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