From Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood to Bonhoeffer, and Back: Cheap and Costly Grace

This is the first in what might become a series of blog entries that my participation in a reading group called “The Rise of Bonhoeffer” has inspired.

Over the past few years, our culture has turned its attention back to an intriguing cultural figure from the 1960s all the way up until the dawn of the twenty-first century – Mr. Rogers. A couple of films, including the documentary Won’t You Be My Neighbor? (2018) and the feature film A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood (2019), starring no less than Tom Hanks as the unique television host, have introduced this figure to a new generation of viewers.

One question that emerges, either looking back at old episodes or viewing the documentary or the 2019 film, is how Mr. Rogers’ program could have been so popular. There is little in the way of intrigue or plot twist. The outcomes are as predictable as what one finds in such black-and-white sitcoms as Leave it to Beaver, in which the audience was expected to absorb and adopt a moral lesson from the show.

A quick scroll through the available programs on television at any one time shows that Mr. Rogers’ sort of program has vanished from our list of options. True crime, dystopian movies, police dramas, reality shows, and sports (mostly pre-recorded right now, thanks to the COVID-19 pandemic that has the vast majority of pro sports shut down) abound. You can watch Amy Schumer learn to cook, if you really want to. You can watch Mark Cuban and his fellow Sharks debate the latest investment proposal that has come before them. If you look at children’s programming, animation is king, which makes a live-action show like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood even more of an anachronism.

It is likely that the popularity of this show has little to do with the format, though, and much to do with the message. In an interview on his podcast Otherppl with author Ottessa Moshfegh, Brad Listi spends some time discussing this phenomenon. What they come up with is intriguing – the essential difference between Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and the rest of the media that we consume is that this children’s show has a message that has failed to resonate with far too many enough of as adults: that we are perfectly acceptable just as we are. We do not need to change the way we look, the way we talk, the way we think. There is nothing we need to buy, nothing we need to sell, nothing we need to commodify, in order to have worth.

That is a revolutionary message, and it is one that we need to hear.

However, for the generation that grew up watching Mr. Rogers take us to the Land of Make-Believe, this message did not resonate, did not last, with nearly as many of us as it could have, or perhaps should have. That one voice, of course, ran into the chorus of voices that greet us in the later years of elementary school and beyond, shouting, whispering, insisting that of course we are not enough, that of course we need to do more, be more, change more, to suit what the world would have of us.

Another question that Mr. Listi and Ms. Moshfegh discussed in their conversation was what it would take for human behavior to undertake a fundamental shift so that our species could get off the crash course that we apparently have with environmental catastrophe, with the next war, or so that our species could finally learn to coexist together. It has never been easy, not since Cain decided to take his brother Abel’s life because Cain thought his sacrifice should have been pleasing enough for God, but it wasn’t – but Abel’s was.

We’ve never been enough at ease with ourselves to interact peaceably with others long enough for social harmony to take root. Why is this?

Dietrich Bonhoeffer offers one response to this question. In his book The Cost of Discipleship, he differentiates between what he calls “cheap grace” and “costly grace,” and it is in the difference between these two ideas that one can find the start to an answer to this question. He uses the word “sin” quite a bit in the opening chapter to his book, and it is a word that has largely disappeared from our collective consciousness, whether one is part of the Church or not. It has taken on a dusty sort of character, as distant from most modernity as the King James Version of the Bible.

When we hear the word “sin,” we worry that other people are going to judge us. Perhaps, though, it is an awareness of our own imperfections that sits at the base of this worry. And so because of this fundamental unease in our own personas, many of us follow one of two paths: we turn our awareness of sin outward, so that we identify it easily in others, and upbraid them for their shortcomings, or we conclude that everyone else is also imperfect, and so we end up justifying ourselves by deciding that, since imperfection is common to humanity, there is no higher aspiration that is worth pursuing.

If we turn back to Bonhoeffer’s dichotomy between cheap and costly grace, we come across this from his writing: “Cheap grace is the grace we bestow upon ourselves.” Costly grace, though, is “the gift that must be asked for, the door at which one must knock.”

Both of the paths I mentioned above are different forms of “cheap” grace. When I focus on what others are failing to do, I declare myself better than them, holier than them. In other words, I justify myself. If I decide that imperfection is perfectly fine, then I’m also justifying myself, deciding for myself that what I have done is enough, since no one else is bothering to do any better.

