January 06, 2021

2020 in movies

January 06, 2021/ Jordan Poss

It me. Bill Nighy as Mr Woodhouse in Autumn De Wilde’s ADAPTATION of Emma — It me. Bill Nighy as Mr Woodhouse in Autumn De Wilde’s ADAPTATION of *Emma*

I originally had an introduction here in which I surveyed theatre shutdowns and the unwelcome pivot to streaming, but that was windy, pessimistic, and irrelevant. So I scrapped it. Here instead, without further introduction, are are my favorites movies of 2020:

Tenet

Tenet is the biggest what-might-have-been of the year, Christopher Nolan having decided to make the most extreme form of the kind of convoluted brain-melting movie he is reputed to make, only to have the COVID epidemic keep people far, far away from the box office.

It’s a shame, because while Tenet is flawed—too loud, too complicated, and too visually confusing for its own good—it is very, very good, with some great action set pieces and excellent performances by the supporting cast, especially Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki, and Kenneth Branagh. (How good is the cast? They make you believe all of this “temporal warfare” and “inverted entropy” makes sense. An overlooked accomplishment.) Tenet is also great to look at, with beautiful large-format film cinematography and some great locations. I was fortunate enough to see this, one time, in theatres. I was the only one in the whole place.

Read my full review of Tenet, in which I elaborate on all of these themes, on the blog here.

The Vast of Night

I’m not sure when I first heard of The Vast of Night, but I decided to check it out thanks to RedLetterMedia, who reviewed it some months ago. This was my surprise hit of the year.

Set in a small New Mexico town in 1958, The Vast of Night follows two characters—high school electronics enthusiast and part-time switchboard operator Fay (Sierra McCormick) and smalltown radio DJ Everett (Jake Horovitz)—on the night of the local high school’s biggest game. Fay has received some strange calls at the switchboard and captured some odd radio signals, and with Everett, who plays a recording of the noise on the radio station, thus prompting calls that might provide leads, they set out of investigate the origin of the sounds. The military? The Russians? Something else? Something not of this world?

The Vast of Night entranced me from the beginning. The characters are fun and the dialogue snappy and humorous. And for a low budget independent film it is visually striking, with excellent cinematography (especially Steadicam work, with long shots swooping across the basketball court or down entire city streets), and sets and costumes that evoke the time and place wonderfully well.

But what makes The Vast of Night especially good, and makes it feel so accomplished, is its perfectly calibrated and controlled tone. It captures precisely the strange combination of suspense, tension, and eagerness that comes with listening to a scratchy, staticky radio signal waiting to hear… whatever is out there. The thrill of the encounter with the creepy. Anyone who has hunched over a computer speaker late at night trying to hear a sample of otherworldly audio knows this feeling. The best example comes in a one-shot scene that is a subtle, low-key masterpiece, in which Fay works the switchboard, talking, questioning, listening, trying to check her equipment for problems, trying to connect or reconnect with people, and always, always returning to the mysterious signal to listen—all while the camera, with glacial patience, pushes in to a closeup.

The Vast of Night keys up our anticipation from the beginning and plays it perfectly. It’s wonderfully done, and a lot of fun if you grew up on “Unsolved Mysteries” or “The Twilight Zone,” or if you just enjoy a trip into the uncanny.

Since I imagine fewer people have heard of The Vast of Night, check out the trailer here. For a taste of the film’s slick camerawork and beautiful sets, check out this four and a half minute shot from near the beginning of the film. And here’s an interesting video featuring the film’s director, in which he comments on that scene at Fay’s switchboard and how the film uses sound to build tension.

Greyhound

This is a movie I’d been looking forward to for some years, ever since reading the novel it’s based on: The Good Shepherd, by CS Forester. You can read more about the book in my 2018 year-in-review here.

Greyhound takes place across about forty-eight hours of the life of Commander Ernest Krause, captain of the destroyer USS Keeling, as he strives to protect the merchant vessels of an Allied convoy from U-boat attack. This film offers a stripped down, mostly unromanticized glimpse of life during World War II without a lot of Hollywood exposition or stock characters or cliched plot elements to get in the way. That requires the viewer to pay attention and keep up, something I always appreciate in a movie. Greyhound doesn’t spoonfeed us, but drops us into a situation as it happens and involves us first as witnesses, eventually as participants.

Tom Hanks wrote the script himself and his performance is the centerpiece of the movie. It’s excellent, and it’s a shame Greyhound didn’t get the big-screen release it deserved.

Read my full review of Greyhound on the blog here.

Emma

This most recent adaptation of Emma snuck into theatres right ahead of all the shutdowns, but my wife and I didn’t get to watch it until it arrived in Redbox in late Spring. It was worth the wait.

Like previous film adaptations of what is perhaps Jane Austen’s best novel, this Emma has beautiful costumes and cinematography, gorgeous locations in the English countryside, and a bright, energetic color palette, all of which make the film visually stunning from beginning to end. Like other adaptations, this Emma streamlines, condenses, and rearranges things to keep the film a manageable length. Unlike other adaptations—at least the ones I’ve seen—this Emma is an overt comedy, amplifying and exaggerating the comedic elements of the novel, especially the characters and all their foibles. It’s hilarious.

But it’s also quite moving and retains the strong moral core of Austen’s original, since it doesn’t shy away from exaggerating the weaknesses of Emma herself. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Emma as a spoiled but immensely self-assured rich girl, one with some fine qualities but a long way to go toward maturity. The zest with which Taylor-Joy plays Emma—matchmaking with the hapless Harriet (Mia Goth), flirting with Frank Churchill (Callum Turner), and trading zingers with Mr Knightley (Johnny Flynn)—makes her negative qualities, her self-absorption, her obliviousness toward or outright disdain for others, and most famously her cruelty, all the more cutting. Which also makes Mr Knightley all the more attractive, given his earnestness, his sense of honor, and especially his charity toward others.

The litmus test for any adaptation of Emma has to be that scene. You know the one—Emma’s joke at Miss Bates’s expense, and Mr Knightley’s epic chewing out of Emma. This film’s version is perhaps the best I’ve seen. The painfully mixed emotions of everyone involved are expertly portrayed.

The performances are excellent across the board. Taylor-Joy does an excellent job making such a difficult character sympathetic, and Mia Goth’s Harriet is adorably dense and vulnerable. The comedic standouts are Bill Nighy as Mr Woodhouse, who spends half the movie in a wonderful comic ballet of footmen and folding screens and imaginary drafts, and Josh O’Connor as a Nosferatu-like Mr Elton. I laughed every moment he was onscreen. But perhaps my favorite performance was Flynn as Mr Knightley. Flynn is striking in appearance but not classically handsome—in the way the excellent Jeremy Northam’s Knightley was, for instance—and so what attracts us to him is precisely his goodness.

I wondered, when I saw the trailer for this version of Emma, why we needed another one. The last couple years have been crowded with high-profile remakes, often with some faddish social agenda glommed on, usually disappearing fairly quickly. This one should last; it approaches the story respectfully but from a newer angle, making it fresh and fun—a reminder of why people love Jane Austen. I’m glad they made it, and especially glad I saw it. Check it out if and when you can.

The Outpost

Based on Jake Tapper’s book, The Outpost tells the stories of Ty Carter (Caleb Landry Jones) and Clinton Romesha (Scott Eastwood), two US Army soldiers who earned the Medal of Honor during the siege of Combat Outpost Keating in 2009.

The army built COP Keating in a mountainous province of Afghanistan but sited it very badly, with virtually the entire interior of the outpost visible from the mountains above. Everyone who entered it became a target—fish in a barrel. We see numerous small Taliban assaults on the outpost early in the film, but when a large force of insurgents, having probed the outpost’s defenses for months, mounts a huge and well coordinated attack, the result is a bloody battle in which COP Keating’s garrison is badly outnumbered and vulnerable from every direction. Not only the heroic efforts of Romesha and Carter but the teamwork of all the men in the outpost and pilots who bring much-needed close air support save the day, though not before eight men have been killed and dozens wounded. The Outpost dramatizes all of this exceptionally well.

Director Rod Lurie stages much of the film in long, unbroken, naturalistic shots that follow the characters around the outpost, giving the viewer a good sense of the geography of the location—always important in this kind of story—as well as subtly involving us in what’s happening. When lulls or mealtime or the boring, routine work around the outpost turns in an instant into combat, the transition is startlingly immediate. Everything feels intensely real.

The performances also help sell what’s happening. Scott Eastwood and Caleb Landry Jones are good in the lead roles, as is Orlando Bloom is a small part near the beginning of the film. The supporting cast is also good, and we get a good sense of the camaraderie of the men in the outpost as they shoot the breeze, rag on each other, and switch—again, instantaneously—into combat mode.

The Outpost is a gritty, unromanticized look at modern combat and well worth checking out.

A Hidden Life

Though A Hidden Life was screened at some film festivals in 2019, I’m treating it as a 2020 movie since it was not widely available until last year. I’m insisting on this because it was by far the best film I saw in 2020, a movie that made me weep and that I’ve meditated upon ever since.

A Hidden Life tells the story of Franz Jägerstätter (August Diehl), an Austrian farmer who, when called up for military service by the Third Reich during World War II, refused to swear the oath of allegiance to Adolf Hitler. For this he was imprisoned and beaten, his wife and daughters were ostracized from their small, tightly knit rural community, and he was eventually executed for treason.

That’s the outline of the story. What Terence Malick’s film of this story does is bring us into Jägerstätter’s life, allowing us to feel the strength he draws from his relationship with his wife Fani (Valerie Pachner), the love he has for his home and his daughters, and the power of his faith in God. It also lets us experience how, once he has made up his mind to refuse the oath to Hitler, something he, a faithful Catholic, believes he cannot do, first local peer pressure attempts to accomplish what the omnipotent Reich seems too distant to do—force him into line—and then how the authorities themselves come down on him. The slowness with which the process plays out is painful to watch; even more so are the suspicious and finally angry glances that Jägerstätter’s neighbors direct toward him and his family. And then there is the prison, the trial, and the wait for the guillotine.

The film takes its title from a line in George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch:

The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

The hiddenness of Jägerstätter’s life and sacrifice are what have stuck with me ever since. We all imagine ourselves, especially in this self-congratulatory age, taking heroic stands, changing minds, changing the world, even if it takes our deaths. But what if our deaths accomplish nothing? Multiple characters, even those sympathetic to Jägerstätter, remind him of this throughout the film. Would we really follow our faith all the way to the guillotine if there were no grand speeches or multitudes of people whose minds were changed? If no one ever knew our names? If it meant the ruin of our families and the orphaning of our children? If it meant losing?

A Hidden Life left me powerfully convicted.

The film is beautifully shot, with gorgeous Alpine scenery, and wonderfully well acted. But one recurring image, with or without actors in it, conveys Jägerstätter’s moral center: the faithfulness of work. The fields around Jägerstätter’s village are the site of constant labor. Agriculture demands constant care and attention no matter what you’re growing, and it is often thankless, those who receive the benefits forgetting immediately what it took to produce it. It is the same, Jägerstätter’s story shows us, with faith. We live in a pragmatic age, where even the faithful strive for purely earthly ends and equate righteousness with success. But we are not, after all, called to “accomplish” anything; we are called to be faithful, to do the work. A Hidden Life is a beautiful, powerful, and much needed reminder of that truth.

The ones that got away

Here’s a handful of movies from 2020 that I missed but still hope to see in the new year:

Soul and Onward—I have zero interest in jazz, the most precious of all musical genres, and am heartily sick of 80s nostalgia, but I love and trust Pixar and really liked the looks of both of these, especially considering the talent involved.
Mank—David Fincher’s telling of a (questionable) behind the scenes story of the writing of Citizen Kane, shot in glorious black and white and featuring a great cast.
Hillbilly Elegy—Shot partly in my home county in Georgia and based on one of the best and most important memoirs I’ve read in the last ten years. Glenn Close looks amazing in this.
I’m Thinking of Ending Things—This isn’t ordinarily my kind of movie, but I want to see this purely on the strength of its bizarre trailer.
The Call of the Wild—Distracting CGI dog notwithstanding, this is based on an old favorite by Jack London and I’m up for anything with these kinds of desolately beautiful landscapes.
Fatman—Mel Gibson as an ornery old Santa defending himself from a contract killer? Reviews were not good but I cannot not see this.
Mulan—I’m generally against Disney’s live action versions of its animated classics, as the tendency is to make them slavishly faithful, shot-for-shot remakes. This approach loses the magic of the originals—which were conceived of and designed to be cartoons—in the translation from animation. The most successful so far have been the handful that have had enough confidence to depart from the cartoons and develop enough of their own personality, style, and tone to work as independent adaptations of the same stories. Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella successfully did this. Mulan, based on the trailers, looked like it could. I’ll be interested to find out if it did.

