My latest: a review of Tara Isabella Burton

I’m in the latest issue of Commonweal with a longish review of Tara Isabella Burton’s latest (nonfiction) book, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. Online, the title is “Have We Become Gods?” In the magazine, it’s “The Brand Called You.” Here are the opening two paragraphs:

I am what I want, and I have the power within myself to make myself what I want to be, if only I find the will to activate this inner potential—or rather, to manifest this authentic identity. Such is the thesis under review in Tara Isabella Burton’s new book, Self-Made: Creating Our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians. The thesis is not a new one. It has a long history, which, in Burton’s telling, begins around the fifteenth century. Though she finds its philosophical culmination in the eighteenth, with the Enlightenment, most of her story covers the past two hundred years: from bon ton and Beau Brummell to “the two most prominent self-creators of the past twenty years,” Kim Kardashian and Donald Trump. Across Western Europe and the Anglophone world, self-creation as both a transcendent possibility and a moral imperative trickles down to ordinary people’s lives and self-understanding, mutating in tandem with religious, economic, and technological changes. Since creation is traditionally the prerogative of deity, Burton’s story is ultimately about “how we became gods.”

Burton is a reliable chronicler. This book continues a theme explored in her 2020 work, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World. There she argued that rumors of religion’s death in the West have been greatly exaggerated. The God of Abraham may be on life support, so to speak, but other gods are alive and well. We haven’t refuted religion so much as “remixed” it. Postmodern spirituality is a potent cocktail of magic, money, and memes; a hybrid made possible by the internet, the dynamic power of capitalism, and the loss of authority once vested in religious institutions and their ordained leaders. America, at least, is not a land of atheists or even agnostics. It’s full of witches, cosplayers, crystals, fangirls, Proud Boys, and Goop. Is SoulCycle a religion? What about wellness culture? The borders of religion turn out to be porous. Accordingly, Burton suggests we’re misreading the signs of the times. We don’t live in a secular age. The gods haven’t vanished; they’ve migrated. Our age is as religious as any other. You just have to know where to look.

Read the rest here. And take note, please, that the URL for the review concludes in this way: “burton-trump-kardashian-east.” Go back a decade and find me somewhere in New Haven, nose buried in a book, prepping for comprehensive exams on systematic theology, and tell me that one day I’d write an essay with those names in the URL. My assumption would have been that something had gone terribly, terribly wrong in my career…

Young Christians (not) reading, 2

I received some really useful feedback in response to my previous post about the reading habits, such as they are, of high school and college Christians today. By way of reminder, the group I’m thinking about consists of (a) Christians who are (b) spiritually committed and (c) intellectually serious (d) between the ages of 15 and 25. In other words, in terms of GPA or intelligence or aptitude or career prospects, the top 5-10% Christian students in high school and college. Future professionals, even elites, who are likely to pursue graduate degrees in top-100 schools followed by jobs in law, medicine, journalism, the arts, academia, and politics. What are they reading right now—if anything?

(I trust my qualifiers and modifiers ensure in advance that I’m not equating spiritual maturity with intellectual aptitude, on one hand, or intellectual aptitude with careerist elitism, on the other.)

Here are some responses I received as well as a bunch of further reflections on my part.

1. One comment across the board: None of these kids are reading anything, whether they are cream of the crop or nothing of the kind. And they’re certainly not reading bona fide theology or intellectually demanding spiritual writing. All of them, including the smartest and most ambitious, are online, all the time, full stop. What “content” they get is found there: podcasts, videos, bloggers, and influencers, plus pastors with a “brand” and an extensive online presence (which, these days, amount to the same thing). To be fair, some of these online sources aren’t half bad. Some are substantive. Some have expertise or credentials or wide learning (if, often, of the autodidact sort). But to whatever extent any of these kids are acquiring knowledge, it’s not literate knowledge. It’s mediated by the internet, not by books.

2. If someone in this age range is reading a living Christian author, then I was right to think of John Mark Comer. A few more names mentioned: David Platt, Francis Chan, Dane Ortlund, Timothy Keller. I also had The Gospel Coalition mentioned as a group of authors read by some of these folks. In terms of dead authors, in addition to what I called “the usual suspects” (Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, et al), I also heard Eugene Peterson, Dallas Willard, and Henri Nouwen. Which makes sense, since all of them have passed in recent memory, and professors as well as youth pastors would be likely to recommend their work. (I’m going to go ahead and assume John Piper is among those names, too, though he is still with us.)

