Print vs. Electronic Publication

PRINT VS. ELECTRONIC PUBLICATION

Translated nto Slovenian as “Knija v digitalni dobi.” Sodobnost no. 3 (March 2011), 201-206.

The digital age has already had profound effects on business and social institutions. It has driven the brick-and-mortar movie rental business into bankruptcy, and mail rental chains are moving into on-line service; the U.S. Postal Service drops deeper into deficit because of this kind of shift and even more because of e-mail. Some assert that the publishing industry will also be cataclysmically affected, even that printed material will disappear.

Certainly something is happening. Even a cursory review of material about print v. pixel distribution shows that there is no consensus about when, or if, this paradigm shift will be completed. Given the uncertainties, perhaps it is best to examine the situation, or rather situations, since different types of publication offer different challenges and possibilities.

I cannot pretend to great expertise. A family member who works for Microsoft called me a technopeasant. He recognizes that I have a high-speed internet connection and can use e-mail and search engines, but from his point of view I might be using a wooden hoe while he rides in an enclosed air-conditioned cab atop the latest model of tractor. But years ago I had the sense to respond to the question, “Will the internet hurt writing” with “Good heavens, no.” It’s saved me hours of prowling dusty library stacks, and now that I’m no longer 300 meters from a good research library, it has saved me from hundreds of embarrassing errors and omissions. In writing drafts of this article, I have probably used it dozens if not hundreds of times.

In any case, I have been involved with all kinds of printed matter for more than seventy years as a reader and for more than half a century as a writer. So I have some ideas about what from the current system seems useful, how the old and new can complement each other, and how electronic media might be extended. That’s on the principle that if even I can think of it, someone should be able to do it.

I’ll begin with books, with which many of us are most intimately engaged. It’s clear that e-readers are becoming cheaper and more versatile and that e-books continue to grow in popularity, so that Amazon.com now claims to sell more of them than it does of printed books. The change from hot type-setting to digital anticipated and made easier the new technology, and most e-books have a parasitic relationship with print that shows few signs of becoming commensual.

There are obvious arguments in favor of e-books. Readers can get them almost instantly by Wi-Fi or other means, at a pinch going to a bookseller able to download material on-site. E-readers can store 3,500 or more books on a small device, saving money, space, and the environment. Readers can get immediate definitions of words and, with word-search, have at hand an instant concordance, even of one’s whole library, and even take and preserve annotations.

Those are marvelous features for the casual reader and even for what Virginia Woolf called the Common Reader (all too uncommon) who has a healthy but not professional interest in intellectual and cultural matters. And there is the question of textbooks, though anyone with long experience of teaching might have reservation about student interest in intellectual and cultural matters. The price of textbooks has long been a scandal—not so much initial costs, though those are bad enough, but the publication of new editions without any justification other than stifling the used-book market. A friend of mine benefitted from but lamented this practice as her text-book for remedial—I’m instructed to call them ‘basic’—courses in first-year university English courses went through edition after edition. The old material wasn’t going to make the students any stupider, nor was the new likely to make them smarter. E-publication might lessen the temptation to churn out new editions, though that’s far from certain because it will lower the cost to the publisher and shorten the time needed to prepare new material.

Some books would benefit from e-publication, perhaps from publication in print as well as pixel. These are books which, for various reasons, necessarily have limited circulation. For example, texture press, one of my publishers, has issued two books of my poems, both in e-form, one with a publish-on-demand house, one only in pixel. The second has illustrations; that would be too expensive for a limited run. Either would have had very limited print run, had they been published at all. I remember a remark by a colleague, a poet with a much longer record, who replied to my question about whether a very small press was a good one. “Any press that will publish your poems,” he said, “is a good one.

Dual publication would be especially useful for translations. There is a very good local example in the center of Ljubljana. The Slovenian Writers’ Association publishes translations of prose and verse that offer the possibility of making individual writers and the national literature more widely known. I’ve reviewed some of them for the American journal World Literature Today. But anyone who reads the reviews and is moved to acquire the book will have to come to Slovenia to get a copy—as I have had to do in order to get a copy to review. I’m always happy to come here, but most readers can’t do that even once. It would cost little to put these translations on a web site, and loss of revenue would be negligible or non-existent. But Slovene writing might reach a larger audience.

