Author: Jim Bowman

Jim Bowman covered religion 1968-78 for the Chicago Daily News, since then has written books, articles, etc., mostly on corporate history but also on religion (Company Man: My Jesuit Life, 1950-1968), and more recently on politics (Illinois Blues: How the Ruling Party Talks to Voters -- Lulu.com, Kindle). Longtime Oak Park, Illinois, resident, he lives now on Chicago's North Side, where four of his and Winnie's six children live close by.

More observations of a literary bent. Gilbert & Sullivan. Reading books. Seven Types of Ambiguity. Kurt Vonnegut Jr. Meditation. The villain television. Harold Bloom. T.S. Eliot. Waste Land.

Gilbert to (Oscar) Wilde to (Jack) Benny: Among “unkillable hymn-tunes” by the composer Sullivan, Gilbert’s partner, is “Onward, Christian Soldiers.” Sullivan has a following today, but not Gilbert, with all his “colossal verbal skill and prodigious industry,” said reviewer X.J. Kennedy in New Criterion, January, 1997.

The two didn’t get along, and each longed to do more serious work on his own. But they stayed together, bound by financial needs: Sullivan was supporting a mistress and Gilbert an expensive wife, yacht, and country estate. Neither could make as much money separately.

Gilbert invented the (comical) straight face, setting the stage for Oscar Wilde’s “The Importance of Being Earnest.” And Jack Benny, for that matter. As a dominant writer-director, he set the stage also for the dominating writer-director George Bernard Shaw. He also sued people a lot, having been a barrister.

The book under review was W.S. Gilbert: A Classic Victorian and His Theatre, by Jane W. Stedman (Oxford).

Gilbert died well, trying to save a screaming teen-age girl. She’d been screaming but was not in danger. He drowned. His widow doted on fresh fruit and while on holiday had peaches sent her from his sumptuous estate.

Hypertexts and hyperlinks beckon. Point and click, say the Internet salesmen. Indeed. Point and click and get hooked. Seductive, addictive, sometimes enervating, the whole package. It’s a jungle in there. Be careful.

So much and so little time: A great poem has “a general sense of compacted wealth,” says Wm. Empson in Seven Types of Ambiguity. Lots of meaning packed in. You needn’t know all of it or have it all in mind at once, no more than you have to know all the notes of a symphony. What you want is awareness of a poem’s “elaborate balance of variously associated feeling.” Just as I was saying the other night at the Ale House.

Kurt Vonnegut Jr. tried meditating in the ’60s, using a mantra, a Sanskrit word which he thinks may mean $85, what he paid for it. Later it dawned on him that “in our civilization” we meditate using “a medieval object, a book,” putting ourselves in touch with people in ages gone by. This kind of meditation, he says, gives “access to brains better than our own.”

Ah the mystery of it all. Some guy 500 years ago had a great thought, and it’s ours to ponder, with or without the Internet.

As for the joys of reading, Dr. Ken Cooper, the meditation-for-relaxation specialist of the ’70s, decided at one point that relaxation was as much obtained by quiet reading as by meditation-with-mantra. The maharishi came and went, and we still have reading.

Secret sharing: People say, “My, you do a lot of reading,” as if I steal from sleep or eating or prayer. It’s time for a little secret: I generally don’t watch the tube, that’s what. The tube I figure is for mind-vacating. A movie works that way too.

The time-snatcher television relates to schooling too. Kids who go for the tube with every free moment, reading only what’s required even in demanding school programs, are culturally deprived. TV, sedative or stimulant, is in any case a drug, sez I.

Some fairly complicated stuff: Harold Bloom touches on TV in The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, his unapologetic appreciation and promotion of what the West has given mankind.

Discussing “Shakespeare, Center of the Canon,” he says “partisans of Resentment” object that only an elite can read in the way he recommends. Bloom isn’t sure even about that. It’s gotten harder to “read deeply” he concedes, adding that “even the elite tend to lose concentration.”

Wondering if his generation represents the last of the close-reading public, he asks whether his not owning a TV set until age 40 might be relevant. He wonders “if a critical preference for context over text does not reflect” impatience with “deep reading.” (I wonder in the same vein with reference to my years as a Jesuit, with little or access to the tube.)

