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.

On sliding from note to note

Listen link #1. Please read the first two paragraphs before you listen.

Want to start a barroom brawl in a place where the musical cognoscenti hang out to drink? Easy. Just say the explosive Italian word portamento and run for your life.

The Italian word is about carrying something. But portamento singing, in English, better translates to sliding, or gliding, from one note to the next note. Gliding from note to note is one of the markers of country music singing — so much so that there is even a country music instrument designed to slide from note to note, the steel guitar. Patsy Cline’s wonderful version of “The Wayward Wind” sounds almost as though she is imitating the steel guitar, sliding both up and down to reach her notes. Go ahead and listen to Listen link #1 now.

Patsy Cline was a fantastic singer, from the days when country music singers actually could sing. But, as far as I know, she never had formal musical training. Her portamento sliding from note to note works (for most ears, anyway), because she does eventually end up on pitch, and the timing of her sliding serves her musical and emotional intent. One of the reasons I grit my teeth at, and run screaming from, most country music is that the sliding from note to note is done with little musical skill and in poor taste. As for skill, the singer seems to lack the ability to land on pitch and must hunt for the note (often without ever finding it). As for taste, the singer is attempting to convey emotion but doesn’t have the skill or taste to do it.

It would be easy to write off all portamento singing as provincial. But the Italians, after all, do have a word for it. And then there is Maria Callas (and many other opera singers). Go ahead and listen to Listen link #2 now and take note of her portamento. You may need to listen carefully, because Callas’ portamento is more discreet than Patsy Cline’s.

Listen link #2

Though the musical cognoscenti and Callas fans (of which there are millions) may argue about her portamento, there is no disagreement on her technique. She knew what the destination pitch was and was perfectly capable of landing on that pitch.

If you’re not quite clear what it means to slide from note to note, consider the piano, where no sliding is possible. Strike a key and you’re on pitch. But consider the violin, which has no frets. Violinists can slide from note to note by sliding a finger, but they don’t (except occasionally and intentionally for musical effect).

For an extreme example of a portamento instrument, consider the theramin. The musician has pretty much no choice but to slide from note to note, and the quality of the musician’s ear will determine the accuracy of the destination pitch and the musical quality of the sliding. And a skillful player such as Clara Rockmore can make surprisingly quick transitions from note to note:

Listen link #3.

 

Extra credit: In the Maria Callas video above, note the difference between portamento and the glissando. At 6:09, Callas sings a descending glissando. Note that she doesn’t slide from note to note in the glissando. She hits each individual note, stunningly and on pitch, on the way down.

In the theramin video, note the wavering of the musician’s left hand, which produces vibrato, a kind of trembling of the pitch.

Joan Baez was known for her rapid vibrato. Clearly it wasn’t easy, because as she aged (she is now 80) she lost this vibrato and wisely sings many of her old songs differently.

Bottom line: singers and musicians play with pitch. But it helps if they know what they’re doing.

Tomato day

Canning is serious work. But it’s very satisfying to put up vegetables for the cold winter that you yourself grew during the hot summer. I canned tomatoes today. I have so many tomatoes that I probably will need to do it again.

I worked on the deck to the keep the heat out of the house, using a gas cooker fired with propane. But it was remarkably cool this morning — 64F when I started working about 7:30 a.m., and 75F when I finished about 11. A cool breeze was blowing out of the woods. A hummingbird hovered for a while to watch what I was doing. She must have been attracted by all the red.

For what it’s worth, my pressure canner is an All American model 915. It holds seven quart jars. Normally I am pretty good at estimating quantities. But I had no idea how many quarts my pile of tomatoes would make. I ended up with a lot of tomatoes left over. From those I will make sauce, and put it up in pint jars, if I can find some pint jars. This is not the best time of year to buy canning supplies, because some places are running out. If you have space to store things for the future, a good supply of canning jars and lids would be good stuff to stock.


Boiling water for blanching the skins off the tomatoes


Ready to pack the jars


I allowed almost three hours for the pressure cooker to cool.


Finally done

What ended the Mediterranean civilizations?


