Aging Gracefully

Imagine a 110 year old Batman, running around in a futuristic Gotham, now part of a giant Police State.  Why imagine this?  Because that seems to have been the start of Paul Pope’s Batman: Year 100.  But, then a funny thing happened between conception and implementation.  A 110 year old Batman would be, well, feeble.  So, while we never learn the age of the titular character, he is at best an insanely well-preserved man in his late-50s.  But, and the problems just keep on compounding, this story is set in 2039, and Batman’s parents were still killed in 1939 in this story, so he must be over a 100.  And, this isn’t just some time shift.  Everyone else from the 1960s is long gone.  Batman interacts with Jim Gordon’s grandson, who is an adult.  Not only that, but Frank Miller’s story, The Dark Knight Returns, in which Batman is already old, is part of the background for Pope’s story, meaning this story is set 50 years after Miller’s tale.  How is this possible?  And, just so you don’t think that such grousing is simply beside the point, the whole point of this entire story is that it has been a very long time since Batman has made himself visible, so long, in fact, that everyone (everyone including Gordon’s grandson, by the way) assumes he never existed and is just some sort of bizarre legendary fictional character.  In other words, this story is literally incoherent.  It’s nice enough if you can ignore the fact that it makes no sense, but it was really hard to ignore the fact that it makes no sense.

All of which prompts me to wonder:  if you want to write a Batman story in which Batman is over 100 years old, why not simply provide a plausible excuse? After all, simply noting that Batman has some accident in a Lazarus Pit would have been enough.  Indeed, since Pope wanted to write, in his own telling, a very physical Batman story, having a Batman rejuvenated by the Lazarus Pits would have allowed him to do what he really wanted to do.  But, it seems he wanted it both ways:  an old Batman when it was convenient, but a young one the rest of the time.

Here is an even better story: make Batman 110 years old.  Now that would be an interesting story.  What happens to a superhero like Batman when he is extremely physically frail.  Imagine he still has the wealth and the intellect, but simply can’t run around Gotham anymore and maybe his memory isn’t quite as good as it used to be.  Now, create a story in which there is a new villain—say some punk who is obsessed with the Joker, and decides to imitate him in minute detail.  Create a large series of puzzles and problems which only Batman could master because only Batman was ever able to fight the Joker.  But, Batman is old, so what worked in the past will no longer work.  There is a fascinating reflection on age in that story.

However, a story like that would, I am afraid, not be terribly popular.  People don’t like to think about aging in general, and an aging superhero is particularly sad.  (See, the Incredibles, well at least the beginning of that movie, since over the course of the movie we find out that being old doesn’t really mean being, you know, old.)  Is this Cult of Youth simply a product of fear of dying?  I’ve never been sure.    

But, to return to the Pope book (and I am well aware that the Reader was pining for just such a thing), the strangest part of all in Batman: Year 100 was the short story at the end, “Berlin Batman,” an earlier work by Pope.  This one is a reinventing of Batman as a guy who lived in Nazi Germany.  Interesting idea.  Sort of like Red Son, which was a pretty good book.  In this story, Batman has to act quickly to prevent the Nazis from destroying some really important papers.  And what papers?  The works of…Ludwig von Mises.  I kid you not.  How many readers of comic books know who Ludwig von Mises is?  How many even bothered to look him up after reading the comic book?  I really want to assign this comic book in an economics class…well, except that none of my students know who Mises is either. 

In the end, is this book worth reading?  I suppose.  Just don’t expect too much.

Have More

In the spirit of suggesting books which might make a decent Christmas gift, I offer up the following suggestion for that person on your list who likes economics, but doesn’t want a technical manuscript.  (For the person on your list who likes economics and wants a technical manuscript, give them a copy of a Shakespeare play and tell them there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in their philosophy and that Christmas is a terrible time to ask for technical manuscripts.)

The recommendation:  Branko Milanovic, The Haves and the Have-Nots: A Brief and Idiosyncratic History of Global Inequality

Unlike many economics books aimed at a general audience, this one a) has good, solid content and b) isn’t longer than it needs to be to make its point.  It’s overall argument is simply an explanation of the nature of inequality.  It does a really nice job at showing that when we talk about inequality there are really three different things:

1) Inequality within a country (why are some people in a country richer than others in the same country?)

2) Inequality between countries (why are some countries wealthier than others?)

3) Inequality between people of the world (why are poor people in rich countries wealthier than rich people in poor countries?)

It’s that last one that surprises many people.  We have heard a lot about the top 1% lately, so here is the fun question:  What income do you need to be in the top 1% of the world income distribution?  Milanovic calculates it:  you need a little over $34,000 a year.  In other words, lots of Americans are in the top 1%.  Moreover, even those that aren’t are easily in the top 5% of the world income distribution.  The poor in America are fabulously rich compared to the poor in most of the world.

