See the third entry under “animals” in the book’s index. This is page 448 in my 1999 Harvard Belknap edition.

2. Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. Section III, “Of Justice,” Part 1.

Another note: Yesterday, a neighbor’s milk cow was hit by a car and killed while they were herding their cows and a calf from pasture to pasture along a country road. Today, the calf broke through two fences to try to get to the place where her mother was killed. The calf was frantic. It took several people to catch the calf, tie her, and, to use Kay’s word, incarcerate the calf in a stock trailer where she is safe. The calf, Kay said, is too traumatized to eat. We are in denial if we can’t see how aware even young animals are.

Remember the stars?

The Human Cosmos: Civilization and the Stars. Jo Marchant, Dutton, 2020. 388 pages.

Marchant is concerned about how modern people and our cultures have lost touch with the sky. Paradoxically, we think of ourselves as living in a larger world than our ancestors. But in truth, by cutting ourselves off from the sky, we live in a much smaller world.

This process of cutting ourselves off has a long history that began centuries before GPS and light pollution. The invention of clocks, for example, in the Middle Ages, meant that people no longer had to look up at the sky to estimate the time. The regimentation of our lives made possible by clocks is something that never occurs to us, but Marchant covers clocks in the fourth chapter, “Faith,” in which she relates how the development of clocks had a great deal to do with the church, specifically the need of the Benedictine monasteries to be more precise in carrying out their 24-hour cycle of rituals.

Marchant starts with paleolithic cave drawings and works forward in time: sites such as Stonehenge, then Babylon, Egypt, Ptolemy, clocks and the middle ages, ocean navigation, the development of modern astronomy, and the interaction even today of plant and animal life with the celestial world.

This is not an academic book; it’s a survey rather than an in-depth exploration of any of its topics. But the book’s extensive notes provide a good list of sources for further reading. There also is an index. The book will serve as a good reference. It will end up on my best bookshelf.

Foundation?

Whatever this is, it’s not Foundation. If Foundation is what it’s supposed to be, then it’s a complete failure. It’s something entirely different from Foundation. Whatever the difference is supposed to be, it’s nothing new. After watching the first two episodes, I find myself angry, partly because it’s not Foundation and partly because it tries to schnooker us into liking it by recycling ingredients from Game of Thrones (but with space ships).

Critics who like it keep inviting us to compare it with Game of Thrones, which, no doubt, is also what Apple wants. I decline.

Isaac Asimov’s Foundation books are very cerebral. There is hardly anything cinematic about the books, which no doubt is why several attempts to make a movie went nowhere. It was obvious, when we first learned in 2018 that Apple had commissioned a Foundation series, that some kind of creative reworking would be necessary to make the story cinematic. I was prepared for that. But I don’t like what I see. Those who have never read the books (I’ve read book one in the series at least three times over the years) will probably not be as critical as I am.

Asimov was not interested in romance. He didn’t bother much about setting scenes, let alone creating spectacle. Asimov was interested in ideas, politics, and the interactions between highly intelligent people. Asimov does that mostly with the intelligence of his dialogue, with very little action. This series has lots of action but some of the crudest dialogue I’ve heard in years. To show us that the Gaal Dornick character is highly intelligent, the screenwriters have her winning a math contest and “counting primes” when she’s stressed. But other than that, she behaves and talks like a not-too-bright teenager with reckless taste in boyfriends. As for politics, the Hari Seldon character comes across as a cold and arrogant smartass, up against emperors who are merely Game-of-Thrones cruel rather than near-matches for Hari Seldon’s political genius.

In short, Apple’s Foundation, after watching the first two episodes, looks to me like a dumbed-down derivative. I will watch the next episode, which will be released on October 1, hoping that, if I can get over that it isn’t Foundation, I might find something worthwhile in it. So far it looks like the screenwriters put a drop of Asimov into a food processor, added some scoops of Game of Thrones and The Rise of Skywalker, chopped it up, and spooned it out on Apple TV.