Discoveries

These are films that came out before 2020—one of them over 90 years before—but that I watched for the first time last year. Presented in approximately ascending order, certainly with the best last:

The Hunley

The Hunley is one of the many TNT original movies through which Ted Turner worked out his Civil War obsession during the mid-90s. (Others: Ironclads, The Day Lincoln was Shot, Andersonville, and Gettysburg, which got a theatrical release.) Somehow the film slipped me by until years later. I’m glad to say I’ve finally seen it.

The Hunley tells the story of the Confederate submarine of the same name, famous as the first submarine to sink an enemy ship. The movie does an excellent job conveying the hard work and claustrophobic conditions of manning the sub, and the viewer has to marvel at the effort put into mastering the use and maneuver of the craft by its doomed crew. Despite some tonal missteps in the final scene, some dodgy late-90s CGI, and an obviously lower budget than films like Gettysburg or Andersonville, The Hunley was well acted and gripping throughout, with enough narrative surprises to keep it interesting. Donald Sutherland has an especially good moment as Gen. PGT Beauregard in which he takes this effete Louisiana Frenchman and reveals, however briefly, the man’s hidden depths.

A historical note: The Hunley was produced just before the wreck was excavated and removed from the ocean for preservation, and so twenty years of subsequent research has revealed a lot of things not known at the time the film was made. So while much of what the filmmakers came up with out of necessity has been disproven, it’s still an entertaining imaginative dramatization of an important event in Civil War and naval history.

Last Stand at Saber River

Another late-90s TNT original, this is an adaptation of my favorite of Elmore Leonard’s Western novels. Wounded Confederate veteran Paul Cable (Tom Selleck) returns to Arizona territory with his family to find that unscrupulous Unionist ranchers (David and Keith Carradine) are squatting on his land. The showdown between these two sides is further complicated by a one-armed storekeeper (David Dukes) who is up to more than selling dry goods. The film departs in some regards from Leonard’s excellent short novel, primarily by introducing a lot of marital strife into Paul’s relationship with his wife (Suzy Amis), which shortchanges the strong and sustaining relationship in the book. Nevertheless, this is a beautifully shot Western with a lot of good tension and strong performances and successfully translates the dramatic plot developments of the novel’s final act onto the screen.

The Great Train Robbery

A light-hearted Victorian-flavored heist film starring the late great Sean Connery, Donald Sutherland, and Lesley-Anne Down and written and directed by Michael Crichton, based on his own novel. Very loosely based on a real incident, The Great Train Robbery is the story of a plot hatched by career crooks to steal a shipment of gold bound for the Crimea. This gold being the army’s payroll, the shipment is heavily guarded before and after it’s put on a train for the coast, which means forming a multi-part scheme to get all the access and equipment necessary to steal it. And it will take no small amount of guts, too, as—even with all the other pieces in place—the only moment it is feasible to swipe the gold is on the train as it speeds through the countryside.

The Great Train Robbery is fun throughout, with interesting characters, humorous situations, and a generous helping of wink-wink-nudge-nudge comedy thrown in—a cross between Ocean’s Eleven, The Sting, and one of Blake Edwards’s Pink Panther movies. It’s also very suspenseful, and Connery’s stuntwork aboard the train at the climax was excellent. The Great Train Robbery is a well-crafted heist comedy set in a period one doesn’t often associate with plots of this kind—it’s worth checking out.

9. April

This excellent Danish war film follows a lieutenant (Pilou Asbæk) and his platoon of bicycle infantry through Denmark’s one-day war against the Nazis as they try to halt the German advance into their country. A well-produced and well acted grunt’s-eye-level film about an often forgotten part of the war. You can read my full review on the blog here.

Come and See

The story of a boy who, at the height of the Nazi occupation of Byelorussia during World War II, leaves his family to join Communist partisans and fight the Germans, Come and See is a hallucinatory living nightmare of a film, one I think everyone should watch at least once. You can read my full review on the blog here.

The Passion of Joan of Arc

The best of this batch of “discoveries,” this 1928 silent film depicts the trial and execution of St Joan of Arc (Falconetti). This hypnotic film is told through a series of agonized closeups and energetic tracking shots and follows St Joan through questioning by a kangaroo court, imprisonment and the threat of torture, and her final moments on the scaffold. It’s a haunting and powerfully moving depiction of martyrdom. Like A Hidden Life, I could think about nothing else for hours after I watched it. Highly recommended.

What I’m looking forward to

Daniel Craig as 007 in No Time to Die — Daniel Craig as 007 in *No Time to Die*

To end things on a hopeful note, here are the movies I’m most looking forward to this year. Many of these are actually 2020 movies which have, owing to COVID, been bumped back to 2021. I’m hoping for some return to normalcy and for the survival and revival of theatre-going, and I hope a few good films like these will help.

No Time to Die—Top of the list for me. Daniel Craig’s final outing as James Bond, with Ralph Fiennes returning as M and some especially stunning visuals in the trailers that have been released so far. Also interested to see Remi Malek as the villain. With Craig stepping away, I hope they’ll hand the series off to Tom Hiddleston or Michael Fassbender while they’re young enough to take a good run at it.
Top Gun: Maverick—I have almost no sentimental attachment to Top Gun, but I like a couple of Kosinski’s previous films and all the aerial stuff—apparently shot for real as much as possible—looks great.
Dune—The okayest sci-fi/space fantasy epic in history gets a high-powered filmmaking team for this adaptation.
Death on the Nile—Kenneth Branagh’s second adaptation of an Agatha Christie mystery, starring himself as Hercule Poirot. I really liked the style of Branagh’s Murder on the Orient Express and its lavish, old-fashioned sensibilities—especially its large format film cinematography—so I’m hopeful that this film will continue in the same vein.
The King’s Man—I liked Kingsman: The Secret Service quite a bit, so I’m looking forward to this lush World War I-era prequel that makes full use of the elegant leather, canvas, and polished oak aesthetic of the period, not to mention cameos from major real life figures. Brilliant casting: Tom Hollander plays cousins King George V, Czar Nicholas II, and Kaiser Wilhelm II. I’d pay just to see that.
The Last Duel—Ridley Scott returns to the Middle Ages for a story of grievance-fueled judicial dueling. I’m sure it’ll be visually stunning and historically atrocious, as per usual with Scott, who never met a medieval stereotype he didn’t like, but I’m interested to see Adam Driver in one of the lead roles.
Mission: Impossible—Libra—My favorite action series is set to return with two more films shot back-to-back and released in consecutive years.
Sherlock Holmes 3—This film is still in pre-production, but I’m hopeful. I quite liked Robert Downey Jr’s take on Holmes, especially the chemistry of his friendship with Jude Law’s Watson. I could take or leave some elements of the earlier two movies but I enjoyed them throughout and have been wishing for a third. Here’s hoping.

Conclusion

Thanks for reading! I hope you’ll check these movies out if you haven’t seen them, and that you’ll get as much enjoyment out of watching them as I did. And let’s hope we can start returning regularly to theatres soon. While I’m thankful for home media, watching a Blu-ray or streaming to a small screen can never replace the communal experience of old-fashioned filmgoing. Something else to look forward to with hope in the new year.

January 04, 2021

2020 in books: fiction

January 04, 2021/ Jordan Poss

As I mentioned in my previous post, I read a lot last year, and a whole lot of it was good. It was hard to narrow things down for the usual year-in-review lists that I’ve done since starting this blog. You can see everything I read in 2020 here. What I’ve selected for inclusion in this post are a few favorites, that is, “those books I most enjoyed, benefited from, or stopped to think about, with plenty of overlap in those three categories.”

So without further ado, I present my:

Favorites of the year

I’m not going to cheat like I did with my non-fiction and declare two winners, turning the top ten into a top eleven, but I will declare a tie for first place between two books:

The Silmarillion, by JRR Tolkien

Somehow I, a fan and admirer of Tolkien since high school, had made it to the age of thirty-six without reading The Silmarillion all the way through. This was the year I finally fixed that.

How to summarize The Silmarillion, and what to say about it that hasn’t already been said? It’s richly imagined, dense with detail, and heavily freighted with Tolkien’s insight into human nature—even when he is not, strictly speaking, writing about humans. His understanding of the tragedy of our fallen condition infuses every page, giving each story—from the creation of Middle-Earth and the rise of Melkor to the tragic story of Túrin Turambar and the cataclysmic fall of Númenor—a beauty and poignancy that other authors labor for entire books to achieve. Tolkien also excels at one of the most difficult tasks a writer can undertake—to make goodness not only believable and appealing.

I was overwhelmed by The Silmarillion, which really is so rich that it will take multiple complete readings to begin grasping it to its fullest. But after years of dipping into it here and there, I’m glad I finally read the thing through, as it was meant to be. I’ll be revisiting it soon, hopefully after another long expected reading of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

If you’re interested, a powerful and unsettling passage from Akallabêth, late in the book, led to one of my most read and commented upon blog posts this year. You can read that here.

Old House of Fear, by Russell Kirk

An American industrial magnate of Scottish extraction calls a young lawyer, a veteran of World War II and former student at a Scottish university, to his office with a special mission—travel to the most remote islands off the coast of Scotland, to a rocky islet called Carnglass, and pay a visit to Lady McAskival, the elderly heiress who has isolated herself in the ancestral home there, the Old House of Fear. Upon reaching her and gaining an audience, the lawyer must negotiate the sale of the island and its estate to the industrialist, a distant relation of Lady McAskival. Simple enough, right?

But Hugh Logan, the lawyer, discovers that this errand will be much more involved and far more dangerous than he could have expected. Even on the journey out, as he attempts to find passage to this isolated and dangerous island, he is accosted and waylaid by mysterious strangers, and the fisherman who know the waters around Carnglass seem to want nothing to do with him. When he finally arrives in near deadly weather he discovers that armed men patrol the island. Intruders disappear. And as Logan probes and investigates, it becomes clear that a Dr. Jackman, a purported mystic, has Lady McAskival in his power and is using the island for his own ends. Logan becomes his prisoner, but not before meeting the beautiful Mary McAskival, a spritely young girl who knows the island—and especially the house—inside and out and becomes one of Logan’s only allies in this seemingly hopeless situation.

Russell Kirk was a great lover of the gothic—brooding and atmospheric tales of desolate, out of the way places, buried secrets, long histories, ineradicable memories, and the ever lurking uncanny. Old House of Fear is one of the best evocations of the gothic mood I’ve come across. I loved every moment of it. Especially powerful is a scene in which Mary leads Logan out of the house through a series of hidden passageways, down from the early modern mansion through its medieval understructure, and from there into darker and gloomier and more primitive Norse and Celtic foundations until they emerge onto the windswept shore through a cave, having descended not only through the guts of the house but through a thousand years or more of its history. Awesome.

But Old House of Fear isn’t just a masterpiece of atmosphere, its story also pits upright and honorable characters, characters rooted not only in principles but in place and tradition, against utterly pragmatic ideologues willing to use guile, cruelty, and violence to achieve their ends. Logan, a veteran of the Pacific Theatre in World War II, is no stranger to violence and brute force, but that he will not bend to the level of his enemies offers the reader a dramatic and thrilling illustration of ancient virtue against modern utilitarianism.

Even to describe this theme is to make Old House of Fear sound boring and didactic. It isn’t. Read it for the adventure, for the atmosphere, for the eerie old castle and the sweeping romance—in both senses of the word. The themes, perfectly attuned to Kirk’s traditionalist conservatism, are there just as the Old House of Fear’s subterranean foundations are there—almost invisible, but supporting an incredible structure above them and offering a way of escape.

Honorable mentions

Here are five books—four novels and a collection of stories—that didn’t break into my top ten for the year but that I enjoyed enough to mention. All of them are worth reading.

Tishomingo Blues, by Elmore Leonard—World champion high diver Dennis Lenahan witnesses a mob hit from the top of his eighty-foot diving platform and finds himself slowly drawn into the shady internal politics of the Mississippi casino where he works, the local Civil War reenacting community, and a brewing rivalry between the local “Dixie Mafia” and a Detroit mob looking to expand. Another compulsively readable Leonard crime novel with some great characters, and the reenacting angle was particularly enjoyable.