Of course, there are arguments not exactly against e-books but against overly enthusiastic praise of their virtues. Here I’m responding primarily as a scholar. I probably don’t have quite 3,500 books, but I have a lot, none in electronic form and most unlikely to be, and I need most of them for my work. Some texts are available electronically, but how does one cite an e-book in a closed system? The purpose of citation is to enable the reader to check on whether the source actually says what I say it says. That’s doubtful with Kindle or Nook, though it’s not a problem with texts from the Gutenberg Project or other repositories, and with on-line sources which it’s much more convenient and useful to cite a link. (What, one might ask, about people who don’t have internet access? Two responses come to mind. What about people who don’t have access to a library or whose library doesn’t have that source? Another answer, as my Jesuit ethics professor [and James Joyce] would say, “We speak here of normal natures.”)

Allied to the citation problem is that of textual provenance and accuracy—who transcribed it under what guidelines? Most readers would not consider this a problem, but scholars are aware of corruptions and variants in various versions of a text, and that is a problem. Peter Shillingsburg scorns Gutenberg texts as “insufficiently proofread, inadequately marked for font and formatting, and they come from who knows where….”[1] Another advantage of printed books is that they make recursive reading easier—that is, one can check back and forth to see patterns, contradictions, and other interesting similarities and anomalies. The process seems clumsier on e-readers, but perhaps I lack the knowledge that would make it easy. That’s related to the question of inertia—I’m used to books, and experience with microfilm and microfiche has made me wary of any medium that requires any electricity more intrusive than a reading lamp.

There’s one personal objection. Amazon.com’s Kindles, at least some models, make a click when the reader selects a new page. My partner likes to read in bed while I’m trying to sleep—and that noise, recurring at irregular intervals, is like Chinese water torture. And, more seriously, is the possible analogy with films. “Straight to video” means, in the US, that the product is so bad that it cannot be shown in any theater. Could “straight to kindle” mean the same thing? Or are the two situations so different that the comparison won’t hold?

Periodicals are a different matter. I continue to read the morning newspaper, though faster than I used to because I’ve already seen news and some analysis on the internet, though any time I start believing in the Pelagian view of human nature, I look at the electronic responses, moronic to ill-informed, to items in the e-version. Here more is definitely less. In the on-line versions, recursiveness is not much of a problem except for material involving complex arguments or detailed analysis. And citation and verification are even simpler, through links, than with hard copy.

A problem with books but even more with periodicals is the question of storage space. Several years ago librarians were reviled for sending physical files of newspapers to the trash or recycling bin because they took up too much space and were used very little. The response was “What part of repository don’t you understand?” I don’t remember whether the contents were preserved in microform (bad) or digitized form (pretty good for the obvious reasons that they could be searched and copied even more easily than the originals).

Newspapers and magazines retain a shelf-life because they are sources of facts and attitudes useful to the historian. The same might, grudgingly, be said of scholarly and scientific journals. The circulation of these materials is very low, partly because in many libraries they don’t circulate but are used on-site. But they tend to be superseded, scientific articles because new and modified findings render them obsolete. Back issues of scholarly journals in the humanities tend to be ignored because critical and theoretical fashions change, because the body of secondary material is impossibly large, or because scholars are lazy—in one instance, ignoring a major source of material for a critical argument because the writer’s Oxford college did not have the book, though the Bodleian down the street did.

Another problem with periodicals in the past is that, when budgets were cut, whole volumes of a run disappeared. One could look at library shelves and see gaps indicating, like tree rings, recurrent cycles of drought. And periodicals, especially in the sciences, are ruinously expensive. Once I served on a university committee to study ways of cutting periodical costs by a certain percentage. After looking at the print-out of titles and prices, I found a solution: abolish the chemistry department.

My suggestion was not entertained in discussion or entered in the minutes, but like many seemingly absurd remarks, it contained a serious point. Scientific journals, many published for profit by commercial publishers rather than scientific associations, not only have four-figure subscription prices but charge page costs to authors. E-publication has the potential to lower costs of production or in some cases to by-pass the publishers altogether.

Then there is the problem of costs over and above subscriptions. As Jennifer K. Sweeney points out in “Cost/Benefit Comparison of Print and Electronic Journals in a University Library: A Progress Report” (http://www.libqual.org/documents/admin/sweeney.pdf), “print journals generate costs in stacks, processing, binding, and periodicals desk, where e-journals do not.” Even if e-journals are not cheaper than print versions, and many are, space has become a major consideration for all libraries.

However, one problem with e-journals, in sciences and elsewhere, is credibility, supported if not assured by the system of peer review. That is cheap, since at least in the humanities it is done as part of one’s professional service. Department heads and deans tend to look askance at publications in journals not, or not rigorously, peer reviewed. But e-journals can be as rigorous as print journals. Some publish in both versions.