“Context over text” refers to how critical theorists, his “partisans of Resentment,” tear everything apart, eschewing enjoyment in favor of analysis. Bloom analyzes too, but their analysis is a peevish pecking away at things to satisfy a craving for upset, he says.

Armed with Freud, whom Bloom much respects, and far lesser lights such as the eminence noir Michel Foucault, whom he does not, they take off into a literary sky-blue yonder with anarchistic intent.

When times weren’t a-changing: We take it for granted that times are changing, but Shakespeare didn’t. Nor did his contemporaries, whom we call Elizabethans and Jacobeans, after Queen E. and King James, of Bible fame.

Therefore, Shakespeare et al. could talk of human nature as a timeless universal. They were not tempted to political correctness as we know it, incessant politicizing — or analysis of their society, which they took for granted.

Their times were changing, of course, and we can analyze them. But apart from recording the “rise of [merchant] families and their ambition to ally themselves with needy peerages and to acquire country estates,” Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists had no sense of it, T.S. Eliot observes in his Selected Essays, 1913-1922 (London, 1950).

They were “blessed,” said Eliot, because it meant they could “concentrate their attention . . . upon the common characteristics of humanity in all ages, rather than upon the differences.” The same went for Dante and the ancient Greeks but not for writers “in periods of unsettlement,” as Petronius in the 1st century and Lucian in the 2nd.

Elizabethans and Jacobeans “believed in their own age,” as “no nineteenth- or twentieth-century writer of the greatest seriousness has been able to believe in his age,” said Eliot, whose “Waste Land” was no happy-ending Broadway musical. Eliot sounded wistful as he made this point, as if he would like to be able to believe in his age.

— More to come of these Observations of a Literary Bent —

Some observations of a literary bent. Deconstruction and finding politics not pleasure. George Eliot. The importance of translation. The Psalms. Defending capitalism. Andrew Carnegie.

Critical mass . . . There’s a literary theory, cynical and full of “Gotcha!” stuff, that says if you read for the pleasure of it, you’re missing the point. All this Dickens and Robert Louis Stevenson is political tract material, you see. Take it apart and what do you find? Dictation from the ruling class.

So take it apart, the theory says. The story or poem was constructed; deconstruct it. Dissect it, you find nothing but worms and ants. If you defend its beauty, as whether the work can stand apart for a reader to love, you are a cultural conservative, fellow traveler with robber barons.

For some dissection of the dissectors, consider a review some years back in the Times Literary Supplement, which likened Literary Theory (reviewer’s capitals) to “uplifting tracts” as read by Janet in the George Eliot short story, “Janet’s Repentance.”

In this story Janet would hurry past references she could not imagine and get pleasure out of – “Zion,” “River of Life,” and the like — not in favor of “the minister’s pony,” “boots and shoes” and the like, images of everyday reality.

The Literary Theory folks want us to stop and savor such uplifting references. The reviewer likened these theory-lovers to 19th-century tract writers.

Let us now praise translation. It is not hack work but is crucial to transporting culture age to age, says Martin Greenberg in an essay, “A Defense of Translation,” in Against the Grain (Ivan Dee, 1995), collection from a New York-based monthly, “The New Criterion.” Almost as much genius is required of good translation as in doing the original, says Greenberg.

Where would we be if there had been no English version of Plutarch’s Lives such as Shakespeare read to learn about Julius Caesar?

Some translations live on their own. Don Quixote is one, Englished by the 18th-century novelist Tobias Smollett, author of Humphry Clinker and other rollicking chronicles. Smollett’s Quixote lives today, same as his Clinker.

Same with Pope’s Iliad. Greenberg writes of “laughing out loud” as a teenager reading another 18th-century translation of Quixote, by Peter Motteux, whom he ranks with Smollett. On the other side are “pedants,” who revel in exactitude and end up writing stuff you can’t read.

The good translator dips into the sensibilities of another age or at least another language and passes sense and tone and manner of expression on to his own age in his own language.

That said, consider the 1996 Penguin paperback, The Psalms in English, edited by Donald Davie, who presents the Psalms in order of composition but also provides an index that allows you to read them in numerical order, first to 150th.