The Mediterranean today. Google Earth. Click here for high-resolution version.

1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Eric H. Cline. Princeton University Press and Oxford University Press, 2021. 278 pages.

Reading about ancient history before the time of the classical Greeks is a challenge. We want a reasonably clear narrative and a good story. But the problem is that we don’t know enough about what happened 3,000 years ago for a clear narrative. All we get is a big mosaic of random pieces, with most of the pieces missing. No clear narrative emerges. But we continue to learn about ancient history, and so quickly, that this book, originally published in 2014, was revised in 2021.

Books from Oxford University Press (and certainly from Princeton as well) can be very dry reading. But the Oxford press in particular has a knack for finding academics who can write for non-academic (though motivated) readers. Eric Cline is a professor of classics and anthropology at George Washington University. His device for making this book more readable is to treat it as a mystery. That’s fair, because the history of high civilization in the Mediterranean and how it ended is a mystery. The year 1177 B.C. is arbitrary, of course. Cline chose that year because that is the year that Egypt, under the pharaoh Ramses III, was invaded by the “Sea Peoples,” and the long era of Egyptian power came to an end.

The kingdoms of the eastern Mediterranean were rich and powerful — Egyptians, Hittites, Mycenaeans, Canaanites, Cypriots. Each kingdom fell, quickly, like dominoes. There followed a dark age, out of which new civilizations arose — Israelites, Aramaeans, Phonenicians, Athenians, Spartans.

Because Cline wrote this book as a mystery, I think I will not get into what he has to say about what caused the collapse, insofar as we even understand what caused the collapse. The pleasure of this book is in becoming interested in the mystery. For a long time, what we knew about this period was learned only through archeology and from the thousands of cuneiform clay tablets that have been found all over the eastern Mediterranean. I had no idea, actually, that so many tablets survived. Many are mundane — inventories, or ships’ manifests. But the rulers of those kingdoms wrote each other lots of letters (on clay tablets), and many of them survive. At least one language has not been deciphered. Other tablets are still being translated and published. In addition to the new material from newly discovered and newly translated clay tablets and the ongoing work in archeology, new types of data are becoming available — DNA studies (from DNA recovered from bones), climate studies, and data on ancient disease pathogens. The history of the ancient Mediterranean is still very much being written.

Clearly some historians including Cline would like for us to know more about ancient history because there are parallels with today’s world that might serve as warnings. That’s fine. But historians are as unlikely to agree on the lessons to be learned as they are to agree on why a civilization fell. Cline makes reference to one historian whose view is that maybe it was a good thing that palace power in the Mediterranean collapsed, leaving room for experiments with different sorts of cultures and governments and a wider (if only slightly) distribution of wealth and power.

As for the warnings, did the ancients have any?:

“Many questions still remain unanswered, however. We do not know whether the various entities (Hittites, Mycenaeans, Egyptians, etc.) knew they were in the midst of a collapse of their society. We do not know whether there were organized efforts to evaluate and remedy the overall evolving situation and look to the future. We do not yet have any indications in the archaeological remains or textual records that anyone at the time was aware of the larger picture.

“And, even if they did know, could the leaders of the individual societies have done anything to slow the spread of decay or to prevent the ultimate collapse? There were certainly individual efforts to counter the effects of famine and drought (e.g., grain ships sent by the Egyptians; possible breeding of drought-resistant cattle and crops in the Levant), but apparently they were for naught. It has been pointed out elsewhere, though, that in virtually all such previous collapses, ‘there were sages or scholars who had a reasonably good understanding of what was happening and how it might be avoided.’ However, ‘If they were listened to at all … their advice was typically followed too little and too late.'” (The quotation inside this quotation is attributed, in the notes, to Thomas D. Hall.)

You will need some good maps while reading this book, and by the time you’ve finished it your Mediterranean geography will be quite good. There are two maps in the book, but they’re not great.


The Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. Source: Wikimedia Commons. Click here for high-resolution version.