For most journals, conversion to e-publication has a number of benefits. A minor example, Evelyn Waugh Newsletter (later and Studies was added) is useful because I have been involved with it since its inception in 1967 after Waugh was safely dead and the editors were immune from his scorn. It was founded by the late Prof. Paul A. Doyle and had a largely vestigial editorial board, of which I was probably the youngest member. Paul had the contents typed and duplicated—one side of a standard 8 ½ x 11 inch American typewriter sheet—whereupon someone stapled its pages together and he carried the issues, about 200, to the post office. Over the years I urged him to cut paper and postage costs by printing sheets on both sides, but he refused because he thought the result would be hard to read.

Later I urged him to consider using a cheaper printer. Again, no. He would occasionally complain of costs as libraries cancelled subscriptions or, as he maintained, I cost him a subscriber every time I reviewed a book. Since the subscription started at $1.-00 a year for three issues and by the end of thirty-two volumes was $8.00, I suspect the other libraries may have done what mine occasionally did—credited a cancellation at the average cost of a journal, very useful for my English department in the recurrent cut-backs. As Paul aged, he lamented the difficulty of carrying the issue to the post office. I suggested an e-version, very tentatively since I wasn’t sure he really trusted typewriters and would have preferred to make copies with a quill pen while sitting on a high Dickensian stool. Finally he sought a successor, but by 1998 most of his editorial board members were past or near retirement, and after thirty-two years he suspended publication, living another dozen years as a leader in self-imposed exile.

Then in 2002 a younger scholar, John Howard Wilson, resumed publication on a website. He sends e-notices of new issues to about 210 people and hard copy to three holdouts. There is no subscription fee. All peer review and other correspondence is conducted by e-mail; his university provides web space. The only costs seem to be for mailing out review copies of books, and even those could be reduced by having copies sent directly from presses to reviewers, as is the case with Southwestern American Literature and perhaps other journals.

While technically the circulation is not much higher than it was in Doyle’s day, the journal is potentially, because of Google and other search engines, far more widely available than it could have been during Paul’s day. Moreover, David Cliffe, an Englishman whose good will seems equal to his energy, has scanned and made available the first ten volumes of the Newsletter. And all of the print issues will apparently be available, at a price, from a commercial site.

This seems an ideal solution for a publication of this kind. While the contents are not uniformly ephemeral, some pieces are just above fan notes, and while many of the articles contain valuable insights, most have neither the length nor the depth of those in weightier journals. But there is no reason why academic journals, which faced many of Prof. Doyle’s problems, should not follow the same pattern. Many have. So have some publishers of scholarly monographs. Ten years ago Timothy McGettigan, in “Where Scholars Fear To Tread: The Inertia Of Academic Epublication,” called for wider application of new technology and dismissed fears about scholarly integrity, maintaining that, “far from bringing about its demise, epublication has enhanced and updated the peer review process (Harnad, 1997, 1998/2000; Willensky, 2000). That is, epublication has permitted the development of post-peer-review procedures that can generate data to evaluate not only readership and citations, but even the amount of time that readers devote to perusing oft-cited articles (Sosteric, 1996c, 1999c). Thus, there are no essential contradictions between ‘legitimate’ scholarship, and epublication’” (http://radicalpedagogy.icaap.org/content/issue3_2/editorial.html). The prospect of keeping material current rather than having it congeal is especially exciting.

Still, given the choice of print or pixel for my periodical publications, I choose the potentially wider circulation. One magazine I review for offers its contributors a choice—print and e-versions differ—and I always choose electronic publication because I can at least send the link to people who might be interested in the topic.

But even this version, like the ones McGettigan envisions, seems wedded to the format of the print book. It is true that post-peer-review would allow questioning and modification of material in articles, but these are versions of letters to the editor. McGettigan does not seem to envision the application of other techniques. Even the Daily Oklahoman, called the worst newspaper in America by the Columbia Journalism Review (Google it if you don’t believe me), accompanies articles not just with photos but with video clips and the more than occasional visual and aural commercial, its reporters and columnists turned into TV personalities. Of course, the newspaper is allied with a television station, but the technology is not that difficult to implement. The New Yorker appends urls at the end of some articles which provide more discussion, illustrations, or the opportunity to communicate further with the author. This is a trend that shows every sign of broadening.