Milanovic has lots of good material on Big Questions like that.  But, the real charm of the book is that he also spends quite a bit of time answering a wide array or ridiculously fun questions:

How rich was Mr Darcy?  (Very, very rich)  How big of a catch was Darcy for Elizabeth?  (Really big; she was nowhere near as wealthy)

Accounting to the price level at the time, who was the richest person ever?  Not Bill Gates.  It was John D Rockefeller.

How much of your income is determined at your birth?  80%

Does the world have a Middle Class?  Not really.

And so on.  Like I said—it’s a quirky and fun book. 

(And, for the MHC folks, he is coming to campus for a conference next March.)

I assigned the book in my class, and one student asked how to move from being a Have to being a Have-More.  Good question.  I think the easiest way is a) Attend a school like Mount Holyoke, b) Spend a lot of time hanging around horses  (not a poor man’s sport) and c) Marry someone you meet at the barn who already is a Have-More.

Why did the maid weep?

Having just returned from my annual Dinner and Christmas Shopping Trip with Lily (I have such a evening with each of the young’ins on a yearly basis), I was about to settle down with the book I am currently reading, but Said Book, while having a content which is inherently interesting, has a that sort of Prose style which causes a new set of one’s brain cells to scream out in death throes with each passing page. (I hear you, Dear Reader, snickering.  No, it is not an economics book.)  I’ll review that book at a later date if the race between my remaining living brain cells and the remaining pages in the book results in a victory for a subset of the former.  But, tonight, I am too tired to read that book, so I figured I might as well write up a review of a book (or more properly a pair of books) which resuscitates dying little grey cells.  (Note, the British spelling of the colour is due to the presence of Dame Agatha on my stack of books awaiting review.)

The tome worth reading:

Stephen Crane, The Black Riders

I’ll also note right away that I have also been reading Crane’s War is Kind and much of what follows applies to that book as well, but the first volume is manifestly superior to the second.  So, if you are going to read one (and you should)—read The Black Riders.

These are books of poetry.  Until a few months ago, I knew very little about Crane’s poetry, but a New Criterion review of a recently published anthology of Crane’s verse (edited by one of MHC’s Own) induced me to purchase the Library of America’s Crane anthology of Prose and Poetry.  I am really glad I did.  The poetry is incredible.  Absolutely incredible.

The poems are all tiny little bits which explode when one starts to pay attention to them.  They are short, very short.  Indeed, they tend to read more like apothegms than Shakespearean sonnets.  At first, they seem just odd or offbeat or disturbing, and then they slowly work their way into the conscious mind revealing themselves as a startling manner of phrasing a Truth, usually about human nature.

Now all of that bit in the last paragraph, let’s face it, just reads like babbling.  So, here is an example:

            A man feared that he might find an assassin;

            Another that he might find a victim.

            One was more wise than the other.

(That’s the whole poem—not just a part of it.  Its number LVI in The Black Riders.)

So, thinking about that poem, which one is the wiser?  It’s obvious that the first is the wiser—after all, being killed is worse than killing someone, right?   But, just as the mind gets set to hasten on to the next poem, it stops.  Why is the assassin afraid of finding a victim?  And, then the poem explodes.  Why be afraid of finding an assassin?  What are the odds of that?  Ah, but on the other hand, how easy is it to find a victim?  And one suddenly hears Paul:

And just as they did not see fit to acknowledge God any longer, God gave them over to a depraved mind, to do those things which are not proper, being filled with all unrighteousness, wickedness, greed, evil; full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, malice; they are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, arrogant, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, without understanding, untrustworthy, unloving, unmerciful; and although they know the ordinance of God, that those who practice such things are worthy of death, they not only do the same, but also give hearty approval to those who practice them.  (Romans 1:28-32, NASB)

 

Who is wiser? The one who sees his own depravity.  He is always in danger of acting according to his nature.  And not “He” in that last sentence.  Me.  And, You.

Crane does this in poem after poem.  The poem looks simple, but it isn’t.

