International Film Fest 2024: a few picks

The International film fest is back in town, and not a moment too soon. Thumbing through the booklet, I see new films by Hong Sang-soo, Ken Loach, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and many others. Yet for the most part, our choices are determined on time of day, when we've got free time, and whether the invariably vague two-sentence descriptions sound interesting. My favorites thus far are:

The Old Oak: A busload of refugees arrive from Syria in a depressed and dismal village not far from Durham, England. Some of the locals aren't happy about it. Others are eager to help the new arrivals. The plot revolves around a broken camera, a potential suicide, and cute little dog, and some broken water-pipes. It might sound sentimental, but veteran director Ken Loach broadens the field of view step by step to expose the unpleasant realities of village life after the coal mines have shut down and also the horrors that have brought these newcomers to England.

The Movie Teller: Set in a mining town in Chile's Atacama Desert, this sprawling and colorful film follows the lives of a spunky local family who face unusual challenges when the breadwinner, Medardo, gets injured on the job. Going to the movies on Sunday had always been a family treat, and as family resources dwindle, Medardo's young daughter, María Margarita, develops a talent for re-enacting the films, first to the family, and soon to the wider community, as a way to earn money.

The Home Game: Set in a small town on the west coast of Iceland, this glorified home movie chronicles the efforts of local citizens to bring a FA soccer game to their home field. Trouble is, they no longer have a soccer team. We watch as the son of the former coach cajoles anyone he can think of to sign on, enlists the help of experts to revive the condition of the pitch, and recruits a woman from a nearby village who's among the better players in the vicinity, though the Football Association doesn't allow females to play in the male division. After a year of effort training the squad for this Quixotic endeavor, with plenty of laughter along the way, the team remains in doubt whether their game will be home or away. It all depends on the draw.

Stripped for Parts: American Journalism on the Brink. This documentary exposes the role of a single hedge fund, Alden Global Capital, in purchasing and dismantling newspaper chains throughout the United States, putting countless journalists out of work and leaving communities large and small without a source of accurate information about what's going on in high places. It focuses on the Denver Post, the Baltimore Sun, and various struggling Bay area publications, highlighting the work of a few dedicated journalists in bringing this form of "vulture capitalism" to light.  The interviews are uniformly crisp and full of information. The graphics are clever and illuminating, though the images of vultures become tiresome through repetition.

What's to be done? It's hard to say. Notions of "government funding" and "a new model" remain vague and largely speculative, while print news circulation continues to decline...

All About the Levkoviches: I suppose there is merit in seeing a film that's not firing on all cylinders. This odd tale focuses on a Hungarian boxing coach, Tamás, and his estranged son, Iván, who's moved to Israel and "gone totally Jew," as Tamas puts it. Iván returns to Hungary with his son to sit shiva when his mother dies, and during that painful and contentious week various elements in the back-story emerge. But the revelations are entirely predictable and Tamás is so relentlessly unpleasant that it isn't much fun to watch.

I guess you can't win them all.  

Wiseman in France - Menus-Plaisirs

In comparison with recent projects focusing on the New York City library system, the Paris Opera, and Boston city government, documentarian Frederick Wiseman's latest field of inquiry—a family of restaurateurs in a small town in southwest France—might seem small. Yet he has little difficulty sustaining our interest through four unhurried hours of Menus-Plaisirs - Les Troisgros. During this time we join Michel Troisgros as he analyzes a menu with his two sons, listen in as the wait staff discuss their daily assignments, table by table, and watch the ensemble at work as guests arrive. We spend a good deal of time in the kitchen as dishes being prepared.

Interspersed here and there are visits to several nearby farms where Michel and his sons get their meat and vegetables. We tour a cheese warehouse along with the wait-staff, where the owner explains the various storage and rubbing techniques required to age a particular cheese successfully, and stop in at a local vineyard where the restaurant gets much of its wine. The pace is leisurely, the countryside quietly sublime.

In one scene Michel discusses the wine list with his sommelier, who has only been able to secure one bottle of Richbourg—at 5,000 euros. (They already have a patron in mind.) Even the lesser Burgundies don't come cheap.