E-books might also make use of other media. My friend’s textbook publisher began to require that she and her collaborator provide supplementary material on a website as well as a teacher’s manual for slow instructors. Some writers of fiction have experimented with hypertext, not merely, as in its root sense, containing references to other sites, but a narrative which becomes more fluid and sometimes unrecognizable. So far, this sub-genre has not spread very widely. But scholarly editions could be profoundly affected. Just as computers have taken over the making of concordances by hand, like that for James Joyce’s Ulysses compiled with the help of a government grant during the Great Depression, digital texts can be manipulated to create variorum editions in ways described by Peter Shillingsburg, who proposes a new model using hypertext for an edition “webbed or networked with cross-references connecting variant texts, explanatory notes, contextual materials, and parallel texts. An archive in a hypertext environment can provide radiating access routes to all its parts.”[2]

This format is theoretically superior to any possible print edition, including one I am preparing of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Brideshead Revisited. There are so many variants—some 140 pages—that no publisher can afford to record them. But at present, a compromise, unsatisfactory though it may be, is the only solution, given copyright laws and the reasonable demands of heirs to the estate.

Clearly, though, things are changing. What is next? We may come to regard printers as exotic and eccentric as we now do scribes. We may never have to encounter anyone to acquire any form of reading material and become as isolated as the characters in Isaac Azimov’s science-fiction novel The Naked Sun. People in print publishing may scurry like ants whose hill is disturbed—they already feel tremors. Or people may want the experience of the physical book just as some moviegoers prefer a large-screen theater to a four-inch cell phone screen.

One possibility I had not considered before I mentioned to my partner the subject of my essay. She asked whether it might be necessary to preserve at least one hard copy of a book. Of course—rather like storing the smallpox virus in case further study is needed.

Meanwhile, I want my books in print form so they can live up to my publishers’ promise that their paper “will last several hundred years under normal use. It covers ph value, tear resistance, alkaline reserve and lignin threshold,” so that when, after humans have extinguished our race, aliens can puzzle at the strange object that is externally solid and internally flexible.

---

[1] Peter Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: Theory and Practice, 3^rd ed. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), p. 161.

[2] Ibid., p. 165.

Albanian epics

Books: Who Killed the Sultan?

Translations of obscure Albanian oral epics add another dimension to the endless conversation over the Battle of Kosovo.

The Battle of Kosovo 1389: An Albanian Epic. Introduction by Anna Di Lellio; translated by Robert Elsie. London/New York, I. B. Tauris, 2009.

Rudyard Kipling may have been right when he wrote that “There are nine and sixty ways of constructing tribal lays and every single one of them is right,” but as Anna Di Lellio shows in the masterly introduction to these translations of eight Albanian variants of the story of Sultan Murat and a Balkan Christian hero, there can be at least as many ways of understanding, interpreting, and using or misusing them as there are ways of telling them.

Di Lellio, a sociologist, journalist, and university professor with extensive experience in Kosovo, thinks that some of those ways can be politically and psychologically damaging. She has several interrelated purposes in her commentary on these poems sung by Albanian preservers of a centuries-old oral tradition, about (sometimes admittedly) legendary events grounded in the historical battle outside Pristina in 1389 which cleared the way for the Ottoman empire’s further expansion into the Balkans. First, and possibly least important for the general reader, is to present these poems, in facing pages of Albanian and English, to a broader audience. More broadly, she tries “to rescue them from marginalization as folklore, or from turning them into a new prison for collective memory,” managed by “memory entrepreneurs” with (sometimes literal) axes to grind and use. Given the complexities of Balkan history, the second is probably, and unfortunately, impossible, since many Serb commentators “have reduced Serbian history and politics to a story” in which facts must give way to “uninterrupted remembrance.”

CENTURIES OF CLAIMS AND COUNTERCLAIMS

Most important for the observer of contemporary politics is Di Lellio’s analysis of the significance for Albanians of the ways in which the story of Murat’s death helps to create a national narrative by establishing their nation, and more broadly their people, as a part of Balkan resistance against Turkish invasion and, by extension, as part of European Christendom – and, not incidentally, resident in Kosovo from prehistoric times. Strategically this is important because, she says, Serbs have used Albanian allegiance to Islam to support an exclusive claim to Kosovo that “goes almost always undisputed in western diplomatic and intellectual circles.” The counter-claim by a young Kosovar I recently met that his country (greater Albania?) is 40 percent Catholic, 40 percent Muslim – figures that would be a surprise to the compilers of the ***CIA World Factbook*** – is clearly an attempt to refute the Serb position.

The complementary Serbian and Albanian poetic narratives pose many contradictions, most obviously the name and nationality of the hero who killed Murat even as the Ottoman forces were victorious on the field of battle. No historical authority seems to support either side. In Serbian epics, he is a Serb called Milos Obilic and early in the last century and during and after the battles following the dissolution of Yugoslavia he “evoked a medieval past of national greatness.” In Albanian, the hero is named Millosh Kopiliq, an Albanian who was for centuries a local folk hero who became part of the national narrative during the Kosovan struggle for independence, useful as indicating a Western identity before what is referred to as the long parenthesis of Islamic domination and conversion and a complement to the contemporary figure of the slain Kosovo Liberation Army commander Adem Jashari as a symbol of armed resistance.