Lord of the World, by Robert Hugh Benson—A work of apocalyptic fiction, dystopia, sci-fi, and theological fantasy, Lord of the World is a wildly imaginative but prophetic novel published in 1907. Set primarily in Britain in the early 21st century, a time in which religion has been excised from public life, weak and compromised progressive strains of Christianity have died away leaving only a Catholic remnant, and massive empires governed by atheistic secularist regimes exercise total control over the world. Benson tracks a handful of characters—an functionary of the British government, his wife, an increasingly lonely priest on the run from the state—through the rise of a mysterious figure from America who resolves the world’s simmering political conflicts and, as a reward, accepts greater and greater power and higher and higher honors.

Though written before the Bolshevik Revolution, the League of Nations and the UN, the era of industrial genocide, mass aerial warfare, widespread sentimental but unforgiving worship of progress and “humanity,” and the possibility of one-world government through a charismatic politician accorded semi-divine status, and the atomic bomb, Benson prefigures all of these, creating a thoroughly believable speculative world—a world that’s only become more believable in the 113 years since the novel’s publication—with a chillingly plausible Antichrist and the only convincing buildup to Armageddon that I’ve encountered in fiction.

I read this after Jack Butler’s enthusiastic endorsement in this excellent article and, to be sure, Lord of the World is well worth your while, but be aware that it’s written in a florid and sometimes difficult late-Victorian style. You can read it for free at Project Gutenberg here or in this inexpensive edition from Dover.

Ride, Sally, Ride, by Douglas Wilson—One night in the near future, clean-cut Christian college student Ace Hartwick is asked by his neighbor to keep his “wife”—actually a sex robot—company while he runs an errand. Ace crushes the robot in a trash compactor and, after an ambitious progressive prosecutor takes an interest in the case, finds himself charged with murder. What follows is a satirical romp through an only slightly exaggerated version of our culture’s confusion about personhood, identity, gender roles, and the proper role of the state. It’s enjoyable, funny, and goes down easy (I read it in three days), but doesn’t have quite the nasty bite that I wish it had. Wilson acknowledges a debt to Wodehouse in his fiction; if he mixed in a little Waugh his satire would really sting.

Trail of the Apache and Other Stories, by Elmore Leonard—A solid collection of some of Leonard’s early Western fiction, including his first published story from the December 1951 issue of Argosy. Goodreads review with some discussion of the individual stories here.

Where Eagles Dare,* by Alistair MacLean—This story has an interesting history. It began as a treatment for the film, then MacLean himself wrote the novelization of the screenplay. So the novel Where Eagles Dare is almost identical to the film Where Eagles Dare, but with the third person roller coaster ride of false leads and plot twists characteristic of MacLean’s zanier espionage thrillers. I listened to this via Hoopla as read by Jonathan Oliver. More detailed Goodreads review here.

Classics

As in my non-fiction reading list, this year I reread a few books that don’t feel like simple “fiction” but deserve their own section. They’ve been around longer than anything else on this list—I figure they’ve earned it. In this case, it’s two epic poems:

The Nibelungenlied with the Klage, trans. William Whobrey—A good prose translation of the great work of medieval German epic and chivalric poetry. The Nibelungenlied is a German chivalric retelling of the much older Germanic legend of Siegfried (the Old Norse version of the story, about Sigurd, is the Volsungsaga, and of course Wagner would retell it in operatic form as the Ring cycle.) Its plot is much too convoluted to summarize here, but it entails multiple overlapping acts of deception and betrayal, coldblooded murder, and bloody, bloody revenge. It’s great—a favorite of mine since college.

Whobrey includes another shorter work, the Klage (“lament”), in this edition, noting that in all complete manuscripts of the Nibelungenlied the Klage is included as a companion piece. The Klage picks up directly after the sudden conclusion of the Nibelungenlied and ties up a lot of loose ends. Goodreads review here.

The Odyssey, by Homer, trans. Robert Fagles—Homer needs no introduction. I reread the Odyssey to prepare for the latest series of the Core Curriculum Podcast, which is going right now. I enjoyed the reread and the discussions I got to have on the five episodes I participated in. Look it up, subscribe, and listen in!

The Charles Portis farewell tour

Charles Portis has long been one of my favorite novelists. I discovered him, like I suspect a lot of people have, through True Grit, which I read in grad school. Over the next couple of years I eagerly read through his other four novels as well as the short stories, journalism, travel writing, short memoir, and play collected in Escape Velocity. I started rereading his work last year, beginning with True Grit and his secret society/conspiracy spoof Masters of Atlantis.

That was as far as I’d gotten when I learned he died, in February, aged 86. I commemorated him on the blog here. I recommend reading that to learn what it is about his writing that I and others love so much.

So, like my project to read as many Roger Scruton books as I could this year (more on that later), as an act of piety and gratitude I finished reading through Portis’s novels, which I’ve given their own section separate from this year’s other rereads. The three I finished the “farewell tour” with were:

Norwood*

Portis’s debut introduces us to Texan Norwood Pratt, who is enlisted by a shady car salesman to drive a car—and a girl—to New York for him. It does not go well, but Norwood bounces from one adventure to another along with a cast of oddballs and verbose con artists and showmen. It’s hard to explain as there’s no plot to speak of, really, but that’s not the point. The characters, the situations, the vividly observed details of life in the country, the big city, and everything in between, and Norwood’s naïve drive—to become a country singer, to recover some cash lent to a buddy when he was in the Marine Corps, to give that car salesman some payback—make this novel a hoot from beginning to end.

For this reread I listened to the audiobook narrated by Barrett Whitener (whose performance of A Confederacy of Dunces is one of the best audiobooks I’ve ever listened to). Goodreads review and reflections here.

The Dog of the South

When Arkansan bore Ray Midge’s wife Norma runs off to Mexico with her first husband, he traces their movements via his credit card bills. Finally, temporarily abandoning the passivity with which he has mostly approached his life, he decides to track them down—if not to get Norma back, at least to recover his car. Ray falls in with an assortment of odd characters along the way, including Dr Reo Symes, a devotee of an otherwise forgotten self-help book and an opinionated old cuss.

Like Norwood and True Grit, this is a picaresque journey through strange lands with even stranger characters. Like Norwood, there isn’t a ton of plot to get in the way of the characters, settings, and especially Ray’s hilarious narration—full of wry asides, historical trivia, and deadpan irony. Portis said he set out to create narrator who was a total bore but still entertaining and he succeeded.

The Dog of the South is some people’s favorite Portis novel. It’s not mine, but it’s a good one to start with to get a feel for all the things that make Portis’s fiction unique.

Gringos

The order of my favorite Portis novels keeps shuffling, and I think Gringos is currently number two (after True Grit). Gringos follows American expatriate Jimmy Burns, who is whiling away his life in the Yucatan alternately giving guided tours of Mayan sites and trafficking in the odd illicit antiquity. His mild and unhurried life is complicated by two women—one a local busybody who decides to make reforming Jimmy her project, and the other a young girl who appears with a band of sketchy hippies one day and turns out to be a runaway. Then Jimmy learns that her parents are looking for her, desperate to get her back.

Jimmy, in his way, investigates and finds that the hippies’ leader has, Manson-style, formed his own cult, and like a lot of other weirdos has fixated on the Mayan temples as sites of immense spiritual power. But it also becomes clear to Jimmy that the stakes are much higher than drug abuse and petty criminality, and the stage is slowly set for a confrontation with the hippies.

Gringos has the strongest narrative drive of any of Portis’s novels, second only to True Grit, and I think that’s one reason I enjoy it so much. As in all of his books, the colorful cast of conmen, talkative layabouts, and cranks, as well as the vividly realized settings and the rapidly escalating absurdity of the situations, make Gringos a joy to read. And it goes without saying that it’s dang funny.

Rereads

As I mentioned in the non-fiction year-in-review, I’ve been trying to develop the discipline of rereading. Too often I have panicked at the thought of how many books I haven’t read and put off revisiting an old favorite. This year I managed to reread—or, via Hoopla or Audible, revisit—quite a few good novels. Here they are, in no particular order:

Shiloh, by Shelby Foote*
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, by CS Lewis
Out of the Silent Planet, by CS Lewis
Moonraker, by Ian Fleming*
Perelandra, by CS Lewis
Diamonds are Forever, by Ian Fleming*
That Hideous Strength, by CS Lewis
From Russia With Love, by Ian Fleming*
The Great Divorce, by CS Lewis*
The Black Flower, by Howard Bahr*
Eaters of the Dead, by Michael Crichton
Last Stand at Saber River, by Elmore Leonard*
The Eagle Has Landed, by Jack Higgins
Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, by Stephen King
Dr. No, by Ian Fleming*

I reread CS Lewis’s Space Trilogy for the first time in perhaps thirteen years for a series of podcast episodes on City of Man. Check those out here, here, here, and here. I’ve been listening back through Ian Fleming’s original Bond novels in their most recent audio recordings via Audible. The performances are excellent, and include readers like Bill Nighy, Damien Lewis, and Toby Stephens. I’m looking forward to listening to the next in the series, Goldfinger, as narrated by Downton Abbey’s Hugh Bonneville.

Conclusion

That’s it for my favorite non-fiction and fiction reads from the past year! But there’s still more to come. Stay tuned for two more year-in-review posts covering my favorite movies of the year—a short list, given the circumstances—and my tour through a dozen of the late Sir Roger Scruton’s books. Thanks for reading!

December 31, 2020

2020 in books: non-fiction

December 31, 2020/ Jordan Poss

All other things being equal, this was an excellent year of reading. I read more books this year than I have in any other year since I started keeping track—so many books, in fact, and so many good books, that I’ve split my usual end of the year “best of” post into multiple chunks to keep it manageable. Today, let me present my favorite non-fiction reads of 2020. I’ll tell you a little more about what else I have planned at the end.

As usual, keep in mind that these are my favorites, which I have defined previously as “those books I most enjoyed, benefited from, or stopped to think about, with plenty of overlap in those three categories.” I had a hard time narrowing it even to the ones you see in this post. You can see a list of everything I read in 2020 at my Goodreads challenge here.

Honorable mentions

Before I get to my favorite read of the year, let me mention a few other books. I read so much good stuff this year that the above “best of” list proved very hard to narrow down. This handful of honorable mentions or runners up began as a list of three, then expanded to five, and finally ten. I present these in alphabetical order, as they were all good and I don’t want to imply any kind of ranking beyond that of “honorable mention”:

Becoming CS Lewis: A Biography of Young Jack Lewis (1898-1918), by Harry Lee Poe—A well-researched look at the years of CS Lewis’s life most commonly neglected by biographers, his childhood and adolescence. Goodreads review here.

Cannae: Rome’s Greatest Defeat, by Adrian Goldsworthy—Excellent short account of one of the most famous and consequential battles of the ancient world. Short Goodreads review here.

Conquered: Why the Army of Tennessee Failed, by Larry J Daniel—Part campaign history, part examination of leadership, part topical and sociological analysis, this is a very good history of the Confederate Army of Tennessee from its beginnings to its destruction. I found the chapters on logistics, food, medicine and surgery, and the soldiering life particularly good. More detailed Goodreads review here.

Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide, by John Cleese—A fun little gift book by my favorite Python. Cleese seeks to find a place for both head and heart in the creative process and offers a number of helpful tips, all of which is buoyed by his fun, lighthearted approach.

Dead Mountain, by Donnie Eichar—A really intriguing and briskly written examination of a bizarre unsolved mystery from Khrushchev-era Russia: the disappearance of a team of hikers in the Urals, their frozen bodies eventually being discovered in strange circumstances. Fascinating. Much more detailed Goodreads review here.

The Gestapo: The Myth and Reality of Hitler’s Secret Police, by Frank McDonough—A good short history of the rise, organization, and functioning of Nazi Germany’s secret police. McDonough cuts through the legendary image of the all-powerful, all-knowing Gestapo to the reality—understaffed, spread too thin, originally made up of more or less disinterested beat cops but gradually taken over by younger political fanatics, and heavily reliant on tipoffs from narcs who, more often than not, gave them bad leads. An informative and carefully researched read.

John: An Evil King? by Nicholas Vincent—A great entry in the Penguin Monarchs series. Nicholas Vincent’s 100-page capsule biography of the worst King of England wears its deep research lightly and conveys not only the particulars of John’s life but the political and cultural landscape in which he lived and reigned. It’s excellent. Gooodreads review here.