Wiseman has never been one to explain things or introduce people, and it takes a while to sort out the principal players. The issue is compounded by the fact that one of Michel's son runs his own restaurant a half-hour away. Such an approach can be confusing in the short run, but it forces us to pay close attention to what's going on, minute by minute. Over time a sense of richness, natural bounty, civility, taste, and family feeling develops, and it's a pleasure to experience.

One attribute that's absent from the film is pretension. Everyone seems to be on the same page—producers, suppliers, chefs, line cooks, servers, guests. No one is trying to impress, or gouge, anyone else. Conversation at the tables is casual yet "informed." Dress is informal but crisp. A large percentage of the guests are elderly, as we might expect, considering that the standard eight-course tasting menu with wine parings runs to $600 per head. But we meet plenty of younger folk, too. And the nearest we come to a conflict is in a scene during which Michel samples a dish newly created by his son and finds it to be too hot. "Too much sriracha," he keeps saying. "I'm enjoying it. But too much sriracha."       

The restaurant has been a family-run affair for several generations, and has retained a three-star Michelin rating since 1968. You could make a reservation there yourself, if you happen to be planning a trip to Lyon. But for now, why not just watch the movie.

You can see the whole thing here.

Spring Morning in the Garden

On a cool sunny morning I wander the backyard, stricken with an inexpressible glee as I listen to the chattering birds—is that the first chipping sparrow I hear?—and wonder at the leaves just now springing into view.

There are the raspberries, hanging on along the side of the garage, though they produce fewer berries every year, and we've been replacing them with other things: a volunteer pagoda dogwood and a miniature woodlot where I split wood and sometimes convert the pieces into kindling.

 Out back I come upon the reddish leaves of a very fine chokecherry tree. 

Right next to it is a honeysuckle. They call it an "invasive" and I wish it would invade further.

And right at my feet I notice the buckeye tree that we've been nurturing for a few years, at least to the extent of putting one of those peony supports around it so it doesn't get stepped on.

 I had big plans for the morning, as usual, and now I put them in motion. I take some cuttings from the yellow-twig dogwood in the front yard, and after digging a hole and filling it with soil and mulch, I plant them along the edge of the woods. I doubt if the plant will take, but it's worth a try. Nothing else seems to do well out there.

My final task is to cut back the sage bush that gets bigger every year. As I dump the old but still fragrant branches into the yard waste container alongside the still fragrant Christmas tree I chopped up and tossed in yesterday, a heady and complex smell emerges, and it reminds me of a remark I came across recently by the Japanese poet Sōshitsu, who died in 1527:

In enjoying blossoms, appreciating scents, and loving wine, I am no different from anyone else. Past to present, these three have been favored by stalwarts and sages, and who, from the oldest village elder to the tenderest youth, does not feel the same?

Year after year, we invite the neighbors to come help themselves to a few springs if they need some fresh sage.

You're also welcome to come take a few. But not quite yet.  

French Food, Sicilian Gravediggers, Japanese Biffies

The original Japanese title of "Perfect Days," the Wim Wenders film nominated recently for the foreign language Oscar, was "Komorebi." I'm told that means "sunlight leaking through trees." Neither title matches the tone of this portrait of Hirayama, a vaguely troubled middle-aged man who lives alone and follows a set routine, cleaning the public toilets of Tokyo by day, stopping in at a bar after work where everyone knows him, and spending his evenings at home reading Faulkner, Patricia Highsmith, and Aya Koda.

Hirayama is good at cleaning toilets, but there isn't much Zen in his approach. He's fast, careful, methodical, and efficient. He rarely speaks to his assistant or anyone else, often spending lunch breaks on a bench in a park photographing the branches of a nearby group of trees as they're jostled by the wind. In short, Hirayama has crafted a simple lifestyle that works well for him, though it seems to be driven less by enlightened satisfaction than caution and circumspection, and even hints of latent fear, like a dog who had a cruel master years ago and can't quite get over it.

Koji Yakusko won the best actor prize at Cannes for his portrayal of Hirayama, and we spend much of the film watching subtle changes in his expression. Though they're sometimes hard to read, Hirayama is clearly moved from time to time by a childlike glee, as when he watches a homeless man doing pantomimes in the park. On the other hand, when a woman sits on a bench near him twice in the same week to eat her sandwich, he's spooked; he doesn't know what to make of it.

