Roger Ebert, RIP

The news has come across the wire this evening that Roger Ebert has died. Just yesterday he wrote that, though his cancer had returned, he was nonetheless brimming with plans for the future: a new web site, his film festival, a documentary on his life. It makes for poignant reading tonight.

Like many people, I first encountered him through the television programme he hosted with Gene Siskel, only later discovering that he was primarily a critic in print. I remember being fascinated by the television show, principally, I think, because I had never before heard considered judgments and articulate criticism about much of anything, still less something as commonplace as movies. It was my first intimation that there might be more to the movies than just entertainment.  Those old shows, segments of which have made their way onto YouTube, still make for good viewing.

His print reviews make for good reading too. He could almost always be counted on to give a clear account of a film’s strengths and weaknesses, often with considerable wit. (Bad films, especially, seemed to inspire his muse, and his collection of critical pans, Your Movie Sucks, makes for terrific occasional reading.) High praise from him was often enough to convince me to clear some time for a film I might otherwise have passed over. I am going to miss my weekly visit to his site.

Readers of this blog might be interested in something he wrote exactly one month ago: a short essay called “How I Am a Roman Catholic”. Those who read him regularly will know that he grew up in a devout Catholic family, attended Catholic schools, but drifted — so I gather — from the practice of the faith in his adult years. Yet Catholicism remained in his bones, and he continued to circle around it. Indeed, in this recent essay he insisted that “I consider myself Catholic, lock, stock, and barrel”. True, this confession was confused to no small extent by his admission that he “cannot believe in God”. I take him to have meant that he had doubts, that he had no firm assurance of faith. If so, he would hardly be alone in that.

In that same essay he, rather surprisingly, staked out a position on a question of current moral controversy that was not calculated to endear him to people who matter. In other words, he was true to his critical task to the end: saying what he thought, with clarity and reason, and leaning into the wind when it blew contrary-wise.

Requiescat in pace.

Easter bustle

One or two people may have noticed that things have been a little quiet around here of late. This is because things have not been quiet elsewhere, and I’ve had little to no leisure.

I have been learning that selling a house is an all-consuming activity. We were advised to “de-clutter” prior to listing the house, and so, after several weeks of sorting and sifting and packing, this past weekend we moved a fair bit of furniture and about 80 boxes out of the house and into storage. I am still trying to understand the mindset of people who consider books to be “clutter”.

With that out of the way, we turn our attention to little matters like painting, scrubbing, staining, fixing, and generally beautifying the place. It’s a lovely house, and I can’t see why someone shouldn’t want it. But it will be even lovelier when we’re through. I hope.

Did I mention that the only time I have to do any of this work is when I should be in bed?

In the middle of all this was Easter: Happy Easter! It was the tenth anniversary of my reception into the Catholic Church, and I had really been looking forward to it. It turned out to be the worst Triduum that I can remember: we had to leave the Holy Thursday Mass early because the kids were crazed, we were terribly late for the Good Friday service, and I even missed the start of the Vigil Mass (which, if you’ve never been, is the best part). Between times, when I would normally want to think about Easter, I was instead thinking about boxes and tape and cleaning supplies and when I went to the church it felt as though I had parachuted in from another realm.

But there was much to be thankful for, all the same. Our wonderful priests, who delivered some of the most thoughtful and provoking homilies that I can ever remember hearing, celebrated all of the Triduum liturgies with great beauty and solemnity. Being there was a balm. We really are blessed to have found our parish (and now, of course, we will really miss it). We are thankful for friends and family who, in the middle of all of this exhausting activity, are lending a hand when and where they can. Mostly we’re just thankful for Easter.

Happy Easter!

Planck results

Big science news today: the Planck experiment has released a huge raft of results based on cosmological observations made during 2009-10. Planck is a satellite-based experiment that has been making precision measurements of the cosmic microwave background (CMB) radiation, the details of which tell us a great deal about the history and structure of the universe. Planck is a truly spectacular project.

I remember that when I was an undergraduate physics student — which was quite a long time ago now — we heard rumours of this satellite, which was then in the planning stages. The hope was that it, and to a lesser extent its predecessor WMAP, would usher in an era of “precision cosmology”, in which cosmologists would have a wealth of high quality measurements against which to judge their theories about cosmic structure and evolution.

