Math vs. the Tornado

When I heard that the Coen brothers were making a new film about a physics professor whose life is quietly falling apart, I had mixed feelings. The premise sounded a bit too much like Garden State for middle-aged people, without the indie music. The Coens have been on a bit of a roll lately, though. No Country and Burn after Reading were two of my recent favorites.

In the end (which should be obvious by the fact that I'm even writing this entry) I gave it a shot.

Two elements took me completely off guard, considering the premise: the offbeat humor and the breathtaking spiritual angst. One scene finds our protagonist, Larry Gopnik, sitting in a room with a Rabbi. In a moment of desperation, he asks, "Why does he (Hashem) make us feel the questions if he's not gonna give us any answers?"

The rabbi responds with a blunt, "He hasn't told me."

This may be a bold or foolish confession, but I wake up many mornings wondering if I'm wrong about the things I believe. Much of my upbringing, even through the end of college, bears a stark resemblance to brainwashing. After walking away from my faith for a time, I felt called back, but it's hard to know why you believe when so much of it was forced on you so early.

Anyway, this movie puts us in a world full of people of straightforward faith, and introduces us to a man on a search for something else. As he wanders through the inconsistencies of his stated beliefs, his profession as a physicist, and his complex, crumbling life, Larry grabs at any proposition that might help.

David Foster Wallace, in an essay titled "Derivative Sport in Tornado Alley," writes about his keen sense of mathematics and how it helped him develop a strong game of tennis. At the end of the essay, a tornado builds while he is in the middle of a volley with a friend. The tornado heralds the end of his development, since he cannot move beyond the math of the game.

I had to wonder if the Coens read Wallace's essay. The two seem to pair so perfectly together.

Our maths, the concrete symbols we ascribe to our universe, the bare facts and our ability to connect them logically, hit a wall in the face of life. We must either turn away from the unquantifiable, or we must leap into it by faith. Both positions leave us (or maybe it's just me - I know many people who don't seem to have a problem with this) with plenty of room for doubt.

After watching A Serious Man, I feel (once again) like I'm witnessing a tornado just when I thought I had the math figured out.

Go to Hell, Pop Culture

The most recent cover given to Gay Talese's cultural chronicle Thy Neighbor's Wife has an image of an unclothed woman sitting on some rocks on a beach. While she is sitting at an angle that covers all the odds and ends that would render the image explicit, it is still clearly suggestive.

It didn't really occur to me that this cover would be a problem, considering that the book was the definitive piece of journalism on the sexual revolution, and the image was clearly a relic of a bygone era, revealing less than you would see at the average neighborhood pool nowadays. So I bought the book at borders and dove in.

My dear wife did not see things the same way I did, so out of consideration for her feelings, I went ahead and took some sharpies and drew a modest skirt and T-shirt on the woman. Enjoying this creative coverup, I went ahead and added some Nike sneakers, a baseball cap, a fish in her hand, and a text bubble that says, "mmmm...sushi."

So in this way, I ended up censoring the cover of a book which is essentially about the battle between censorship and sexual liberty in America. That would place me squarely in the same camp as most of the Christians in the book, with the exception of a liscentious cult leader named John Humphrey Noyes.

In fact, I read the book with a sort of perpetual cringe, waiting to find out what kind of cruelty and repression the Christians would come up with next. As Americans from all sectors of society began openly discussing, portraying, and practicing the kind of sexual (mis)behavior that had, according to the Kinsey Reports, been going on for generations, the Church moved in with its giant political claw to smother the movement.

The tactics employed included intimidation, imprisonment, smear campaigns, and various ill-conceived political maneuvers. It's not too difficult to see why people define Christians by their hunger for power and their ignorance.

Where does anyone get the idea that a Christlike response to "sin" is to crush it with all the political muscle we can muster? I think this response is exactly the opposite of Jesus' teaching, which pierces past appearances and deeds to the heart, and addresses pain, need, and perversion that lies there with love.