The Kingdom of Speech, by Tom Wolfe—Wolfe’s final book, a waspish attack on the Darwinism through speech, a uniquely human phenomenon that has never been adequately accounted for by Darwinian theory. This and From Bauhaus to Our House above are the books that made me realize that what Wolfe most relished was to deflate the pretentions of cliques—in this case, the 19th century clique of aristocratic Darwinists and the 20th and 21st century clique of Chomskyites, both of whom have worked from their titled sinecures to destroy or coopt the work of field researchers.

The Last Days of Hitler, by Hugh Trevor-Roper—A historic examination of a historic event. Trevor-Roper was an Oxford historian who worked for British intelligence during World War II. Immediately after the end of the war with Germany, Trevor-Roper was assigned to ascertain what, precisely, had happened to Hitler. The first edition of this book was the result. The edition I read was the seventh, and includes several forewords and introductions from across the fifty years following Trevor-Roper’s investigation in which he updates the information he had originally collected. The result is a great piece of historical detective work and an inside look at how an historian acquires, assesses, and weaves evidence into a coherent narrative. Worth your while. Longish Goodreads review here.

Myth and Meaning in Jordan Peterson: A Christian Perspective, Ron Dart, Ed.—A good set of essays responding to different aspects of Jordan Peterson’s thought and teaching from a variety of angles and perspectives. Worth your while if you’ve been looking for a thoughtful and religiously orthodox engagement with this latter day virtuous pagan.

Favorite of the year

I’m going to cheat a bit now, and recommend my two favorites of the year, making this top ten a top eleven. Consider it a bonus.

Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World, by Tom Holland

One of the best books I read in grad school was David Bentley Hart’s badly titled Atheist Delusions, in which Hart argued that, “[w]e live in a world transformed by an ancient revolution—social, intellectual, metaphysical, moral, spiritual—the immensity of which we often only barely grasp,” and that this revolution is “perhaps the only true revolution in the history of the West.” That revolution is Christianity, which remade the Western world from top to bottom.

Tom Holland’s vaguely titled Dominion is built upon the same thesis—indeed, Atheist Delusions is cited in the bibliography—but where Hart’s book is dense, tightly argued in sometimes highly technical language, and narrowly focused on the early centuries of that transformation, not moving much beyond late antiquity in its coverage, Holland’s is dynamic, epic in scope, and ranges from the origins of Hebrew religion to the present day. It is also, as is typical for Holland, engaging from beginning to end and utterly readable. I have often recommended Atheist Delusions, but Dominion possesses a sweep and accessibility that make it a valuable successor to that book.

Beginning with Judaism and the emergence of Christianity, Holland follows this new faith as it slowly transforms and reshaps the world in which it arrived. He capably contrasts Christianity with the Greco-Roman paganisms we think we know (they’re about a lot more than mythology) and shows how radical a departure Jesus’s message was. Christianity made slavery impossible and made elites accountable to more than their own lusts. It raised doubts about war and gave a new meaning to heroism, elevating the humble and weak and casting down the mighty. Along the way he offers striking and vividly written vignettes of major events and personalities from over two thousand years of Western history, ranging from kings and emperors to martyrs, poets, monks and nuns, philosophers and scientists, and ordinary people.

Holland argues that Christianity laid the groundwork for life as we know it today. Even non-Christians—and Holland is not a Christian—who are concerned with “justice” and “equality” root their notions of those concepts in Christian teaching, which offers the only successful means of making those concepts coherent. Without Christianity, there is no notion of human equality of any kind, much less that espoused by the UN Declaration of Human Rights or modern day Woke activists.

What the moderns don’t understand, Holland shows, is that we abandon Christianity at our own peril. Because of the high ideals of its teaching, Christianity comes with built-in tensions—between equality and poverty and maintaining some kind of order, for instance—that require constant reform and rejiggering. Strip out the Christianity and these tensions dissipate, leaving us with something veering toward brutality in one direction or the other, a point one of the characters profiled by Holland late in the book, Friedrich Nietzsche, understood better than anyone since.

I don’t agree with all of Holland’s conclusions, and I think he sometimes overstates the importance of particular parts of these tensions—especially where the primitive and voluntary socialism of the early Church is concerned—but the book is a brilliant tour of select currents in the Christian tradition and is well worth reading. It’s also beautifully written and structured, using a nesting series of threes and sevens (three parts, each with seven chapters, each with three subsections) to give a Christian shape even to the organization of the book, and with the vignettes and profiles leading from one to another in a series of setups and callbacks that give intimacy to the sweep of his narrative.

It’s an accomplishment, and I hope to reread it soon.

Land of Hope: An Invitation to the Great American Story, by Wilfred M McClay

This is the best one-volume history of the United States I’ve read in some time. McClay’s Land of Hope offers a balanced and carefully crafted history that moderates the worst tendencies of a lot of other such recent histories—jingoistic, uncritical admiration for everything America has ever done on the right, self-loathing denunciation and scolding on the left. Striking that balance is especially important nowadays, as the two sides I just mentioned have both sought to make history a weapon, simplifying and exaggerating—if not outright making stuff up—in order to have politically helpful narratives to which they can appeal.

McClay begins with pre-history and an in medias res leap into late medieval Europe, arguing that the histories of America and Europe, especially in the early going, are inextricably intertwined. From there he follows European exploration and the establishment and growth of the various British colonies, and does a good job exploring the diversity of who came to these colonies and why—aristocratic Anglican adventures and planters (Virginia and Carolina), religious autocrats seeking to remake the world (Massachusetts), persecuted religious minorities (the Quakers and Catholics of Pennsylvania and Maryland), and humanitarians (Georgia). These first chapters are especially strong, as are McClay’s carefully balanced examination and explanation of the crisis born with Independence from Britain, the political, cultural, economic differences embedded in these quite different but now united colonies that would grow and bloom and bear fruit as the Civil War.

Land of Hope continues right up to the present—that is, the present of 2019, when the book was published. One wonders what the last three pages or so of this book would look like if McClay could update it for this year. But in addition to the measured, balanced approach he takes throughout, McClay also takes pains to explain that the closer we get to the present, the harder it is to maintain or even to have a proper perspective on events. Everything is too recent.

This is perhaps why the last chapter or two are the weakest of the book. Putting together a survey of all of American history is difficult, and so one has to be selective. Mostly I think McClay selects well, though in the first half I wish the many Indian Wars, which varied immensely in scale and ferocity but played out over decades and consumed a great deal of the United States’ resources and imagination, to say nothing of blood, got more time than they do. But in the last few chapters the history becomes almost entirely political and economic, focusing on who won elections and what policies they tried to enact. This is hard not to do (speaking from classroom experience), but a history of the recent past that moves from stagflation to Donald Trump without mentioning the sexual revolution, Roe v. Wade, or the radical transformations that have been worked on American culture and society is going to be incomplete.

But again, that’s a niggle. Ideally, Land of Hope will be a starting point—it is an “invitation” after all. A properly curious reader or student will not stop with this book, and its warm, engaging style, careful structure, and evenhanded treatment of even the most controversial moments in American history make it an excellent introduction indeed. McClay ends the book with a brief meditation on what a rightly ordered American patriotism—a patriotism that takes account of America’s flaws as well as its ideals—should look like, a good sendoff for a very good book. The highest praise I can give this book is that I wish I could teach from it.

For more, and for a sample of McClay’s excellent writing, see my blog post about McClay’s use of narrative, an approach I wholeheartedly endorse, here.

I’d recommend both of these for sweeping, elegantly written accounts of important ideas and events, and to help make sense of where we are now—which is the whole reason we study the past in the first place.

Classics

These are great books from the ancient and medieval worlds that don’t feel like standard “non-fiction” to me, but which I want to acknowledge as part of what made this year’s reading good. There’s a reason these have stuck around—they’re all great.

The Life of St Francis, by St Bonaventure, trans. Ewert H Cousins
How to Run a Country, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. Short Goodreads review here. Election day blog post about this here.
The Secret History, by Procopius, trans. GA Williamson
Strategikon, by Maurice, trans. George T Dennis. Short Goodreads review here.
Two Lives of Charlemagne, by Einhard and Notker the Stammerer, trans. Lewis Thorpe. Goodreads review here.
The Ecclesiastical History of the English People, by Bede, trans. Goodreads review here. A semi-humorous blog post inspired by a story Bede tells in his history here.
On the Ruin of Britain, by Gildas, trans. John Allen Giles.
How to Grow Old, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. See rereads below.
How to Think About God, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. Goodreads review here.

Many of these medieval texts I revisited—or read in their entirety for the first time—for a podcast series I’m involved in. Looking forward to telling you more about that in the future.

Rereads

Per CS Lewis, “I can’t imagine a man really enjoying a book and reading it only once.” This is a habit I’ve been trying intentionally to develop more in the last couple of years, and this year, in addition to favorite novels, I revisited a lot of old non-fiction favorites. I say revisited because several of these were audiobooks, which feels like cheating to me. I’ve marked the books I listened to—via Hoopla, a wonderful service—with an asterisk.

How to Grow Old, by Cicero, trans. Philip Freeman. One of my favorites by Cicero. Full review on my blog here.
The Forgotten Soldier, by Guy Sajer.* Short Goodreads review here.
Saint Francis of Assisi, by GK Chesterton*
Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, by GK Chesterton.* Short Goodreads review here.
Eugenics and Other Evils, by GK Chesterton.* Goodreads review here.
On Becoming a Novelist, by John Gardner. Short Goodreads review here.
The Defendant, by GK Chesterton. Short Goodreads review here.

Conclusion

If you’ve made it this far, thanks for reading, and I hope you’ve found at least one book here that sparked your interest and that you’ll seek out in 2021. Coming up in the next couple of days I’ll go through my favorite fiction of 2020, as well as, for a special post, all the books by the late Roger Scruton I read over the last twelve months, an act of piety on my part for a great mind gone too soon.

Thanks again, and happy New Year!

December 30, 2020

The Odyssey XV-XVI on Core Curriculum

December 30, 2020/ Jordan Poss

The latest episode of Core Curriculum’s journey through the Odyssey has arrived! In this episode my friend Jay Eldred hosts Michial Farmer and me in a talk through books XV and XVI.

In these books of the Odyssey, Telemachus returns to Ithaca from his search for his father; Odysseus, incognito, begins to scope out the members of his household; and father and son reunite. Along the way, Jay, Michial, and I talk about fathers real and substitute; what Helen’s parting gift to Telemachus may or may not mean, the swineherd Eumaeus’s tragic backstory and his reconciliation to his fate, the finely observed details of Homer’s poem, its recurring theme of hospitality, and even country novelty singer Ray Stevens. This was a fun episode, and I hope y’all enjoy listening.

You can listen to Core Curriculum by subscribing on iTunes, Stitcher, and other fine podcasting platforms. You can look at this episode’s shownotes, including links to the relevant Ray Stevens songs, on the Christian Humanist Radio Network’s site here. Subscribe to the show—and the other shows on the CHRN—so you can catch up on previous episodes of Core Curriculum and won’t miss future episodes.

Thanks for listening!

December 29, 2020

Elmore Leonard, macho man

December 29, 2020/ Jordan Poss

A few weeks ago I shared a post on Ursula LeGuin’s sly dig at Elmore Leonard in her excellent little book on writing, Steering the Craft. You can read that whole post here, but for the sake of this one here’s the section I quoted, from a chapter on syntax and sentence length:

“Rules” about keeping paragraphs and sentences short often come from the kind of writer who boasts, “If I write a sentence that sounds literary, I throw it out,” but who writes his mysteries or thrillers in the stripped-down, tight-lipped, macho style—a self-consciously literary mannerism if there ever was one.

Again, you can read my response to what I think is an unfair dig in the previous post. But a few days ago I happened to run across an interview with Leonard that I hadn’t seen before, from a 1984 episode of a program called “First Edition” hosted by literary critics John Leonard (no relation) and Nancy Evans. Leonard’s most recent novel at the time was LaBrava, which won the Edgar Award for Best Novel in 1984.

Here’s part of the interview that, with the macho accusation in mind from LeGuin’s book, caught my attention, part of a discussion that flows out of talk about influences and the kinds of writers Leonard reads:

John Leonard: What were you looking for, say, in a Richard Bissell? What did you feel the need of—you’re a working writer. You’ve worked all your life as a writer in one form or another. Did you read a particular writer to solve a problem? What’d you read Richard Bissell to solve for you?

Elmore Leonard: No. I started to read Richard Bissell—I read, uh, what was it, 7 1/2 Cents, was that the, uh, Good Bye, Ava, A Stretch on the River—

JL: Yeah.