Apple News+

There are two versions of Apple News. The free version, called just “Apple News,” is on all Macintosh computers, iPads, and iPhones. The subscription version, called “Apple News+”, costs $9.99 a month.

For some years, I had casually used the free version on my iPhone, because it often showed me things that I had missed on my daily rounds of a long list of newspapers, magazines, and web sites. After I upgraded to a new version of iOS, some ads appeared for the subscription version. I looked through the long list of publications that are available and immediately subscribed.

Getting news from Europe to Americans is just one example of how Apple News+ can expand our reading horizons. One of the reasons we Americans know too little about Europe (and the world, for that matter) is that American media (including the New York Times) don’t cover Europe well. For years, I had longed for access to the Times of London, but it was hard to justify the cost. Nor did I want yet another password to manage. A part of the hassle of managing subscriptions to paywalled publications is the aggravation of signing in. With the New York Times and Washington Post, I deal with that by always having a tab open to their “my account” pages. Subscriptions to the New York Times and Washington Post, by the way, are expensive and are not included in Apple News+. Part of the appeal and convenience of Apple News Plus is that you don’t have to sign in to read any of the publications you follow. That’s all handled through your Apple ID, so you’re always signed in to the publications you want to see.

Many times, I have been tempted to resubscribe to the Economist. But an Economist subscription costs about the same as the New York Times, and the sign-in problem was a big deterrent. Apple News+ lets you subscribe to the Economist through Apple News+ and pay for it monthly through Apple. With access to the Times of London and the Economist, suddenly I have new windows into Europe. Previously I had only the Guardian, the Irish Times, and the Herald of Scotland. (As far as I can tell, Der Spiegel’s English edition is not included in Apple News+.) The Times of London, by the way, seems to cover Scotland quite well.

Another newspaper that is included in Apple News+ is the Wall Street Journal, still a good newspaper in spite of its wingnut editorial department. Two North Carolina newspapers are included, the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer. Both those state newspapers are greatly diminished, but they’re all we’ve got for state coverage.

Magazines include Scientific American, the New Yorker, Wired, the Atlantic, and MacWorld. There is a long list of niche magazines, to which I subscribed to only one lest I be overwhelmed by niche magazines. That exception was Octane, a niche magazine about classic cars.

Some people like reading on their phones. I do not, even though I have a large iPhone 12. It’s on a big iMac screen that Apple News+ excels. The presentation is often just as good as a publication’s web site. There are some ads, but they’re not terribly intrusive.

In short, for news junkies and those who make a serious effort to keep up with the world’s news sources, Apple News+ is both a bargain and a convenient way of centralizing lots of sources.

One thing is missing. Much of what we need to know is to be found in papers from academics and think tanks. That stuff has been privatized. It is very hard to get and also very expensive, unless one has access through a university’s accounts. It’s a cartel that needs to be broken. There is a movement crusading for open access publishing in academia. Apple probably could break that cartel if they wanted to.

As for newspapers and magazines, much has changed. The Times of London today is nothing like the old gray lady it was when I first bought copies of it in London in the 1980s. Many publications still exist but have gone to hell in a basket — Newsweek, for example. Fox News is in Apple News+, making an ax-grinding fool of itself as always. Wired, though provocative, seems to be just as wrongheaded as it always was. The Atlantic’s print version maintains a high standard, but their web site indulges in clickbait. Fox News notwithstanding, and though there is plenty of fluff, Apple News+ seems to have steered away from fringe publications on both the right and the left, as though the word came down from on high at Apple that their mission is to be informative, not provocative. Imagine that.

Here is Apple’s complete list of publications.

Who doesn’t love a band?

Stokes County’s biggest public event is the Stokes Stomp, an outdoor music festival that happens each September on the weekend after Labor Day. The Democratic Party had a booth, of course. But I sneaked away from the booth when the army band arrived.

As the band regrouped at the stage for the national anthem, I asked the band director, “When’s the Sousa?” Much to my disappointment, he said that too many members of the band were sidelined with Covid for a concert band performance. Drat. Maybe next year. And by the way, a nicer and more polite group of people you’ll never see.