Fidelity to the original is crucial for him. He calls “most horrible” the translation that most went off on its own, a self-described “paraphrase” of the 137th Psalm by John Oldham in the 17th century. Davie admittedly prefered versions that reflect the Christian view. Such translations work for Christians, who appropriated them centuries ago.

The Psalms in English popped out at me from the neatly ordered, modest-sized new-book shelves of the River Forest public library, which reflect the relative orderliness (and affluence) of the town itself. My Oak Park library is bigger and bigger-budgeted, and ever there when I need it. It says a lot about where the two communities choose to put their tax money. This is the point of affluence, it seems to me, not that it’s there but what’s done with it.

From that RF library shelf also popped out at me a defense of capitalism by the philosopher Michael Novak, Business as a Calling: Work and the Examined Life (Free Press). And from this book’s pages popped out a defense of the supreme capitalist Andrew Carnegie, who sold off U.S. Steel in 1901 at age 66 and spent his last 18 years giving away the proceeds.

Carnegie is defended by Novak as a creator of wealth. Born poor in Scotland, in Pittsburgh he worked from the age of 12 to help support his family. With just four years of formal education, he eventually devised a way of making steel and running a business that changed how people live.

He is also blamed for hypocrisy and dishonesty in absolving himself of a role in precipitating and suppressing the Homestead Steel strike in 1892 — an action he spent much time and money atoning for. Novak in effect puts the question: are we better or worse off because of Andrew Carnegie?

The Mud Hole, Aunt Enid and my dying grandmother, Harry Truman, FDR, Stevenson Playground, and the demolition of buildings for the sake of progress . . .

From my Short History of Oak Park Volume 1, compiled 2004-2005, based largely on columns I wrote for the Oak Park and River Forest Wednesday Journal.

In the ‘30s and ‘40s, there was a big wading pool in Stevenson playground, under a huge willow tree east of the field house, which had WPA-era murals of Long John Silver, Jim Hawkins, Blind Pew, and others of the Treasure Island bunch.

A block away, across Austin Boulevard, was another such pool, called “mud hole” for its sandy-near-muddy bottom, on the corner of Austin & Lake Street, where now there’s a sprinkler playground.

Across Lake from the Mud Hole and down a bit to the east was a brick courtyard building with a big goldfish pond in the middle of the court. My two aunts lived in that building.

Aunt Enid watched me one day in the Mud Hole, where for some reason I stood shivering the whole time, watching other kids. About ten years later, my aunts had moved, but my grandmother lived in that building, and died in her apartment of a heart attack — a surprise because she’d passed an EKG exam the day before.

This is how it happened then, in the late ‘40s. People died more often at home, not in a hospital after being rushed by ambulance, sirens blaring, paramedics working hurriedly to restore the beat — which does not always go on, no matter what Peggy Lee sang.

And when the priest showed up from St. Lucy’s a few doors away, my grandmother knew the end had come and said so. He brought comfort but was also a harbinger.

In the ‘40s Stevenson’s half-block-long playing field, not yet raised a few feet, was flooded in winter for skating. You changed shoes for skates on a long bench on the Northwestern track side.

The other option for ice skating was the lagoon in Columbus Park, many blocks to the south and a few more to the east, winding in a curve away from a heated clubhouse, where you could buy chips and Coke and hot dogs. Columbus was better skating, but Stevenson was closer if you lived where I did, on Lombard a half block north of Washington Boulevard.

In summertime the livin’ was easy, but problems arose for baseballers at the west end of that big field. If a ball went into the street, fouled off to the left, the search might go long and hard until, as happened once, it turned up in the street car track declivity, flattened by a passing trolley.

I recall the day in April of ‘45 on that dusty field, we budding political thinkers stopped long enough to discuss the succession of Harry Truman to the presidency, Franklin Roosevelt having just died.

Friend Bill, a Roosevelt fan, questioned my deep concern over Truman, whom for some reason I considered even worse than the (in our house) much resented FDR. How I responded I can’t remember. I just know I felt very convinced.

The houses came, the houses went… Where Cheney Mansion stands, on the 200 North Euclid block, was once a beautiful many-porticoed house, a private residence big enough to be a sanitarium or nursing home. The owner tore it down.

Where there are houses on Ridgeland just south of North Avenue was the cutest brick farm house from the 1860s. Developers flattened it in the 1920s.