EL: Mark Harris, Bang the Drum Slowly, The Southpaw, uh, one or two others. I like their attitude. I like the way they viewed life. I liked the way they handled their characters. I liked the way Bissell’s lead would take his girlfriend for a ride and take her down to the Mississippi River to show her certain plants. I mean, factories. He shows her what the industry is there along the river on a date. You see. Things like that appeal to me.

JL: The attitude.

EL: Yeah, the attitude. I write with my attitude, which becomes my style, my sound. I’ve finally—I read in a review that I’m a stylist, that you can tell my writing.

JL: Oh, for sure.

EL: In fact, now that I’ve been parodied in National Lampoon—

Nancy Evans: Right.

EL: Yeah, and it wasn’t bad! It did sound like me. And when I read it, when I see the string of participle phrases preceding the verb, then you see the Hemingway influence. You see—but I took, I took construction from him, um, without taking his attitude, thank God.

JL: No. There’s no machismo rubbish in your books, that’s the odd thing.

EL: There is machismo, but not on the part of the hero. The other—

NE: Well, also, the guys are, uh, sensitive. I mean, any woman would swoon over one of these guys, and the women are also a surprise. I mean, my picture of a woman in one of these so-called hardboiled detective fiction is she’s a broad and you’ve got these women who are gorgeous and blonde but they’re smart.

EL: Well, I worked hard on my women. There was a review in the Detroit Free Press said that my sensitivity toward women was about on a par with Mickey Spillane, and I didn’t think, uh—

NE: Hey.

EL: I took exception to that but at the same time I looked a little more closely at my women characters and I worked a little harder on them and my wife has helped me a lot, an awful lot, on bringing to life my women characters and using different kinds, different kinds of women.

NE: Will there ever come a day when you will make a woman your central—

EL: The next one was going to be, but it isn’t. Now it’s going to be one or—she’s one or two books away.

NE: But she’s coming.

EL: Uh huh.

NE: That’s good news.

All of which corresponds well to what I laid out in the previous post, including everything from voice or style as “attitude” to the aforementioned macho-man style.

The interviewers cut Leonard off before he can expand on his thoughts about machismo, but I suspect he was about to explain that there is often plenty of bluff, phony masculinity in his novels on the part of the bad guys and minor characters. I’ve observed that the villains in Leonard’s books—starting in his westerns and carrying on right through his crime novels—tend to fall into two categories: physical threats who are often powerful but dumb and backbiting sneaks, wannabe masterminds who are often the main antagonists. Most of the former kind behave in the Hemingwayish macho manner Leonard avoids for his heroes.

Watch the rest of the interview to see him explain how the protagonists of his novels are often underestimated and severely tested by the villains. The heroes of Mr Majestyk, Last Stand at Saber River, Valdez is Coming, and Tishomingo Blues—which I read after first beginning this post—come immediately to mind.

That female lead, by the way, would be Jackie Burke of Rum Punch, which I read this fall. The book was eventually adapted into the film Jackie Brown by Quentin Tarantino.

You can watch the entire episode of “First Edition” in two parts on YouTube, here and here, with a wrapup segment featuring only the hosts here. I wasn’t able to find out much else about “First Edition,” which isn’t even listed on IMDb, but apparently the New Criterion’s reviewer wasn’t a fan. What a lineup of guests, though.

December 22, 2020

Tenet

December 22, 2020/ Jordan Poss

I saw Tenet in theatres in September. I’ve been trying to write a review ever since. Here’s a start:

Everything you’ve heard is true.

It’s long, it’s so loud that the dialogue is sometimes incomprehensible, and its plot is so convoluted that it’s almost—almost—impossible to follow. It’s also masterfully crafted and acted and a deeply frustrating might-have-been.

Protagonist and plot

Tenet follows the Protagonist (John David Washington), a CIA operative whose initial mission to thwart a hit on a Ukrainian informant is blown. Having taken a cyanide pill but failed to die, he awakens to be told by one of his handlers that he has passed a test, proven himself capable of missions and tasks that rise even above the level of national interest. The CIA is kicking him upstairs. Armed with the codeword “tenet,” the Protagonist sets about investigating some of the oddities of his last mission, including a mysterious device he lost when his team was captured and bullets that seemed to travel backwards—from their targets into the weapons of the men firing them.

A helpful scientist (Clémence Poésy) tells the Protagonist about “inverted entropy,” a process that reverses the movement of objects through time. A storage locker in her lab is full of “the detritus of a coming war,” a war the Protagonist must find a way to stop. She also gives the Protagonist a piece of advice that is clearly intended not just for him but for the audience: “Don’t try to understand it. Feel it.”

Leads that the Protagonist and his number two, British intelligence operative Neil (Robert Pattinson), investigate in Mumbai lead them to Russian arms dealer Andrei Sator (Kenneth Branagh) and his estranged wife Kat (Elizabeth Debicki), an art appraiser who offers the Protagonist the best opening to attack Sator. Kat wants to escape the terrifying, possessive, and violent Sator, but he has leverage over her in the form of their son and a botched art deal from years gone by. Helping Kat, the Protagonist decides, will help him get closer to finding out what Sator is up to, just what “temporal warfare” is, and being able to defeat him.

Bond unbound

So far, so good. Tenet, in its first hour or so, looks and feels very much like a more serious Bond film—and Nolan has made no secret of wishing he could direct a Bond film. John David Washington even wears a close copy of the magnificent three-piece grey suit the late Sean Connery wore in Goldfinger. (I say this as someone who never notices clothing: Washington and Pattinson look dang studly every moment they’re on screen.) As the Protagonist and Neil investigate and work their way first closer to Sator and then deeper into his inner circle, Nolan slowly introduces the true nature of the “cold war” Sator is engaged in. There are the few odd incidents in the opening action sequence, then a bizarre fight against masked antagonists (explicitly referred to as such) in an Oslo vault. Finally, Nolan reveals exactly what “temporal warfare” means in a set of bravura action scenes set in Tallinn, Estonia. These are the chase scenes we saw in every trailer for the film, and they’re stunning—and confusing.

When I first saw Tenet I went in armed and ready. I had heard how difficult it was to follow, how loud it was, how hard one had to concentrate even to hear the exposition. One scene, in which Sator imparts some crucial plot information to the Protagonist, not only takes place on a high-speed racing catamaran but is scored with pulsing electronic music. So I watched the film in theatres prepared to work at it. And I did. Though it lost me in parts I was usually able to puzzle the plot out and really enjoyed it—but found myself, to my astonishment, just checking out during the climax.

Rewatching Tenet on Blu-ray now at least partially confirms what I suspected—in addition to plot points and critical information about the stakes being lost in the noise, the film is too visually confusing.

Nolan has had a reputation for “mind-bending” plots for a while, Inception being the most famous. But he has always devoted a lot of craft to keeping things visually coherent. While the climactic multi-dream-level heist of Inception launched a thousand infographics and “explainers” on the internet, it was really not that complicated to follow because Nolan not only made sure every level of the dreams had been explained beforehand—sometimes laboriously so—but also made each level visually distinct, so that even a casual viewer, disinclined to meet the movie halfway, would know where he was in the story when he saw an LA freeway, a hotel hallway, or a fortress on a snowy mountain. Careful, precise editing helped reinforce these visual cues.

Tenet is altogether different. Like Inception, it’s carefully planned and precisely edited, but the subject matter itself is part of the problem. Time travel stories are complicated enough plotwise, on paper. Visually, most time travel stories feature clear distinctions between past and present. But in Tenet the time travel happens simultaneously, like fish swimming up- and downstream in the same creek, giving us people and objects traveling in both directions through time at the same time onscreen.

We get this in the chase scene in Tallinn and especially during the climax, in which multiple large units of special ops soldiers attack Sator’s men in a “temporal pincer move,” with some attacking in real time and the others attacking backwards through time, both forces visible at the same time and even intermingling. Earlier in the film Nolan does a good job establishing the weirdness of walking backward through time, as the Protagonist looks at a dustcloud billowing into a pile of sand and the water of a puddle rushing together when he stomps in it. But in the climax, when your mind works not only to make sense of a plot that loops back and forth through time, but also to comprehend action scenes that pound you in the face with noise and spectacle—including those armies of masked and uniformed (and therefore almost indistinguishable) men running both backward and forward and explosions whooshing down into the ground—as well as to keep track of characters who “invert” themselves and seemingly die and come back to life, it shuts down. At least mine did.

But there is an exception to this part of my criticism. The scientist at the beginning of the film had told the Protagonist not to try understanding inverted entropy or how it worked intellectually, but to “Feel it.” As cold and cerebral as Nolan’s reputation is, I think that emphasis on emotional and thematic storytelling has always been a strong part of his work. And the half of Tenet’s climax that undeniably works is the most straightforward part, in which Kat confronts Sator on his yacht while those commandos are blasting their way—both backwards and forwards—into one of Sator’s strongholds. This confrontation works because you do feel it—Kat’s terror of Sator, whom Branagh imbues with a frightening rage, and the stakes, which are of human proportions: the love of a mother for a son and her desire to save him from an evil father. A storytelling lesson built right into Tenet’s climactic action.

Deliberate incomprehensibility

So as much as I liked Tenet and as dedicated as I was to following it, I zoned out during the climax—at least for the half involving the “temporal pincer movement.” That was in theatres.

Rewatching it helped. I bought the Blu-ray when it came out last week and watched it a second time, and Tenet revealed more of its secrets. More of it made sense. I followed more of the climax, and even knew what the stakes were more specifically than We have to stop the end of the world. And I’m confident that the next time I watch it, I will understand yet more.

At the time Tenet came out, Ross Douthat wrote that

Every Nolan movie is made for multiple viewings, but this is the first one to bifurcate the experience it offers. In the theaters, you just have to sit back and let it happen to you, without even trying to understand. Then at home you turn on the subtitles, slo-mo the fight scenes, and after seven or so viewings you might finally comprehend its genius.

So far this has proven to be right. Tenet’s “deliberate incomprehensibility,” Douthat writes, “needs to be treated as what it is—a gonzo, avant-garde experiment, not just a normal B+/A- action movie.”

And that’s the frustrating might-have-been thing about Tenet. Nolan has pushed the envelope and made something genuinely challenging, an extremely demanding film that requires the audience to do more than keep up, and I applaud both him and Warner Brothers for going for it. He has produced a film that, in any other year, would be seen multiple times the way he intended to it be seen. But because it came out this year, and because it was what Warner Brothers banked on to reinvigorate filmgoing among a public either too scared or simply unwilling to go to theatres during the COVID epidemic, even the audience that would take pains to see this film would only see it once. That’s exactly what happened to me.

Feeling it

That’s a shame, because I really like Tenet. If I’ve gone on at length about its flaws—and it does have flaws—it’s only because I’m puzzling out the parts that befuddled me. It’s brilliantly shot on film—part 65mm, part IMAX—by Hoyte van Hoytema, one of the best cinematographers working right now, and has great practical stunts and effects. As unreal as the plot and action are, everything onscreen feels real. One of the big set pieces involving a heist—which we see twice, from two different points of view—is especially well-staged and exciting. The costumes and locations are stunning, especially scenes set on the Amalfi coast. I also really like Ludwig Göransson’s score, which sounds like one part Hans Zimmer, one part Philip Glass, and several parts Tron: Legacy. (You can listen to the whole thing here.)

Best of all—and the thing that really carries you through some of the denser thickets of plot and inversion—the acting is terrific, especially Pattinson and Branagh. Pattinson, whose character Neil has a lot of secrets, is even better on a second viewing, and his final act revelations give the film an extra dose of heart right at the end.

So give Tenet a watch. It’s not Nolan’s best film, but it’s certainly his most daring and complex and, with enough concentration and enough viewings, perhaps his most rewarding.