As might be expected in the Balkans, since we are dealing with human beings, neither side can fully agree among its own cohorts. Albanians are ambivalent about whether Islam is bad in the West/good, East/bad Manichean dichotomy or whether “multi-confessionalism” and religious tolerance (which much resembles indifference) is the more profitable stance, especially if it is vaguely Christian. Or, as De Lellio puts it, whether “Muslim identity … is conceived as foreign, or as constitutive of the nation.” At one point, there was some discussion in Kosovo about mass conversion to Catholicism, though it came to nothing. Especially in the period after 9/11 and other terrorist attacks, that was likely, and perhaps calculated, to appeal to the European Union and the United States.

The Slav-Albanian battle over facts and interpretations extends far beyond the use and misuse of these epics from the oral tradition. Di Lellio points to the controversy over entries about Albania in the ***Enciklopedija Jugoslavije,*** published in Croatia in 1980, after which the Serbs demanded that the reference to Albanian descent from the ancient Illyrians be deleted in an obvious attempt to demonstrate the Albanians had no historical place in and therefore right to Kosovo. Almost 30 years later, a similar battle has erupted over the new Macedonian encyclopedia which “refers to Albanians, who make up about a quarter of Macedonia’s population, as Shqiptars” – a term that Albanians consider derogatory when used by outsiders – “and as primitive people who came from the mountains.”

The Prime Minister of Albania condemned “the racist, anti-Albanian doctrines of our neighbors [which] are based on the need to find an identity, because those who fake history just confirm that they are searching for their own identity. Albanians are not.” An Albanian rights group spokesman said the reference work “jeopardized interethnic harmony in Macedonia.” Cynical observers will be surprised that he has been able to find some. In any case, the offending entries will be deleted.

In the 1990s, a friend joined me in Vienna to travel to Hungary. She asked, “Why can’t these people over here just get along with each other?” “We’re only going to be here two weeks,” I said. “I can’t possibly explain it in that short a time.” More than a dozen years later, I still can’t. Anna Di Lellio deals with some of the causes, but she is really interested in furthering “the democratic project” of “deconstructing a national creed.” People of good will, not always easy to find in any region, can only wish her luck.

Robert Murray Davis regularly reviews literature and books on the Balkans for TOL.

Buy The Battle of Kosovo at the TOL Store.

Coming Home
page 1 of 4

by Adrienne Davich
29 June 2007

An American who grew up listening to stories about the Serbian province of Kosovo struggles with her discoveries.

Living in the dust bowl

This is a book that reveals what thing were like for people who, unlike Steinbeck's Okies, stayed and struggled in the Dust Bowl. Terrific research and writing.

The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl by Timothy Egan. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. 340 pp. $28 hardback.

This is the best book about the American West that I have read in years. Egan discusses in detail the causes and effects that led to and resulted from reckless denuding of the soil in eastern Colorado and western Nebraska and Kansas and the Oklahoma and Texas Panhandles—the Homestead Act, called in a government report, “almost an obligatory act of poverty”; real estate developers’ desire to settle empty land and promises that “rain follows the plow”; the wheat and cotton booms during World War I; the falling prices that led to increased production. The result was the loss of 480 tons of soil per acre in the dust bowl area, the loss of perhaps a third of the population, and the impoverishment of the rest. He includes starkly dramatic and depressing photographs of the landscape and buildings, but also, and more important, he tells the stories of a half-dozen or so families, drawing upon interviews with survivors who were children in the 1930s and upon written testimonies and oral histories by their parents.

The result is more like a nineteenth century novel—Vanity Fair, for example—than usual popular history. Like Thackeray’s book, this is a story without a hero—or with so many heroes that none dominates the narrative. One of them is Hugh Bennett, who founded the soil conservation program after he managed to get Congressional funding by filibustering a committee for several hours until the anticipated dust storm darkened the windows of the hearing room in Washington. Another is FDR, who didn’t always understand the possible effects of his programs but was at least willing to act and remained a hero to my father’s generation and even to Alf Landon, who admitted years after Roosevelt crushed him in the presidential election of 1936 that he “saved our society.”

