Speaker 1: Welcome to a special Christmas edition of the Ricochet Podcast.
I'm Peter Robinson, born and raised in South Dakota. Joseph Bottom,
or as his friends know him, Jody, spent a decade
and a half back East, first as an editor of
the Weekly Standard and then as editor of First Things,
and then Jody returned to the Black Hills of South Dakota.
He is a writer and poet, and he has a
daily poem with commentary on a substack called Poems Ancient
and Modern. But we today are going to be discussing
Jody's spectacularly, heartbreakingly beautiful new book, Frankinson's Gold and Myrr,
a Christmas Chrestomothy three beautiful and engrossing short stories and
twelve really luminous essays. And if you think I'm going
over the top because Jody is an old friend, that's
not true. I've said many nasty things about him behind
his back, But what I'm saying now I believe every
word of this the book. In fact, the book is
so good that all his friends hate him for having
been able to produce such prose. Jody, welcome, Oh thank
you Peter for having me. Okay, listen, why on earth
would you use a high falutin word such as christomathy.
Let's just get this cleared up right away. Christomothy in
the title.
Speaker 2: Well, it's ancient Greek. It's an ancient Greek word for
a collection. And I only know it, Peter, the same
way you should know it because h O Menkin, whom
every writer secretly wants to be used it as the
name in the name of one of his selected collections
of selected essays named Mencan Christomathy. And I think he
ran across it in a dictionary somewhere, you know, he
was a kind of word maven or word order or something,
and ran across it somewhere and thought, well, what the
hell I have to use that?
Speaker 1: Uh? And there we are.
Speaker 2: And all of my writer friends know this word solely
because of.
Speaker 1: Bancon solely because of Bancoann. All right, So you're working
within a tradition. Speaking of working within traditions, the title
of the book is Franken, Sense, Gold, and Murr, which
I think reverses as I think of the three wise
men from school, I think we ordinarily say gold, Franken, sense,
and murr. Is there some reason for the order in
which you place those words or am I thinking this
one perversity?
Speaker 2: Of course, you know, the desperate attempt to be different,
matched with just the rhythmic sense. If you say gold,
frankensense and murr, you have two stresses in a row,
in gold and then frank. And if you say frankinsense,
gold and murr, you get a nice kind of trochaic
falling rhythm that sort of holds up. You know. But
I think that is an example of overthinking.
Speaker 1: Oh well, all right, but it shows our listeners. If
you can put that kind of thought into three words,
imagine what the man does with a paragraph, let alone
a story. Let's start with the stories three stories. Part
one of the book is called The Gifts of the
Majeaw Three Christmas Tales, and the tales are Wise Guy, Nativity,
and a town in the far upper Midwest which has
a French name. And I don't know how I imagine,
since it's in the Midwest, it has an Anglicized pronunciation
porte decas. How has it pronounced it? Probably?
Speaker 2: Of course there is no such town.
Speaker 1: Oh it is. Oh you see how good you are?
You made me? I was thinking to myself, one of
these days I have to drive through this place. That's
how much it lives in my head.
Speaker 2: But the details are all drawn from my experience of
Minnesota and and that world up in northern Minnesota, where
Bamidge is a southern town to these people who live
on the northern shore. There that point that goes out
into the lake. But I imagine, you know, I grew
up in a town called Pierre. Pierre, South Dakota, like.
Speaker 1: The capital of South Dakota, isn't it.
Speaker 2: Well yeah, but you know, we say it like a
fishing pier or a jury of your peers, whereas Outlanders
are easily identified because they say Pierre. And so all
of those des Moine, all of those old French names
in the Midwest and the West, it twisted. My favorite,
of course, is the Texas Arkansas River that's called that
The French explorers called the Purgatoire, the Purgatory River reduced
somehow in that twang to the get wire. I wasn't
aware of that, but that's you know, that's how these
French names get warped. I think they'd probably say Porto Grass.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, well, since you invented it, you get
to title it, you get to choose the pronunciation. The
first and last of these stories, Wise Guy and Port
de Grass are crime stories, Jody crime stories for Christmas.
By the way, they really are crime stories. Now the
criminals are lovable criminals, and one really does does fall
in love with them, and the first the tavern where
they it opens and the big scene towards the end
takes place in a tavern, and you really feel you
could walk into the tavern and sit down and have
a drink with these people, and that you'd like to.