December 18, 2020

In praise of hoodies

December 18, 2020/ Jordan Poss

Here at the end of the semester I’ve been reading the French historian Régine Pernoud’s 1977 book Those Terrible Middle Ages: Debunking the Myths. A delightful excursus from chapter two:

But we can also, quite simply, illustrate this sense of ornamentation, always renewed on the basis of the same theme, with respect to a detail of everyday life that was very characteristic of a whole mentality: the hood. This was the usual headgear of the period. It goes back to the mists of time, since the medieval hood is nothing but the hood cape of the Celts, our ancestors. This humble cape covering the head and shoulders gave birth to the “cowl” of the monks, but also to most of the headgear of men and women between the sixth and the fifteenth century. It has always and everywhere continued to be worn as a hooded cape, like those of the shepherds on the rood screen of Chartres or the peasants of Jean Bourdichon. But this same hood, placed so as to frame not only the face but the skull, while still composed of the same elements, is found continually renewed, whether by the material of which is its made (wool, velvet, satin) or by the way in which it is draped (the ends drawn forward, held in a turban, enlarged into a two-pointed hat…), so that it gives birth to all headgear, those still seen in frescoes, miniatures, and even in the Fouquet pictures. This hood, whose initial form has not changed but is ever reinvented, is very characteristic of the man who wears it, both through its extreme simplicity and functional character and through that perpetual invention in which the personality of its possessor is expressed. (43-4)

This happened to jibe perfectly with a couple recent conversations with friends about the hoody. Comfortable, adaptable to a variety of climates and social settings, with a range of cuts, colors, functions, accessories, and ways of wearing it that allow the wearer—endlessly and effortlessly, without the show or ostentation of fancier, less useful clothing—to show what kind of man he is: the hoody has made a worthy comeback in the last decades. It deserves better than to be associated with criminals or slackers. Remember that it is a mark of academic achievement to be hooded.

In this as in so many things, we moderns are only rediscovering the wisdom of the medievals.

I have owned many. The first that I bought and wore as a conscious item of fashion and comfort was a North Face hoody in navy blue, which I bought when I was in grad school at Clemson. Five or six years later my wife insisted I replace it, as its long service had made it truly holey. She gave me a dark grey North Face hoody (also a size up, aging being what it is), which has in its turn been replaced by a green one from Carhartt and now one made by LL Bean in navy blue, with a striking plaid lining. All have been full-zip, the only significant improvement upon the early medieval originals.

December 18, 2020

Four years worse than 2020: 1968

December 18, 2020/ Jordan Poss

Today will be the final post in this short series on years worse than 2020. I began Monday with a year of starvation for millions, 1315. Tuesday we looked at one of the worst pandemics in history and its effects on western Europe and the broader world in 1348. Wednesday we took a step back to survey six other years that I could have included—giving us not just four, but ten years demonstrably worse than 2020 in this project. And yesterday we took a deep, grim dive in what is, for my money, the most miserable year in human history, 1945.

Today, we’ll conclude with one more year that is still easily within living memory, a year of political upheaval, campus radicalism, racial violence, dramatic social change, and even worldwide disease:

1968

This was only fifty-two years ago, and if its events feel familiar, if it resembles the world we recognize it is not only thanks to proximity, but because in many ways its upheavals have in their turn given birth to conflicts we struggle over and fuss about online today.

As this is the year closest to our own, and recognizing that anything following even a summary of 1945 like the one yesterday might appear small potatoes by comparison—as well as in the interest of space—I’ve chosen to adopt the same stripped down organizing principle as that used for 1933 in Wednesday’s interlude post.

In southeast Asia

The year began with the siege of Khe Sanh and the Tet Offensive, each of which lasted months and resulted in thousands of killed and wounded, including civilians purged by the Viet Cong when they took South Vietnamese cities. The latter, which came as a shock to an American public given continuous mathematical assurance of impending victory, severely damaged LBJ and his government’s credibility and further stoked the American anti-war movement. Multiple war crimes occurred on both sides including the My Lai massacre, in which US troops killed over 300 civilians. LBJ declared an end to the ongoing American bombing of North Vietnam and, shortly thereafter, shifted the bombing campaign to the Ho Chi Minh Trail, including its routes through Laos. In Cambodia, local Communists affiliated with North Vietnam, the VC, and the Chinese Communist Party founded the Khmer Rouge.

In Europe

In the spring, leftist student protests occurred in countries on both sides of the Iron Curtain, though the largest, most radical, and most destructive were those in Paris and other French cities, a series of events too complicated even to begin to summarize. (Here’s a game attempt from NPR. Here’s a negative reaction from a well known eyewitness to the events.) Two stores in Frankfurt were firebombed by leftwing German terrorist Andreas Baader, who would go on to found the terrorist group RAF (Red Army Faction). Palestinian terrorists hijacked an El Al flight in Rome and diverted it to Algiers, where they held its passengers hostage for forty days.

In the United States

LBJ chose not to seek reelection following the Tet Offensive and poor showings against challengers in the Democratic primaries. A massive outbreak of tornadoes stretching from Arkansas to Iowa and including two F5 tornadoes killed seventy-two people, injured 1200, and destroyed over a thousand homes. A student protest at a segregated bowling alley in South Carolina ended with police firing on the crowd, killing three and wounding almost thirty. Students protesting the Vietnam War and a list of other grievances, inspired by the example of Parisian students, occupied buildings at Columbia University; the administration caved to their demands. A Palestinian terrorist and a white supremacist assassinated Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr, respectively. The latter’s murder, in combination with the events in South Carolina and other violent incidents across the last three summers, triggered race riots in over a hundred cities. The National Guard, US Army, and Marine Corps were called in to reestablish order in some cities, especially Washington, DC. On a lower level, black nationalists engaged in a series of shootouts with police in several major cities including Cleveland and Oakland, and leftist groups fought with police outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, leading to the injury of over 700 people. Hijackers seized control of a Pan Am flight from New York and redirected it to Cuba, the beginning of a five-year period in which 130 American airliners will be hijacked. The November election was not close; Republican Richard Nixon defeated Democrat Hubert Humphrey by a margin of 110 electoral votes. Third party segregationist candidate George Wallace carried five states. In December, the Zodiac killer murdered his first two victims.

Worldwide

The Hong Kong flu pandemic (aka “Mao flu”), a highly contagious virus originating in Asia and brought to the US by troops returning from Vietnam, killed between one and four million people. Over half of America’s 100,000 victims were under 65.

Conclusions

I began this series with a line from CS Lewis that I’ve returned to again and again: “Do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation.” Indeed. And this in the face of the terrifying new technology of the atomic bomb.

This series emerged from that historical understanding—that our problems are by no means unique, nor as severe as we want to believe. But this is not to say that our problems are not problems. Far from it. Let me reiterate what I said in the first post: 2020 has been a bad year for a lot of people. But what should we expect? Though offering many, many different solutions and means of coping, the greatest sages are all in general agreement with one of Jesus’s most overlooked and “unclaimed” promises: “In this world you will have trouble.”

I went into this project last week with a grab bag of ideas about how I would conclude it. I don’t set much stock by my own advice (and you shouldn’t either), but if I were to give any it’d be some of the things I’ve been shouting all this year:

Quit reading the news.
Use social media as little as possible, and ditch Twitter entirely.
Read a book—preferably by someone who’s been dead a while.
Mind your own business.
Keep your nose to the grindstone.
Go outside.

I’ll stand by those. But I’d rather wrap up this grim trek through a widely scattered decade of suffering and death with something more heartening. I settled on three things I think may help to—like the historical perspective I’ve tried to offer in these posts—vaccinate us against despair.

Be tough.

Look back at that verse from the Gospel of John above. That’s a guarantee from the mouth of Christ himself. A healthy adult must learn a certain tough-mindedness. How much of our own childhoods was spent learning this? And yet we lionize and enable whining, the louder the more prominent—a culture of spoiled children clamoring to be heard over each other. Remember that no hero, of whatever variety, ever achieved that status through softness, and certainly not through whining about whatever a given year had brought their way. As Richard Weaver put it:

Since he who longs to achieve does not ask whether the seat is soft or the weather at a pleasant temperature, it is obvious that hardness is a condition of heroism. Exertion, self-denial, endurance, these make the hero, but to the spoiled child they connote the evil of nature and the malice of man.

Toughness can be learned. I think it needs to be relearned on a broad cultural basis. That means embracing difficulty and not complaining—lost arts, arts I consistently fail at, but worth our while.

Be thankful.

For years now I’ve intended to write an essay called “Gratitude: The Historical Virtue.” I’m not sure I’ll ever get beyond the title, which pretty much conveys the message. I value historical perspective not just as a salve for anxiety about the present but for its necessity to gratitude. Without memory we cannot be thankful, and when a culture becomes as present-minded as our own we are bound to become entitled and ill-tempered, having forgotten where our comforts came from and having no perspective with which to view our hardships.

Where to start? Purposefully develop a sense of history, of a past. Start with your own and it will immediately take you outside yourself—to those two people who, whatever their flaws, are directly responsible for your existence. See this as an unmixed gift among whatever list of complaints our culture wants us to populate. As Chesterton wrote:

In being glad about my Birthday, I am being glad about something which I did not myself bring about. In being grateful for my birth, I am grateful for something which has already happened; which happened, sad as it may seem to some, quite a long time ago.

Note the simple historical thinking, and note the gratitude. Begin there and, having begun, don’t stop.

Have faith.

We are an idolatrous people. I’m a big believer in man as Homo religiosus; as Karen Armstrong once put it, “As soon as we became recognizably human, men and women started to create religions. We are meaning-seeking creatures.” So in one sense, to urge ourselves to have faith is redundant, as people will have faith in something—it’s our nature.

But let us not put faith in the weak, fragile, jealous gods that have demanded our loyalty and our blood—or the blood of others—this year, whether they be freedom, a strong economy, and pet theories about the real goings on behind the curtain on one side; safety, equality, and activism on the other; or, for both sides, power, autonomy, scientific certitude and control over the world, a wide selection of terrible political figures, and utterly owning the opposition. That’s not even getting into the broader therapeutic deities of the Universe or, worse, humanity. These gods are immanent; they exist in the here and now and rise and fall with it, which is why they are so jealous and so demanding, especially as they pretend to more and more transcendence.

It’s real transcendence that we need, which means we have a search ahead of us—more hard work. So if we have faith in something outside the tyrannical present, let us search it out with fear and trembling rather than confidence in our own righteousness.

Not only will looking outside ourselves to something beyond this world anchor and steady us in times of strife, for Christians like myself it can include a redemptive side effect, something notably lacking in 2020. To quote more fully from John’s account: “These things I have spoken unto you, that in me ye might have peace. In the world ye shall have tribulation: but be of good cheer; I have overcome the world.”

Be tough. Be thankful. Have faith. And most of all, be of good cheer—a real counterculture, the revolution we all really need.

Besides, 2020 ain’t over yet.

December 17, 2020

Four years worse than 2020: 1945

December 17, 2020/ Jordan Poss

This is the fourth and penultimate post in this short series on years worse than 2020. We began with 1315, a year of natural disaster and continent-wide starvation; continued with 1348, a year of pandemic like our own, but exponentially worse; and followed that yesterday with brief looks at six other terrible years I considered including. We resume with two years from within living memory. I start with the year that I think best qualifies to be called hell on earth:

1945

For Americans, who lost 400,000 servicemen killed but remained relatively untouched by a war fought on the other side of two oceans, it is easy to identify 1945 with V-E Day and V-J Day and imagine people cheering in the streets and sailors kissing nurses in Times Square. But that’s a moment in one corner of the globe at the tail end of the bloodiest war in all of human history.

The war in Europe

About that war: As 1945 began, in Western Europe the Battle of the Bulge, a massive German counterattack that aimed to break through the Allied lines and sunder the British and the Americans, had petered out and January saw the mopping up operations. American troops, angered over German massacres of American prisoners during the battle, committed their own massacres of surrendering Germans.

As the western Allies pressed across the Rhine and into Germany, they discovered Nazi labor camps, the most notorious being Dachau, liberated by the Americans, and Bergen-Belsen, liberated by the British. Skeletal survivors greeted the soldiers who captured the camps. The soldiers discovered railroad cars or storage buildings full of emaciated corpses, and sometimes neat rows of prisoners executed in batches before the guards abandoned the camp. At Dachau, some of the guards remained behind. The American infantry who caught them machine gunned them.

On the Eastern or Russian Front, the Soviets began massive assaults on the German lines in two zones—along the Vistula and Oder Rivers and against the German redoubts in East Prussia, offensives that committed four million men to the fighting, before making the final drive on Berlin. Along the way the Red Army liberated several concentration camps, including the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau, which the Nazis had evacuated at the beginning of they by sending the surviving prisoners on forced marches to the west. Thousands died. Some of the female survivors liberated by the Russians were raped.