The area north of North Avenue — hundreds of acres — was a family farm. The owner, a man named Gale, trashed it for the sake of developing what we know as the city neighborhood, Galewood. He’s commemorated in a shingle on the Unity Temple parish house on Kenilworth across from the Oak Park post office.

Oak Parkers have not always been as respectful of history and the land as today’s [2004] anti-development people want. I’m not making it up. It’s in a 1990 Historical Society calendar with photos of long-ago houses by Philander Barclay, of Philander’s Restaurant and Poor Phil’s sports bar fame.

(As for the Oak Park & River Forest Historical Society, It’s been the source of this tale of demolition in the course of the village’s march of progress.)

Some of the landscape-changing was done by or for churches. A big “stick style” house from the early 1870s at Oak Park and Superior got out of the way in 1900, leaving room for First Methodist 25 years later.

Two years later, in 1927, First Baptist replaced another stick-style house two blocks away, at Oak Park Avenue and Ontario Street.

This was O.W. Herrick’s house, which in our time might have been preserved. Herrick had come from New York as a schoolmaster and had married the daughter of founding father Joseph Kettlestrings, whose name is on a plaque at the southwest corner of Scoville Park. Herrick was Oak Park’s first postmaster.

That’s not the half of it about the Herricks. Their son James B. Herrick was a trailblazing Rush Medical College researcher who described (discovered) sickle-cell anemia and coronary thrombosis. In his memoirs he spoke of watching the 1871 Chicago fire from his house and later greeting his father in a horse-drawn vehicle returning from the city, where he had gone with food and supplies for homeless and hungry survivors. [See: Good Medicine: The First 150 Years of Rush-Presbyterian-St. Luke’s Medical Center]

To continue. In 1932 houses were torn down for a new post office at Kenilworth & Lake. Across Lake a splendid Italianate house became a tear-down, leaving room for what was to become the Grace Episcopal church yard.

Down the street Henry Austin moved his house in 1936 from Lake Street, where it was obstructing commerce, to what we call Austin Gardens. That lovely house was flattened 25 years or so later — for noble purposes, to make room for grass, trees, and in due time outdoor performances of Shakespeare.

Meanwhile, on Lake Street just short of Harlem Avenue, an Italianate cottage dating from the 1860s had fallen years earlier to the wrecking ball, crushed by the wheels of commerce.

In 1927 a late-1800s stick-style house at Maple and Washington lost out to an apartment building marvelously titled “Sulgrave Manor,” whose multipurpose architecture was intended somehow to evoke the tenth, 19th, and 20th centuries!

The apartment building — the condo of its day — took over space from a late-19th-century turreted Queen Anne house at 228 South Oak Park Avenue, once called home by the family of Melancthon Smith, a prominent Presbyterian and treasurer of the Oak Park Band Concert. Nothing was sacred.

And around the corner and down a few blocks, at Washington and East, a three-story, multi-chimneyed “imposing colonial revival” house with a high-roofed wrap-around front porch was replaced in 1929 by the equally imposing sandstone of Fenwick High school, home of “Friars, men of steel,” according to the school’s fight song.

That was a good move, say I. It meant I could plunge into the Fenwick pool first thing in the morning on every other school day, even on the coldest days of my freshman year in the winter of ‘45 and ‘46. Men of cold steel.

— to be continued —

At mass, crying rooms for chatters? The worshiper reported and commented decades ago.

MODEST SUGGESTION . . . . An idea whose time has come, or so said the worshiper. A special room for people who want to chat during mass. Yes, we’ve had crying rooms for people with babies, he conceded. But now it’s time for chat rooms in church! It would be a way of recognizing that some people worship differently from others.

He walked into church one Sunday, and everyone was talking. Mass hadn’t started, it was not too big a crowd, it was like walking into a school board meeting before it’s called to order. And as in some board meetings, the calling to order did not entirely silence some, who took mass as chat time: it was a family group, with infants in arms, just the kind of people you like to see. But couldn’t they be quiet?

PARISH BULLETIN WARNS PEOPLE AWAY FROM ILLEGAL LATIN MASS CHURCH . . . . It’s a “chapel,” says the bulletin, “that advertises itself as ‘Our Lady Immaculate Roman Catholic Church.'” But it’s actually not Roman Catholic but is run by the St. Pius X society founded by Archbishop Lefebvre, who was excommunicated, etc. etc.