But they're criminals at the end, as they were at
the beginning. This is these are not stories of penitence
or turning around or redemp exactly. So how do they
fit in with Christmas?
Speaker 2: Well, maybe there's some redemption in them, but also kind
of hint that they weren't as bad as they thought
they were. They do come together, the young, hapless would
be criminal, and the last story is turned into a
national hero, you know, just by happenstance. I think though
the model here. I once said to our mutual friend
Andy Ferguson right that every writer wants to be Damon
Runyan and write the kind of stories that Damon Runyan
could write. Andy said, well, maybe but you know what else,
every writer, every male writer, secretly wishes that he had
published in Sports Illustrated. And you know he does politics
or literature. But what you really, you know, what would
really make you as a writer, was what Sports Illustrated
was in those old days. I think Damon Runyon too,
you know it. And part of it of the very
first story, which came out some years ago. Amazon had
started this self publish or this series that they were
publishing called Kindle Singles.
Speaker 1: Yes, and I knew.
Speaker 2: An editor there, and he called me up and said,
we don't have anything for Christmas? Do you have anything?
And I wrote that first story kind of in a
Damon Runyon way, you know, lovable gangsters, this's territory right exactly,
and you know, all meeting at Lindy's for for coffee
or and and I wrote it for him. And then
I thought, well, that's kind of a wise man tale,
hence the jokey title wise Guy. And so the next
year I wrote a second one, and then life intervened
and I never wrote the third one. Also, the editor changed,
and you know, you always lose giggs as a writer
when the new editor comes in and wants his own people,
and I was going through a rough time in my
personal life at that point and just never wrote the
third story. And then this year, less Full, lest Spring. Rather,
my poetry publisher said, you must have a lot of
Christmas pieces, because I've written two or three of them
for magazines like the Weekly Standard as the Wall Street Journal,
and the rest two or three of them a year
for thirty years, and they actually add up, you know.
So I said, yeah, you know, I could put together
an anthology or selected ones. And then I thought, this
is an excuse to write that third story and close
this trilogy of wise men's stories. So this summer I
wrote the por de Grass, the third and completing story
of these, kind of picking up links from the other stories.
So the first story, an independent thief is compelled by
the local crime lord to recover twelve bags of lost heroine.
Merry Christmas, everybody, and the second house, or the first
house he actually burglarizes, belongs to a rich man. These
packages of heroine were sent by mistake to an old
Christmas mailing list out of a shipping center, so they're
scattered across town, and one is to a rich man's
house named Michael Stuyvesant, the very first burglaries of Michael
Stevenson's house that ends with some resolution of his problem
and a real Christmas spirit. The second story follows that
rich man who is not at home when he was
burglarized as he's trying to drive to Denver. He's an
ill man with his cancer's return and he's trying to
get to Denver to visit with his children while he
still feels well enough to do that, and has a
series of misadventures across the Midwest. And then the third
story is following the hunting down of the twelfth bag
of heroin, which was the one that wasn't sent anywhere
near by the thieves, but was sent to a little
Minnesota town called Poor de Grass, and a would be
thief who's not actually very good is sent off to
try and retrieve it because the sophisticated, wise guys in
the big city think, oh, it's just a little town
in Minnesota, it won't be any problem. And those of
us who been to the Midwest know that, you know,
there are a handful of sophisticated people who live out there.
And he runs into trouble, but again it all works out.
Speaker 1: Jody We've talked about this long enough. Give you give
our listeners just the two opening paragraphs of the very
first story. It all starts. But then where does anything start?
Back at the first moments of creation maybe, or down
in some long ago legend, its meetings and purposes faded
now into the darkened past. Every story's opening is a
little arbitrary, one way or another. Every beginning is a
small lie. Still, since this particular story concerns a thief
named Bart Sagan, we should probably begin where he did
the afternoon of December eighteen, a week before Christmas, when
he fought his way through the icy winds that slice
down High Street to meet a friend at the Evergreen
Tavern and ask her for some help hatch a quick
plan with her. In other words, plot a little crime
that is so beautiful. I hate you for being able
to write so wonderfully, But so how do you work characters? First?
Setting first, a line or two that comes to you.
How do you do this?
Speaker 2: You can't write, Peter, I mean I envy people who
can just sit down and write.
Speaker 1: Oh, I'm so happy to hear you say that.