Roastnears

When I was a young’un growing up in North Carolina’s Yadkin Valley, corn of the type one wants for corn on the cob was called roastnears. I learned in school, around the fifth grade, that roastnears means roasting ears. Back then, I thought of that as just the way people talked. Now I would see it as a bit of the Southern Appalachian dialect.

I don’t try to grow corn here. It takes up too much room in the garden, and the raccoons pull it down and steal it. This summer, neighbors have given me corn. But there is no shortage of it. All through late summer, grocery stores sell it in large quantities, very fresh, for 20 cents to 50 cents an ear.

I would never boil it, not least because who wants all that heat in the kitchen in high summer. Roasting it in foil on an outdoor grill is easiest. But it’s more fun to roast it in the shucks. Peel the shucks back on the raw ear of corn, remove the silks, apply some olive oil, and fold the shucks back over the corn. About 22 minutes in a hot covered grill should do it. Apply as much butter and salt as your conscience will permit.

The Heart of Mid-Lothian ★★★★

“The Porteous Mob,” James Drummond, 1855. The painting is on display in the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

A couple of weeks ago, I came across an article in The Herald of Scotland in which a scholar of literature urged filmmakers to make “blockbuster” movies from Walter Scott novels. The article is “Call for Walter Scott’s novels to be given film treatment,” Aug. 10.

I found the article charming, but I also was skeptical. At that point, I had read only one Walter Scott novel, The Antiquary, 1816, the third of Scott’s Waverley novels. That novel was a good enough read, but it’s not blockbuster material. Had I continued to judge Scott’s novels based only on the The Antiquary, I would not have rated him all that high, and I would have continued to wonder whether the high esteem in which the Scottish hold Scott has more to do with nationalism than with literature.

But any scholar, in this age, who makes a specialty of 19th Century literature automatically has my respect. So, I thought it likely than Alison Lumsden, who is quoted in the article, must know things that I don’t know. I ordered a used copy of The Heart of Mid-Lothian from Amazon. It’s a 1947 edition, poorly printed and with small type, but I didn’t want to read this book on a Kindle. Almost always, when old books are made into Kindle editions, they are full of typos because the text was scanned and was poorly edited, or not edited at all, for scanner errors.

The novel was first published in 1818. That makes it more than 200 years old. I had just finished reading Charles Dickens’ Martin Chuzzlewit (1842) and Barnaby Rudge (1841). To read these novels back to back seemed like a good idea, not least because my neural circuits for parsing long 19th Century sentences were fully warmed up, and also because I was curious how the Dickens would compare with the Scott.

The Heart of Mid-Lothian is a seriously good novel, and I now agree with Alison Lumsden: It deserves to be made into a blockbuster.

One of the reasons Lumsden gives for bringing Scott to the screen is “because I think that’s a really good way of getting people to engage with writers again — they see the film and then they read the book.”

No doubt Professor Lumsden has students who would be able to read The Heart of Mid-Lothian. But my guess is that this novel would be insurmountable by most young readers today. The novel is long. The sentences are very long. For the first 120 pages, hardly anything happens. Most daunting, though, is that the dialogue (of which there is a great deal) is in dialect, written phonetically. (Some people would see this speech not as a dialect of English, but as a separate Scots language.) Thus there is a great deal of reader friction. Other readers may have other methods, but my method is to sound the dialogue in my mind. Usually it can be understood from the sound of it. If a character uses the word “waur” in a sentence, it’s not too difficult to recognize that “waur” means “worse.” The word “maun,” meaning “must,” will already be understood by readers of English literature. But some words simply have to be looked up, such as “gleg,” meaning sharp or wary. I learned the meaning of “Gardyloo!” from a walking tour in Edinburgh, in which I also learned about the Grassmarket and Half-Hanged Maggie, and where the gallows used to be. (If you love Edinburgh or are planning a trip there, that alone is a reason to read this novel.)