So how does one knock? For Bonhoeffer, the answer is following the call of Jesus Christ into obedience. He talks about the fact that people who struggle with moral dilemmas simply lack clarity of focus in his book, and how often the rationales that we use to keep ourselves from obeying Christ have to do with our own self-involvement.

Some elements of the Church in the United States constantly complain that they are under attack, that they suffer from oppression, but often that feeling comes not from control of their own religious practices but the tolerance, in a society designed to welcome practitioners of any religion – even no religion, of practices with which they do not agree. Perhaps a first step toward bringing a message of “costly grace” would be a realization, and an affirmation, that everyone in the world is equal in terms of worth. All are God’s creatures; all are called to be disciples. In other words, there is no one on the planet who is unworthy of God’s love.

There is no greater shock to the system than the realization of self-worth. Authentic self-worth does not mean that it is acceptable to be mediocre; instead, it is a calling to live up to standards that are not only possible but are demanded. That focus on one’s calling makes it impossible to notice the shortcomings of others in a way that is anything but encouraging.

One word that resonates from both Mr. Rogers and the Bible is the concept of the neighbor. Bonhoeffer wrote that “Neighborliness is not a quality in other people; it is simply their claim on ourselves.” Acknowledging our own worth while embracing the challenge it presents, and allowing others room to realize their worth and pursue their own challenges, would lead to a chorus of knocking on the door of costly grace, the sort of chorus that brings transformation.

The Genius of Genius.com

There are quite a few different interactive websites where you can take a look at texts and add your own comments, but one of the more diverse is Genius.com. It was primarily set up as a place to look at musical lyrics, but people have taken it upon themselves to add different passages from literature, whether that comes from poetry, drama and even entire chapters of novels put up at a time. Then there are the comments that people have put up over time as they have taken on the texts.

This is not a particularly literary website in terms of comments, at least not in the works that I pulled up. When I searched for The Great Gatsby and clicked on Chapter 1, I was sent to this page. There are not a lot of annotations of a literary nature there at this writing, but an interesting feature is that the text is broken down into sentences and even phrases, and you can choose different highlighted text points to insert the annotation that you have in mind.

This is what inspired me to put together my digital humanities project — an interactive version of “A Christmas Carol” for teachers and students to interact with as they study the novella. I decided to establish this separately from Genius because I had a different audience besides the general public; I wanted to see what other teachers have to say about different elements of the novel, and I would also like to see what my own students have to say about the text should I teach this book again.

When I took a look at poetry, when I searched for different authors, I found a wealth of different choices — as expected, they were mostly the more popular works from those authors’ repertoires. Here, for example, is the page dedicated to the works of Edgar Allan Poe.

How could English teachers use this? It is a website that is fairly easy to use, and the fact that the kids can also look up their favorite songs and see the lyrics (and add comments to them) could help to cross that bridge between the literature the kids are forced to study and the literature the kids hum every day on the way to class.

“Neuromancer” and “Ready Player One” — The Frog Boiling in Water

For my Digital Humanities class, I was on an airplane a few months ago reading William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer, which came out in 1984 and became the first novel to collect the trifecta of the Hugo Award, the Philip K. Dick Award and the Nebula Award. One of the pioneering works of the cyberpunk genre, this was one of the first stories that looked at the ways in which virtual reality could formulate a major part of the plot.

At the same time while I was reading Neuromancer, my girlfriend was watching the movie Ready Player One — the film adaptation of the Ernest Grimes novel that details yet another journey through virtual reality.

Both stories dealt with quests through virtual reality, but their tone different significantly. In Neuromancer, the main character is Case, a burned-out hustler looking to make his way after having his central nervous system ruined by a poison (payback for stealing from his client on a hacking excursion). He is offered a cure for this damage in exchange for his hacking services, and the story reveals how his client is really a burned-out former general himself, and then potentially just a front for some sort of artificial intelligence, and the journey that his quest takes him through pushes him all the way to a meeting with the Neuromancer, who tries to pull people into a sort of limbo, but does not always succeed. The pessimism latent in this foray through a world of drugs, pain and only occasional and accidental intimacy rang true in the mid-1980s and continues to ring true in our own time.

The ongoing pessimism in our culture has apparently taken such deep roots that dystopian trips through artificial intelligence now form young adult entertainment. I enjoyed both Neuromancer and Ready Player One — in the latter, “Parzival” is the screen name for one Wade Owen Watts (initials = WOW), whose quest through 1980s popular culture and video game lore takes him to the top of a contest pursuing control of the OASIS, a virtual reality network where most people in the novel spend their time because the real world has become so depressing. There are subtle changes: the name Parzival takes the idea of the quest back to one of its heroic roots; the truth that Wade learns is the importance of taking risks for true love. In Neuromancer, the importance of true love also appears, but its reclamation is impossible.

