Besides school books (of course), here’s my priority reading list (with current publisher, original publication date):

1. Toni Morrison, Mercy (Random, 2008): Wikipedia tells me that this will be released in October.  I will be there the day it comes out.  That is all.
2. William Gibson, Neuromancer (Ace, 1984): I’ve been wanting to read this because it so often comes up in critiques of modern SF literature; it’s sort of the book equivalent of Blade Runner.  I’ve started to read it, and I’m amazed at how it seems to have a coherent story despite its disorienting premise.
3. David Michaelis, Schultz and Peanuts: A Biography (Harper, 2007): I love the idea that the man behind Peanuts was a tortured artist and that one of the most ubiquitous commercial properties in American culture has a great deal of pathos behind it.  I was first introduced to this idea by a comic artist (I forget who) who pointed out that the absent parents are the most striking feature of Schultz’s strip; when I heard that Michaelis had uncovered the reason for this pathos, I knew I had to read his biography.
4. William Empson, Milton’s God (Greenwood, 1961): I don’t know if I’ll agree with all of Empson’s conclusions (probably not), but I’m intrigued by the idea that Milton was so towering a poet that even the most ardent atheist had to pay attention.  Also, I think one of the greatest heresies of Milton scholarship is the one that supposes that he always and everywhere wrote orthodox poetry.
5. Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (Oxford, 1967): This one is more of a line of research, while my interest in Empson is mostly curiosity. I’m intrigued by the endings of GenX novels and, specifically, how the endings relate to the tension between cool disaffection and melodramatic sincerity.  My hope is that Kermode, having written the definitive book on endings, will aid me in my research.
6. Alister McGrath, Christianity’s Dangerous Idea: The Protestant Revolution (Harper, 2007): This was recommended by the Internet Monk as a cogent and sometimes damning history of the Reformation.  I like the idea of scholars committed to a certain religious cause taking a serious look at its origins.
7. Zora Neale Hurston, Dust Tracks on the Road (Harper, 1942): Last year, I fell in love with Hurston’s writing.  Few modern American writers are so poetic (for me, she is only eclipsed in this regard by Morrison), and none provide such eloquent–if occasionally shocking–expositions of racial inequities.  Dust Tracks is her autobiography, and it now includes what her white editors made her cut in the interest of political correctness.
8. Toni Morrison, Paradise (Penguin, 1997): It is my understanding that Paradise completes a trilogy started by Beloved and continued in Jazz.  Both of the latter novels are remarkable, and I simply must know how Morrison binds her books together.
9. Jacob Weisberg, The Bush Tragedy (Random, 2008): Most anti-Bush books are foaming-at-the-mouth affairs, but I like Weisberg’s approach.  He begins with the assumption that Bush is a failure–debatable, but not debated here–and uses his book to examine the man’s character.  It sounds like solid journalism from what he describes in interviews (I recently heard him on Fresh Air).
10. Douglas Coupland, Microserfs (Harper, 1995): I adored Generation X, even though the ending was extremely odd (see above), and I’m desperate to learn more.  Though I didn’t enter the corporate workforce until the 2000s, I’ve always felt drawn to the business and technology culture of the 1990s.  The tech boom to the tech bust is the most interesting period of business history for me, probably because I grew up with it.  Also, there’s a wild-west/hopeless-slacker combination going on.  I’ve heard good things, and I’m looking forward to reading it.

The 1972 documentary Marjoe follows Marjoe Gortner as he takes the viewer behind the scenes of the Pentecostal tent revival circuit.  That description is paraphrased from the IMDB plot summary, and it doesn’t even approach a good description of the film.  Marjoe is part character study, part investigative journalism.  We get a close-up view of Gortner’s strange life, from his manipulation by his parents to be the “youngest ordained preacher” at 4 years old to his hippie lifestyle as he presented himself to congregations as a mature man of the cloth.  At the same time, the filmmakers show candid conversations with high-profile pastors as they count money and talk about their extensive foreign properties.  The brilliance of the film is the way these two purposes interact–we are inclined by the corruption we see behind the stages of the revival tents to perceive Marjoe as heroic but we are disturbed by his character flaws and blatant self-interest.

There is a certain segment of Christianity in general and in any denomination that seeks to reduce charges of sinfulness and corruption–Catholic Answers is famous for this, as demonstrated in its tract, “The Inquisition” (filed, notably, under “Anti-Catholicism”).  That segment of Christians and Pentecostals would be hard pressed to work around Marjoe; the film doesn’t show anyone other than Marjoe admitting to using evangelism as a business, but all the evidence is there.  This is shown marvelously when Marjoe guest-preaches and exhorts the congregation to make a “donation” for handkerchiefs that offer spiritual benefit.  During the laying-of-hands segment after his sermon, he and the lead preacher go into a back room and count money.  The film cuts between the counting of money and the Spirit-stricken congregation–then, the preacher hands Marjoe a stack of cash.  For some, this is evidence enough that Christianity has always been about collecting money from the less fortunate, but I think the corruption is more subtle than that.  What the filmmakers have shown is a symbiotic relationship; the guest preacher, especially a celebrity like Marjoe, brings in a crowd who is willing to part with some cash.  That’s why the guest preacher gets a “cut,” and that’s the problem.  An honorarium is a set amount, so the guest preacher is not impelled to force further payment; but the corrupt lead pastor brings in Marjoe hoping he’ll convince the congregation, explicitly or implicitly, to give abundantly and then rewards his guest according to the results.  It is the subtlety of this corruption that convinces me it is both ingrained and widespread.  Marjoe is, therefore, not a film about a select group of nasty preachers and their enablers.  Rather, it is about a corruption that reigned and continues to reign in American Pentecostalism (witness Senator Grassley’s investigation of six televangelists).