One of the poems in this collection has been forever stamped with a unique and rather odd mental association because of the circumstances in which I discovered Crane’s poetry.  The aforementioned editor of the volume of poetry which was being reviewed in the essay I read is currently the Dean of Faculty at MHC.  (I didn’t actually buy the volume he edited, by the way—I wanted to get all the prose too, so I bought the longer LOA volume.  Sorry, Chris.)  (But, on the other hand, for the rest of you—if you are looking for a great Christmas gift for someone who likes poetry, get the Library of America volume of Crane’s poetry—not the one I bought, but the one Chris edited.)   Anyway, poem number V begins with a man in the first line—that man will forever be Chris acting as Dean of Faculty standing in front of a Faculty Meeting:

Once there came a man
Who said,
"Range me all men of the world in rows."
And instantly
There was terrific clamour among the people
Against being ranged in rows.
There was a loud quarrel, world-wide.
It endured for ages;
And blood was shed
By those who would not stand in rows,
And by those who pined to stand in rows.
Eventually, the man went to death, weeping.
And those who staid in bloody scuffle
Knew not the great simplicity.

(I think Chris, who despite the note above will almost certainly never read this blog post, would be amused by the comparison.)

Pass Us That Bottle, Will Ya?

In the last week, I’ve read almost 300 applications for a job here at MHC, graded two tests, and began the Christmas Season.  I am now terribly far behind in the book review department.  So, given the Season, I figured I’d start catching up by reviewing the book which is the least congruous with Modern Christmas Festivities.  I am immediately reminded of a nice little essay by Chesterton in which he discusses the Wrong Books for Christmas—a hit piece on some newspaper’s Christmas book suggestions which were all books with messages antithetical to the message of Christmas.  Thus, this post could have been entitled, “A book not to give as a Christmas gift.”

Flannery O’Connor’s A Good Man is Hard to Find is a collection of deliberately bizarre short stories.  The stories here are best described as Grotesques.  In a Dickens story, every character is a caricature; in an O’Connor story, every character is a grotesque.  So, if you want to read the literary form of Grotesque populated by characters who are Grotesques, O’Connor is about the best you can do. 

What interested me most about these stories is that even the characters which appear quite normal are, upon reflection, grotesques in their own way as well.  Indeed, it is a pretty interesting matter to ponder.  Many of the stories have a character who is  manifestly evil.  Yet, when you stop to think about the characters upon whom the evil person practices his Nefarious Deeds, it doesn’t take long to realize that the seemingly normal person is also, in fact, quite Wrong.  There simply are no good people here.  And, so the stories become reflections on how fundamentally bad people really are.

We read the book for my tutorial, and none of the students were very happy with that realization.  It is a Truth universally acknowledged that people are basically good.  And actually, come to think of it, “basically” doesn’t belong in that last sentence.  So, what does one do when one is certain that people are good and you have a story in which people aren’t good?  The people in these stories aren’t lacking in goodness for some understandable cause which gives us a built-in excuse for their deeds; they are simply not good people, neither wanting to be good, nor acting as we might like a good person to act.  Their Wrongness is weirdly exaggerated and this oddity is what makes them the Grotesques they are, but they are weird in a strangely believable, yet a bit too exaggerated to be really believable, way.  They are, in other words, a bit too much like us for our own comfort.

If you start reading the stories knowing O’Connor was Roman Catholic, it’s not hard to put this together.  Here is the fundamental revolt against a world which abandons moral standards and pretends that nothing is wrong.  There is a collection of her essays  and speeches in the Library of America volume I read in which she, more or less, makes this point.  It’s an interesting point.  (Also interesting is how these novels do not read like the pabulum which generally passes as Christian fiction.)  And yet…I can’t say that reading these stories was all that wonderful of an experience.  On their own, many of these stories are classics—the sort of thing that you can give to high school students and ask them to write an essay on Irony or something.  (I had to read the title story in 9^th grade.  Our assignment was to write a different ending for the story.  What that assignment was supposed to teach me is completely beyond me.  But, oddly, I still remember the ending I wrote.  I remember almost nothing else from that English class, but I remember the revised ending I wrote.  Whenever I think of it, I cringe.  Believe me that you should be very grateful that I am not relating the revised ending I composed.)

My biggest problem after reading this book is that I cannot figure out what to make of O’Connor.  She is highly praised by the sort of people whose Praise is normally worth considering.  Yet, after reading this collection and Wise Blood a few years back, I am having a hard time seeing the Greatness.  She is good.  But Great?  These stories, for example are all too repetitive.  A few of them are much better than the others; I particularly liked “Good Country People” and “The Life You Save May Be Your Own.”  But, on the whole, the individual stories seemed to me to be the “Read one, read ‘em all” type of thing.  In fact, looking back over the table of contents a couple of weeks after finishing the book, it is amazing how many of these stories have simply blurred in my memory.  Obviously I am missing something here.  I can’t decide whether I should just go ahead and read The Violent Bear It Away in an attempt to unravel the mystery, or put the book on my shelf until sometime in the future I discover an essay which explains the greatness of O’Connor.

To conclude, here is A Christmas Song which I like and which I suspect is the sort of song O’Connor would have enjoyed.