The central mystery of Hirayama's back-story gurgles quietly beneath a succession of minor incidents involving, for example, his goofy assistant, whose demanding girlfriend steals one of the cassette tapes Hirayama plays every day on his way to work—The Velvet Underground, the Kinks, Otis Redding, Patti Smith. Some critics have taken Lou Reed's "Perfect Days" and Nina Simone's "Feelin' Good" as anthems of Hirayama's inner contentment, though it seems more likely that this music serves as an early morning pick-me-up to go along with the canned coffee Hirayama invariably buys from a vending machine in the alley before heading off to spend another day polishing sinks and urinals. 

 Critics have also found it significant that Hirayama is still playing cassettes, as if he were nobly eschewing streaming technology, but the simple truth is that he drives a dilapidated van fitted with a cassette player. What else is he going to do?

Fans of Wenders' early films such as Alice in the City and Kings of the Road will relish the relaxed pace, subtle humor, and seemingly random digressions that occupy much of Perfect Days, but when Hirayama's young niece, Nico, shows up at his apartment one night, out of the blue, and asks if she can spend a few days—she's run away from home—it gives the film an added dimension.

Some movie-goers will be disappointed, no doubt, by a film in which very little happens and not all is revealed. But often the things we remember best are those that remain unresolved--active little seas, dangerous at times, across the surface of which we live our lives. 

Notes: This film began its life when the city of Tokyo hired Wenders to direct short videos about a few of their new public toilets, which had been newly designed by world-famous architects prior to the 2020 Olympics. Also worth a note--in Japanese public schools the students are typically assigned to clean the toilets.   

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The Taste of Things begins in medias res, with Eugenie (Juliette Binoche) selecting heads of lettuce from a large, well-kept garden. It's a lovely, bucolic scene, and the same can be said for the kitchen where much of the action takes place. The greens are brought inside, and for fifteen minutes we watch a highly choreographed primer on how to cook haute cuisine on an open fire and a cast iron stove. 

It's clear the cooks have been working together for a long time—Dodin Bouffant, Eugenie, and her young assistant Violette. The instructions they send back and forth across the capacious kitchen are kindly, and they don't look like servants. At this point we have no idea who these people are, nor do we know who they're cooking for.

We're eventually introduced to four or five well-dressed men sitting at a table in the next room. Dodin joins them. He's the master of the house, a true gourmand, and these are his aristocratic friends, all of whom share his passion for fine dining. They tell stories about Carême, Balzac, and Estouffier, glory in the subtleties of Meursault and Chambolle-Musigny, and have a jolly good time. Dodin and his friends gratefully acknowledge that Eugénie is the kitchen mastermind and deserves a large share of the credit for the results, and they've invited her to join them more than once. But she cheerfully declines, pointing out that it would be impossible in that case to keep the dishes coming.

The film's plot-points, such as they are, revolve around an exchange of dinners between Dodin and a Eurasian count of great wealth but limited taste; Dodin's fruitless efforts to get Eugenie to marry him—they've been lovers for years; and best of all, their attempts to educate Violette's young niece, who has an extraordinary gift for discerning flavors, in the culinary arts.

But plot and character remain subordinate to the food—how it's prepared, what it looks like. The settings are appealing, the lighting is exquisitely subdued throughout, and the stews, fish, vegetables, and desserts invariably look scrumptious. Eugenie puts a cheery face on things, though she often looks a little tired, and occasionally comes close to fainting. Dodin is a cypher: Where did he get his wealth? Is he writing a cookbook? You don't have to be a Marxist to ask, more generally, whether eating well can serve as the be-all and end-all of authentic living.   

Director Tran Anh Hung never asks that question, and he doesn't have to. From an aesthetic perspective, The Taste of Things serves up a lovely meal, though perhaps a bit lukewarm. Maybe because we never get a chance to taste the food?

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The Strangeness is a gem of a film depicting a few days in life of Luigi Pirandello during which he returns to Sicily to attend to the death of the nanny who cared from him as a child. Along the way he discovers that Onofrio and Sebastiano, the two  gravediggers handling the funeral, are also collaborating on a community play. Pirandello is suffering from writer's block, and while waiting for the interment he begins to take an interest in these two would-be dramatists, whose constant bickering constitute a running comedy routine.