Even the people of Edinburgh speak in dialect. But characters from the Highlands are more challenging:

Hout, tout, ne’er fash your thumb, Mrs. Putler. The law is put twa-three years auld yet, and is ower young to hae come our length ; and pesides, how is the lads to climb the praes wi’ thae tamn’d breekens on them? It makes me sick to see them. Put ony how, I thought I kend Donacha’s haunts gey and weel, and I was at the place where he had rested yestreen ; for I saw the laves the limmers had lain on, and the ashes of them ; by the same token there was a pit greeshoch purning yet. I am thinking they got some word out o’ the island what was intended — I sought every glen and cleuch, as if I had been deer-stalking, but teil and wauff of his coat-tail could I see — Cot tam!

Note the beautiful rhythm of this little speech. Rhythm has a great deal to do with why we find Scottish accents so charming.

There is another factor that Chuzzlewit, Rudge, and Mid-Lothian have in common that may be offputting to contemporary readers. That is that the dramatic trajectories are very different. Contemporary readers will expect a story to begin with some dramatic action. Then the author will be forgiven for a bit of exposition. Then the action will resume and build step by step until the climax. The climax will be followed by a very short denouement. Readers of 200 years ago, no doubt, would have been entirely content with a different sort of trajectory. For many pages — maybe even 20 percent of the novel’s length — nothing much will happen. Some scenes will be set and characters will be introduced. But nothing happens, and how the characters and settings are related is not disclosed. There will be clues and a bit of foreshadowing, but there is hardly any dramatic tension. Finally the threads of the plot (and the subplots) will start to emerge. By the halfway point, the reader will finally see where the story is going. The climax will occur very early, around the three-quarters mark, followed by a very long denouement. Readers who anticipate this might be more motivated to stick with an antique novel if they have low expections that anything important will happen until well after 100 pages.

For that reason, books such as The Heart of Mid-Lothian would present some big problems for filmmakers. A filmmaker might, for example, have to start the movie with a high-drama event that doesn’t occur until much later in the story, and then depend on a flashback to introduce the characters and settings and to do the necessary exposition. Or screenwriters might cut the first quarter of the novel completely, and dribble in the background some other way. Exposition is another challenge. Contemporary writers avoid relying on exposition, in which the author explains what is happening. Instead, the action is expected to tell the story. In Mid-Lothian, the readers will encounter many pages of exposition, and only the key dramatic parts will be handled with scenes and dialogue. The art of storytelling and the expectations of readers have changed. But old stories are good stories all the same.

As the drama in Mid-Lothian picked up and peaked, I found myself staying up late to read. Was it a good read, worth the effort? Yes!

There are other rewards, though, for reading a novel like this. I understand much better now why the Scottish hold Scott in such high esteem. I have a much better feel for some Scottish history — particularly the events that followed “the Glorious revolution,” though that history is complicated and remains vague to me. Scott was a lawyer. He works in some very interesting facts about Scottish law, for which he clearly had great respect. And though I don’t think that Scott was particularly religious, a major theme in Mid-Lothian is the religious conflict in Scotland that was closely connected with conflict around the union of Scotland and England. One of the characters in Mid-Lothian, David Deans, goes into long and rather tedious disquisitions on doctrine. Scott refers to Deans as a “proser,” and it’s fairly clear that Scott was making fun of doctrinal hair-splitting, as well as of old men who talk too much.

As for the Porteous riots, the riots are not central to the plot of Mid-Lothian, but the riots have a great deal to do with the characters. The Porteous riots — of which Scott’s account is surely historically accurate — also ruffled feathers in London, and those ruffled feathers in London also connect with the plot.

Jeanie Deans, Mid-Lothian‘s heroine, will seem like a prude, I think, to young people today. But Jeanie’s sister, Effie, is very different. The difference between these two sisters will give modern young readers plenty to think about. And for students looking for a topic for a paper, I suggest this: Compare the hangman characters in Barnaby Rudge and The Heart of Mid-Lothian. Was Scott as much a social reformer as Dickens? How did the Scottish of the time justify capital punishment? Was the public attitude toward capital punishment starting to change? Why or why not? How does a duke’s attitude compare with that of a peasant, or with that of a religious character such as David Deans?