Although I've only skimmed it, Rob Bell's recent book Sex God seems to herald a changing voice in the dialog between Christians and pop culture on sex, which used to go something like this:

Pop Culture: Isn't sex awesome?
Christians: Sure, as long as you don't enjoy it.
Pop Culture: But sex is wired into us. It's a biological part of who we are.
Christians: Your wiring is evil. Sex is only for making babies.
Pop Culture: You're irrelevant.
Christians: You're perverted.
Pop Culture: F**k you, Christians.
Christians: Go to Hell, pop culture.

That's a paraphrase, but I think it pretty accurately sums up the tone.

I'm a big believer in the idea that our understanding of, and more specifically our relationship with, Jesus gives us a perspective that can be both illuminating and liberating (although some would argue with my use of that word) if we can be a little less spiteful in how we listen to and speak with those who disagree with or don't understand us.

That goes for sexuality and dozens of other issues on the cultural radar these days. It doesn't mean we shouldn't have convictions and opinions. It means we should always let our speech be seasoned with Grace. We should be quick to listen and slow to speak, and we must understand that nothing short of love really makes a difference, anyway.

Steinbeck and My Hermeneutic Grid

One can read a certain edition of a book then, on the blog post wherein she or he speaks of said book, insert a completely different cover, for certain creative reasons. It is in this freedom that I post the image above, which is not only different from the cover of the book that I read, but is also almost entirely out of touch with the book itself.

But, self, you might be asking yourself, why would he choose such a lurid paperback cover when the book is such a masterful piece of literature?

Fear not. The answer is forthcoming.

The book itself, Cannery Row, is much like a Robert Altman film or a Garrison Keillor book (or a combination thereof). Its structure, if you can call it that, weaves in and out of lives, drawing sketches of immensely interesting characters, then leaving them half-done. John Steinbeck, the author (in case you didn't pick up on that from the picture), returns every other chapter to a narrative thread, but even that seems to move around in its own way.

The book is about a place called Cannery Row in Monterey in California. Or no, it's about the people who inhabit the place. Wait, actually, it's a parody of the American dream. Well, yes and no, it's about how to live freely. Hold on, maybe it is actually about a place called Cannery Row.

We could go in circles like this for pages.

This problem has been facing me in the arts quite a bit lately. A good book or a song or a movie takes however long it takes because it has a lot to do, and it works on so many different levels that summarizing it is next to impossible. Still, we fans keep trying.

The same is true of the Bible, which is a book whose identity I've been reading about quite a bit lately. It seems that if I adopt one view on what it really is, I have to chop it up and filter it and do a lot of analysis that seems a little removed from the heart of the thing. Anyway, I digress.

So the reason I chose a different cover for Steinbeck's book (the other, newer cover shows frogs scattering before a group of hobo types, which could serve as a pretty good hermeneutic key to the whole thing, seeing as how it highlights what is perhaps the central symbol of the book) is to avoid "let's run this through our hermeneutic grid and see what we come up with"-type thinking.

Try the book yourself. I'd say the best approach is to read it for the characters, and let the symbolism and statements bounce around in your head during the aftermath. That's what I did half a week ago, and they're still bouncing around in there, asking me questions, striking chords with my experiences, bringing certain characters to light, and calling me to rethink, rethink, rethink (word repeated for echo-type effect).

Poetic Facts

My official writer's bio reads:

Half-American, half-Australian, Philippine-raised, Chicago-educated, Atlanta-dwelling writer Ian North lives and works with immigrants and refugees. He mentors and equips members of the international community to tell their own stories through writing, visual art, and music. He is also involved in several creative projects, including a blog of off-kilter folk stories and songs at http://ghosttownrevival.wordpress.com.

But if I were to write my story, to really write it as I'm learning to see it, it would be the story of a movement from Scotland to Australia to India to China to Indonesia to the Philippines. It would be short on memoir, long on family history. It would take years of research that I don't know how to do, and it would owe its scope to a book called Unto the Sons by Gay Talese.

Talese is the son of an Italian-American tailor named Joseph Talese, himself the son of an Italian immigrant to the United States. I'd read some of Talese's work in The Gay Talese Reader a few years back, so I was aware of his ability to make nonfiction reports resonate with narrative immediacy, a trademark common to practicioners of the "New Journalism," a writing movement spawned by reporters and nonfiction novelists like Joan Didion, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson.