3. An addendum: Some young believers are reading books, but the books they’re reading are mostly fiction. Typically YA fare; sometimes older stuff, like Tolkien or Jane Austen; occasionally scattered past or present highbrow fiction like Donna Tartt or Cormac McCarthy or Susanna Clarke. But still, not a lot of fiction reading overall, and the majority is page-turning lowbrow stuff, with occasional English-major nerdballs (hello) opting for the top-rack vintage.

4. A second addendum: It isn’t clear to me how to count or to contextualize kids who are home-schooled or taught in classical Christian academies. What percentage of the total student population are they? And what percentage of this small sub-population is being taught Homer and Virgil and Saint Augustine and Calvin and so on? Or, if we’re thinking of living authors, which if any of them are they reading? I simply have no idea what the answer is to any of these questions. Nor do I know what the difference is between such students being assigned these texts and their actual personal reading habits outside of class.

5. Back to the brief list of living authors above: Comer, Platt, Chan, Ortlund, Keller, et al. The question arises: Are young Christians who report these names in fact reading their books? Or are they “digesting” their message via sermons, podcasts, and video recordings available on the internet? The same goes for megachurch pastors with an online audience, like Jonathan Pokluda, who preaches outside of Waco; or Andy Stanley in Atlanta, or Matt Chandler in Dallas. There’s a lot of daylight between reading an author’s books and knowing the basic gist of a public figure.

6. To be even more granular: If a young Christian says that she has read Comer’s latest book, what is likeliest? That she used her eyes to scan a codex whose pages she turned with her hands? or that she read it on an e-reader/tablet? or that she listened to the audio version? After all, Comer—like other popular nonfiction authors today—reads his books himself for the audio edition. And since he’s a preacher for a living, it’s very effective, not to mention personalizing; which is part of the appeal for so many young people today.

7. In a word, is it true to say that even the readers among young believers today are often not “reading” in the classical manner many of us presuppose? So that, whether it’s a podcast or a TikTok or an IG Reel or a YouTube channel or a “book,” the manner of reception/intake/ingestion is more or less the same? So that “reading” names not an alternative mode of acquiring knowledge or engaging a source but simply a difference in type of source? In which case, it seems to me, young people formed in this way will not, would not, think of “books” as different in kind from other social media that make for their daily digital diet, but merely a difference in degree. Books being one point on a spectrum that includes pods, videos, and the like.

8. So much for technologies of knowledge production and consumption. Another question: What counts as a “serious” Christian author? That was part of my original question, recall. Not just intellectually serious young Christian readers, but serious Christian books by serious Christian authors. Not fluff. Not spiritual candy bars. Not the ghost-written memoirs of influencers. Not, in short, the “inspirational” shelf at Barnes & Noble. If one-half of the presenting question of the original post concerned a certain type of young Christian reader, the other half concerns a certain type of Christian author. Here’s what I have in mind, at least. The author doesn’t have to meet a credentials requirement; doesn’t have to have a doctorate. Nor does he have to write in an academic, jargon-laden, or impenetrable style. That would defeat the point. To be popular, you have to be readable. And “being popular” can’t be a defeater here, or else no one, however rich or good in substance, could ever sell books: they’d be disqualified by their own success.

As I’ve said, Lewis and Chesterton are the gold standard. Other names that come to mind from the twentieth century (beyond Bonhoeffer, Nouwen, Peterson, and Willard) include Karl Barth, Dorothy Sayers, Francis Schaeffer, Os Guinness, Martyn Lloyd-Jones, Madeleine L’Engle, John Stott, J. I. Packer, Robert Farrar Capon, Frederick Buechner, Wendell Berry, Stanley Hauerwas, and Marilynne Robinson. That’s a very short list; it could be doubled or tripled quickly. As it stands, what do the names on it have in common?