Based on the results published today, I would say that those hopes have been triumphantly vindicated. For instance, consider this paper on cosmological parameters; look at Tables 1 and 2. These are amazing results: baryon density is about 2.2%, cold dark matter density about 12%, dark energy density about 68%, Hubble constant about 67, and the age of the universe about 13.8 billion years (with an uncertainty of only about 100 million years!).

There is a lot here for non-specialists to digest — and I certainly count myself in that group. The BBC is on the case.

Pope Francis

Habemus Papam!

It appears that my decision to not follow any of the pre-conclave speculations on papal candidates saved time and energy; Pope Francis seems to have taken most commentators by surprise. I am surprised too; I had, to my recollection, never heard of Jorge Mario Cardinal Bergoglio before yesterday. The two or three minutes during which he was on the balcony were hardly sufficient to form any adequate idea of the man, but he made a strong and favourable impression on me. Notice that he spent most of those minutes praying with and for the people gathered to greet him. A good beginning.

Among the three or four bits of background that are floating up into news reports is the observation that he has been known in Argentina as an unusually humble and self-effacing cleric, eschewing most of the pomp of his  office in favour of a life of relative simplicity. His choice of name would seem to be indicate that such observations are relevant to the kind of pope we can expect him to be. I am personally an enthusiast for papal pomp — the restoration of which was for me one of the attractive aspects of Benedict XVI’s reign — but I can also see the appeal of a principled (as opposed to a desultory) simplicity, such as one finds in Benedictine monasteries and (naturally) in the life of St. Francis of Assisi.

The two most informative pieces I have seen on Pope Francis were both written before his election. John Allen, who is generally regarded as being the best informed and most astute Vatican journalist in the English-speaking world, wrote a profile of him a few weeks ago, and back in 2005 the Catholic Herald published a fairly lengthy essay by Jose Maria Poirier about him after Benedict XVI’s election:

If he were Pope? Everything suggests that his approach would be above all pastoral, which is what a number of the cardinals were looking for in the conclave. He would govern the Curia with a sure hand, as he does his diocese. He would likely take a firm stand with the powerful of this world. But the modern-day media demands on the papacy would be a torture for this most retiring of Church leaders.

It would be a torture for most of us, I expect. The Holy Father made it clear in his first address that he wants the Catholic faithful to pray for him; Janet Cupo has posted a few suitable prayers.

Tristan und Isolde in Toronto

I have mentioned before that in February I will be seeing the Canadian Opera Company’s production of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde. It is one of those operas that has been on my short-list for quite a few years, and I am thrilled to finally have the opportunity to see it.

It opened this week, and I am pleased to see that the production is being praised in lavish terms (also here). Hurrah! I think this is going to be great.

Here is a promotional video for the COC’s production:

Botched abortions and homicide

This is not a politics blog, but after what I wrote yesterday about this week’s sad anniversaries, I want to follow up by commenting on a story that has broken just today: three Canadian Members of Parliament have asked our national police commissioner to investigate documented cases of infants who were apparently born alive during an abortion procedure and subsequently died. The MPs contend that these cases may meet the legal standard for homicide.

The media coverage of this story is, once again, incompetent. Several major news outlets (the CBC and National Post, for starters) are running the same story from the Canadian Press, which states, falsely, that

…the MPs say abortions performed at 20 weeks gestation or later breach Section 223a of the Criminal Code.

But Section 223 concerns the definition of homicide as it pertains to newborns, which should have tipped the journalist off. What the letter actually states is this:

From 2000 to 2009 in Canada, there were 491 abortions, of 20 weeks gestation and greater, that resulted in live births. This means that the aborted child died after it was born… According to the Criminal Code, a child is considered to be a human being and a person after proceeding fully from the mother’s womb, therefore, based on Section 223(2) of the Criminal Code, there should be 491 homicide investigations or prosecutions in connection with these deaths.

As I say, this is, at best, incompetent journalism. The MPs are not asking that all abortions performed after 20 weeks gestation be investigated as possible homicides, as the article states, but only those cases in which the child is first born alive and then allowed to die. I don’t think there is a clear moral difference between the two cases, but there is a difference under the Canadian Criminal Code, according to which birth magically confers “human being”-ness upon the child, thereby making the child a potential victim of homicide. Was any medical care offered to these young human beings? Of course it might be that some were not yet at the point of viability and so nothing could have been done to save their young lives (apart from preventing the abortion attempt in the first place), but some of them may have been viable. (With current technology in North America viability is about 50% at 24 weeks gestation.) Certainly it is hard to argue that such cases, grisly as they are, should not at least be investigated to discover the facts. It might be that the cases do not, according to the various fictions governing this section of our Criminal Code, constitute legal homicide, but wouldn’t you like to know for sure?