Egan admires others because, like some of Faulkner’s characters, “they endured.” Bam White, the highlit figure with the eponymous implement in Pare Lorentz’s The Plow That Broke the Plains and was reviled by Dalhart, TX, boosters for his participation, was in fact a cowboy at heart, hated the destruction of the grasslands, and left his son a love for the land that carries into his nineties. Hazel Lucas Shaw taught in Boise City, OK, receiving only scrip that finally the bank would not accept, lost a baby and a grandmother to dust pneumonia on the same day, and reflected years later that she missed life in No Man’s Land. Uncle Dick Coon, famous in Dalhart for the hundred dollar bill he kept in his pocket as an ace in the hole and for his support of the local soup kitchen, gave the bill to a drifting cowboy and died broke in Houston. Doc Dawson, his friend and operator of the soup kitchen, hung on until he died.

If there are no villains, the cast has a good many dishonest or deluded characters. The founders of Boise City flat lied about the land and infrastructure and go down in history as the only people to go to jail for lying about Western real estate. Alfalfa Bill Murray comes across as a virulent, ignorant racist. John McCarty, editor of the Dalhart newspaper, later head of the Chamber of Commerce, and founder of the Last Man Club of those who swore to “grab a root and growl,” was a prairie Pangloss who extolled the magnificence of the dust storms that buried his town and filled stomachs of cattle and people with dirt and who was the first of the Last Men to leave.

Egan moves artfully from statistics to harshly realistic descriptions of town under siege to sagas of people struggling through drifts of dust to reach a wife in childbirth or to bury the dead or to seek shelter from killer storms. He concludes his story with FDR’s 1938 visit to Amarillo, center of the reclamation effort, jutting out his chin and offering hope in a rare rainstorm. “Then,” Egan writes,

it was back to the train, a quick ride to get out of the rain, and away, never to return to the High Plains, away to a world war, fought by some of the same young men straining to hold the flag on the wet streets of Amarillo, away to a day when the Dust Bowl would be forgotten, the flat land left to the winds, the towns shriveled and lost, the last survivors bent and broken, telling stories of a time when the sky showered the land down on them, not knowing if people believed them but not giving a damn if they did.

Then, in the Epilogue, he denies us the comfort of superior hindsight, pointing to the folly of subsidized agribusiness, the depletion of the Ogallala Aquifer—in the Panhandle, perhaps by 2010; the bulldozing of the shelter belt of trees; the persistent decline in population. But he does conclude, like Thackeray, with the lives of those who lived through the Dust Bowl, and them he celebrates.

St. Francis's Cleaning Bills

I can't get anyone to publish this, and one contest judge thought it bad taste to attack the Catholic Church in a short piece. Sancta simplicitas! (Latin for blessed idiot, too stupid to be morally culpable.)

St. Francis’s Cleaning Bills

Browsing in the gift shop of the Center for the Arts in Tubac, Arizona, I saw a small statue of St. Francis of Assisi with birds perched on his shoulders and wrists. This was not surprising, since Tubac lies between two missions served by the Franciscans after the Jesuits were thrown out in the eighteenth century for being pains in the ass. And of course, as a cradle Catholic born in 1934, I have been familiar with the iconography for nearly seven decades.

Suddenly I wondered, aloud, if his birds had ever acted like normal birds. My companion, raised as a Southern Baptist, now a member of some less exacting heretical sect, and in any case bemused by most signs of Popery, was shocked. “I can’t take you anywhere,” she said reproachfully. But the woman behind the counter snorted in surprise and what sounded like delight.

Looking back, what strikes me as odd is not the fact that I raised the question but that it took almost seventy years for it to occur to me. Anyone raised Catholic in my generation could probably come up with a number of reasons for that, all of which reveal a good deal about Catholic education and practices up at least until the mid-1960s and, in some enclaves, beyond. For example, a near-contemporary who went to a Catholic girls’ boarding school said, speaking for the nuns who taught her, “Of course the birds wouldn’t do that to St. Francis! God wouldn’t allow it!” Made sense to me: His eye is on the sparrow, and presumably on the other species as well.

Of course, neither my friend nor I nor any of our contemporaries would have put such a question to the nuns, or to each other, because it would never have occurred to us that anything connected with a saint or even with the clergy could have had anything to do with bodily functions. Sure, in saints lives people got eaten by lions and torn on wheels and fried on griddles and a whole lot of other things that would make Stephen King retch, but the pace of the narrative was as swift and painless as a Roadrunner cartoon; the distinction between bad guys and good made Gene Autry westerns seem by comparison as complex as The Brothers Karamazov; and the resolutions glossed over any possible internal conflicts or questionings. No time for zits, wet dreams, flatulence, or any of the minor grossness that makes adolescence seem purgatorial.

Even worse than the brief saints’ lives were the pious stories printed in Manna, I think it was called—anyway it was the magazine given to us in fourth or fifth grade—about supposedly real people. In the only one I can remember, a very pious boy drinks holy water in order to better himself spiritually and dies—though not, unfortunately, as a result—in an odor of sanctity. If this was supposed to move us to emulate him, it failed. No one we knew, even the good kids, would be that much of a dork, a term we didn’t have, though we understood the concept intuitively.