Here’s how I’d put it. Each author’s writing draws from a rich, clear, and deep reservoir of knowledge and wisdom, a reservoir that funds their work but does not overwhelm it. Put differently, what a normie reader encounters is the tip of the iceberg. If that’s all she can handle, so be it. But to anyone in the know, it’s as clear as day that there’s a mountain of ice beneath the surface.

Furthermore, one of the consistent effects of reading any of these authors is not only sticking with them but moving beyond them into the vast tradition that so evidently informs their writing. This could be the Thomistic tradition, or the patristic, or the Homeric, or the Antiochene, or the Kantian, or the Reformed, or whatever—but what the author offers the reader is so beautiful that the reader wants more of whatever it is. And so she moves from Piper to Edwards to Calvin to Augustine in the course of weeks, months, and years. From there, who knows what will be next?

That is the kind of book, the sort of author, I have in mind. My original interlocutor was asking about such work in the present tense. Who fits the bill? And who are young people reading? I’m willing to say that Keller fits the bill. Comer does too, in my judgment, though that is a status he graduated into with his last two books. His earlier work was far too primitivist-evangelical, far too dismissive of tradition, to qualify. But to his credit, he has clearly read himself into the tradition and now invites his readers to do the same.

I can certainly name others, like Tish Harrison Warren, who are doing the work and who are selling books. But are they having a widespread discernible influence across a vast slice of 15-25-year olds today? It’s probably too early to tell.

9. Let me think about my own trajectory for a moment. Here are authors whose books I read cover-to-cover across three different age ranges:

• 15-18: Lewis, Chesterton, Bonhoeffer, Kierkegaard, Tolkien

• 18-22: Lee Camp, Douglas John Hall, Richard Foster, Nouwen, John Howard Yoder, Hauerwas, Berry, Walter Brueggemann, N. T. Wright, Ben Witherington

• 22-25: William Cavanaugh, Terry Eagleton, Robert Bellah, Augustine, Charles Taylor, Barth, Robert Jenson, John Webster, Christopher Hitchens, Michael Walzer, Kathryn Tanner

These aren’t all the authors I was reading at these ages, but rather the kinds of names I was introduced to that made an impact on me—so much so that I remember, in most cases, the first book I read by each, and when and where I was, and what my first impression of them was.

I’m sure I’m leaving off some important names. But the list is representative. I was a precocious, brainy young Christian who loved talking about God and reading the Bible, and these were the authors that youth ministers, mentors, and professors put in my hands. Not a bad list! Pretty much all living authors, or from the previous century, so not a lot of historical or cultural diversity on offer. But substantive, provocative, stimulating, and accessible nonetheless. The kinds of authors who might change your life. The kind who might convert you, or de-convert you. Who might shadow you for years to come.

And so, once again, the question is: Is the 2023 version of me (a) reading at all and, if so, (b) which authors, living or dead, is he reading? which is he being poked and prodded by? which stimulated and provoked by? Inquiring minds want to know!

10. This exercise has made me take a second look at my own teaching. Which authors do I assign? If you are a student who enrolls in my class, who will you read? A rough summary off the top of my head:

• Dead: Barth, Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Saint Athanasius, Saint Thomas Aquinas, John Calvin, Martin Luther, Saint Augustine, Saint Oscar Romero, Pope St. John Paul II, Pope Paul VI, Henri Nouwen, James Cone, Gerhard Lohfink, Dietrich Bonhoeffer

• Alive: Tish Harrison Warren, James K. A. Smith, Thomas Joseph White, N. T. Wright, Beth Felker Jones, Martin Mosebach, Tara Isabella Burton, Ross Douthat, Andy Crouch, Andrew Davison, Andrew Wilson, Peter Leithart, Jemar Tisby, Victor Lee Austin, Michael Banner, James Mumford

Those are just authors of books I’ve assigned (and do assign). The list would be far larger if I included authors of chapters and articles and online essays. In any case, I’m pretty happy with this list, granting that I teach upper-level gen-ed elective courses to undergraduate students who have never taken theology before.

11. What lessons do I draw from all of the above? First, that people like me have a lot of power and influence and therefore enormous responsibility toward the young people who enter our classrooms. I cannot control whether my students fall in love with the books I assign them. But if I choose wisely, I make it far more likely that they might fall in love. That might in turn set off a chain reaction of reading and learning that lasts a lifetime.