Speaker 2: You know you mean it's hard for you too, I said,
writing is just like working in a coal mine, except
you have to do it by yourself, and you know
it's a hard thing. But you know, I remember I
was close with be Crystal, Gertrud Timilfhard and she wants
we're having lunch, and she launches into this complaint about
her husband, Irving Crystal, on the grounds that he has
an idea and he sits down and writes it, and
you know, three hours later the piece is done. That's
just not how writing works for anybody, but Irving, who
just could sit down and do it. Now, Irving was
no high Silas, but he was plenty. He had a
plenty good style, that plain style, and he could. He
knew how to wait his leads with the new piece
of information. He knew how to snap an article close.
The famous essay he wrote on Joe McCarthy, he said
the one thing it ends, this commentary piece from years
ago in the fifties. He ends by saying, there's much
to dislike about McCarthy, but one thing Americans know is
that he is against communism. About his opponents, they know
no such thing. Beautiful And you know, so he could
do that, yes, But you know, here is Gertrude Him,
author of fourteen books and innumerable essays complaining about you
know how people who find it easy to write?
Speaker 1: May I offer you a return story?
Speaker 2: Sure?
Speaker 1: My return story is dinner one evening out on Long
Island with Tom Wolfe. Tom wolf and we sat down
and I did I don't know what came over me,
because of course you should never do this with any writer.
But I said, Tom, how did the writing go today?
And his face fell, and his wife next to him.
I was seated. I was seated across from Tom, but
I was seated next to Sheila, and she stiffened just slightly.
And I mean, what a stupid thing to say to her.
But I must admit that my heart leapt and I said, Tom,
you too, and he said, it's just as hard as
it ever was. The Only thing that has changed is
that now I can look up from my desk across
to a bookshelf that's filled with books with my name
on the spine and say to myself, wolf you did
it before, you must be able to do it again.
Speaker 2: Yeah. I you know, I've always thought, but how do you?
Speaker 1: How do you work? Now that we've talked about around
other writers?
Speaker 2: Oscar Wilde was staying in a country house and someone
asked him, you know, how did the writing go at dinner?
How did the writing go, mister Wilde? And he said,
this morning, I put a comma in. This afternoon I
took it out. That's the ex question. But you know,
I know, I just sort of fiddle around. I can't
write unless I have a lead. And this came from
really my very early writing. One of the first pieces,
non academic pieces I ever wrote was a review of
a biography of Ersy Kazinski for I can't even remember
who now, the New Statesman may be, or one of
one of the journals of that day, right, uh and uh,
And I wrote, you know, I just wrote it, and
the opening was something like, Ersy Kazinsky is a Polish
American author who you know, achieved some fame with the
Painted Bird. And I set it aside and I went
to sleep, and I got up in the next morning
and I wrote on the top of it, there's just
no getting around the fact that Ersy Kaczynski was a toad.
Speaker 1: Oh, there you have it, of course.
Speaker 2: And I thought, oh, if I can get the lead,
then the rest flows from that. Then you've caught the audience, right, yes, yes,
and you have their goodwill or their anger, you have
their attention, you have their attention for the next couple periods.
Speaker 1: And maybe giving it to you grudgingly, but you have.
Speaker 2: It right exactly. And that's when I sort of formed
this habit of being unable to move on until I
have the lead.
Speaker 1: And Andy's that way too, I think, isn't he is he?
I think he is? I think he is. I wish
it well, the three, Well, we'll do another podcast with
the three of us and we'll all moan about writing together.
How's that? Jody? You and Christmas? You and Christmas? But okay,
so you get the lead. I do. I do want
to know, I really I can't. There's nothing that I
want from you except your continued friendship. So I'm not
for our listeners. There's no reason I'm sucking up to you.
If you were Elon Musk, I might flatter you here.
I'm just telling the truth. The characters, even the minor characters,
are just so completely present. They just present themselves to
you and you write them. How does it work? The characters?
How do they work?
Speaker 2: Yeah? I think you know. I mean, fiction is relatively
new I've probably only written a dozen short stories in
my career. But Mary Eberst our friend Mary Eberstat once
accused me of writing nothing but fiction, not in a
bad way that I was somehow, you know, telling lies,
but in the sense that my descriptions of people and
scenes were always you know, using the devices of narrative fiction. Yes,
and and I don't think she's wrong. But you know,
you start to form a character, and then sort of
details from people you know start creeping into them, and
then then the fully formed character emerges from these borrowed
bits of ten twelve different people. I mean, I'm not
like Saul Bella, who you know, would really try and
understand a character by a person he knew by casting
as a fictional character. You know this, and that went
till the end. This is Ravelstein with Alan Bloom, you know,
is the central the renamed Alan Bloom or Thomas Mahn,
who had every literary gift except plot, I mean literally
every literary gift at the level of a Nobel Prize winner.