As this story illustrated, in the 1940s and 1950s almost everyone we encountered who was officially connected with the lower rungs of Church hierarchy seemed to assume that profane, everyday experience had nothing whatever to do with the sacred world. Actually, the sacred was pretty much overlaid by a wide and heavy stratum of piety, and piety precluded not only questions about St. Francis but about the stories in Manna and everything else having to do with religion and religious people. This attitude was fostered implicitly by the visual and narrative art we saw and more or less explicitly by priests and especially by nuns.

The pictures and statues available in Catholic churches and schools in my youth would have had to struggle to rise to the level of kitsch. The term is all the more apt because the style was heavily influenced by nineteenth-century German sculptors and painters, though the Italians, debasing the style of Tuscan Renaissance painters, also contributed, and in the mid-1950s I heard a rumor that distribution of pious art was controlled by the Mafia before the organization discovered that pornography was more profitable.

Pious religious art was pastel, genteel, unthreatening, unremarkable. Even depictions of Christ’s passion and death in the Stations of the Cross was sanitized, the graphic reality of the Gospels undercut by the style.

Fortunately, ecclesiastical pseudo-art was easy to ignore because it was, literally and otherwise, put on pedestals above the common gaze. The statue I saw in Tubac was by comparison to the art I saw in my youth—and in a recent newspaper story about a Catholic school--worthy of Malliol or Moore.

Music was another matter. Some people apparently can shut out tunes they find banal or offensive; others, like me, are doomed to listen to anything remotely rhythmic and melodic. Anyway, school children in my parish, regardless of desire or talent, were expected to sing in the choir. It was possible to sing, with aesthetic as well as religious fervor, Benediction hymns like “Tantum Ergo,” “O Salutaris Hostia,” and “Holy God We Praise Thy Name.” But most hymns in English, like “Daily, Daily Sing to Mary,” strained credulity as well as the larynx.

And it wasn’t only statues and other forms of art that were pedestalized, raised above the common view of experience. Members of the clergy were regarded as special, above criticism, reproach, or, as recent events in the Church have shown, criminal investigation. When I was in high school, a youngish assistant priest came into the men’s room and complained that lay people didn’t think that priests went to the bathroom. But his colleagues and predecessors had done a great deal to foster that illusion.

Nuns were a bit lower on the scale of ethereality, partly because some of them were likely to go upside our heads when annoyed, but even had we high school boys known anything at all about menstruation, it would never have never occurred to us that nuns menstruated because we never thought of them as women. (On the other hand, PMS would have explained the behavior of some nuns we encountered.)

Nor, as the reaction to the priest in the men’s room shows, did many of us think of them as real people. They seemed removed from ordinary concerns, sorrows as well as joys, untouchable and out of touch. I can think of perhaps a dozen members of the clergy whom I found really attractive as human beings, and in all cases I did so because they were intelligent and well-educated and sensible and aware of human as well as pious values.

Jacques Maritain held that piety is no substitute for technique, and it took me a long time to discover art that confronted the complexities of human experience. When I did, the pious art and legends formed a useful backdrop. At the very least, they prepared me to enjoy the fake hagiographies in Norman Douglas’s novel South Wind. One tells the story of an impossibly precocious ascetic virgin; the other of Saint Dodekanus (etymologically speaking, a name derived from twelve inglorious parts of the human anatomy), clearly based on an earth-deity of an island with twelve noxious mineral springs, in which the saint is led into the woods by a figure who may be a man (later a woman) “or only an angel.”

And when I finally read Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory—almost condemned by the Vatican before common sense prevailed--I empathized with the young boy restive at his mother’s reading of a pious legend who responds to the real pain and martyrdom of the whiskey priest. Years before, I had read Morris L. West’s The Devil’s Advocate—probably a selection from my mother’s membership in the Book-of-the-Month Club—in which the central, absent figure being considered for beatification had problems and passions and conflicts that I was beginning to be able to recognize. Years later, Ignazio Silone’s Bread and Wine showed me how someone technically a non-believer, in fact a Communist, could respond to others’ need for the world of the spirit.

Still later, I was able to experience the remoteness and mystery of Byzantine art, the sense of real and compelling temptation portrayed in Cranach’s diptych of Eve seductively offering the apple to Adam, the vision of the unknown artist whose Crucifixion hangs in the museum of ecclesiastical art in Esztergom, Hungary, or the practical sense of Flemish and Dutch painters who made the job of prophet seem like a really tough hustle, unlike the Tuscans who painted aged holy men with foreheads as smooth as those of praying virgins.