12. Second lesson: Don’t assign “textbooks.” That is, don’t assign purely academic or fake authors. Don’t assign books dumbed down for teenagers. Avoid books that do not look like any sane person would ever cozy up with them in a comfy chair and read leisurely for a whole afternoon. Instead, assign books whose authors are known for befriending their readers. Assign authors who have fanatical followings. Assign authors who have the power to convert readers to their cause. Assign poets and rhetors and masters of the word. Assign stylish writing. Assign passionate writing, writing with stakes. Assign texts with teeth. Don’t be surprised when they bite students. That’s the point.

13. Third, the express aim of Christian liberal arts education and certainly of every humanities class within such institutions ought to be for students to learn to read, thence to learn to love to read, thence to learn to desire to be (that is, to become) a lifelong reader. Every assignment should be measured by whether it conduces to this end. If it does not, it should be scrapped.

14. It follows, fourth, that professors should shy away from assigning online content, whether that be links, videos, podcasts, or even texts on e-readers. That’s not quite an outright ban, but it is a strong nudge against the inclination. Give your students books: physical books they can hold in their hands. Reading a book is an activity different from scrolling a website, watching a video, or listening to a podcast. Young people already know how to do those things. They do not know how to sit still for ninety minutes without a screen in sight, in utter silence, and turn pages, lost in a book, for pure pleasure or simple edification. They have to be taught how to do that. And it takes time. What better time than college?

15. All this applies twice-over for seminaries. What is a pastor who cannot read? The principal job of a pastor, alongside administering the sacraments, is to teach and preach God’s word, which means to interpret the scriptures for God’s people. You cannot interpret without reading, which means you cannot teach and preach without being able to read. Are we raising a generation of illiterate ministers? Is the time already upon us? Are our seminaries aiding and abetting this process, or actively opposing and redirecting it?

16. If professors have some measure of influence, youth pastors (in person) and pastors with a public platform (online) have much greater influence. What we need, then, is for pastors to see it as part of their job description to find ways to encourage and induce literacy in the young people at their churches and, further, to suggest authors and books that are more than candy bars and happy meals, spiritually speaking. For this to happen—allow me to repeat myself—pastors must themselves be readers. They must be voracious bookworms who understand that their vocation necessarily and essentially entails wide and deep and sustained reading. Their churches (above all their elders and vestries and bishops) must understand this, too. If you walk into a pastor’s office and he is reading, he is doing his job. If you never see him reading, something’s amiss. The same is true, by the way, if you do see him reading, but he’s only ever reading a book written in the last five years.

17. Returning to the academy, what happens in the classroom is not all that happens on a college campus. Much, perhaps most, learning happens elsewhere. To be sure, it happens in library stacks and dorm rooms and coffee shops and Bible studies. But it also happens at Christian study centers. The importance of these cannot be overstated. Their presence on public and non-religious campuses is a refuge and a haven for young believers. They can’t be only that, however. They have to be the kind of place that fosters learning, reflection, discussion, and—yes—reading. Reading groups on the church fathers, or the magisterial reformers, or the Lutheran scholastics, or the ecumenical councils: these should be the bread and butter of Christian study centers. Hubs of vibrant intellectual life woven into and inseparable from the spiritual.

18. I’ll go one step further (borrowing the tongue-in-cheek suggestion from a friend): What we need is Christian study centers on Christian college campuses. Sad to say, far too many Christian universities today have bought into credentialing, gate-keeping, and careerism. They do not exist to further the Christian vision of the liberal arts. They exist to stay alive by selling students a product that will in turn secure them a job. None of these things is bad in themselves—enduring institutions, diplomas, gainful employment—but they are not the reason why Christian higher education exists. The presence of Christian study centers on Christian campuses would signal a commitment to the telos of such institutions by carving out space for the kinds of activity that students and professors are, lamentably, sometimes kept from devoting themselves to within the classroom itself. Perhaps this could be done explicitly on some campuses, whereas on others you would have to do it on the sly. Either way, it’s a worthy endeavor.