The Toronto Star, in a piece by Tonda MacCharles, gets the story right.

Update: the CBC have now improved their story to reflect the fact that the letter is about infants born alive. That is a big improvement. However the television segment, accessible through the same page, presents the story as being about all abortions after 20 weeks gestation. Given that the reporter is on camera waving the letter and still doesn’t bother to state the facts clearly begins to look less like incompetence and more like fudging. I don’t actually expect much better from the CBC, but I would have been happy to be wrong.

Unhappy anniversaries

This week marked two major anniversaries in the political struggle for legal protection for the unborn in North America: the twenty-fifth anniversary of R v. Morgantaler, which struck down all abortion laws in Canada, and the fortieth anniversary of Roe v. Wade, which effectively did the same in the United States. This is not a subject that I enjoy writing about; the terrain has been covered so many times, over and over, that it hardly seems worth the effort to try again. The pro-life side has the moral high ground and the stronger arguments, but the pro-choice side has the power and the status quo, and, especially in Canada, nothing seems to budge one way or the other. Sometimes I feel like I am living in Louisiana in 1840.

Today, then, I will simply draw attention to some of the more noteworthy commentary that I have seen on this issue in recent days. Before doing so, however, I would like to briefly comment on the media coverage of these anniversaries.

The media coverage has been, putting it as kindly as I can, incompetent. Many pro-lifers have complained, for instance, year after year, that the mainstream media ignores the annual March for Life in Washington, DC. This year was no exception: hundreds of thousands marched, and most of the major US news outlets ignored it. Search Google News for “March for Life” and you’ll come up with articles from the National Catholic Reporter, Lifesite, the Nashua Telegraph, the Greene County Daily World, and other heavy hitters. The New York Times’ coverage was both minimal and biased (critiqued here), and the story filed by the AP was riddled with errors both factual and grammatical (fisked here). As has been noted, the day after the March for Life approximately one thousand people marched in favour of gun control, and the media was all over them. The disparity speaks for itself. If you want to see what actually happened at the March for Life, try YouTube.

In Canada the coverage of our anniversary was similar. The Canadian Press ran an article about how Canadians “don’t want to reopen the abortion debate”, a refrain heard so commonly up here that I wouldn’t be surprised if someone (probably from Quebec) would propose putting it into our national anthem. ([Snip: removed parenthetical comment.]) The National Post, our allegedly conservative national paper, seems not to have run a single article or column about the anniversary. The Toronto Star, our reliably left-wing daily, ran one column, by the odious Heather Mallick, celebrating Henry Morgantaler, Canada’s most prominent abortion activist. The CBC, our state-owned national broadcaster, reported that some barriers to abortion in Canada have yet to fall: namely, in Saskatchewan women seeking an abortion must make two separate visits to their doctor, rather than just one. And the flagship CBC radio news program ran a segment in which they interviewed Henry Morgantaler’s lawyer and an abortion clinic founder. How is that for fair and balanced? (Although it is nice to see the Morgantaler decision described as merely “historical” rather than lauded as “historic”, a subtle but significant difference that I am sure could not possibly be a mistake). All told, it amounts to a shameful lack of moral seriousness about the most important human rights issue of our time.

Let me point, briefly, to a few things worth reading from sources outside the main news outlets:

• No-one should miss Mary Elizabeth Williams’ article in Salon, “So what if abortion ends life?” It has the courage to abandon the usual evasions of the pro-choice side of the debate. Of course, it is also blood-curdling. (And how much worse to hear it from a woman bearing those names.)
• In “The Paradox of Persons Forty Years after Roe”, Gerard Bradley of Notre Dame Law School examines the way in which the debate about abortion addresses the foundations of our legal order. It’s an illuminating essay.
• In “Bringing Marx into the Abortion Debate” Russell Nieli looks to an unlikely source for pro-life arguments. Couched in a reminiscence of an abortion debate at Princeton, Nieli emphasizes Marx’s insight into the ways in which material interests can distort our moral judgements, which is surely a significant factor underlying this issue.
• In a review of Christine Overall’s book Why Have Children? The Ethical Debate, University of Pennsylvania law professor Amy L. Wax draws attention to the way in which liberal abortion laws undermine the rationale for child support laws. It is an obvious point, but one we do not hear very often.
• Finally, a reprise of Richard John Neuhaus’ important address, given a few years before he died, “We Shall Not Weary, We Shall Not Rest”:
  

  We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until every unborn child is protected in law and welcomed in life. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until all the elderly who have run life’s course are protected against despair and abandonment, protected by the rule of law and the bonds of love. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, until every young woman is given the help she needs to recognize the problem of pregnancy as the gift of life. We shall not weary, we shall not rest, as we stand guard at the entrance gates and the exit gates of life, and at every step along way of life, bearing witness in word and deed to the dignity of the human person — of every human person.