The bulletin quotes the Pope about the “grave offense” involved in adherence to the Society leading to excommunication. The worshiper is at risk, therefore, by now and then attending the Latin masses at Our Lady Immaculate.

Would the parish consider now and then having a Latin mass, so as to ween him away? For pastoral reasons? A recent special mass for gays and lesbians at a neighboring church was a one-time thing, apparently. Maybe have a one-time thing for Latin mass enthusiasts who make no claims about being born that way but only say they were raised that way?

THE MODERN CHURCH AT PRAYER . . . Warmup for a recent RC funeral mass included an organ-ized rendition of “All the Things You Are” — lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II. Only the music (by Jerome Kern) was played, however. The words go this way and would have been applicable to the deceased or to Jesus, though that would be a major surprise to Hammerstein:

You are the promised kiss of springtime That makes the lonely winter seem long. You are the breathless hush of evening That trembles on the brink of a lovely song. You are the angel glow – that lights a star. The dearest things I know – are what you are. One day my happy arms will hold you And someday I’ll know that moment divine When all the things you are are mine.

Ain’t liturgy grand?

KEEN ANALYSIS . . . Sacramentalism used to be the thing, but in contemporary Catholicism it’s the person. We take our cue from Evangelical Protestantism, where grace (divine help) comes from praying with partners after service and not from the sacrament. Potential partners wait at the end of each service, usually couples. It’s ministry up close and personal.

Ritual was the medium in Catholicism, not one’s fellow worshipers. This was a major sticking point of the Reformation, as in whether the sinfulness of the minister affected a sacrament’s value. “Ex opere operato” was a key term, from or because of the thing done, vs. “ex opere operantis,” from or because of the one doing it.

It’s a 500-year-old or older divide. In bald terms, for the sake of argument, does it matter who administers the sacrament (who’s the minister) or does the sacrament carry its own weight? Fall on one side, you have something good anywhere, any time, any place. Fall on the other, it don’t mean a thing if you ain’t got that swing.

Lacking ritual, you have something here today gone tomorrow or next century. Lacking the personal, you have the unsalable, the unpersuasive. You always depend on people. But with ritual, you have what lasts, what relies less on performance by the minister. Do a good formula right, you’ve got it right.

But Catholic worship has gotten flaccid and informal, compared to 50 years ago. It features priest as performer, even showman, vs. priest as follower of ritual prescribed by the church as millennial institution.

Importance of ignoring what’s up front during mass, 2004 . . . Various ministers are thrust up front by current rules. It’s not their fault. Politeness does not require looking at them, however. So don’t look but mind your own business, reading and meditating on the day’s Scripture. There’s so much going on up front, traipsing to and fro with book held high over forehead as if to ward off falling plaster, prior to reading Scripture of the day. It’s not helpful ritual but merely distracting. Then you look up and see priest looking at you. He can’t help it. Reverentially downcast eyes have not been part of his training. But you can help it by not looking.

Halfway through the last year of the 20th century the worshiper mused about what happened to the mass in the previous 30 years and put it in writing . . .

. . . here presented once again in these millenial reflections
JIM BOWMAN
JUL 24, 2024

Is the two-mass Sunday schedule [down from three] related to diminishing numbers among priests? Is the change a one-timer, or are we headed for one-mass Sundays in our cathedral-class Gothic church with the big oak doors?

A certain kind of person is reminded of magazines and newspapers faced with declining circulation, whose editors remake the publication only to find the changes alienate regulars and attract too few new readers. Tricky business.

One is also reminded of earlier efforts at bringing the body religious into new realms. In the tragicomic vein, there’s the recent roping off of back pews (by a previous pastor) in this same church, with a view to getting us Catholics to sit up front and close to each other, not at comfortable distances, but close enough to exchange handclasp of peace at the appointed time.

There were the lines of yellow police tape one Sunday, silently telling us to move up front, as if plaster was going to fall soon on the prohibited pews. Yes, dear reader, in due time someone tore the tape and moved into the forbidden territory. This is rebellion, dear reader, the sort to be cherished years after the fact at class reunions, as above.