He could do anything with pros except think up a story,
which ruined his children's lives because he basically plundered them
for stories. I see, because you couldn't think of a story.
So you know, his children would be going through some
breakup and he would like, oh, a.
Speaker 1: Story for me. How interesting?
Speaker 2: Yes, exactly not an ideal parent. But I think fiction
is fiction is strange and interesting. And the poets that
said never lie because they do not speak the truth.
There's some realm in which, you know, art lives that
aims to be more true than reality by being actually
less true.
Speaker 1: Jody Bottom and Christmas from your introduction, I write about
Christmas so much because that's where I perceive the thin
place to be, the moment in which I sense most
clearly the spiritual crossing over into the physical, the supernatural
sneaking into the natural, the arrival of the divine in
the mundane is the central and most outrageous claim of Christianity.
The thin place, Jody, we live, Peter.
Speaker 2: In in such a naked world. I mean, I take
Matthew Arnold to be speaking the truth here that the
world as it is to human perception is you know,
the naked shingles where ignorant armies clash by night and
there is no help for pain, no grace, no meaning,
It's just existence. And we clothe that in Dover Beach.
Arnold uses this language of girdling of clothing, that the
sea of faith once covered this naked shingles of the shore,
you know, of the world of reality. And the trouble
is that perhaps a saint could, but for most of us,
we need a shared experience. We need shared shared ideas,
shared symbols, shared feelings to clothe reality, to make it decent.
We need morality. For that, we need something more than
just physical reality. And we stripped that away in modernity
as much as we can. But one place, it has
always seemed to me where one time where the division
between the newman and the physical or the social, you know,
which is so thin now and tabscent and weak, that
the there's one place where it still kind of leaks
in where we still have a little bit of a
cultural and emotional feeling that the world is clothed, decently arrayed.
And that's Christmas and my struggles with the modern my
you know which I The very first piece I published
was called Christians and Postmoderns, and I actually praised the
postmoderns for at least seeing that modernity was a problem,
right that you know, that something had gone out of
the world with that. Took three hundred years to work
out what that was. But we arrive at a place
that is so stripped of meaning, and I want the
world to be almost sacramental. I want the grass to
be singing songs of the fact that it's created. I
want this, and I don't often have it, and I
don't think any of us often have it. Except for
the handful of anvil is even too large a number
for the saints we may have met in our lives.
I think the vast majority of us don't have that
except Christmas, you know, except Christmas. Christmas is deep, is
a chance where the numinous and the divine leak through
and we see the world in a clothing light. It
makes things look better. Now, I could have reversed the
metaphor and said it reveals things as they really are.
But you know, my own sense is that it's the
same stuff we see every day. It's the same feelings
we have every day. They are just bathed in a
golden light. They are they feel meaningful at Christmas. Acts
of charity feel more meaningful at Christmas. Our love of
our families feels more meaningful in Christmas, not more real,
more meaningful more connected to a world of symbols and
greenery and you know, care for the poor and all
the things that all these metaphors that accrete around Christmas.
Speaker 1: So this is one of the great themes that comes
through Frankinson's Gold and myrrhr another. We turn now to
part two of the book, which is called Twelve Christmas Thoughts,
which is twelve nonfiction essays, and another of these is
a really specific particular sense of place from the first
essay Dakota Christmas quote. If you've never seen the South
Dakota country in winter, you have no idea how desolate
land can be. I once asked my grandmother why her
family had decided to stop their wagon trek in what
became the prairie town where she was born, and she answered,
in surprise, I didn't know, because that's where the tree was.
The tree, all right, you had. It's something like a
dozen or fifteen years on the East Coast, divided between
the most cosmopolitan of lives in Washington as an editor
with the now deceased to last but at the time
with it and hopeful and buoyant publication, the Weekly Standard,
and then up to New York, where you edited. I
think I can see this. Well. Somebody will write a
note contradicting me if he wants to. But the most
important journal of religion and politics, religion and public thought
first things, and then you back and have stayed there
ever since. And I am enough of a coast dweller.