Obviously, not everyone feels this way, and in fact can’t imagine their saints looking any other way than pastel and dehumanized. This exasperates real artists like Sister Giotto, who found money to restore and redecorate the church in San Ysidro, New Mexico, and who painted santo-like murals above the altar only to discover that many parishioners preferred the nineteenth-century blond Madonna and her plaster companions to the style of their Hispanic heritage.

Other styles and rituals came into the Church after the Second Vatican Council—not always or, in my experience, often for the better. Sometimes, like the concept of “disposable art” advanced in the early 1970s by a religious education director who liked to have kids blow up balloons to demonstrate the action of the Holy Spirit, it was often for the worse. So, it seemed to me, were borrowings from popular music like “Kumbaya” or from Protestant hymnals, especially songs proclaiming to God that He is great. Come on! He’s omniscient! He knows that. Why insult his intelligence? And of course, when we started singing Martin Luther’s “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God,” I figured that it was all over. But perhaps the religious education director was right to reject my suggestion that, to welcome the newly imported bishop, we sing “I’ve Never Been to Heaven, But I’ve Been to Oklahoma,” though that might have reminded the bishop that he was coming into a real context among real people. Still, in the ceremony celebrating the religious education director’s departure for a new job, I did manage to slip in a passage from Bread and Wine extolling the virtues of the communist disguised as a priest. He and the congregation loved it—perhaps because, as the Virginian says in Owen Wister’s novel, it was about something.

It was also heartening to see that children even younger than mine are able to let practical good sense override piety. In the 1970s, I attended a children’s Mass where a hippy-dippy priest was giving a dialogue homily on the theme of freedom. Imagine a bird in a cage, he said to the children in the front pew. What do you have to do for the bird? “Feed him,” one child said. What else? “Give him water.” “Good,” said the priest. “And then what does the bird do?” The answer, based on experience rather than sentiment, convulsed the whole congregation. The last I heard of the priest, he was selling antiques in Colorado.

Unfortunately, some members of the clergy seem immune to even stronger doses of reality. For example, the former bishop of the Phoenix diocese plea bargained his way out of charges of obstruction of justice for concealing evidence that priests under his care had molested young men and in some cases young women. In this he was clearly following the practice of many bishops, if not stated Church policy, as many other cases have shown, based on a clerical culture that put loyalty to the institution above concern for the laity supposedly in their charge. I’m reminded less of the injunction to “Feed my sheep” than of the joke about Montana, where the men are men and the sheep are terrified Even after the Phoenix bishop signed the plea bargain, he denied doing anything wrong until the district attorney threatened to abrogate the deal. The bargain itself should have meant instant disgrace and dismissal, but the Vatican refused to accept his resignation.

It did allow him to retire when, two weeks later, the car he was driving struck and killed a pedestrian. The bishop did not stop. Told by a trusted aide that the police wanted to talk to him, he not only did not call them but refused to answer the door when they came to interview him and asked his secretary how he could get his windshield repaired. In fact, testimony in his trial indicates that he acted as he had done in the molestation cases: hoped it would just go away. It turns out that some eighteen months earlier he damaged another car in a parking lot, got out to look at the damage, and drove away without notifying the owner of the other car. Although he never admitted responsibility, the incident didn’t quite go away, for his insurance company paid for the damage. In his trial on the charge of leaving the scene of the fatal accident, his defense attorneys contended, unsuccessfully, that he thought that he might have hit a dog or been hit by a rock. One can’t know what was in his mind, but from the outside his actions portray a man who never had to confront a serious moral issue—at least one that involved him directly. Certainly not much evidence of heroic virtue in him or in his fellow bishops who allowed priests to run over at least 11,000 lives—and those only of the victims who were willing to bring lawsuits. Nor, come to that, much evidence of manhood.

Running away from or refusing to acknowledge the consequences of one’s actions doesn’t sound much like St. Francis, even in the account wavering between piety and dryness from an early edition of the Catholic Encyclopedia that I found on-line. He was often dirty and ragged, hungry and ill, not always from choice. Perhaps, however much he loved the birds and even sentimentalized them, he knew something about the ways they lived and acted. Another question bubbles up from early training: if they did leave souvenirs on his habit, would their feces be accorded the status of relics of the second order (that is, anything not bearing the saint’s DNA)? And would he have brushed them off in annoyance, or would he, in the phrase notorious in my youth, have offered it up and worn the stains in honorable acceptance of the nature of birds? I like to think so. And I’m pretty sure that he would have stopped to see if he had hit a dog.