19. Let me close on two notes, one negative and one positive. The negative: As I have written about before, we have entered a time of double literacy loss in the church. Christians, especially the young, are at once biblically illiterate and literally illiterate. They do not read or know the Bible, and this is of a piece with their larger habits, for they do not read anything much at all. That is a fact. It would be foolish to deny it and naive to pretend it will change in some seismic shift in the span of a few years.

The period in which we find ourselves, then, is a sort of return to premodern times: Granting a kind of minimal mass literacy, in terms of widespread active reading habits, there is now (or will soon be) a very small minority of readers—and everyone else. What will this mean for the church? For daily spirituality and personal devotion? For catechesis, Sunday school, and preaching? For lay and voluntary leaders in the church? For ordained ministers themselves? We shall see.

20. I am biased, obviously, in favor of literacy and habits of reading. I want my students to be readers. I want pastors to be readers. I want more, not less, reading; and better, not worse, reading. But not everyone is meant to be a reader. Not everyone should major in English. Not everyone’s evenings are best spent with Proust in the French and a glass of wine. God forgive me for implying so, if I have.

Here’s the upshot. If young people (and, as they age, all people) are going to learn about the Christian faith through means other than reading, and for the time being those means will largely be mediated by the internet, then what we need is (a) high-quality content (b) accessible to normies (c) funded by a reservoir of knowledge rooted in the great tradition, together with (d) ease of access and widespread knowledge of how to get it. We need, in other words, networks of writers, pastors, teachers, scholars, speakers, podcasters, and others who have resources, audiences, support, technology, and platforms by which and through which to communicate the gospel, build up God’s people, and educate the faithful in ways the latter can access and understand, with content we would call “meat,” not “milk.”

I know one such endeavor. There are others. I don’t want to give up on literacy. I never will. But we can walk and chew gum at the same time. Time and past time to get moving on these projects. I’m entirely in favor of them, so long as we do not see them as a substitute but instead as a supplement to the habits of reading they thereby encourage rather than block. What we need, though, is the right people, adequately resourced, finding the young, hungry and seeking Christ and open to learning as they are. If this is the way to reach them, and it can be done well, count me in.

Jimmy’s change

So far as I can tell—but I haven’t been trawling Twitter for contrarian takes—Alan Jacobs’ negative reaction to the Better Call Saul finale (spoilers herein, obviously) is the exception to the rule. The people I read loved it. Friends and family who watch it loved it. I loved it. But it’s useful to read a take against the grain. Is Alan right?

His case is simply stated. Jimmy’s volte-face in the third act of the finale is unwarranted either by the episode’s events or by the series’ narrative thrust as a whole. Who Jimmy is, deep down, has more or less always been set in stone, and that concreteness was not softened by these final episodes. Jimmy-as-Saul-as-Gene has only become more narcissistic, more reckless, more negligent, even murderous and sociopathic. Are we really supposed to believe that a single remarkable deed by Kim has the power to undo all of that, to make of Jimmy a Sydney Carton bound, selflessly, for the guillotine of a lifetime in prison?

Answer: Yes, actually. I think so. But before I defend that view, let me say why I resonate with Alan’s disappointment.

His disappointment was my disappointment with the original finale of Breaking Bad, which just about everyone else I read and know thought was perfect. It was not perfect, and for the same rationale Alan offers for BCS. Vince Gilligan loved his character too much to let him down. Though Walt had to die, though he had to be humiliated, he also had to go out in a blaze of glory. He had to earn some degree of redemption. He had to do something good, or at least something on his own terms. And thereby, all fans, not just “bad” fans, could get some measure of catharsis for watching and secretly (or not so secretly) cheering on a wicked and murderous drug dealer for five years.

Ever since that finale first aired nearly a decade ago, I’ve proposed an alternate ending. It’s only slightly different than what occurs in the final ten minutes of the episode. Walt arrives in his car, parks it where he does, walks into the building with all going according to plan. Only: when the button is pressed and the machine gun lets loose, the bullets spray wildly without hitting anybody. The plan fails. The cowboy’s last hurrah is an anticlimax. Walt doesn’t win. Instead, once the bullets are finished, the neo-Nazis look at Walter, look at Jesse, and shrug. Then they take them both outside. First they shoot Jesse, as Walter looks on. Then they shoot Walter. They dump both in an unmarked grave. Fade to black; end credits.