I grew up in the Shock Area, the Blast area
of New York, and I now live in California. That honest,
I mean, I would ask you this if I were
an interviewer. I live next door, but since I live
on the coast of California, this is to me a
saggering thing. Why did you go back? And why do
you what is it that you love it? Desolate as
it is you love it?
Speaker 2: Well? You know. Bollsac has a line in great short
story about a man who's trapped at a water hole
in the desert an oasis with a lion, a female lion,
and this becomes a metaphor for male female relations and
all kinds of things, because Ballzac always has several things
that he's juggling. But it ends with someone misunderstanding and saying, well,
I don't get it. What's the point of the story,
And the narrator says, uh, or the you know, the
narrating first person narrator says, uh. You see there in
the desert, God is there, Man is not.
Speaker 1: Uh.
Speaker 2: And you know there is a kind of burnt over
purity to the snow on the prairie. It's like white ash.
You know, this world seems pure sometimes, but also you
know it's I'm native to the soil, and and I
don't know, Peter, you know, this has kind of been
in my mind. My daughter is in New York right now.
Speaker 1: Well do I know it? Faith Bottom, who writes for
the Wall Street Journal and has her father's ear. How
you managed to pass it along, I do not know.
But she has your ear.
Speaker 2: She writes lots of beatings, lots of beatings, all right,
but the uh. But she boasted, you know, last year's time.
She said, well, you know, we lived in New York,
we lived in Washington. We had a summer house out
in the Black Hills, and then moved out there full time.
And now I'm back in New York. And so I've
lived in rural settings and small towns, and I've lived
in the middle of big cities. At least, she said,
I can say that I've never had to live in
the suburbs. And she said it with such distate, and
I thought, how did I give her that that was
not the lesson that you were supposed to take away
from all of this, Honey. You know, we had friends. PJ.
O'Rourke loved the serbs, wrote about them, you know, marvelously comically,
of course, But I think you know, it's not And
I think Tom Wolfe had an appreciation of the suburb too,
and you know, and the aspirations of middle class life.
I did really like hearing my daughter say this, you know,
but there is a truth there that we've never lived
in suburban America, right. It was always small town or big,
big city.
Speaker 1: And it gives you a.
Speaker 2: Picture of America that I don't know it's truth anymore.
I mean, I think, you know, I don't know how
true this is of the American idea that there's the
country and the city. I think the vast majority of
people actually have an entirely different experience of life in
this country. But it will say it does create in
one peter an appreciation of eccentricity. G. K. Chesterton once said,
the Gospel urges us to love our neighbor, and the
Gospel urges us to love our enemy, probably under the
assumption that they were often the same, right, And there's this,
you know, because you've got to live with these people,
and I like that, but also you know they're our friends.
And my daughter and family are urging me now that
you know my situation has changed and my wife is gone, yeah,
she slipped away last year, that I should return this
house to the summerhouse and go back to Washington. You
know where we have friends, I would say California, except Peter,
you were the exception to an experience that many of
us in the old conservative world had, which is, whatever
I have to sell, whatever we had to sell, it
only sold the east of the Mississippi. There you were.
You know. Out of those hundreds of talks and panels
and everything that I've done over the years, maybe three
four five have been in the state of California. But
you flourish out there.
Speaker 1: Well, we've done that, we've yes, thank you. But back
to you. Another of your essays, this is called actually
it's the closing essay of the book. It's called Christmas
and the Boy Reader. There were always books for Christmas,
mounds of them, flurries of paperbacks, drifts of presentation copies
inscribed in the unreadably copper plate hand of maiden, great ants,
avalanches of books on chess, and manuals of do it
yourself chemistry experiments. Christmas was books and books. Christmas in
those days, now mostly washed down to the cold sea.
Was it such a bad way to grow up? The answer,
of course is that it was a wonderful way to
grow up. And how much are you and I permitted
to And if it is an indulgence, indulge in despair
when we see faith Bottom was of course far too
fine and intellectual to do this. But when we see
our children or their friends pouring their lives into iPhones
or on video games. When when, or let me just
give you a specific example. This will take only a moment.
I think it's worth it because it makes a point.
When I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth, I stayed on
one summer to work reunions. You could make good money,
and my job was to sit in a dorm from
something like six in the evening until two in the morning.
And because in those days dorms had keys that opened
the I would hand. I would take the key from
the alumni as they would go to their dorm room
where they were staying for their thirtieth reunion, and I
would hand them the key when they went back. That
was all I had to do, sit there and hand
out keys and take them back. And I read a
book a night. And then I went back for my
thirtieth reunion and there was still the same job. But
the kid was watching movies on a laptop instead of
reading books. And I thought to myself, Oh, something has
been lost. Am I a dinosaur? Am I a fool?