But corruption mainly occupies the first third or so of the film–the rest is about Marjoe.  We pity him at the beginning as scenes of his preaching at four and five years old are interspersed with images of him in his mid-twenties, when the film was shot.  He tells us that he was programmed by his parents to preach for money, and we believe him.  What’s more, I think the filmmakers revealed the extent of his programming, though unwittingly.  I think that the filmmakers, good skeptics that they are, believed that just showing a five-year-old claiming to be a preacher would be evidence enough of such programming, but their audience includes believers in miracles.  Who is to say that God may not call a young child and gift him with inspiration?  But that supposition is refuted before we even hear from grown-up Marjoe, when four-or-five-year-old Marjoe declares that he is convinced–not he believes–that the Bible is the Word of God.  The line between conviction and belief is fuzzy at times, but few (if any) four-or-five-year-olds would have the intellectual capacity to honestly assess the evidence and come away convinced in the veracity of Scripture.

As the film examines the grown-up Marjoe, our pity doesn’t fade entirely, though it is significantly complicated.  The filmmakers are shown in the film, laughing along as Marjoe makes fun of the congregants that he hoodwinks, but there is no direct commentary or voiceovers from them.  After a couple of scenes in the beginning, the filmmakers disappear from the film altogether, lending the film’s focus entirely to its titular subject.  We see Marjoe at his best and worst–he claims he is “over” his parents’ manipulation of him because he believes they will receive bad karma as a result.  Obviously, Marjoe is emotionally shallow to still want his parents to suffer and spiritually shallow enough to believe in a complex Hindu principle without any education in that religion.  Later, we see him justify the film’s morally ambiguous setup–no one, including his father at one point, knows the film is an expose or that Marjoe no longer believes in what he preaches.  He’s “bad, but not evil,” and he wonders aloud what he’ll do afterward.  He mentions he would like to go into film, and we should all raise an eyebrow at that point.  Clearly, there are other motives than journalistic honesty at work in the film.  In short, Marjoe is shown as a human being with good traits and bad (but not evil) traits.

Given the film’s emphasis on corruption and on Marjoe, one wonders why there is so much footage of the revivals, on the performance of the preachers and the crowd interaction and reaction.  I suspect there is a strong element of debunking that’s intended here; maybe, like Marjoe, the filmmakers are convinced that the “work of the Spirit” in Pentecostal congregations is mostly the result of a warped crowd mentality.  But I think there’s something more going on, because the filmmakers do not just focus on the parts he tells them to; they fix the camera after they’ve been touched or “baptized in the spirit.”  They show the choirs dancing without suggestion from the pulpit and the people along with them.  Marjoe’s girlfriend states on camera that she can’t believe that the crowd, deep down, believes they are having a genuine spiritual experience, and Marjoe reduces revivals to the same status as rock concerts (a way of “getting off”).  So it seems that the filmmakers are concerned with a question that Marjoe dismisses: can we take these spiritual experiences seriously?  Even if the ethical questions are silenced (they aren’t in the film, but let’s pretend they are for a moment), the question of individual authenticity remains.  The congregation believes Marjoe, believes in God’s power to heal, and the congregants are never presented as stupid or as dupes.  They are presented as they are, and extensively so.  The film left me wondering about these congregants, whether they would feel cheated or satisfied that God had spoken to them, somehow.  That I couldn’t get them out of my mind, that I couldn’t resolve them away with theological or psychological explanations, is an indication of that Marjoe succeeds, and succeeds abundantly.

I’m reading…

• Soon I Will Be Invincible by Austin Grossman (Pantheon, 2007; via Audible.com): Just started this one, and it’s a true delight.  It’s a dual reading, appropriate for its dual voice narrative.  Grossman seems to take superhero and supervillain tropes seriously and provides a world to explain how they operate.
• Pontoon: A Novel of Lake Wobegon by Garrison Keillor (Viking, 2007; via Audible.com): Just finished this one, and I’ve concluded that audio is the only format to read a Keillor book.  Pontoon begins with a transcendent description of Heaven and descends to the earth, to Lake Wobegon, to examine what happens when a citizen dies.  The strength of the novel is that the situations and the characters are both unique and universal; you feel that these people are down the street from you, but you also feel they’re unlike anyone else.  You feel that these situations have happened to you, but they never have.  But most importantly, Pontoon is an example of what happens when an author truly understands oral literature and incorporates it into the Western novel.  Thus, the narrative is recursive, with each person’s story being told, as if the novel itself represents what future generations of Lake Wobegon will say about these people and these events.

Of Kahlil Gibran’s Collected Works, by Alan Jacobs, in First Things.  (Via Little Professor)

Say what?  There’s something between Iowa and New Hampshire?

The only reason I knew at all was that NPR’s nifty Election 2008 map breaks down the primaries and caucuses for you.  I’ve searched elsewhere for any info on the results, and have only found an article on CNN that’s being updated as new information surfaces.  Also, there’s the aforementioned NPR Election 2008 page, which gives results in tabular form.

Well, that’s not the conclusion of this article on MSN Money (via my dad, a BlackBerry user).  The iPhone wins for me because it combines all the things I want in a portable device into one.  The nice thing is that I don’t forget my iPod or CDs or calendar at home; I have to have my phone on me, and it’s all there.  As for corporate email–my personal mail is Gmail, and I don’t make use of it, except when out of the state.

That’s not to say that the iPhone is perfect.  I’ve had one for a few months, and I’ve discovered a couple of odd kinks.  For one, the internal speaker automatically shuts off if you remove the headphone jack from it when you’re playing music or receiving a call.  To get it back, you have to make and complete a phone call with the headphone jack inserted
and then remove the headphone jack.  Annoying, but minor.