too many Daves

This was me today, standing with my dogs at a crosswalk on 24th, waiting for the “WALK” sign, and listening for what might be the eighth, ninth, or eleventh time since June to an audiobook version of The Sun Also Rises. The novel has become more impressive to me with each listen. Just thrillingly so. More than I will try to express in a post that I aim to keep short.

What’s crushing, though — and what made me mutter the words “just a total doormat” for only a Lab mutt and a deaf spaniel to hear — is that I keep spotting details in the novel that diminish Jake, the narrator. Even in a single attentive reading, you probably can’t fail to notice Jake’s drinking or his “all of a sudden I started to cry” one restless night in bed. But he is in Paris and in Pamplona and in Burguete, and he’s in the company of people who are drunker than him and people who are more conspicuously heartsick than him, so Jake’s narration has a way of distracting from the rough truth that Jake is the story’s most abject character.

He’s the Catholic who says nothing and does nothing when his pissed-off friend tells a Catholic priest on a train that Catholic pilgrims monopolizing the tables in the dining car is “enough to make a man join the Klan.” He’s the bullfight purist with so much “aficion” that he shields a bullfighting prodigy from being ruined by a night of wining and dining with the American ambassador, but he abets the fickle lust of the woman he himself loves and gives her all the help she needs to seduce the very same bullfighting prodigy. Jake loiters so innocuously, so amiably around this woman he loves that her fiancé asks for Jake’s help in getting rid of another discarded suitor who keeps wrecking the mood by having the minimal dignity to pine openly and pick fights.

Short. A short post. That’s the goal. I’ll stop. I’ll stop this post. Maybe I should stop with this novel, too. It’s suddenly leaving me sad in ways that don’t get erased by the funny scenes.

John T. McGreevy and R. Scott Appleby, Catholics, Muslims, and the Mosque Controversy (via nybooks)

I have yet to read the full piece that this excerpt links to. The excerpt itself is sensible and worthwhile, so I’m reblogging it. It reminds me of a post I wrote in ‘08 for Huffington Post about the anti-Catholic smears Al Smith endured when he ran for president in the 1920s. I’d been ignorant of that.

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UPDATE: 

Now that I’ve read what McGreevy and Appleby wrote, I want to call attention to another passage from their post: “For much of the nineteenth century Catholics in America were the unassimilated, sometimes violent ‘religious other.’ Often they did not speak English or attend public schools. Some of their religious women—nuns—wore distinctive clothing. Their religious practices and beliefs—from rosaries to transubstantiation—seemed to many Americans superstitious nonsense.”

They go on to acknowledge that “historical comparisons are bound to be inexact.” Even so, their rundown of the American Catholic experience is helpful. They do leave out Al Smith, though. So here, for whatever it might be worth, is a link to my aforementioned 10/19/08 HuffPost, “A Cell Phone Call During Mass (Remembering the Anti-Catholic Smears of the 1928 Election).” (I just re-read it. Parts of it make me cringe. Style stuff. Not substance. Let’s just say that it was written at a certain historical moment that is not now. I’m tempted to delete the link, but the stuff I quote from NYT stories in 1928 is worth knowing about. For example, one Alabama senator refused to vote for his fellow Democrat because Smith’s Catholicism supposedly would drive him to use the presidency to annex Mexico. Because Mexico has lots of Catholics, see? And then pretty soon the Protestants are outnumbered and America is ruined. “Smith!!!!” Crazy, bigoted stuff.)