It was much worse than I thought

Until this week, I would have thought that all the events that occurred between election day (Nov. 4, 2020) and the Capitol insurrection (Jan. 6, 2021) were just the random, malignant thrashings of disinformed idiots. But now it appears that there actually was a plan and a conspiracy to overturn the election. The key to that conspiracy was to throw the election to the U.S. House of Representatives. The 12th amendment to the Constitution provides for this if no candidate has an absolute majority of electoral votes. Who becomes president is then decided by the House of Representatives, with the delegation from each state voting en bloc. That is, each state gets only one vote.

Could the plot have succeeded if the House of Representatives had decided the election? The math on that is beyond my ability, but I will point out that, in the 50 states, there are 27 Republican governors and 23 Democratic governors.

Even though, all along, many of the connectable dots were consistent with such a conspiracy, I was skeptical that it could have been a serious attempt at overthrowing the government, simply because it was so hard to imagine that anyone would be so stupid and so evil as to attempt such a thing. The odds of success were poor, the consequences of getting caught would be severe, and the damage to American democracy and rule of law would have been fatal. In fact would have amounted to the cold-blooded murder of the U.S. democracy and rule of law.

Now there is a smoking gun. On Friday, the Justice Department provided Congress with notes on a call that Trump made to the acting attorney general and his deputy on Dec. 27. Trump threatened to fire them. He demanded that the Justice Department declare the election corrupt. They told Trump that they couldn’t do that and that there was no evidence that the election was corrupt. “Just say that the election was corrupt [and] leave the rest to me and the [Republican] Congressmen,” Trump told them.

Ten days later, a Trumpist mob stormed the U.S. Capitol while Congress was meeting to certify the results of the election. Inside the Capitol, Republicans already were attempting to block certification of the election. The votes of eight Republican senators and 139 Republican members of the House of Representatives are on record. Their names are known. Some of them talked to Trump that day or spoke at the Trump rally outside the Capitol. The notes on Trump’s phone call to the Justice Department show that some of those Republicans were co-conspirators. All of them violated their oaths of office.

We do know, at least, that the Justice Department would not join Trump’s conspiracy. Even the odious Bill Barr had resigned on Dec. 14. A new book by Washington Post reporters Carol Leonnig and Philip Rucker says that Gen. Mark Milley, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and other top generals were afraid that Trump would attempt a coup. According to the book, Milley said, “This is a Reichstag moment. The gospel of the Führer.”

Those who know their history see the connections.

I am not out on a limb here in smelling treason and conspiracy. Since Friday, several stories have appeared in the media that I believe show that Washington’s elite now realize that there was a plot and a conspiracy to overturn the election and install Trump as Führer. A piece in The Atlantic, I think, is particularly credible, because the Atlantic is so closely aligned with Washington’s political and media elite. The piece is “The Insurrection Was Just Part of the Plot: The full contours of Trump’s effort to overturn the election are coming into view.”

I am confident that congressional investigations and the U.S. Justice Department will bring everything to light. Everyone who was part of the conspiracy must be brought to justice. Even more important, I think, is that history must have the full story. As for the Republican Party, having proven itself willing to set fire to the U.S. democracy to preserve its own power, I am not confident that it will ever truly get what it deserves, simply because so many Americans are so gullible and so stupid, and because I don’t expect oligarchs to cease their attacks on democracy until they are taxed out of existence.

Entropy and a speculative theory of health


Basil (with okra in the background) — a negative entropy factory!

Edible order

I have written here before about negative entropy and its relation to life on earth. The post was “The opposite of entropy, and why we’re alive,” from December 2016. The concepts are based on a short but important book by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life. Yes, Erwin Schrödinger is the Schrödinger who gave us the thought experiment about Schrödinger’s cat. The book was first published in 1944 and has gone through at least eighteen printings from Cambridge University Press. I need to summarize some fundamentals, but this is a post about food, not physics.