That’s a bleak ending, but its bleakness matches the bleakness of the show’s story. For that story is one without any happy endings. Walt doesn’t get to save his orphaned would-be son. His outlandish plan doesn’t succeed. Such plans don’t always work. He doesn’t get to pass out and pass on in the midst of the humming chemistry of a meth lab, happy in his own way, dying as he lived. He doesn’t get to set the terms of his exit from this life. That’s the way he thought he could live. But he was wrong. And the show’s writers mistook their protagonist’s self-understanding as the show’s own inner meaning. An easy error to make, but a costly one. Not just the bad fans rejoiced at the finale. Even ordinary viewers left with a sense of cathartic release: Jesse got away, the bad guys lost, and Walt redeemed himself. Good for him.

It seems to me that Alan thinks the same (whatever his actual thoughts on the BB finale) of the BCS finale. I wondered, going into the episode, whether Gilligan and Gould would be tempted by the same error: the need to make their evil lead good by the end; the desire to make things right that can’t be made right; the pull to let Saul undo, by TV magic, what can’t be undone.

I understand why one might see “Saul Gone,” the name of the series finale, as indulging that temptation. But I don’t agree, for the following four reasons.

First, there’s a lot more going on in Jimmy’s incredible courtroom speech than breaking good, for Kim’s sake. He’s putting on a performance. That performance is Heisenberg-like in its pomposity and pride. He doesn’t want seven years in a cush prison with the world thinking he was a victim. Instead, he wants the world—the feds, the judge, his future inmates, even Kim—to know that without him, Heisenberg wouldn’t have lasted a month as a free man. The real hero of Walt and Jesse and Mike and Gus’s story was Saul Goodman. He made it all possible. After all, he’s the only one still standing. Are you not impressed? Are you not entertained?

Second, so much of what the previous 61 episodes of BCS gave us, which the 62 episodes of BB did not, is that, unlike Walt, who was rotten to the core from the beginning and just needed the opportunity to show it, there was always a goodness to Jimmy intermingled with the bad. Not only certain good inclinations, but the desire to do and to be good. Granted, that desire is snuffed out by the time he’s transformed into Saul. But we have no reason to suppose that it’s gone forever, that it’s beyond recovery. Moreover, he didn’t leave Kim; she left him. It is precisely her reentry in his life that reawakens that desire once more. On the phone, she tells him to turn himself in; he scoffs and tells her to take her own medicine. She does. At great cost to her own life, possibly bringing it to an end. I find it wholly plausible, not that her extraordinary good deed converts him from pure evil to pure good, but rather that her action, like a flash of lightning, transforms the scenery before him. It shuffles the board of his potential actions. It makes possible certain decisions that he would never have considered before. He doesn’t become a martyr. But he does tell the truth.

Why? Because, third, what we know of Jimmy—again, from those prior 61 episodes—is that his moral psychology is not defined solely by greed or victory or successful schemes. An additional and irreducible element is his desire to please those he loves or reveres, even in spite of himself. (In this, too, he is different and, I think, a more complicated character than Walter White.) That’s the thing that made his relationship to Kim so complex. Together, they were bad. But in truth, while he made her worse, she made him better. She kept him from from the dark side, from truly breaking bad all the way. Only in her absence does does he do that. All his worst propensities, however much he toyed with them and leaned in their direction, he kept at bay so long as she was still around. That’s not to say such an arrangement would have lasted forever. But he always cared what she thought. Because he always truly loved her, as she did him. And what he is doing in that courtroom is trying to earn her approval, trying to see a glimmer of the love that once burned bright in her eyes. I have to say, this strikes me as absolutely and unquestionably psychologically and emotionally plausible. The man is a living image of self-sabotage in service of his insatiable desires. He never knows when to stop. Only now, he isn’t risking everything for the sake of some petty score. He’s forsaking a short time in prison for an indefinite one for the sake of the woman he never stopped loving, because the one and only thing that ever competed with his love for self and love for money was love for her. Which is to say, his need for her requited love. So he schemes one last performance for the ages. (Showtime!) And, as ever, he gets what he wants. It works—like Walt’s plan worked—except no one thinks him a hero, and the cost is a life sentence.