While other writers in this movement employed a cavalier approach to phrasing, language, and self-characterization, Talese maintained a style that may have cost him the celebrity that visited many of his contemporaries: formal, immaculately structured portrayal of fact.

The reason that I find Unto the Sons so compelling is the subject: Talese turns his journalistic eye on his own family history. He sees himself as part of a massive movement, discussing Italian history, moving seamlessly from Roman Empire to World War I to the formation of the Mafia and its roots in America to his own childhood as an Italian-American during WWII.

So, where I always saw Talese as a brilliant collector of fact and a masterful essayist, I now see the roots of his talent, the development of his eye for minute but significant details, and his comfort with a formal, well-dressed approach to examining the human soul.

What does this have to do with me? It makes me want to know where I come from. I want to understand where my little life, my interests, my movements, my troubles, my talent all come from, and where they all lead.

What of my great uncle who played harmonica with the Sydney Orchestra? Has anyone upstream battled depression like me? Who left the Christian faith, and who stayed? Were the evangelists to China and India ever doubtful of their work or purpose? What drove them forward or slowed them down?

There are dozens of relatable movements in Unto the Sons, especially to someone who comes from a well-traveled line. But the main drive it leaves me with is the desire to be the Gay Talese of my own family line.

The gift given to me by God and/or genetics and/or a few encouraging teachers was to write. So when this gift turns to a profession and I have the time and resources, the North family will have its own book which looks back and finds the poetry in the facts of our heritage, and hands it forward as a legacy for our children to do with as they see fit.

Deaf and Depressed

Evelyn Glennie draws rhythm from pretty much anything she can find. She goes into an abandoned factory and beautiful sounds emerge. With a single snare drum, she can freeze commuters in a busy train station. Her childhood farm holds rusty pipes and tubs which, under her percussive hand, ring out their age and texture in rhythm.

Evelyn Glennie is one of the world's most impressive percussionists. She jams with other masters like KODO and Fred Frith, and the outcome is breathtaking. The question that comes to mind upon watching director Thomas Riedelsheimer's masterful documentary Touch the Sound, is would I be this amazed if she wasn't also deaf?

The back cover of the DVD announces her hearing impairment, and I'm sure it was a significant factor in the marketing because obviously a brilliant percussionist is so much more interesting if she can't hear. On the other hand, the musical moments in this film would floor me whether I knew she was deaf or not.

It was interesting to watch this film for the first time this morning, in the middle of a fight with my own disability, a major depressive disorder. Last night, I had an impulse to write the single most tragic piece I ever conceived, to mourn the temporary losses of faith and hope that accompany the stronger waves that move through me. Like most depressed artists, I despaired of ever being able to communicate the soul of the story, and didn't even start, opting to lounge on my couch and watch an old movie instead.

The thing about Glennie's story is that her deafness is not an obstacle to her gift. It's a doorway. When she lost her hearing as a child, she began to discover that she could feel sound in a new way. She could trace its movements through her hand, into her arm, and around her body. She could sense textures, rhythms, and echoes not available to her when she relied too heavily on her ears.

So as to whether or not her music would be as impressive were she not deaf, I say "no." I do not say this because of the novelty of a deaf musician. I say this because her failing ears opened her up to new channels of experiencing sound which transformed her music. So whether or not you are even aware of her deafness, Glennie's music benefits from its fact. She understands sound in a way that no hearing person can.

So as someone who loses his sense of balance sometimes, who can't grip hope like any normal person, who cannot feel joy in these times, how can I feel and connect with beauty? How can I perceive and convey joy beyond what comes naturally to me? How can I sense truth beyond the dead nerves in my heart?

So woven through all my diseases and irrational flaws and fears and hungers, maybe there's a sense that reaches beyond what I'd experience otherwise.

Seeing Glennie play her drums, and watching her teach a younger, deaf student how to feel the rhythm she plays, I get a new sense of discovery and a new desire to write, which led specifically to the creation of this blog, which does not do much in the way of making any objective claims about the quality of any artistic expression, but takes it subjectively and digests and integrates it into my own story, which I think is what artists want us to do with their work anyway.