The concept of entropy

The concept of entropy is simple enough, though a great deal of complex physics arises from the concept. It’s that systems always seek a state of equilibrium. This is laid out in the second law of thermodynamics, which explains why your cup of coffee gets cold. Your coffee will seek the same temperature as the room it’s in. As the coffee loses heat to the room, the temperature of the room will rise very slightly from the heat of the coffee. The thermodynamic system — the coffee and the room — seek a state of equilibrium. A state of equilibrium may sound all orderly and pretty, but the opposite is true. When a system is in a state of equilibrium, no work can be done. The engine in your car can do work only because high heat inside its cylinders (from burning gasoline) is much hotter than the surrounding environment. A gasoline engine would lose efficiency inside a hot oven and would eventually stop running as the oven got hotter.

Life

The physicist Roger Penrose extends Schrödinger’s ideas by pointing out that life on earth is possible because of the temperature difference between our very hot sun, which is surrounded by very cold space. A system that can take advantage of that differential (and the absence of temperature equilibrium) can do work. Penrose: “The green plants take advantage of this and use the low-entropy incoming energy [from the sun] to build up their substance, while emitting high-entropy energy [for example, body heat]. We take advantage of the low-entropy energy in the plants, to keep our own entropy down, as we eat plants, or as we eat animals that eat plants. By this means, life on Earth can survive and flourish.”

We can think of entropy as disorder, and negative entropy as order.

Life, then, to a physicist, is a system that can do work, and create order, by exploiting the temperature differential between a star and the cold space that surrounds the star. All life on earth is dependent on photosynthesis. All the work of photosynthesis must be done by green plants exposed to sunlight. Green plants are little factories that do the work of creating all sorts of orderly molecules that are essential to life as we know it. Animal life is possible because animals eat plants. Animals take in the order (or negative entropy) from the plants and excrete disorder. The taking-in and the excretion are equally essential.

Health and disease

First, a disclaimer. To think about health and disease in terms of entropy and negative entropy does not in any way deny, or conflict with, the sciences of nutrition and medicine. Rather, to think about our own life and health in the context of entropy and negative entropy is just a way of trying to keep in mind the most fundamental principles of what it is that keeps us alive and healthy. To be healthy, we want to maximize the order made possible by our hot sun and cooler planet. We can do that only by eating plants.

In my previous post on this subject, I asked a question as a kind of thought experiment: Would it be possible for human beings to live off of compost? I propose that the answer is no — at least, not for long. Though many of the minerals and even molecules necessary for life can be found in compost, the compost, by decomposing, has lost most of its order. Those minerals and molecules degrade into the soil and get recycled back through living plants exposed to the sun, creating order again by using energy from the sun. I would predict that, if we tried to live off of compost, we would sicken and die as the reserves of negative entropy in our bodies became exhausted and disorder set in. I also would predict that that disorder would be expressed as common, well-known ailments and diseases, leading to a common and well-known cause of death.

For example:

Origin of Cancer: An Information, Energy, and Matter Disease. (Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology, 2016.) “We therefore suggest that energy loss (e.g., through impaired mitochondria) or disturbance of information (e.g., through mutations or aneuploidy) or changes in the composition or distribution of matter (e.g., through micro-environmental changes or toxic agents) can irreversibly disturb molecular mechanisms, leading to increased local entropy of cellular functions and structures. In terms of physics, changes to these normally highly ordered reaction probabilities lead to a state that is irreversibly biologically imbalanced, but that is thermodynamically more stable. This primary change—independent of the initiator—now provokes and drives a complex interplay between the availability of energy, the composition, and distribution of matter and increasing information disturbance that is dependent upon reactions that try to overcome or stabilize this intracellular, irreversible disorder described by entropy. Because a return to the original ordered state is not possible for thermodynamic reasons, the cells either die or else they persist in a metastable state. In the latter case, they enter into a self-driven adaptive and evolutionary process that generates a progression of disordered cells and that results in a broad spectrum of progeny with different characteristics. Possibly, one day, one of these cells will show an autonomous and aggressive behavior—it will be a cancer cell.”