Speaker 2: Well?
Speaker 1: We can, we can.
Speaker 2: We have to be careful, or I have to be
careful because I am prone to what I sometimes called
the old man's disease. Well that the sky was bluer,
the grass cleaner, and the girls prettier, and we had
to walk to school uphill both ways. But the but
there's a loss here, the loss of the physicality of books,
the necessary engagement, the slow pacing of reading. There's an
extraordinary video I mentioned I would recommend to you Peter
of Marshall, mccluan and frank Kermode. Frank Kermode was an
aim to conjure with in literary circles once upon a
time and they're on some Canadian talk sixties talk show,
you know where they would have, you know, endless space,
and nobody's watching. Remember Michael Kinsley's famous headline, most guaranteed
to make you not want to read the article, and
the headline was a New York Times headline of worthwhile
Canadian initiative. But there they are, and you know, Kramote
is trying to understand why Marshall mccluhan is taking off
as a figure as a cultural figure which soon petered out,
and I think he's undervalued now after having been overvalued,
but he's starting to take off, and Kimote's trying to
understand that. And mccluhan says, brilliantly, I think, or at
least really thought provokingly, that the virtues of the American Founding,
the virtues of the the Bill of Rights, the sense
that all those young lawyers had at that moment as
the revolution is going on, and then we build to
the Constitution, that the virtues they had in mind were
the virtues of readers. Yes, and the Bill of Rights
is sort of fundamentally directed at readers, a protecting readers
from the government. And he said, if you think what
you have When you have readers, you have a very
slow pace for the transfer of information, as opposed to
nomadic tribes which are trying to read whether there's a
leopard in that tree or not. They have to condense
information with myth, they have to condense it with memes.
They have to process very very quickly, and they develop
storytelling techniques and language techniques to do that processing very quickly.
Reading is much slower conveying of information. It requires time,
which only really modernity brings to the masses, at least
to the middle class. And I thought, what a really
thought provoking thing to say. And then I looked at
the challenges that are emerging to the Bill of Rights,
the fact that very near a majority of undergraduates today
want to abolish free speech, and I think unthinkable, not.
Speaker 1: Just a minority position when we were in school, unthinkable, unthinkable.
Speaker 2: Well, what's changed they've ceased to be readers. It doesn't
they don't see the need for it. And it seemed
to me a small confirmation of mccluan's thought. And so
I worry very deeply about the disappearance of reading, not
just on the attention spans formed in adolescence from watching
Instagram and TikTok all the time, which I think is
very destructive of unformed mental pathways that really don't emerge
maturity till eighteen or nineteen. But even more, I think
it's dangerous to our republic.
Speaker 1: By the way, do you remember Goodness? I think he
just died two or three years ago at an extremely
great age, one hundred or one hundred and one. Bernard Balen,
the great Harvard historian and his work. Oh it's a
classic book. And of course I can't remember the name
just now, but Balen, who, if I understand things correctly,
was It came along at a time when he was
reacting against the Marxist rereading of the American Founding and
the Marxists saying, oh, no, no, the Constitution is just
cover for economic interests of various kinds. And Balen read
the documents, He pulled together all the pamphlets and all
the articles, and all the little town newspapers across New
England and down into the South. He discovered that what
you had here was an intensely literate society in which
reading and writing were taking place all the time at
a serious exchange of ideas, and that far from being
cover for underlying economic interests. You just could not conclude
other than that they had read and written themselves into
real belief. Okay, so this is a compliment to the
Marshall McLuhan comment.
Speaker 2: And it's why I think we should worry about young
people not reading. There was a recent article in The
Atlantic that talked about declining reading lists in college courses,
and one professor from Georgetown I think, which is my
alma mater, saying she notices that her students at Georgetown
can't read a sonnet with attention. They lose track in
fourteen lines of what's going on, you know, so they
can't think, oh, that's where he picks up this symbol, right,
they can't read fourteen lines with attention. I think she's
probably exaggerating, but on the other hand, maybe not, because
it has not been demanded of them.