I had no idea while watching the film that the actors playing the gravediggers were Salvo Ficarra and Valentino Picone, a well known comedy duo in Italy. Toni Servillo, whom you might recognize from The Hand of God or La Grande Bellezza, is also perfectly cast as the melancholy playwright, who sometimes stays up at night conversing with characters from his plays. Other townspeople, including Onofrio's sister and other members of the cast, also figure prominently in the film.

Opening night becomes a scene of mayhem, full of gaffes and accusations. The play cuts too close to home (as intended) and members of the audience who recognize unflattering versions of themselves on stage are outraged. A riot ensues. Pirandello watches it all from a box on the mezzanine. A few years later, he writes his masterpiece, Six Characters in Search of an Author.

Not much of this story is true, though Pirandello was invited to Sicily to deliver a speech in 1920. But it doesn't really matter much. The joy in the film lies in the humor latent in small-town vanities and anxieties that are exposed during rehearsals and performance, and also the growing appreciation Pirandello feels for these Sicilian crooks and bumpkins, who possess their own flavors of sincerity and genius.    

Bulgar and Brahms

Home alone on a cold gray morning—Hilary is bringing some vegetable soup over to her mom's apartment—I convince myself that it's time to make the salad I've had on my mind ever since I bought that bag of Bob's Red Mill bulgar a week ago. I can see through the plastic container that the fresh mint I bought for that purpose is growing less fresh by the hour. I put a CD of Brahms' second and third symphonies on the stereo—melancholy, turbulent, serene, and majestic by turns, like a shifting sea at sunset. Those symphonies remind me of my college years, when Brahms was one of my favorite composers. (I'm not saying that my college years were melancholy, turbulent, serene, and majestic, though that's not far off the mark either.)

But a line from a poem by Wallace Stevens from the same era suddenly surfaces:

A little less returned for him each spring.

Brahms, his old familiar, often walked alone.

At the time those lines worried me a little. Is this what aging does? I asked myself. Reduces one's ardor, one's affection for things? I haven't found that to be the case. I simply quit listening to Brahms somewhere along the line, except for his late, poignant piano intermezzos. He began to sound slightly turgid and overwrought in comparison to the more haunting and evasive sounds of Faure, for example. And at a certain point the lyric and dramatic genius of Brahms' near contemporary Verdi came into play, along with other competing interests.

In short, I found that my experience broadened rather than fading; my tastes expanded. Yet there's also a subtle joy to be felt  in circling back to those memories, and tastes, of forty or fifty years ago. I found myself whistling along to the symphonies—I internalized them long ago and know them all by heart—while following the recipe for bulgar salad in a food-spattered copy of the Moosewood Cookbook from the same era. This isn't nostalgia—a pining for something that's lost. It's probing the mystery of time and relishing the deep overlay of memories that have returned to life in the here and now.

Hilary and I drove down to campus on a sunny morning a few weeks ago to see an exhibit at the Weisman Art Museum. We parked on the street a few blocks away--it happened to be spring break, though we didn't know it at the time--and strolled down East River Road to the gallery. After viewing the show we returned via the mall to Northrup Auditorium, trying to remember what each of the buildings used to be. Scott Hall was Music, Morall Hall was where you registered for classes. Anthropology was in Murphy Hall, but so was the University Film Society. Or was that Fraser Hall?

 Beyond Northrup we came to Folwell Hall, where I once studied Classical Greek, and sometimes climbed out on the roof through the dormer windows after class to enjoy the spring breezes.

We ate lunch at a Chinese restaurant in Dinkytown. The Podium Guitar Shop across the street is long gone, and so is the Tokyo Café, where you could get a bowl of tendon for $3.50. (In those days the tempura was out of my price range.) Gordon's Bakery, where the banana donuts were so good? Long gone. Vescio's? Not a chance. But there were shops selling Gopher paraphernalia, which would have been unheard of  during the hip and turbulent Seventies.