A refugee crisis began as soon as Russian forces entered German territories like East Prussia or Pomerania, with millions of German civilians fleeing ahead of the Red Army. Many went on foot in the dead of winter. Eyewitnesses wrote of women staggering westward clutching babies that had already frozen to death. Those that were caught by the Red Army were brutalized; from the beginnings of the 1945 offensives through the fall of Berlin and beyond, Russian soldiers raped as many as two million women, sometimes gang-raping a single woman over a dozen times and raping any females from grandmothers to eight-year olds. German evacuations of civilians along the Baltic coast in Operation Hannibal resulted in the largest ever maritime evacuation, moving over two million people to the west, as well as the largest ever loss of life from a sinking ship, when a Russian submarine torpedoed the Wilhelm Gustloff, killing almost 10,000 people, most of them civilian women and children.

By the time Berlin fell, Hitler had killed himself and taken millions with him—including hundreds of thousands of old men and boys conscripted as militia, the vast majority of whom were slaughtered. In just the three offensives it took the Soviets to capture Berlin, a quarter million Soviet soldiers died and almost 900,000 were wounded. Half a million German soldiers were captured, many of them not to be released until the mid-1950s, and an unknown number—but likely in the hundreds of thousands—were killed. And reflect again on the civilians caught in between. Thousands committed suicide, sometimes en masse.

The war in the air

The air forces of the Allied countries continued strategic bombing campaigns both of Germany and Japan, wreaking widespread destruction and massive civilian casualties. The most notorious single incident in Europe occurred in February of 1945, when Dresden was annihilated overnight, killing over 20,000 people.

Meanwhile, long-range bombers stationed on Pacific islands captured from the Japanese in the previous years of the war—and always captured with heavy loss—began fire-bombing Japanese cities. Incendiary bombs of the kind dropped on Dresden had even more devastating effect in the timber- and paper-constructed houses of Japan. In one nighttime raid in March, firebombing destroyed sixteen square miles of Tokyo and killed at least 90,000 people—the most destructive air raid of the war, even including those that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Piles of bodies clogged the streets where civilians fleeing the fires bottlenecked and were trapped. Most of the corpses were too badly burned to be identified and were buried in mass graves.

67 cities in Japan were targeted with firebombing, and some suffered much greater destruction than Tokyo. Millions who survived the bombings were left homeless.

The war against Japan

Through the Spring and Summer in the Pacific the Allies—chiefly the British and Americans, but with help from other Allied countries including offensives launched by the Chinese—pressed in toward the Japanese home islands and did so with renewed vigor following the surrender of Germany. The British pressed through the jungles of Burma; the Americans landed on the islands of the Philippines and the volcanic island of Iwo Jima. The US Marine Corps committed over 100,000 Marines to the latter, an island of eight square miles, and lost almost 7,000 killed and 20,000 wounded. Almost all of the Japanese defenders were wiped out.

Worse yet was the Battle of Okinawa, which lasted from April 1 to mid-June and saw American casualties, both killed and wounded, doubled. These losses were controversial at the time and would only prove more so following the revelation of the atomic bomb.

The two bombs that ended the war are probably the most notorious single thing to come out of 1945, and justifiably so. The figures are murky, owing both to the nature of the bombs, which vaporized their targets instantaneously, and to the political debate surrounding them, which has tempted people to fudge the numbers both upward and downward for decades. But by a conservative estimate, the bomb dropped on Hiroshima instantaneously killed 70,000 people and wounded as many more; the bomb dropped on Nagasaki killed at least 35,000 and wounded almost twice as many. And this is not even to raise the issue of the firestorms started by both bombs, or the much longer-lasting effects of radiation poisoning.

The aftermath

And so the war ended. But the killing did not. The German refugee crisis was ongoing and would continue for years, as “ethnic cleansing” purged the bloodlands of Eastern Europe of unwanted elements, especially ethnic Germans. A million Germans would die in the year after the war ended. Eastern Europe saw widespread ethnic cleansing, including waves of anti-Semitic violence, even before the war had ended, violence to which Soviet authorities turned a blind eye, often allowing it continue for years.

The Soviets were busy, after all; they continued systematic purges both of their own ranks—it was at this time that Soviet authorities netted Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, who had served in the East Prussian campaign, for criticizing Stalin in a private letter and sent him to the Gulag—and of any possible resistance to Soviet overlordship of the lands they had “liberated” from the Nazis. They were really fighting two wars—one against the Nazis and one against any local resistance that arose to reclaim control of their countries following the expulsion of the Nazis. In some places, especially remote regions of Yugoslavia and Hungary, the fighting would continue into the 1950s. The last Polish soldier fighting the Soviets would not be killed until 1963.

Ultimately 70-85 million people were killed in the war itself—a number that has been continually revised upward. The majority of these deaths were civilians and the vast majority of those were Chinese and Russian, many of the latter being victims of the Holocaust. Here are some very safe, lowball estimates of the death toll. For the many who apparently like infographics, let me recommend this chart, which also includes some conservative estimates but is carefully designed to convey the proportion of dead from each country pulled into the war. This widely shared video makes a similar point. Averaged out across the six years from 1939 to 1945, 27,000 died per day.

And, in addition to the manmade destruction that peaked in this year, there were typhoons and earthquakes.

Just the beginning

The events of 1945 brought about the end of World War II, to be sure, but history does not consist of discrete episodes that begin and end on precise dates, and, as I hope I’ve made clear in the descriptions above, 1945 not only saw tremendous upheaval and loss of life but set up future conflicts, disasters, and upheavals. The entire endgame of the war created the conditions out of which the Cold War would emerge, including not only the overarching US vs USSR conflict but the many proxy wars in which satellites of the First and Second Worlds would bleed each other for fifty years.

To name just one example, in 1945 a Communist guerrilla leader who had spent years fighting the Japanese occupiers of his country declared the newly liberated French territory of Indochina the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. That leader was Ho Chi Minh.

That will prove relevant to this series in its final installment, tomorrow.

Four years worse than 2020: An Interlude

December 16, 2020/ Jordan Poss

Monday I began a series on four years worse than 2020. That day I covered 1315, a year of famine and starvation. Yesterday we looked at 1348, the first full year of the bubonic plague epidemic in Europe commonly known as the Black Death. This year struck a little closer to home, albeit with much greater mortality and severer political, economic, and cultural effects. Today I want to take a step back for

An interlude

I had initially planned on including five years in this series, but lowered it to four as what began as one blog post grew longer and longer and longer. But even narrowing “worse years than 2020” to five was difficult at first. Here are six I considered including, both from the ancient and the more recent past, but that I want to at least look at briefly as way of further broadening our perspective.

1177 BC

I decided not to include this one because there’s no set, specific year for the Late Bronze Age Collapse. This is just the year the archaeologist Eric H Cline used as the title of his excellent book 1177 BC: The Year Civilization Collapsed. Invasion, warfare, the widespread and destructive raiding of the mysterious Sea Peoples, and natural disasters drove the civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean—Egypt, Mycenaean Greece, the Hittites, the Canaanites, and others—into total collapse, with a domino effect that took down the Assyrians and Babylonians.

AD 536

I include this date because I had several people independently mention it to me during the earlier parts of the year, when there was more hysteria and less numbness than now. 536, like 1177 BC above, is a bit of a catch-all for a series of events that played out over a decade or so in the 6th century, including a massive volcanic eruption that caused years of climatic disruption with knock-on effects including crop failure and the first major round of bubonic plague in Europe (“Justinian’s plague,” so called). Serious demographic decline, economic stress and collapse, military upheaval, and other problems resulted everywhere from Britain to China. This year was popularized as a “worst ever” by an article in Science a few years ago. You can read that here.

1863

To look at the United States alone:

At the beginning of the year the Emancipation Proclamation went into effect, a measure that has been lionized in the mythology of the national civic religion but actually accomplished little and was extremely unpopular, creating further upset in a North still reeling from the losses of defeats like Fredericksburg late in the previous year. Resentment over the draft and the unpopular shift of the war aims toward emancipation led to the New York City draft riots, racially-inflected mob violence that ripped through the city for almost a week. Several hundred were killed and many more beaten, including freedmen living in the city. The threat of violence was so serious that at one point a Gatling gun was even deployed on the roof of the pro-draft New York Times’s offices.

The Confederacy continued to struggle with supply problems and runaway inflation, and the heavy taxation necessary to support the war effort as well as draft laws viewed as tyrannical caused widespread dissatisfaction among ordinary Southerners. Women in overcrowded, underfed Richmond rioted when turned away by the governor of Virginia, who refused to hear their complaints. Numerous similar incidents occurred in other cities across the South.

On the front, Confederate guerrilla William Quantrill carried out his second raid on Lawrenceville, Kansas; several of the largest and most consequential battles of the American Civil War took place including Chancellorsville, the siege of Vicksburg, the battles of Lookout Mountain and Missionary Ridge; and the two bloodiest battles of the war, Gettysburg and Chickamauga. Just the latter two accounted for over 85,000 casualties.

1916

The years of the Spanish Flu took more lives but have been talked about a lot this year, but 1916 was no less awful. World War I looms large as it continued to rage on multiple European fronts and in Africa and the Middle East. The wasteful Gallipoli Campaign ended in failure, the Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire, a revolt that had as its aim the creation of a unified Arab nation-state and ended in the partition of the Ottoman Empire by the Western powers, began; and the Battles of the Somme and Verdun took place which, between the two of them, killed over 600,000 men and wounded many more; and the Russians launched even bloodier offensives in the east. The Armenian genocide, begun by the Turks the year before, continued, with hundreds of thousands more Armenians killed in concentration camps, forced marches through the Syrian desert or in harsh winter conditions, and thousands of women raped. Natural disasters made the war even worse, as on the alpine Italian front, where avalanches in the Dolomites buried thousands. Elsewhere, the United States became further involved in the Mexican Revolution, committing thousands of troops in futile border raids to catch Pancho Villa, as well as invading the Dominican Republic; and the Easter Rising occurred in Dublin.

1933

In Germany: the seizure of power by Hitler and the Nazi Party; the construction of the first Nazi concentration camps; the establishment of the Gestapo; the arrest and brutalization of Jews and political opponents; and the first moves toward rearmament, war, and the Holocaust.

In the United States: peak unemployment as part of the Great Depression and the first Dust Bowl storms; the beginnings of years of political controversy (for those who are into that kind of thing, especially where it concerns the Supreme Court) as FDR is sworn in.

In the Soviet Union: the completion of the White Sea-Baltic Canal, an infrastructure project using political prisoners that killed over 25,000; and peak starvation as a result of a man-made famine in the Ukraine, a punitive measure undertaken by Stalin the knowledge of which is suppressed with the active collusion of Western journalists. The famine ultimately kills over three million through starvation.

Natural disasters: earthquakes in California, China, and Japan, the latter with a resulting tsunami.

2001

This one really shouldn’t need an explanation. Not for my generation, at least.

Tomorrow and Friday we’ll discuss the remaining two years that I’ve chosen for this project. Both of these years occurred within living memory.

December 15, 2020

Four years worse than 2020: 1348

December 15, 2020/ Jordan Poss

Death comes for a peddler in a woodcut by Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497-1543)

Yesterday, heartily sick of complaints that 2020 is the “worst year ever” and hoping to bring a sense of historical perspective to our times, I began a short series on four years that were demonstrably worse than 2020. The first, 1315, was a year of famine and starvation. This, in the following generation, was a year of epidemic—something with which we are all too familiar, albeit on a much smaller scale.

1348

The Plague or Black Death, the second major epidemic of bubonic plague in recorded history, devastated both Europe and Asia. I know the most about the European outbreak, so that’s where I’ll concentrate for this post, but be aware that much of what I’m describing occurred in the Middle East and as far away as China, as well. The world was much more deeply interconnected back then than is often assumed.

Already under way

But the Plague arrived in a Europe that already had problems. Agriculture was still recovering from the famines of the 1310s and 20s and from the economic, demographic, and social disruptions that resulted. Politically there was upheaval in Italy, as usual; the already weakened Byzantine Empire was fighting a civil war; the Reconquista, the Christian reconquest of Spain from the Muslims who had invaded in the 8th century, had recommenced after one of many lulls; the Swedes were at war with Novgorod, the kingdom that would eventually grow into the Russia we know and love; and the Hundred Years’ War between England and France was in its tenth year. Religiously, the Church remained mired in controversy over the Avignon Papacy, a seventy-year period in which a series of popes served—in France, rather than Rome—as yes-men to the French king, weakening the power and moral authority of the office of Bishop of Rome and worsening preexisting political crises.