Fourth and last, it’s essential not to overlook what Gould shows us on the bus and in the prison. Jimmy isn’t in chains. His spirit isn’t quenched. He’s finally at rest. He’s among the people he always worked for and with and among. He always had their back, and now they’ve got his. They’re chanting his name. They’re fist-bumping him as he swaggers by. He’s not a fish out of water. He’s not suffering in squalor. He’s king of the castle. He’s come home. This is where he belongs. This is where he’s comfortable. This is where he was always meant to be, where his path always led. There’s not a trace of pain or resentment on his face. Not, again, because he’s a martyr. But because he’s accepted who he is and what he’s done, in an irresolvable combination (one that defined his life from start to finish) of chest-thumping pride, feigned performance, and quiet shame.

Nor is Kim’s visit an absolution. Their few words reflect the years and the distance between them. There’s nothing he can do to change the past, to rectify his wrongs. But behind bars, in the plain light of day, he can acknowledge who he is to the one person (apart from his brother) whose opinion he values, and she can accept that knowledge so long as he isn’t hurting anyone or inciting her to do the same. His quiet bravado (“…with good behavior…”) is a sign that he’s no Sydney Carton, nor does he imagine himself to be. He’s Jimmy. But then, Jimmy isn’t the antithesis of Saul Goodman, since Jimmy always was and always will be Slippin’ Jimmy. Kim, though, always loved Jimmy, and Jimmy always loved Kim. If what it took to see her again, to see her look at him like he was Jimmy, not Saul, one more time, was this—getting all the credit for Heisenberg’s crimes while serving time he always knew was coming down the pike—then so be it.

His whole life was a tissue of tradeoffs, anyway, cooking up some brilliant idea in the moment to get what he wanted most, without necessarily thinking of the long-term effects. He did it one last time. Who’s to say he’d regret it now anymore than he did in the past? In the time machine motif that haunts the episode like the ghosts of another Dickens tale, Jimmy wonders about regrets, his own and others. We know he always regretted losing Kim. His moment in the courtroom is his last chance to hop in his own personal time machine and make one single change. Not to alter the laws broken, the people conned, the lives ruined, the victims murdered. Not even—though he does regret it—to unwind his brother’s end.

No, the one change concerns Kim, having once lost her, seemingly forever. Once that change is made, he can live with the consequences.

Pseudo-Scorsese

It’s come to my attention that there are discrepancies in the filmography of American director Martin Scorsese. To be precise, certain films attributed to him evidently qualify as pseudirectoria (pseudokinemagraphia? pseudeikonzon?)—that is, instances of unnamed others claiming his name as director of a cinematic artifact, although the evidence suggests otherwise.

Consider three films, released across more than two decades’ time: The Age of Innocence (1993), Kundun (1997), and Silence (2016). Their subject matter, respectively: a historical romantic drama set in the 1870s among the upper class; the life of the Dalai Lama, set in Tibet in the middle of the twentieth century; and the plight of Catholic converts and their missionary priests in seventeenth century Japan.

Are we really supposed to believe that the director responsible for these films is the same man behind the camera—during the same time span!—for Goodfellas (1990), Casino (1995), and The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)? Not to mention Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), and Raging Bull (1980)? It beggars belief.

The visual grammar; the composition and editing; the characters, time periods, settings, and cultures; the dialogue; the feel—it’s all off. Someone else has been posing as Martin Scorsese in plain sight. Any honest comparison between the two groups of films will render the same result; any protest to the contrary is clearly a matter of special pleading.

The upshot: We have a Pseudo-Scorsese on our hands. The time has come to weigh the evidence and thence to sort the “official” or “received” Scorsese oeuvre into those films that are “authentic” or “undisputed” and those that are “inauthentic” or “disputed.” Historical and artistic integrity demands no less.