After lunch we went upstairs to browse a used book store that's changed hands several times over the years. Alas, for me that particular activity has lost most of its charm. I've got quite a few books lying around the house, and I seldom see a new one that doesn't immediately remind me of others I already own. For example, I was intrigued by a book containing eyewitness accounts of Verdi's life and habits by those who actually knew him or passed him on the streets of Busseto or Parma. Sounds interesting. But what about the thick Phillips-Matz biography of Verdi sitting on the shelf back home, unread? And George Martin's Aspects of Verdi?  Charles Osborne's The Complete Operas of Verdi? Or my favorite, William Berger's Verdi with a Vengence? No. I don't need another book about Verdi right now.

But I've made a mental note of it, and if I happen to be in the neighborhood again sometime ... 

I was happy to see that Verdi's Nabucco had been included among the Met Opera Theater Simulcasts last fall. I'd never seen it, and the only piece I knew was the famous "Va Pensiero." The opera was Verdi's first youthful success, a Biblical epic heavy on the choruses, and I wasn't expecting much, but it turned out to be tremendous--stirring, romantic, ridiculous, and profound--and the effect was enhanced by the fact that the theater sound had been turned up a little too loud.

We wanted to sustain the mood, so when we got home I scoured our CDs and came up with a complete recording of La Forza del Destino, an opera sometimes referred to as Verdi's "black sheep" that we hadn't heard in years. In this sprawling four-hour drama the hero, Alvaro, kills his girl-friend Leonora's father by an unlikely accident, and spends the rest of the opera being hunted down by her brother Carlo. In the third act Alvaro (incognito, of course) saves Carlo's life in a back-alley rumble, and they become best friends. (You get the feeling it's not going to last.) By the end of the opera both Leonora and Alvaro have withdrawn from the world to monasteries, but plenty of blood gets spilled just the same. In operaland, how could it be otherwise?

Listening to CDs, we had no idea what was going on, of course, but the music was a delight. 

And just our luck, a few weeks ago the Met brought La Forza del Destino to town on a Saturday Theater Simulcast. The production was terrible...but the music, as usual, was sublime.

After the Oscars

The songs weren't bad, and the drumming was memorable; the winners were mostly deserving, I can recall only one over-the-top dance number--"Just Ken"--and  Jimmy Kimmel took care of business as well as Johnny Carson ever did. The early focus on Barbie was gratifying to see. The worst bit involved a pseudo-streaker. I didn't "get" it.

Kimmel's worst joke—horrific, really—was to remark that in Germany The Zone of Interest fell into the rom-com category. The technical awards and the always tedious speech by the president of the Academy were scuttled. But the In Memoriam episode, brief though it was, didn't come off well: the camera was so far removed from names and faces that you couldn't see or read them, and the flailing dancers in the foreground looked ridiculous. By the same token, the film clips were meager. That's too bad. Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford, and Meryl Streep were nowhere to be seen, which is fine by me. And the show was wrapped up by 9:30. It was hard to believe.

I can't recall an Oscar ceremony that gave us less to complain about. 

Then again, what do I remember about the event from previous years anyway? Not much.

Can anyone even remember which films won the Best Picture Oscar in recent years? I don't find it easy.

I just now called up a list of nominees, year by year. Here are some winners, followed in some cases by a runner-up that might have taken home the prize with equal justice.

Everything Everywhere All at Once ... or Tar?

Coda ... or Licorice Pizza?

Nomadland

Parasite ... or Ford vs. Ferrari?

The Green Book ... or Black Klansman?

The Shape of Water ... or Phantom Thread?

Moonlight ... or Hell or High Water?

Spotlight ... or The Big Short?

And so on.

I read a fair amount of Oscar chatter before the ceremony, and sometimes almost forget how trivial it all is when compared to the experience of actually seeing a film. Any film. For example, the energy, sweep, detail, drama, intensity, and moral import of Oppenheimer stagger the imagination. It's a very good film, I think. The question of how many statues it won seems vapid by comparison.

On a much smaller scale, The Holdovers  also won my heart. It's full of humor and sorrow and truth. And purposeful lies. It isn't a Christmas movie or a coming of age movie or a Vietnam movie or a 70s movie, though all of those elements play a part. It's one of those movies that develop organically as we learn more about the characters, and it's fair to say that even Classical Studies—you know, Latin and Greek, Horace and Thucydides—come into play, as do race and class and parental loss and academic vanity. 