Speaker 1: Right right, by the way, I want to interject for
our listeners, the name of the book is Frankinson's Gold
and murr It's three stories and twelve essays. And I'm
repeating all this just now because if you buy a
couple of copies and leave them around the house, teenagers
pick them up and Jody's first sentences, let alone his
first paragraphs and first pages, are enough to tempt I
think even an adolescent male into setting down his phone
and sticking with the book. Frankinsense Golden Murr. Do it
for your children? Okay, Jody? A couple of last questions
here if I'm reading Frankinson's Golden Merrh at all correctly.
Of course we've just discovered this. One of the themes
is your love of Christmas. And the other which we've
discussed in a way when we talked about the Midwest, Actually,
what is South Dakota. It's too far west to be
the Midwest, but it's not really a rocky mountain state.
What do we call where you live?
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's I have a friend, the actually wonderful South
Dakota History, and he writes on the Midwest all the time.
Had a popular book recently, John Louck and John Says
has this quip that the West begins about twenty miles
east of the town of Chamberlain, South Dakota, because that's
when the river hills start rising. Then you get the
Missouri and you're in the Midwest up till that point.
So eastern South Dakota is basically Iowa. Western South Dakota
is basically Wyoming.
Speaker 1: Okay, all right, all right, So you're in the We'll
say you're in the West, and you love the West
because you love American life in some ways, you love
those towns because that's American life at its most distilled,
it's most it's most American, all right. From your essay
Beyond the Bleak Midwinter quote one sentence. I've always thought
depressed people understand Christmas best. Close quote Jody explain that
one your love of Christmas, ordinary American life, and then
you introduce depression.
Speaker 2: Well, I you know, I'm a melancholy man, and so
there's some self defense in there. Look, I understand Christmas
really well, look at the book. But also when things
are going really well for you. I don't just mean financially,
although that sually has something to do with it, and
in your family and in your mental health, it's easy
to think, oh Christmas. You know, it's when you're depressed
and Christmas makes you more depressed.
Speaker 1: Yes, it can be very sad to see.
Speaker 2: What Christmas is. I mean sad people understand how much
Christmas matters, how it changes the world. They're further saddened
by the fact that they're not getting it, but they
see it was the point I was trying to make there,
and you know, the Christmas asks us one of the
carols I wrote. I've written several Christmas carols, and in
one of them, I put this line in that I
felt had really personal application and bears on that bleak
mid Winter Essay, which is a title taken from Christina
Rosetti's Great Christmas poem. But there's a couplet in there
we will escape the sadness. There comes now grace and gladness.
And grace and gladness was the phrase that this Nashville
studio took. Is the kind of album title for these
carols that I had written when they recorded them. But
you know, grace and gladness the message of Christ, the
whole Christmas feeling. It has to be an answer to something.
One of the reasons I think that some of our
you know, people fall away is they forget what the
quest question is to which Christ is the answer, and
they or they lose track of it. It doesn't seem
important anymore to think we're going to die. We live
in a world that has you know, whose intrinsic meaning
is is invisible to us. We live in a culture
that's strange and bleak and manic, and you know it
is to those things that christ is the answer. And
in the same way Christmas needs an answer for a question.
Speaker 1: You and I are of an age that when we
took our English classes, we were reading Fitzgerald and Hemingway
and Gertrude Stein, and all the cool kids were skeptics.
Christianity did not enter in to the the fizz pop
whiz bang of the twentieth century on whom we were raised.
We studied as when we studied our English. And I
was thinking, as I was reading your book, I can
only think now you, being you, will be able to
name twelve more, but don't because I want to come
to the point of this is you. I can only
think of one American author who embraces the modern, who
embraces modernity in her prose and uses and produces modern novels,
although we're talking about mid century or second half of
the twentieth century now while while while insisting on remaining explicitly,
not overbearingly, but explicitly Christian, and that is Flannery O'Connor
until Jody Bottom comes along. I can see no you see,
I said, you being you, you're thinking of a dozen
other authors who fit that narrow bill. But so that
your middle story, Nativity, you've already explained it's about a
rich man. What you've left out is that this rich
man who's dying on this adventure, which is thwarted because
of because of course we're in we're in the Upper Midwest,
and he's thwarted by a snowstorm. The drive to Denver
becomes impossibly. He has to pull up, and he rescues
a manic, crazy chatterbox young woman, who, however, is pregnant.
That's enough others. If you want to know how the
story ends, read Jody's book. But let me quote a paragraph.