Art tonnage

This weekend I watched Steven Soderbergh’s latest film No Sudden Move (available on HBO Max). It’s a modest period heist film, of a piece with Soderbergh’s proclivity to leaven his Major Releases with minor genre exercises. I always enjoy those exercises, and I enjoyed this one, too. It’s restrained, formally inventive, clever, and draws lovely performances out of actors old and new. I especially appreciated seeing Don Cheadle in fine form. I imagine a whole generation of young moviegoers knows Cheadle solely from his role in the Marvel films, which means they think of him as entirely forgettable and therefore dispensable. Not so! (Perhaps his own Disney+ series will rectify that error? Probably not.)

Soderbergh has likened himself, fittingly, to a graffiti artist. He’s a street performer: he does his art quick and dirty, to please his audience and himself—then moves on. His output, as a result, is quite large. Side projects, side hustles, delivery innovation, technical experimentation, multiple films per year: Soderbergh is a jitterbug craftsman, always in motion. He never sits still, just like his camera.

In this Soderbergh belongs to the Stephen King theory of popular art. Even apart from highbrow versus lowbrow (or masscult versus midcult), this theory eschews a vision of creative labors as necessarily painful and painfully long. If you’re a craftsman, then know your craft and do it when called upon, to the best of your abilities, and with celerity. The fact that you’re paid to do it, moreover, is a feature, not a bug; there’s no room here for the pure genius, tortured, alone, and unappreciated. No, you’ve got an audience—readers, viewers—happy and willing to hand over money for what you’ve made. Serve them! Entertain them!

And if not everything you make it a work of world-stopping brilliance, so be it.

This reminds me of John Grisham’s famed writing routine. Every fall, just in time for the airport-heavy travel seasons of Thanksgiving and Christmas, he drops a new novel. After taking some well-earned time off, he outlines in great detail the plan for his next novel. In the first week of January, he begins writing: every weekday for x hours per day. By mid-spring he has a rough draft; by mid-summer, the revisions are complete. Then the manuscript is off the printers, and they publish the book by Halloween. Grisham’s been doing this for more than 20 years. You can set your clock by it.

I certainly don’t think the Soderbergh–King–Grisham model is for everyone. Nor do I think their work is flawless as a result of it. High art is high art for a reason; it takes time, passion, and sometimes pain. But not everyone is meant for such heights. I’m happy to live in a world with graffiti artists and airport novelists. The pleasures they afford are real, and they would be far less and few fewer if their authors weren’t willing to risk some measure of artistic failure and critical dismissal in the speed and style of their creation. May their tribe increase.

A very special episode of Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood

In which Daniel, now the middle child with half a dozen siblings, experiences a tiny setback that flummoxes his otherwise unqualified expectation that everything in his young life ought to go his way.

He sits down and cries—but in the chaos of a bustling household and so many other children, his mother and father are unable to pause the family's life, halt the earth's spin, and sing a song to soothe his self-esteem while ostensibly increasing his emotional intelligence.

Soon enough Daniel stops crying.

Eventually he gets up, discovers a solution to the problem on his own, and moves on.

Roger Scruton on the new divisions of class, centered on TV

"The growth of popular sports and entertainment in our time, and the creation of a popular culture based in TV, football and mechanized music, have to some extent enabled people to live without ... home-grown institutions. They have also effectively abolished the working class as a moral idea, provided everyone with a classless picture of human society, and in doing so produced a new kind of social stratification—one which reflects the 'division of leisure' rather than the 'division of labor.' Traditional societies divide into upper, middle and working class. In modern societies that division is overload by another, which also contains three classes. The new classes are, in ascending order, the morons, the yuppies and the stars. The first watch TV, the second make the programs, and the third appear on them. And because those who appear on the screen cultivate the manners of the people who are watching them, implying that they are only there by accident, and that tomorrow it may very well be the viewer's turn, all possibility of resentment is avoided. At the same time, the emotional and intellectual torpor induced by TV neutralizes the social mobility that would otherwise enable the morons to change their lot. So obvious is this, that it is dangerous to say it. Class distinctions have not disappeared from modern life; they have merely become unmentionable."

—Roger Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism, 169. Originally written in 1980, the book was heavily revised for a 2002 re-publication, from which this excerpt comes. With the rise of both "reality TV" and so-called "Peak TV," this semi-Marxist, though conservative, analysis would be worth modifying and extending into the new situation in which we find ourselves, especially in the U.S. (since Scruton is British).