Increased temperature and entropy production in cancer: the role of anti-inflammatory drugs. (Inflammopharmacology, 2015.) “Some cancers have been shown to have a higher temperature than surrounding normal tissue. This higher temperature is due to heat generated internally in the cancer. The higher temperature of cancer (compared to surrounding tissue) enables a thermodynamic analysis to be carried out. Here I show that there is increased entropy production in cancer compared with surrounding tissue. This is termed excess entropy production. The excess entropy production is expressed in terms of heat flow from the cancer to surrounding tissue and enzymic reactions in the cancer and surrounding tissue. The excess entropy production in cancer drives it away from the stationary state that is characterised by minimum entropy production.”

The bottom line where our health is involved seems clear enough. Negative entropy and order lead to health. Entropy and disorder lead to disease. What we eat is extremely important for keeping order inside our bodies.

Concepts for better health

“Eat more leaves” is almost a mantra with the food writer Michael Pollan. He is, I think, not thinking about entropy or about physics from physicists such as Roger Penrose or Erwin Schrödinger. The science of nutrition tells us the same thing that physics tells us. Leaves, of course, are the primary source of the negative entropy that supports life on earth. Leaves are healthy things to eat.

Clearly freshness matters. A just-picked squash will turn into compost fairly quickly under certain conditions. Though a just-picked squash and a week-old squash will have identical amounts of some nutrients, clearly the just-picked squash will have more negative entropy, or order, because living things start to decompose as soon as they are cut off from their source of order. With a squash, that happens when you cut the stem between the squash and the leaves of the squash plant. The difference between a fresh squash and a composted squash is entropy. When you eat a squash, you absorb its order. What’s left is compost.

Eat as close to photosynthesis as possible. Chlorophyll itself is very good for us. Could we live on a diet of nothing but meat? Some animals do, obviously, though those animals evolved to be optimized for an all-meat diet (though they get vegetable matter from the entrails of the animals they eat). But human beings are not optimized for an all-meat diet. As Michael Pollan says, eat mostly plants.

Eat preserved foods only if fresh foods are not available. To live in the northern latitudes, it’s necessary to eat preserved foods. But why open a can of vegetables in the summer?

What animals eat matters. It seems reasonable to assume that milk or cheese from cows that ate grass would contain more negative entropy than milk or cheese from cows that ate moldy corn. Honey from bees fed sugar water couldn’t possibly be as good as honey from bees with access to fresh flowers.

Avoid processed foods. Not only do processed foods provide terrible nutrition with an excess of calories, the negative entropy has been processed out. Many processed foods are probably little better than compost, though they may taste better.

Cook sparingly and carefully. Cook with an eye to preserving the order contained in food. For example, be sparing with heat, using no more heat than is necessary to find the sweet spot between deliciousness, digestibility, and maximum order.

Lest this sound like quackery, I should point out that it only boils down to considering health from the perspective of fundamental physics rather than from the higher-level sciences of nutrition and medicine. Those sciences all lead to the same conclusions about what’s healthy and what’s not, though the physics emphasizes one point: Eat as close as possible to the order that plants create from sunlight. That’s another way of saying what nutritionists are saying when they encourage us to eat fresh, whole, unprocessed foods.

Why I have been thinking about this

Having our own garden, or living on a farm, obviously can be beneficial to our health. But even if we don’t have a garden, fresh foods are available in most places (to those who can afford it). I find it ironic that northern Stokes County, where I live, is considered a food desert because of the distance to places that sell fresh food. Many people here buy most of their groceries at places such as Dollar General, where absolutely nothing is fresh and everything is processed. The consequences to people’s health is obvious just from looking at the people in Dollar Generals.

I thought a great deal this spring, as I bucked myself up for a hot summer, about how my garden is my opportunity to maximize my intake, for a full season, of negative entropy from the summer sun. Or, to turn it into a jingle, make order while the sun shines. It’s in summer that negative entropy from the sun is freshest and cheapest. I strongly suspect that, just as we can store food for the winter, our bodies also can store negative entropy for the winter. So, as I see it, we have a kind of duty to take advantage of the sun in summer to benefit our health.

Stars

Stars and life have two interesting things in common. They are the only systems in the universe that can create order out of chaos. Stars actually can create negative entropy inside themselves for their own purposes.1 And stars also supply the radiant energy that makes life possible.