Paul Giametti shines as the harsh and frustrated instructor, so lovelorn he's forgotten what the word means, though he does love his Latin quotations about nobility and sacrifice.  But the entire cast is up to the challenge of making a seemingly arbitrary and unpleasant situation into a funny and moving tale. Well done all the way around.

American Fiction also works well, though not quite so touchingly, as both a family drama and a charming, if someimes bitter, comedy about how academia, the publishing industry, and the reading public shape the dialogue about underrepresented communities. Very shrewd.

Past Lives  is a quietly enigmatic film that follows a few decades in the life of Nora, who emigrates to Canada from Korea at the age of twelve with her parents. Nora seems unperturbed by the change; a few frames later she's become an adult and moved to New York to pursue a career as a playwright. 

The plot centers on her relationship with Hae Sung, the boy she left behind in Korea when they were kids. They reconnect online and begin a vague, dreamy correspondence about where their lives are going, how they still think about each other, and so on. Meanwhile, Nora meets Arthur, a likeable novelist and self-styled New York Jew. The two are happily married by the time Hae Sung decides to come visit.

Barbie is a colorful, fun-loving, ingenious romp that examines gender roles with tongue partly in cheek. The production is unique and audacious. 

 Maestro is full of dazzle and bluster but it fails to offer a broadly satisfying portrait of its subject, the conductor, composer, and educator Leonard Bernstein. Nor does it probe very deeply into Bernstein's marriage or the career and personality of his wife. Director and star Bradley Cooper chose to focus instead on himself—er, I mean, the maestro's numerous gay affairs, and viewers are left with an energetic but hollow "long-suffering wife" tale, in which the musical genius and emotional complexity of the ostensible subject is largely missing. As Richard Brody put it in the New Yorker, Cooper "left out all the good parts." 

I fell asleep during The Boy and the Heron. The portraits of bird life are inaccurate and uncomplimentary, the facial expressions of the humans lack dimension, and the voices are cartoonish. Oh? It is a cartoon? Well, that explains it.

Anatomy of a Fall had piqued my interest even before it won the Oscar for best original screenplay. It revolves around the question of whether a depressed author living in the Alps killed himself by jumping out a window or was pushed by his wife. Neither of them are all that appealing, and the French courtroom scenes are full of badgering lawyers asking tendentious questions. Meanwhile, no one makes the slightest effort to look for the murder weapon, presuming there was one. Our sympathies come to rest with the couple's sight-impaired son and his cute dog, who also happen to be the prime witnesses.

In the end, it isn't that hard to figure out what happened. But I'll leave you in suspense, while also noting that the recent Japanese film, Decision to Leave, covers similar ground in more suspenseful and entertaining ways.

Now, on to the International Film Fest and the summer blockbusters! 

A Note on Marilynne Robinson

During my days on the loading dock, my colleagues and I used to comment wryly on the exaggerations and absurdities that routinely appeared in the promotional copy on the books we were checking in. I was reminded of that the other day when I glanced at the blurbs on the back of Marilynne Robinson's collection of essays The Death of Adam. In the first line it's described as a "grand, sweeping, blazing, brilliant, life-changing book" that will leave the reader "shaken." That's not the impression I got while reading a few of the essays. To my mind it would more accurate to describe the book as modest, astute, carefully focused, cautiously articulated, thought-provoking, and leavened with only occasional touches of gentle irony. But I suppose such phrases are unlikely to sell many books. Post-modern readers want to be shaken, not stirred.

I heard Marilynne read maybe ten years ago at a book convention. She was soft-spoken, mournful, almost lethargic, yet animated by a smoldering inner fire that kept your attention. I don't remember what she was reading; the passages might have been from her novel Home.

After the event I went up to ask her a question. "You've devoted several essays," I began, "to the connections between Marguerite of Navarre and John Calvin—" Before I had time to come to the point, she said,  in a quiet but strangely troubled and insistent tone of voice, "But why would you be interested in that?" It wasn't a challenge or a put-down, as far as I could tell, but a serious inquiry. To be honest, I wasn't sure what she was driving at. What I might have said in reply was, "I like Marguerite of Navarre's Heptameron quite a bit, but have an altogether negative impression of John Calvin. I don't see the connection." I see now that if I had, she might have responded, in a courteous voice tinged with humor, "Well, if you'd actually read the pertinent essays in my collection The Death of Adam, you'd have seen the connection." But there was a line of eager readers forming behind me, and it didn't seem the proper time to elaborate on the sources of my interest.