So why 1348? While, as I mentioned above, the Plague entered Europe through port cities like Messina and Split in the fall of 1347, I choose 1348 because by the summer the Plague had reached much of Western Europe, with cases as far north as England. The effects were already severe. COVID-19 and the Plague are both highly contagious, virulent diseases. But where COVID kills about 1.9% of those it infects (based on my reading of data at the CDC and Johns Hopkins as of today), the Plague had a mortality rate possibly as high as 80%. (In American records from before the availability of antibiotics, the rate was 66%, still catastrophically high.) The Plague eventually killed a third to over half of the population of Europe—an estimated 75,000,000-200,000,000 people in Europe and Asia combined.

What happened

So much for statistics. What happened in Europe in 1348 in concrete terms?

First, the Plague attacked the human body. The bacterium responsible, Yersenia pestis, can infect a human in several ways, most famously through flea bite but also through airborne transmission or touch, resulting in bubonic, pneumonic, or septicemic plague. The three related infections attack the body in different ways. According to medieval historian Morris Bishop:

In the bubonic plague the bacilli in the bloodstream settle in the lymph glands. They act against the walls of the blood vessels, producing hemorrhages, dark patches that eventually cover the entire body, and the tongue turns black. . . . Under the arms and in the groin appear swellings and carbuncles, the buboes that give the plague its correct name. Sufferers from the bubonic form of this disease occasionally survive, but most die within three days. In the septicemic form, the blood is fatally infected. The pneumonic form causes gangrenous inflammation of the throat and lungs, resulting in violent pains in the chest, vomiting and spitting of blood, and a foul smell. Victims of the pneumonic form almost always die; fortunately death comes to them very quickly.

We’ve discussed the mortality above. Now imagine watching the spread of this disease among your region, your parish, you neighbors, and your family, and the winnowing that followed—and how suddenly it began.

The food supply was affected as the Plague struck the peasantry. Theft and other crime, as in the Great Famine, increased. Prices rose. Kings could not marshal armies—the Hundred Years’ War entered a de facto truce. Entire families died. Others abandoned sick family members to their fates. Priests and doctors died while attending to victims. Cities and villages emptied, further spreading the disease to the countryside. Wolves scavenged among the corpses. So many people died that they could not all be given customary burial, and mass graves became common. According to an English chronicler writing in Rochester:

A great mortality . . . destroyed more than a third of the men, women and children. . . . Alas, this mortality devoured such a multitude of both sexes that no one could be found to carry the bodies of the dead to burial, but men and women carried the bodies of their own little ones to church on their shoulders and threw them into mass graves, from which arose such a stink that it was barely possible for anyone to go past a churchyard.

Here’s a contemporary depiction of a mass burial in Belgium. Here’s a modern photo of a partially excavated mass grave in France. Note that in the medieval depiction from Tournai the living have at least been able to build coffins for the dead. Even this luxury would not last. Here’s Boccaccio, in the shockingly vivid introductory passages of the Decameron, describing the effects of the Plague in Florence:

And many would meet their end in the public streets both day and night, and many others, who met their ends in their own houses, would first come to the attention of their neighbors because of the stench of their rotting corpses more than anything else; and with these and others all dying, there were corpses everywhere. And the neighbors always followed a particular routine, more out of fear of being corrupted by the corpse than out of charity for the deceased. These, either by themselves or with the help of others when available, would carry the corpse of the recently deceased from the house and leave it lying in the street outside where, especially in the morning, a countless number of corpses could be seen lying about. Funeral biers would come, and if there was a shortage of funeral biers, some other flat table or something or other would be used to place the corpses on. Nor did it infrequently happen that a single funeral bier would carry two or three people at the same time, but rather one frequently saw on a single bier a husband and a wife, two or three brothers, a father and a son, or some other relatives. And an infinite number of times it happened that two priests bearing a cross would be going to bury someone when three or four other biers, being borne by bearers, would follow behind them; the priests would believe themselves to be heading for a single burial, and would find, when they arrived at the churchyard, that they had six or eight more burials following behind them. Nor were there ever tears or candles or any company honoring the dead; things had reached such a point, that people cared no more for the death of other people than they did for the death of a goat: for this thing, death, which even the wise never accept with patience, even though it occur rarely and relatively unobtrusively, had appeared manifestly to even the smallest intellects, but the catastrophe was so unimaginably great that nobody really cared.

That’s just an excerpt, selected arbitrarily from the horribly detailed descriptions he gives. Read more here.

Fake news

And, then as today, there were conspiracy theories. (Incidentally, the story of “thieves oil” we’ve all heard from the MLM ladies at church is nonsense.) Notoriously, some directed their suspicions toward Europe’s Jews, whom a widespread rumor accused of poisoning wells. Despite a papal bull placing the Jews under the Pope’s protection and arguing vigorously against the illogical rumors, anti-Semitic pogroms broke out and some Jews were lynched or executed on trumped up charges or confessions extracted under torture, as in these accounts from Geneva and Strasbourg.

The consequences

The year 1348 saw the Plague already working destruction to its fullest, and it had not yet run its course. By the end December of 1349 the Plague had reached Scotland, Denmark, Norway, and the heavily populated river valleys of central Germany. By the end of 1350 it had reached al of Scandinavia as well as the Baltic.

In addition to outbreaks of violence against Jews, other popular movements emerged. German penitents known as flagellants took to the roads. According to a French chronicler,

They were men who did public penance and scourged themselves with whips of hard knotted leather with little iron spikes. Some made themselves bleed very badly between the shoulders and some foolish women had cloths ready to catch the blood and smear it on their eyes, saying that it was miraculous blood. While they were doing penance, they sang very mournful songs about the nativity and passion of Our Lord. The object of this penance was to entreat God to put a stop to the mortality.

The flagellants were excommunicated.

With the ranks of every class depleted and the agricultural economy a shambles, authority tottered, and the generations after the Plague saw multiple peasant uprisings. The largest and most famous occurred in France in 1358, ten years after the time we’ve discussed in this post, and in England in 1381—the famed rebellion under Wat Tyler, the participants of which were also fired with the populist religious teachings of John Ball. Both uprisings destroyed and were destroyed in their turn.

Between 30 and 60% of the population died regardless of age, sex, or social status. Everyone lost someone—a reality reflected in the art of the next several generations—and Europe would stagger through these years and the rest of the century, a civilization hobbled by the chunks taken out of its body at every level.

Tomorrow we’ll step back for have a brief interlude in which I talk about a few of the years I thought about including but didn’t.

Four years worse than 2020: 1315

December 14, 2020/ Jordan Poss

“You know what I’m craving? A little perspective.” —Anton Ego in Ratatouille — “You know what I’m craving? A little perspective.” —Anton Ego in *Ratatouille*

A week or two ago the Babylon Bee published the story “2020 Rated Worst Year Ever, Provided You Never Lived At Any Other Time In History”—a precision strike piece of satire. Not to be outdone, but missing the joke, last week Time published this.

The Worst Year Ever. While I thought perhaps the internet-inflected childishness might just be an attention-grabber, the cover story embraces it. The author of the piece, a film critic, makes a formal acknowledgement that “[t]here have been worse years in U.S. history, and certainly worse years in world history,” such as those of the Spanish Flu, the Depression, or World War II. But from there the writer turns inward, self-ward, implying that, where previous generations were somehow prepared for the Spanish flu or the Depression, we “have had no training wheels for this.”

That metaphor says more than I think the writer intends.

Back in the Spring, when all of this was just getting started, I shared a post on CS Lewis’s essay “On Living in an Atomic Age.” That essay is worth revisiting in its entirety, but let me quote one of its great lines and leave it at that:

“[D]o not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation.”

— CS Lewis, On Living in an Atomic Age

Lewis’s essay was written and delivered to students in the late 1940s, then living with the new and unprecedented fear of atomic warfare. The line above, which comes early in the essay, introduces what I think is the most helpful concept in the essay: perspective.

With that in mind, in September I began to fiddle with a blog post about the many, many years that are demonstrably worse than 2020. That Time piece finally irritated me enough to complete it—not as a single post, but as a short series I’ll be sharing this week. What I hope to accomplish with these posts is what I hope to accomplish anytime I get to talk about history: to offer perspective, to participate in broadening the range of our experiences so that the now, the tyrannical present, cannot dominate us with its fleeting concerns, however serious they may be. “One of the great merits of history is that it takes us out of ourselves,” Christopher Dawson once wrote. A vaccine against the hysteria of the present, if you like.

2020 has not been a good year. But there have been worse years—much, much worse years, unimaginably worse years—and it is not hard for a history teacher to think of a few. Here are four—two from the more distant past and, since it became abundantly clear this year that many do not care about anything that happened before the present, two from within living memory.

1315

The obvious choice for a bad year in the 14th century is some date in the late 1340s because of the Plague. Granted—and we’ll take a look at that shortly. But I’m starting with 1315, as it was not only a bad year in its own right but began a century of calamity.

How it happened

Contrary to “Dark Ages” myths, the early Middle Ages was a time of flourishing and growth. Thanks in part to the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from the 10th to the 13th century, growing seasons lengthened, crop yields increased, and the population of Europe exploded. That changed in the 14th century. After the Medieval Warm Period ended in the mid-1200s the summers slowly shortened and average temperatures slowly, slowly fell, eventually to bottom out in the “Little Ice Age.” 1315 is the year western Europe felt the first serious effects.

What happened

First, it began to rain. It rained and rained and barely stopped—for two years. Flooding became a continent-wide problem, especially in many already marshy coastal areas, and many coastal settlements, including well-established and prosperous towns, were partially or totally abandoned.

Most seriously for a world built entirely on farming and the stewardship and control of farmland, agriculture became nearly impossible. There was too much rain and therefore not enough sunlight, the temperatures were too cool, and even those crops that could be planted failed, either not germinating or rotting on the stalk. In other places the rains reduced fields to mud or washed the topsoil away. Other broad, flat regions of ploughland in northern France or England became lakes. Hay could not be kept dry and so livestock starved for lack of fodder or succumbed to disease.

The lack of food caused prices to rise exponentially and the vast peasant population of Europe was reduced to scavenging for wild plants, eating their livestock—even draught animals like horses. Perhaps as much as 80% of livestock died of disease or were eaten during the famine. Some ate dogs, pigeons, or bird droppings. The most desperate ate their seed grain, the grain set aside for the next year’s planting, thus only postponing starvation. Others, it was darkly rumored in many places, resorted to cannibalism.

According to one English chronicler:

Four pennies worth of coarse bread was not enough to feed a common man for one day. The usual kinds of meat, suitable for eating, were too scarce; horse meat was precious; plump dogs were stolen. And, according to many reports, men and women in many places secretly ate their own children.

Armies could not march or fight because the ground was so swampy, and the king of England, perhaps the wealthiest kingdom in northwestern Europe in these centuries, could not find food during some of his progresses through the country. Grain proved so scarce in his kingdom that even brewing beer was prohibited. The peasantry, unable to survive in the villages and on the manors to which they were bound, sometimes abandoned their ancestral homes to live wild or to roam in search of work and food. As the chronicler quoted above noted: “There can be no doubt that the poor wasted away when even the rich were constantly hungry.”

And, as I mentioned earlier, 1315 was just the beginning. The rains continued through 1316 and into 1317 before the weather returned to its more accustomed patterns.

The consequences

But the damage had been done. Widespread starvation led to a breakdown of social order, with sharp rises not only in prices (for those mostly concerned economic effects) but in crime and violence, food riots, and even the prevalence of conspiracy theories—rumors that so-and-so in the village, often the miller, had a secret stash of grain, sometimes leading to lynching and disappointment when the stash was not found—and, of course, most fundamentally, a massive loss of life. According to historian Christopher Given-Wilson, in his short biography of England’s king at the time, Edward II:

Around 10 per cent of the population starved to death, not just in England but in much of northern Europe, a terrible human tragedy compounded by war and social unrest. Flocks of sheep were decimated, and wool exports, the basis of England’s customs revenue, fell by 40 per cent between 1313 and 1316.

Even those that got enough to eat to survive remained more susceptible, owing to the wet weather and their dramatically diminished nutrition, to disease. The population growth typical of the Medieval Warm Period was not only ended but reversed, with huge numbers dying as a result of the famine. The consequences were not limited to the time of the famine itself, though, as it took years for European agriculture to recover, with many localized famines in the coming decades.

And, finally, the Great Famine of 1315-17 left Europe—its economy, its political and social institutions, and most of all its people—weakened ahead of the arrival of the Plague.

We’ll talk about that tomorrow.

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1348

Already under way

What happened

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1315

How it happened

What happened

The consequences

Further reading

Jordan M. Poss

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