More seriously (and successfully) was the all-church changeover from Latin to English after Vatican Council II. Was this centralized planning or not? Enough to make a statist weep with envy. The world over, Catholics got used to mass in everyday language. It became part of the worldwide social engineering taking place – change by design, not by natural influences.

Vatican II celebrated the freedom of the children of God, but not in liturgy. Latin had to go. Latin went. Rebels were marginalized. Only recently has Latin returned with church authority’s blessings.

So it goes, change dictated from above for our own good by people who know what’s best. My friend M., in his last year before ordination as a holy Jesuit, complained. He had enough trouble believing in the mass in Latin, he said. Now the mystery would be severely lessened. He was not happy.

This from a Catholic-school-educated fellow, including Jesuit high school and college in the 1950s, a straight-arrow fellow from an Irish Catholic Chicago neighborhood, who swallowed hard and went on to be ordained — later to fall by priestly wayside, get married: the full catastrophe, as Zorba said.

M.’s problems sound strange to today’s 27-year-old who learned her Catholicism in our parish – the part about the mass being hard to believe in. But friend M. had much more to believe about the mass than she does today, when it’s essentially a church-sponsored, Scripture-referenced celebration of unity with each other.

He had to believe in transubstantiation – who now says the word? The bread and wine became the body and blood of Jesus in substance, while accidents (of breadness, etc.) remained, etc.

The priest held the host (bread) and believed he held the body of Christ. At least one could hardly do it and would stutter at the “words of consecration,” barely able to say them. A whole new mass developed after Vatican II — was developed quite consciously, as young Jesuits debated in the mid-50s, looking ahead — this liturgy of the future, vernacularized, would be as much communicating with people as with God. The priest would face the people, look at them, saying the dread words, making them more pew-sitter-friendly.

My friend M. saw the mystery dissolving away, and with it his belief. This has happened. Mass is now something else — arguably a very good thing, in which we celebrate unity with each other. As for the mystical and mysterious, that’s a happy memory, fast fading from Catholic consciousness.

St. Mark’s Day, Alleluia.

He was a disciple, gospel-writer, evangelist, worked Cyprus in 47 with Paul and his cousin Barnabas. Did same later in Alexandria, where he “won the glory of martyrdom,” as Deacon John relates in his splendid TRADITIONAL LATIN MASS PROPERS IN ENGLISH blog.

But not before he did same with Pope Peter, working as secretary to the first pontiff, not to mention amanuensis, taking notes from his sermons about Jesus’ public ministry which became Mark’s gospel, the second after Peter in the New Testament but probably the first written.

His was “terse, picturesque language [that] must have been very close to the words of the former fisherman of Galilee.” Don’t you love it? We live and pray the words and recollections of a fisherman!

You see why I call it St. Mark’s Day and add an Alleluia. Because he was a reporter, just like me. AND arguably the best writer of a Gospel. His gospel is “short, action-packed,” wrote one-time newspaper reporter and AP wire editor Jack Zavada.

Here’s Mark’s gospel’s opener, in the nonpareil Knox translation:

1
The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ, the Son of God.
2
It is written in the prophecy of Isaias, Behold, I am sending before thee that angel of mine who is to prepare thy way for thy coming;
3
there is a voice of one crying in the wilderness, Prepare the way of the Lord, straighten out his paths.✻
4
And so it was that John appeared in the wilderness baptizing, announcing a baptism whereby men repented, to have their sins forgiven.
5
And all the country of Judaea and all those who dwelt in Jerusalem went out to see him, and he baptized them in the river Jordan, while they confessed their sins.
6
John was clothed with a garment of camel’s hair, and had a leather girdle about his loins, and he ate locusts and wild honey.
7
And thus he preached, One is to come after me who is mightier than I, so that I am not worthy to bend down and untie the strap of his shoes.
8
I have baptized you with water; he will baptize you with the Holy Ghost.
9
At this time, Jesus came from Nazareth, and was baptized by John in the Jordan.
10
And even as he came up out of the water he saw the heavens opened, and the Spirit, like a dove, coming down and resting upon him.
11
There was a voice, too, out of heaven, Thou art my beloved Son; in thee I am well pleased.✻
Such a lead. No editor would touch it.
St. Mark, pray for us. Especially newsies of any stripe.