Transforming the dystopian quest into the stuff of the After School Special suggests that assumptions about our future that are largely dark have become commonly accepted. Novels like 1984 and Brave New World were groundbreaking and shocking at the time; novels like Neuromancer added the element of virtual reality; novels like Ready Player One, the Hunger Games trilogy and the Maze Runner series show us how deeply ingrained the expectation for a dark future has become, to the point where we inculcate it in the fiction that tweens read. While quest narratives have been a part of literature for as long as there has been literature, the propagation of dystopia as a conceit cannot help, one imagines, prepare us to accept the worst when we switch over from Netflix to the news.

Thoughts on Week 4

I was sorry not to be able to attend the Week 4 class in person. I continue to get a kick out of the ins and outs of dual modality, broadcasting and all that. In my own classroom, we received some new projectors that are supposed to transform our classrooms into oases of technological greatness, so that we can actually use our document cameras and show (albeit brief) clips of video. Let’s just say that the jury is still out, at least as long as ambient light comes into the room.

I have enjoyed the rigorous precision of the rhetorical precis form. I am using these with my AP juniors to help them corral their thoughts in a direction that is exact and concise at the same time. Now that they are becoming more accustomed to the form, they are more comfortable writing more with less verbiage, which is one way to help yourself get through the AP test without collapsing.

On my blog, I have written a couple of posts dealing with eversion, and I have also posted a couple of rhetorical precis along with a look at a scholarly article.

For the midterm project, I am thinking about putting together an interactive version of The Yellow Wall-paper, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. I have been intrigued by the website Genius and the way in which it allows interactions across various texts that have passed into the public domain, and I would like to create a product that allows students and teachers to converse remotely about the story, but also to allow teachers to assess student responses with the text before them, and then also for teachers to interact with copies that other teachers have made, in order to make the instructional content much more robust, as multiple teachers working on the same text would result in a lot less re-creation of the wheel (but perhaps a sharp drop in fees for Teachers Pay Teachers, alas).

I enjoyed the interactive capacity in Daniel’s presentation. The ability that students have to put their own videos is neat. I have used Flipgrid in my own classes on multiple occasions when I want to give students a break from writing – and myself from reading. Watching the videos together as a class can be a real icebreaker for future public speaking and give students another way to show mastery.

Easter Eggs?

Directional impairment has been greatly alleviated by Waze, at least in my own case. And who doesn’t love To Kill a Mockingbird? And who wouldn’t want to wander around dressed as a ham?

Rhetorical Precis #2: “Judging Books by Their Covers — or — Chance Favors the Prepared Meme”

Once again, I am choosing Option 1 for my rhetorical precis, this time from Chapter 13 of Reading Maps, Graphs, Trees.

John Holbo, in the essay “Judging Books By Their Covers — or — Chance Favors the Prepared Meme,” asserts that we do judge what read before we read it, by using such factors as the author’s name and the design of the book, rather than knowledge of the actual contents (or quality) of that same book. Holbo supports his claim by addressing Moretti’s argument that luck does not produce bestsellers alone, using the example of the success of Harry Potter to show that momentum, once established, has much more power than actual literary quality. The author’s purpose is to suggest that “many authors occupy cultural niches that others might occupy but don’t happen to” (Holbo 97) in order to claim that image has more power than text. The author writes in a somewhat ironic tone for an audience of literary professionals, critics and avid readers.

The ending line of this essay may be the best one: “Chance favors the prepared meme.” My students refer to memes as a form of nutrition, a form of psychological therapy, or some other form of sustenance, all the time. I like memes myself, but I don’t need them to the degree that the kids these days seem to.

Or do I? If we return to the example of J.K. Rowling, we remember that she published the Harry Potter series under her initials instead of her full first name, because of the doubt that publishers might express that a woman would be able to write so ably about the experiences of a boy entering, and then traveling through, adolescence. S.E. Hinton encountered a similar difficulty when she sought to publish The Outsiders, but it would be hard to find two more effective portrayals of the experiences of young men going through their teenage years, even if (as Holbo does) one finds other issues with the literary quality of the Harry Potter franchise.