I should say a few words about the moral tone of The Heart of Mid-Lothian. It is an extended meditation on suffering and justice. Here is a quotation from Jeanie Deans:

O madam, if ever ye kend what it was to sorrow for and with a sinning and a suffering creature, whose mind is sae tossed that she can be neither ca’d fit to live or die, have some compassion on our misery! — Save an honest house from dishonour, and an unhappy girl, not eighteen years of age, from an early and dreadful death! Alas! it is not when we sleep soft and wake merrily ourselves that we think on other people’s sufferings. Our hearts are waxed light within us then, and we are for righting our ain wrangs and fighting our ain battles. But when the hour of trouble comes to the mind or to the body — and seldom may it visit your Leddyship — and when the hour of death comes, that comes to high and low — lang and late may it be yours! — Oh, my Leddy, then it isna what we hae dune for oursells, but what we hae dune for others, that we think on maist pleasantly. And the thoughts that ye hae intervened to spare the puir thing’s life will be sweeter in that hour, come when it may, than if a word of your mouth could hang the haill Porteous mob at the tail of ae tow.

In short, though I read this novel in two weeks, I feel as though I just finished an entire semester in a tough course on Scottish literature and history that I found very rewarding. Thank you, Professor Alison Lumsden of the University of Aberdeen.

The Scott Monument in Edinburgh’s Princes Street Gardens. The monument stands on prime real estate just west of Waverley Station, below, and northeast of, the castle. I’ve never been inside this tower and have only admired it from the park, from which I took this photo, but I’ll climb the steps on my next trip. The tower is over 200 feet high.

On a lighter note: It’s entirely possible that the difficulty of understanding the many Scottish accents has been a running joke among speakers of English for centuries. I’d have to say that, as a native speaker of Southern Appalachian English, I am pretty good at parsing Scottish. I easily understand all of the video below. Twice in my life I have encountered English accents that I have not been able to understand, and it’s possible that one of them was speaking Gaelic rather than English. One was a Cockney taxi driver in London. I knew he was speaking Cockney only because of “My Fair Lady” (though I also read “Pygmalion” in high school and thought that it was one of the funniest things I’d ever read). The other was an old man, a beggar, I think, who approached me on the street in Edinburgh. Sometimes locals will take the time to school you, as with a clerk in the ferry office in the east of England who wouldn’t give me my ticket to the Hook of Holland until I correctly pronounced “Harwich” (which sounds like “Harridge” to me). There are very funny videos about this on YouTube with James McAvoy.

Watchmen

I’m two years behind on this. It took a while for Watchmen (2019) to show up on my radar screen. I’ve watched only the first episode so far, but rarely have I seen a first episode as original, as surprising, and as good as this.

A friend recommended Watchmen (in a texting conversation) while we were talking about Trumpists and Trumpist militias. Watchmen is based on a comic book series from the 1980s. HBO, I understand, made significant changes in updating the storylines. Comics purists, I understand, were enraged at the changes. But Watchmen — or at least the first episode — speaks directly, and maybe even presciently, to what we’re living through. It was extremely satisfying to see rightwing defectives who would take the law into their own hands taken down and taken out in the picturesque ways that Hollywood can deal with villains.

But it also worried me. I texted my friend: “Has there been any concern that it might encourage the militia crazies?” He replied, “No, those folks didn’t have it on their radar.” Whew.

As we wait for justice to catch up with the tyrants, traitors, racists, insurrectionists and criminals who are trying to destroy American democracy and install their little Hitler, Watchmen is good therapy. There are nine episodes, and they can be streamed from HBO.

Church culture

A tent revival

I drove out during the cool of the evening yesterday to pick up the mail and look for more canning jars. At Sandy Ridge up near the Virginia line, people were gathering under a big tent for a tent revival. I stopped to take pictures, but I kept well back from the tent, assuming that I would quickly be identified as an outsider up to no good. I watched for a few minutes, though, and it was easy to see that this was a social occasion. Most of the people clearly knew each other. To them, I think, it was an occasion for dressing up just a little and spending a pleasant summer evening fanning themselves and exchanging gossip.