This is Michael Stuyvesant, of whom you were speaking a
moment ago. By the way, do you remember that old
It was never never appeared on the masted, but it
was one of the greatest newspaper models ever The New
York Daily News in the old days, when it was
still known as New York's picture newspaper. In the newsroom,
the word was, or what they would tell a new
hire was tell it to the McSweeney's The Stuyvessants already know,
isn't that wonderful and old New York there? All right?
But here this is Jody. This is Jody Bottom, his family.
His family had always been Episcopalians. But Anne, this is
writing about his late wife. Anne was a Catholic, something
of a to do in the family. At the time
of their marriage. He remembered her explaining to him that
all pregnant women are beautiful because they are signs, visible
reflections of the blessed Virgin Mary in all her future
joy and all her future pain and sorrow. Close quote.
Now you didn't have to do that. That doesn't exactly
advance the plot, but you do do it, and of
course it's right. I don't want to say it's you're
introducing an extraneous note, but that's you. Why do you
do that? If you've just been a little more skeptical, Jody,
it'd been so much easier to sell.
Speaker 2: There was this moment in the late nineteen forties early
nineteen fifties when it looked like the pieces the fragments
of conservatism we're going to cohere into a fundamental statement
of the glory of Western civilization. Against the Communists, and
this would have been the new Critics, and this would
have been T. S. Eliot's poetry, and this would have
been Richard Weaver's ideas have consequences. And there was a
world out there that looked for a moment like it
might cohere, and it didn't. But I mentioned that simply
because Peter, I think we have a responsibility, you and
I to make the pieces of ourselves fit. That there
has to be some kind of unity, that we have
to reject any doctrine of double truth, that oh, there
are these truths of physics and then there are truths
of religion and poetry, and they don't go together, but
that's okay because they live in such entirely different worlds
that we don't have to make them go together. I
flinch every time I hear someone say my truth. Yes, yes,
because truth is truth, and we have a responsibility. We're
not going to succeed at making the world whole, making
the universe of truth. One God does that, but we
have a responsibility to hold the pieces together as best
we can. And I am a believer and I want
to be an artist, although I usually fail at it,
and I want to no things, Peter, you know that
that schoolboy hunger, just to know, yes, it never left me.
I still have it. You know. I was listening to
a lecture on quantum mechanics thinking I don't understand any
of this, but by God I should, And because you know,
I still have that schoolboy hunger for that and all
that has to cohere, and sometimes around Christmas, I feel
like it does.
Speaker 1: Jody, would you take us out, if you would, by
reading a passage from Angels, from one of the essays
Angels I have heard on high I want to hear.
I want our listeners to hear this prose in the
voice of the man who composed it.
Speaker 2: Let's see, so the passage you picked out was this.
I love the Santas with their bells, the Salvation armies
call to charity on the sidewalks of American cities. Love
the stores with displays of candy canes and sleigh bells.
I love even the musact carols in the elevators, and
the municipal trees, and the oversweet candies from the neighbors,
and the fruitcakes like depleted uranium, and the school children's
Nativity plays and the advent calendars, and the trips to
the food bank, and the seasons goes for Christ's sake?
Why not be happy? So much around us shouts reminders
of the cause for Christmas joy. A sinner, corrupt and soul, sick,
heartsore and muddled in my thoughts, I sometimes wonder what
this world looks like to the saints. The universe must
glow every day a holiday, a homely day, like the
blinding sunlight off the clean snow and sharp swirls of
sparkling ice. But it needs no individual grace, no special
sanctity to feel the life of the Christmas season. Portions
of the wall are tumbling down, and through the breeches
anyone can discern some of what we ordinarily keep hidden
from ourselves, Christ himself, and the faces of the poor
and battered, the treasures the charity lays up in heaven,
the supernatural beauty of nature, the joy of creation, and
the objects all around us, the almost sacramentality of everything real.
This December, I heard the angels singing, actually heard their
voices high in the wind across a western meadow, frozen
stiff and covered with the fallen snow. Listen and you'll
hear it too. Down from the hills and the cold trees,
Ponderosa pine and Black hills spruce, along the icy stream bed,
through the brush and over the rocks. All those voices caroling, praising, rejoicing,
a swirl of joy beyond all deserving.
Speaker 1: Jody, Merry Christmas, Merry Christmas. Peter the book again, Frankinsens,
Gold and Murder, A Christmas Christomothy by Joseph Bottom, available
on Amazon. Do yourself a favor, buy the book and
read it, and leave a copy around for your kids.
For Ricochet, I'm Peter Robinson.