Rowling has had to resort to an entirely different meme, if one wants to keep moving in this direction, as cover for her Cormoran Strike series, which now has reached four novels in scope. Writing under the pseudonym of Robert Galbraith, she has created a moving detective (and male at that), scoring royalties for a television series based on that character.

With that said, there has to be some attention paid to the role that timing plays in pulling some authors to the forefront while others remain in obscurity. The fact that Jane Austen began to write just as an era of peace broke out in Europe, as Moretti argues, may well have caused favor to shine on her stories that had naught to do with war but everything to do with the next great conflict: the drive for women to find a degree of equality in society, a drive that remains in place in the meme that Rowling has had to erect for herself. What this article does for us is state, quite plainly, the power that image and reputation have to point us toward consuming particular texts, even if those texts may turn out to be inferior to ones that we did not come close to approaching.

Work Cited

Holbo, John. “Judging Books by Their Covers — or — Chance Favors the Prepared Meme.” From Reading Graphs, Maps, Trees: Critical Responses to Franco Moretti, eds. Jonathan Goodwin and Jon Holbo. Anderson, SC: Parlor Press, 2011.

“Consensuality” — The Begrudgingly Shared Experience of Cyberspace

My uncle was one of the first people I knew who had a cell phone. Back then, he called it his “mobile” phone, and it came in a bag, which he carried around with him. If he called you on it and left you a voice mail, and you called him back, you would most likely not reach him, because his practice was to turn the phone off as soon as he was finished with a call, because he did not like the idea of the government tracking him through its movements. The only reason he had one in the first place was that his employer made him carry it around.

As we see in Chapter 3 of The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, William Gibson defined “cyberspace” as “a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts…unthinkable complexity Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding” (???? 73).

While one of my uncles was loath to use his phone, and even, really, to carry it around, I had another uncle who was most definitely an early adopter of the opportunities that cyberspace provided. He was one of the first people I knew who used Prodigy, an online service that allowed you to set up your travel arrangements with your computer, instead of having to call airlines and book your travel with an actual person on the other end of the line. He was an early adopter in other areas of digital communication as well, one of the first people that I knew who was on Facebook (outside the original clientele of Ivy League kids, of course).

The idea of participating in a sort of online community can be bracing at times. It can be bracing to get over 100 birthday greetings from your Facebook friends list, and it can be gratifying to see how many people like the Instagram Story you posted about your niece’s first time crawling. At the same time, we have to remember that the images, the words, the content we post becomes the property of someone else, and so the free ancestry survey we complete now becomes something salable for Mark Zuckerberg, as do the images we post in that 10 Year Challenge, as facial recognition databases hunger for the ways that they can predict how we will look later on in life.

So it is a delicate balance that we walk: how much we will give for the “free” privilege of the emotional gratification that we receive for our time in cyberspace.

Scholarly Article #1: “Digital Humanities and Libraries: A Conceptual Model”

Chris A. Sula, in the article “Digital Humanities and Libraries: A Conceptual Model,” asserts that despite the discussion of the possible synergies between the digital humanities and libraries, as of the time he wrote this article, a general model for those synergies had not yet appeared. Sula supports his claim by surveying the current (2013) status of digital humanities and its areas of concentration and suggesting a paradigm for the digital humanities and libraries that would be more complementary with existing cultural mores. The author’s purpose is to provide digital humanities with a specific place within the world of the library so that a concept of those possible connections can become more practicable.

Work Cited

Sula, Chris Alen. “Digital humanities and libraries: A conceptual model.” Journal of Library Administration53.1 (2013): 10-26.

Thoughts Before Week 4

I will not be able to attend the Week 4 class through the miracle of Zoom, so I would like to contribute to the discussion ahead of time with this quote from the chapter on “Eversion”, taken from Adam Greenfield:

“in everyware pop culture and actual development have found themselves locked in a co-evolutionary spiral” (Jones 23). While there are plenty of examples of this, such as the ones that Greenfield provides from science fiction films and novels, as well as the literary works of such writers as Foster Wallace and DeLillo, but it is not like this is anything particularly new. The notion that people go out and try experiences that they have read about or seen on a screen — and that books and films will appear on topics that reflect actual events in real life — has always been with us.

Whether we are members of a royal court in antiquity, listening to the recitation of an epic about the destruction of Troy, which may or may not have happened, while contemplating whether the grand adventure we have gnawing at our minds is worth undertaking, or whether we are smiling and nodding about the ways in which the events of Ready Player One not only reflect 80s pop culture but also not only show the move toward VR that is happening around us but show us new ideas to try, the interplay between human events and the art that both inspires and draws from those events. The grotesque experiments in Frankenstein both reflected and inspired questions about the nature of human life, and whether it was possible to start and end life, that emerged during the Enlightenment and the Romantic eras and still inform the use of stem cells today.