I envy them for the social part. Country churches, had they not aligned themselves with such an ugly politics, could serve as social glue in places where social glue is badly needed. Nor am I just guessing at the politics being offered at this particular tent revival. The preacher behind this tent revival ran for county commissioner a few years ago but lost in the Republican primary. After losing, he set up a little church in a vacant building across the road from this tent. I think the vacant building formerly was a garage. When he was running for commissioner, he ran his campaign from Facebook, where his theology and his politics were on full display. If you’ve read about some of the preachers who recently tried to take over the Southern Baptist church, then you know the type.

If there is an opposite of church culture, I think it would be pub culture. I would argue that one of the reasons rural American culture is falling apart is that church culture has become such a poison. Church culture is highly antagonistic to pub culture. Churches have done everything possible to prevent and kill pub culture. The real reason, I would argue, is competition. Even now, in the state of North Carolina, alcohol cannot be sold on Sunday mornings. Given a choice between a healthy pub culture and church culture, most people would choose pub culture, as they still do all over the British Isles and Ireland.

We do have places here that serve alcohol. But a healthy pub culture does not exist. On the way to Walnut Cove there is a motorcycle bar. I believe it is loosely aligned with one or more militias. On the other side of Danbury, in a nice spot overlooking the Dan River, there is a place that might have succeeded if people in these parts understood pub culture. I am among those who will never go back again, though, because the atmosphere is so ugly and the music is so loud. Those who won’t go back tell similar versions of the same story: friends of the musicians tell people to shut up so they can hear the music, and people who want to talk ask the musicians to keep it down. The owner of the place is so undiplomatic that he makes things worse. And so the vibe is terrible. A pub can’t be a concert hall and a place for friends to drink at the same time. Certainly, in Ireland, the music and noise in a popular pub might go on until late at night. But the locals also know when they can go for a quiet drink and when the place will be a party.

Mental health people tell us that drinking is healthiest when it’s social. In places like this, social drinking is pretty much totally unsupported. Instead, people stop at Dollar Generals and gas stations for beer. Recently, on my way to buy groceries, I passed the ABC store in Walnut Cove a few minutes before opening time. There were a dozen people lined up to buy liquor at 9:30 a.m. Alcoholism is a major rural problem, but social drinking in a form that could serve as healthy social glue is unsupported and almost unknown.

There is little charm anymore in rural American culture, as far as I can tell. Most rural people these days crave a suburban lifestyle, not a rural lifestyle — that is, a lifestyle that revolves around cars, without the slightest effort toward self-sufficiency or any kind of interaction with the outdoors. Even deer hunters rarely stalk deer on foot in the woods anymore. Instead, they set up deer feeders (containing corn) and then put up blinds or stands that they can drive to and in which they can sit and shoot deer. (Walmart sells blinds and deer stands.) I have met one local “coon hunter” whom a neighbor invites to hunt in our woods. I’m not sure that I’m on board with killing raccoons for sport (in spite of the damage that one has done to my tomatoes), but at least the coon hunter does it in the traditional way — on foot, in the woods, at night. I liked this coon hunter, actually. He said he didn’t know why, but that there was something spooky and exciting about being in the woods at night. “It’s primal,” I offered. “That’s it,” he said, “primal.” So he is one unsuburbanized person, at least, who is still in touch with traditional rural culture. He’d probably go to pubs, if there were any. The woods are his church, my guess would be.

I would argue that, decades ago, we passed the point at which rural white churches served any healthy purpose. Instead, the purpose they chiefly serve is to reinforce the grievances and identity that the Republican Party requires to retain its hold on rural America. Churches now operate as social wedges, not social glue. If we liberals were half as anti-freedom as authoritarians think we are, we’d close the churches and open some pubs to save some rural souls.

By the way, not one single mask was in sight at that tent revival.