The astronomer Carl Sagan made the famous statement, “We are star stuff.” I would add to that statement: We are star stuff, powered by starlight.

Notes:

1. An Introduction to Modern Astrophysics, Second Edition. Bradley W. Carroll and Dale A. Ostlie. Cambridge University Press, 2017. Page 330.

Extra credit: One way of assessing the consequences of global warming would be estimating its effects on the ability of plant life on earth to create order from the sun. The health of oceans, forests, and tundra obviously is critical. It recently was reported that the Amazon is now a net producer of carbon, rather than a carbon sink. I don’t know of any data on how such things affect the planet’s net ability to create negative entropy. But it can’t be good. Yes, plants need carbon dioxide, as global warming deniers often point out. But carbon dioxide is not the only thing that plants need to flourish. They also need clean water, a suitable environment, and not being killed by human activities.

Testament of Youth

While scouring HBO, Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, etc., for those rare items that are both intelligent and not set in the here and now, I came across “Testament of Youth.” It is a beautiful but disturbing period piece about World War I, based on the memoir by Vera Brittain, which was published in 1940.

Brittain’s dream was to go to Oxford. That dream came true, but the war fell hard — very hard — on her generation. After the war she became a pacifist activist.

As much as I wanted to read Testament of Youth, after looking at samples on Amazon I decided not to. Unfortunately she was not an appealing writer.

But, regardless of her style of writing, Brittain’s is a story that deserves to be told and to be remembered. The film, with a fine cast, does a very good job of that. Anglophiles will find much in the film to interest them.

“Testament of Youth” can be streamed from Amazon Prime Video.

Martin Chuzzlewit


Pinch starts homeward with the new pupil. Hablot Knight Brown (also known as Phiz). Source: Wikimedia Commons.

In our era, Charles Dickens is neglected and undervalued. Martin Chuzzlewit surely is one of Dickens’ most neglected and undervalued novels. For reasons that I was completely unprepared for, now would be a good time for a Dickens revival, not to mention a Martin Chuzzlewit revival.

The last villain I would have expected to mention in a review of a Charles Dickens novel is Donald John Trump (whose name happens to have a Dickensian ring to it). But it’s not Trump himself who appears in the novel. It’s the red-cap wearing, snuff-dribbling, dumb-as-rocks and in-your-face Trumpists who appear in the novel, fine Americans all.

Wikipedia writes, citing Hesketh Pearson (1949), “Dickens’s scathing satire of American modes and manners in the novel won him no friends on the other side of the Atlantic, where the instalments containing the offending chapters were greeted with a ‘frenzy of wrath.’ As a consequence Dickens received abusive mail and newspaper clippings from the United States.”

Martin Chuzzlewit was published in serial form between 1842 and 1844. Dickens had visited America in 1842. Clearly he had some things he wanted to say about Americans, so, in Chuzzlewit, Dickens has two characters visit America. This visit to America is peripheral to the plots, so clearly it was a device for conveying Dickens’ disgust with the hypocrisy of Americans — or, at least, with the hypocrisy of certain Americans. Americans in Chuzzlewit are always going on about liberty, their own liberty, liberty that they deny to others, up to and including slavery. Two years after the Civil War, in 1867, Dickens returned to America and backpedaled on his criticism, calling it satire (which of course it was).

Maybe Dickens believed in 1867 that Americans, having gone to war because of it, had confonted and corrected themselves on matters of liberty. If that’s what he thought, he would have been wrong. In How the South Won the Civil War, the historian Heather Cox Richardson describes how Southern values — “a rejection of democracy, an embrace of entrenched wealth, the marginalization of women and people of color” — not only lived on but also migrated west, encoded as the myth of the ruggedly independent cowboy. Today’s Trumpists, Richardson shows, are the very same people.

That they are the very same people also is what Dickens shows in Martin Chuzzlewit. It is to be regretted that Dickens ever backpedaled on those insights. There have been times in American history when it might have been possible to imagine that America had changed and turned over a new leaf — for example, July 2, 1964, when Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act; or November 4, 2008, when Barack Obama was elected president. Now we know that we might as well say that we are still fighting the battles of the Civil War and that we just came through one of the most dangerous battles since Appomattox.