Abandon hope: Dan Brown is back

We had been enjoying the respite, but it now seems that Mr. Dan Brown has gone and written another book:

Brown, one of the world’s bestselling authors, will publish his fifth novel on 14 May, his publishers announced this morning. Langdon, a Harvard professor of “symbology” who sports a “charcoal turtleneck, Harris Tweed jacket, khakis, and collegiate cordovan loafers”, will be adventuring through the “heart of Europe” this time round, where he will be “drawn into a harrowing world centred on one of history’s most enduring and mysterious literary masterpieces”.

This ought to be good. And just what is the masterpiece that has had the misfortune to attract Mr. Brown’s attention? None other than Dante’s Inferno.

It is a canny (though, naturally, unhappy) choice: Inferno has an imposing reputation and a certain allure, though relatively few people have actually read it. Thus Mr. Brown gets them in the door, after which he can pretty much do what he wants. And I’ve no doubt he will, on both counts.

It is a hard thing to see a beloved book disfigured by a nincompoop, and quite a few mean-spirited witticisms occur to me. I am going to resist. It is probably too much to hope that the book will be a flop, so I content myself with this: I hope this is not the first volume in a trilogy.

Musical anniversaries in 2013

Happy New Year!

Here is a list of the major music-related birthdays and memorials that I — and, surely, you — will be marking, to one degree or another, this year.

Birthdays

1000 years

• Hermannus Contractus (1013-1054) [July 18]

450 years

• John Dowland (1563-1626) [date?]

200 years

• Richard Wagner (1813-1883) [May 22]
• Giuseppe Verdi (1813-1901) [October 10]
• Charles-Valentin Alkan (1813-1888) [November 30]

150 years

• Pietro Mascagni (1863-1945) [December 7]

100 years

• Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994) [January 25]
• Benjamin Britten (1913-1976) [November 22]

Memorials

400 years

• Carlo Gesualdo (1566-1613) [September 8]

300 years

• Archangelo Corelli (1653-1713) [8 January]

50 years

• Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) [January 30]
• Paul Hindemith (1895-1963) [December 28]

***

The birthdays of Wagner and Verdi loom largest; I hadn’t realized before that they were born in the same year. Neither is in my short list of favourite composers, but an anniversary year is a good opportunity to re-appraise. I would like to say that I’ll listen again this year to The Ring Cycle, and I might, but it is more likely that my Wagner-birthday observance will pivot around Tristan und Isolde, which I will be seeing live next month. As for Verdi, the public library is my friend: I am going to make an effort to see at least a few of his operas on DVD.

The same is true of Benjamin Britten’s operas: there are several that I have not heard, and more that I have not seen performed; I hope to fill those gaps this year.

My sentimental favourite is the 1000th birthday of Hermannus Contractus, who is credited with the authorship of the great Marian hymns “Salve Regina” and “Alma Redemptoris Mater” (which I am still trying to learn).

A more comprehensive list of music-related births and deaths to be marked in 2013 can be found here. (Thanks, Osbert.)

Happy New Year!

Apocalypse soon

The impending end of the world has naturally attracted attention and commentary from many quarters. The event raises questions that nearly everyone is asking themselves: why should I bother with Christmas shopping this year? can I fit in one more Roland Emmerich film festival before the end? And so on.

But the apocalypse affects specialist interests as well. I was reminded of this yesterday when I picked up the most recent edition of the Canadian Medical Association Journal and found an article exploring. . . well, here’s a quote from the abstract:

We discuss how the outcomes of clinical trials may be affected by the extinction of all mankind and recommend appropriate changes to their conduct. In addition, we use computer modelling to show the effect of the apocalypse on a sample clinical trial.

It is an issue that had not occurred to me before, and perhaps the same is true of you. Read the whole thing.