A few days ago Hilary forwarded to me an article that Marilynne wrote recently about Joe Biden. I liked it so much that I tracked down my copy of The Death of Adam and gave it another look. I read an essay called "Psalm Eight," in which Marilynne describes the role religious feeling played in her childhood.

"I was becoming a pious child, seriously eager to hear whatever I might be told. What this meant precisely, and why it was true, I can only speculate. But it seems to me I felt God as a presence before I had a name for him, and long before I knew words like "faith" or "belief." I was aware to the point of alarm of a vast energy of intention, all around me, barely restrained, and I thought everyone else must be aware of it."

That's a remarkable passage, I think, To which she adds: "I do not remember childhood as happy but as filled and overfilled with an intensity of experience that made happiness a matter of little interest."

From there I turned to a piece titled "Puritans and Prigs." Marilynne likes Puritans, and thinks they've been given a bad rap. She hates prigs, though she sees them nowadays almost everywhere she looks. At one point she writes:

"The way we speak and think about Puritans seems to me a serviceable model for important aspects of the phenomenon we call Puritanism. Very simply, it is a great example of our collective ignorance to disparage without knowledge or information about the thing disparaged, when the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved of." Ouch!

 At another point: 

"For at least a century we have diverted ourselves with the fact that it is possible to translate whole constellations of ideas into terms inappropriate to them. And when, thus transformed, they seem odd or foolish, we have acted as if we had exposed their true nature—in its essence, the alligator was always a handbag."

These are fine examples, I think, of Marilynne's even-tempered (yet scathing) criticisms of the current state of critical judgment. Meanwhile, she seems to knows a great deal about Puritanism herself, both the Genevan original and the North American offspring. In fact, the thirty-five page essay titled "Marguerite de Navarre" is almost entirely devoted to the career of John Calvin, about which I, for one, knew almost nothing before reading it. It's a long and eloquent narrative, and at its heart lies the notion that divine energy is real and exultation is something valuable to share it. On a more prosaic level, she concludes:

"There are things for which we in this culture are clearly indebted to [Calvin], including relatively popular government, the relatively high status of women, the separation of church and state, what remains of universal schooling, and, while it lasted, liberal higher education, education in "the humanities." All this, for our purposes, emanated from Geneva—in imperfect form, of course, but tending then toward improvement as it is now tending toward decline."

Her assertion that American culture and institutions owe more to Continental than to English precedents is an intriguing one, and it seems to jibe with other treatments of the subject—for example, Guido de Ruggiero's History of European Liberalism.   

Marilynne's judgments are finely put, rather unlike the hysterical tone so common nowadays, and her prose has a kind of purring density that requires close attention. It reminds me more of Sir Thomas Browne than Hunter Thompson. She doesn't use Bible references to "prove" her points, but rather, offers glosses from afar that may, perhaps, alter our perspectives. For example:

"I believe it is usual to say that the resurrection established who Jesus was and what his presence meant. Perhaps it is truer to say that opposite, that who Jesus was established what his resurrection meant, that he seized upon a narrative familiar or even pervasive and wholly transformed it."  

But what about Marguerite of Navarre? Marilynne admits in the first paragraph of her essay that the appearance of Marguerite's name in the title is mostly a deception; readers would be unlikely to take up an essay devoted to John Calvin. And she may be right. Yet the association isn't entirely arbitrary. The two almost certainly knew each other, and Marilynne  makes the case, albeit briefly, that Calvin was deeply influenced by Marguerite's religious poetry, though she doesn't reproduce any of it. Meanwhile, she doesn't think much of Margaret's Heptameron, casually lumping that collection of moral tales in with Boccoccio's much less interesting, though far more famous, predecessor, The Decameron. With that judgment I cannot agree.

I requested a copy of The Grammar of Silence: a Reading of Marguerite de Navarre's Poetry from the library. It was the only thing they had that might serve. I expect it will be a scholarly slog that I'll dismiss in a few pages as worthless. But who knows?

 I'll let you know how it turns out.