So in what ways does the modern intertwining between art and life differ from the historical trend?

 

State of the Union, or #SOTU? When Memes Become Mirrors

I watched the State of the Union address that President Trump finally delivered on Tuesday evening. I say “finally” because of the delay that the government shutdown had brought with regard to the original date of January 29.

President Trump was not the first Chief Executive to line the House Chamber with human talking points, as we saw a collection of World War II heroes, now in their 80s and 90s, lined up for nostalgia, and we even saw a youngster with the last name of Trump who had been bullied because of that last name, brought to be honored (and quickly to fall asleep). However, we also saw multiple lines of response to the speech, many of which are applicable in the study of digital humanities.

One, of course, was the hashtag (#SOTU) which was applied to the speech. The hashtag has become a way to organize items in the digital morass, of course, but when I look at Instagram posts that have more text in actual hashtags than in actual content, I start to wonder what the point of all this categorization is, as I do not remember paying more attention to the numbers of the Dewey Decimal System than I did to the text of the books inside.

There was occasional reference to the actual content of the speech. One line of response had to do with the number of times the President was accused of having issued statements that were untrue. Another had to do with the activity of Speaker Pelosi in the background (rifling through the print copy of the speech, sitting at times while Vice President Pence stood to applaud, issuing that clap at the end that, depending on which side you represent, either was sincere or was sarcastic). Yet another had to do with the way that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, shortened to @AOC, once again, for the ease of search, was either using her grimaces as part of the #Resistance or was acting like a sullen teen.

So when we consider the actual State of the Union, very little of what comes to mind (the economy, the national debt, foreign policy, the national infrastructure) enters any of the above streams of conversation. Our pre-existing tendency to celebrate the visual rather than the actual (women wearing white to celebrate the suffragettes; President Trump looking less orange than usual; the glare that @AOC appeared to be directing at the back of Senator Joe Manchin (D-WV)’s head) now explodes with the arrival of the meme. We look at memes; we share memes; we laugh at memes; we find memes offensive. So the additional layers of attention that we provide have very little to do with the matters of the State of the Union that affect the lives of people on an ongoing basis.

So as we move into a time period of ever greater digital engagement, finding ways to bring real-time advocacy and real-time activism along with us are also important. Because while memes are a form of creative expression, they also simplify, and do so in ways that make engagement with complex social and economic policy even less palatable to the American attention span.

Rhetorical Precis #1: “My Old Sweethearts: On Digitization and the Future of the Print Record” with Summary

Andrew Stauffer, in “My Old Sweethearts: On Digitization and the Future of the Print Record,” argues that the temptation to remove non-rare print materials that are out of copyright from library collections will eliminate valuable elements of the print record in ways that will make research problematic for scholars and will reduce the value that libraries hold. Stauffer supports his assertion by explaining that libraries are questioning the worth of keeping these print materials once they have become available scanned and online, through such venues as Google Books. The author’s purpose is to convince the audience of the necessity of maintaining print collections so that the heterogeneous nature of the print record remains intact for present and future generations to study. Stauffer writes in a passionate tone for academics as well as for other bibliophiles.

The author has several points to make about the value that storing print materials in a library setting provides. He begins with the affective value, such as the intellectual spaces that libraries provide for patrons, whether in the academic world or as laypeople indulging curiosity about different points on the literary timeline. He moves then into an interesting part of the print record that library administrators may be overlooking when they rely just on access to scanned books for non-rare materials that have passed into the public domain: the history of the publication and the use of the books.

For this project, he requested copies of My Old Sweethearts and took photos of them to demonstrate his point. The colors of the different hardcover books differ, as do various details with regard to the binding, as well as the illustrations inside, which were rendered in different colors. As I was reading this chapter, I was reminded of the different feel that pages that were designated for photographs used to have when they came in sections within larger books, smoother than the text-only paper around them, and of how long it has been since I have read a book that was divided that way.

Other differences had to do with the user markings on the inside. If one subscribes to the notion that the semiotic nexus around a work of writing is as important as the writing itself, then those user marks provide a valuable portion of the print record, as the curious can see what prior readers noted as they were engaging with the text. Those points of engagement can be just as salient as the text itself.