But enough about Trump and Trumpists, who seem to intrude into everything these days, for the purpose of exercising their liberty to drag everyone down with them (public health and the climate of the planet, for example, not to mention, as always, the tyranny of the rich). One of the reasons I read novels is to escape from all that.

Back in England, if I had to choose one word for what drives Dickens’ novels and motivated Dickens to write them, that word would be character. By that I mean character not in the sense of “Tom Pinch is a character in Martin Chuzzlewit.” Rather, I mean the character of the characters, as in the Oxford definition, “the mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual.” Charles Dickens, I must imagine, quietly studied the character of the people around him, no less than did Sigmund Freud. Dickens obviously did not like much (maybe most) of what he saw. He chose satire as his vehicle. As for Dickens’ lovable characters (Tom Pinch, for example), they are not perfect. During the course of the story they will learn, and by the end of the story they will be changed.

I can think of a dozen reasons for reading Dickens today beyond what I would call Dickens’ “re-relevance,” that is, the fact that, 180 years ago, he came to America and saw straight through us. (Unfortunately, as the arc of justice has moved on, some people never changed.) As I wrote here recently about Barnaby Rudge, Dickens’ style is worth studying for its cinematic qualities. His ability to evoke atmosphere is enormous. The setting, the dialogue, and even the weather will work together to create a powerful scene — for example, the opening scene of Barnaby Rudge inside an English tavern on a dark and stormy night.

In Martin Chuzzlewit, Dickens spends several pages to take the reader on an absolutely thrilling stage coach ride (on top of the coach) from Salisbury to London. If I were a scholar and had the time, the first paper I’d want to write about Dickens would be a survey of his complete works for what people are eating — scrumptious or revolting as the scene requires, and always beautifully described. Dickens gives as much attention to costumes as to food. There also can be no doubt that, just as Dickens looked around him and was horrified at the ill treatment of human beings, he also was well aware of the suffering of animals, such as the birds in the bird shop in Chuzzlewit and the horses who draw the coaches on those thrilling, and rather dangerous, stage coach rides.

Yes, reading Dickens takes time. His style is not suited to reading fast, and his novels are long. Chuzzlewit is about 770 pages. I realized, while reading Chuzzlewit, that I identify with Dickens. I too look around me and am horrified at how bad and how deluded people can be. It’s easy to be angry. But Dickens never, ever sounds angry. Rather, he makes fun of crummy people. He lets their own words expose them for what they are. And his stories always deliver in the end exactly what his characters deserve. Here we are, 180 years later, still trapped in Dickens’ world with our work cut out for us, a world in which hardly anybody — whether good or bad — gets what they deserve.

Hinge and Bracket

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7KbhGQTak8

George Logan (Dr. Evadne Hinge) is now 77 years old and lives in France. Patrick Fyffe (Dame Hilda Bracket) died in 2002 at age 60. In the 1970s, their musical comedy was extremely popular on British television and stage. They first worked together in 1972 and became famous after they appeared at the Edinburgh Festival in 1974.

What was remarkable about their act was their superb musicality combined with their comic genius. Fyffe’s singing also recalls the extraordinary sound of the castrati singers of centuries past. We will never hear that sound again, but male voices singing falsetto surely come remarkably close. The best such singers (and Fyffe was one of them) can blend their “head voice” (higher notes) and “chest voice” (lower notes) in such a way that the sound is almost like a male voice and female voice singing together.

The Tomorrow War

I admit it. I’m a sucker for movies like this — pure, fast-moving, undemanding, popcorn-friendly entertainment. With that kind of movie, pacing is critical. There have to be times when the characters (and the audience) can stop and catch their breath. “The Tomorrow War” nicely balances the action against a family story, in much the same way as “Greenland.” Both the family drama and the action drama make good use of the time-travel angle.

Paramount Pictures intended this movie for release in theaters, but because of Covid-19, it was released instead on Amazon Prime. It doesn’t score very high on Rotten Tomatoes, but I’d give it at least a 90.