Reading Journal 2023: Silver, Sword and Stone: Three Crucibles in the Latin American Story
Author: Marie Arana

When one hears the term “America”, generally speaking there is a singular conception that comes to mind, one that centralizes the story of America geographically. This basic truism lies at the heart of Marie Arana’s harrowing history of “Latin America”, cutting through the clutter of our marginalized terminology- north, south, central- in an effort to locate a cohesive and binding narrative for “Latin” America. What emerges from this is a harrowing anid often brutal mix of history mixed with modern journalism.

She settles on three defining ideas- sliver, sword, and stone. Silver equals money, Sword equals violence, and Stone equals religion. With each of these things there is an evolution. For example, mining turns to farming turns to drugs. Or the sword transforms from colonization and conquest to dictatorship and gangs. Religious interests go from the Sun God to Catholicism to Evangelicalism/Pentecostalism. Threading through each of these things is the undercurrent of war, international politics and power.

Here its worth mentioning a small critique of the book’s structure and focus. It is sweeping, both in the amount of geogprahy it wants to bring into a singular narrative, and in the amount of time it wants to cover. Given that Arana is not interested in giving us a straight up history of the lands and people- she aims for an interpretive story and includes the voices of 3 present day Latin Americans who can give this interpretation a practical grounding and shape- Silver, Sword and Stone is meant to immerse us in the particulars of a segment of the world lost in the shadows of its marginalized appeal to the “Americas’, rather than offering a didactic, linear information dump. This does get a bit much at points, jumping in time and from place to place, often at risk of repeating some of those universal traits. But it is also clearly designed to be an entertaining read all the same, showing how the three pronged descriptive is an integrative process of struggle. It remains true though that it could have told the same story from the perspective of a more narrowed time frame and narrowed geographical focus.

Lest it be thought this is all dark- and most of this is, to be sure- I wouldn’t say its completely without hope and inspiration. I don’t know that I ever felt like this historical treatment was detached from a love of the people and the place, and for as much as it seems like each of these three entities are defined by each other- the religion being inherently political, the politics being inherently religious, the money being the source of these two powers, both on the inside and for the destructive forces coming in from the outside- each of these three aspects retain their own individual beauty. This would be true for the earliest evidences of silver being seen less as a commodity and more as a representation of their worship. This would even be true of some of the spirited revival that one can see in the growing evangelical presence melding with local religious customs, however muddled that is by an ingrained sense of craving prosperity. Stories of more holistic democracies and even healthy societies within dictatorship linger in the backrop of the complicated realities of the people and the land.

But this sentiment nevertheless rings loud and true;
“Then and now, there is a sameness at work, a dogged consistency, a stubborn mind-set in occupier an occupied alike.” (pg 128)

If Arana is right, and there exists a very real obstaacle to Latin America history in the notion that “chroniclers of old have accustomed us to see history from the eye of the invader, from the perspective of the conquest” (pg 362), then “we imagine Latin America… with a conquistador at its start. A Hispanic tale. The rest scatters into the haze, into the wings of history, into oblivion.” Sadly, this is what the “other America” has been reduced to in the collective consciousness. Arana wants to help readers to understan the “ands” that formulate the cultural landscape that the conquests conquered. The other side of the coin. “Until we understand the “ands” of history- the ghosts in the machinery, the victims of our collective amnesia- we cannot hope to understand the region as it is now. Nor will we ever understand the chracter of its people.”

I came across this through an interview with Rick Steves. His interest was in exploring the intricacies of travel to the area and how we can find some more meaningful ways to engage the story of a foreign land and people to “americans”. Part of that of course turns the lens back on the traveler, no matter where one is coming from. This book is also meant to provide a liberating word to Latin Americans, or the Americans of the South. The book insists it is equally true that understaning the role of these three crucibles in telling the story of their people and their culture is necessary for understanding who they are.

Reading Journal 2023: The Night House
Author: Jo Nesbo

From the famed voice of the Harry Hole series comes a decidely different kind of story, one that at least protends to delve into straight up horror, albiet with his typical allegiance to crime and mystery/thriller.

The book is written in three parts, each part bringing its own twist to the story. Part 1 is where we get the straight up horror vibes. Given where part 2 and 3 take the story, I do think mileage will vary. In truth, I didn’t expect the story to go where it does, and it does aim for something far more ambitious than the title and synoposis might suggest.

But much of that ambition is tied to thematic concern, and I am someone who is big on theme. If a story wants to give its horor a grand metaphor or an allegorical force, I’m typically all in. And to be clear, what Nesbo does with the story isn’t overly complicated. It could, in fact, be that straightforward simplicity that turns people off. It could be interpreted as something of a betrayal. For me though, I felt like affording the story the freedom to go where it wants to go is precisely what my expectation should be. It would be a different thing if I didn’t care about the characters or the themes or the tension. Given the fact that I did, goiing in a direction I did not expect was part of the enjoyment. I would even go so far as to say it was a genuine page turner. There was another degree of investment for me too once I reached part 2, because once I understood what Nesbo was willing to do with the story, I was all in on trying to guess where he might go next. The mark of a good storyteller.

Reading Journal 2023: A Haunted House And Other Stories
Author: Virginia Woolf

It certainly can get a bit frustrating, especially when you get a few stories in to this collection, for Virginia Woolf’s prose to be as ambiguous and hard to narrow down as it is. There are moments where I wanted, or perhaps needed, some points of clarity, something concrete to attach myself to, be it a clearly formed character, thematic resonance or narrative interest. These moments are far and few between.

This certiainly leaves plenty of room for poetic resonance and lyrical presence. And as I have learnt through some time spent with the life of the author, her interest in bucking tradition and convention while playing with familiar genres and forms is very real.

Lets look at the most famed short, a take on the haunted house story that finds its way into the traditional horror of the piece by using it to create an uncertain space.
“Whatever hour you woke there was a door shutting. From room to room, they went, hand in hand, lifting here, opening there, making sure- a ghostly couple.”

Is this a ghost? Is the ghost the thing to be afraid of? The opening of doors? What we discover is that the ones awake hearing these doors opening and shutting are in their bed “reading”.

They go on to say,
“But it wasn’t that you woke us.”
Rather, its that “they’re looking for it”. And “now they’ve found it.”

They put down their book to “rise and see for oneself”. Curiosity? Uncertainty? “What did I come in here for. What did I want to find?” is the question that rings forth from the empty hallways.

What they found is contrasted with the invisbility, figures cloaked by the window panes and shadows. An open door. “My hands were empty”. The pulse of the house beat soflty with the words “safe, safe, safe”. Is this a question? A reassuring statement? A proclomation? A discovery?

And yet the buried treasure, the discovery awaits in the moment that the lights suddenly fade. “But the trees spun darkness for a wandering beam of sun.” coming through the window. “Death was the glass; death was between us.”

Now we gain a single point of clarity- one of the ghostly couple is called a woman, and she died hundreds of years ago. There is also a him, Woolf bringing into the portrait a point of context- he left her, they left the house in darkness. And return to it in the cloak of this darkness.

“The candle burns stiff and still” in the darkness. Is it a dead flame burning still with the silence of their continued “wandering through the house, opening windows, whispering not to wake us”? We now know what they were searching for. “Their joy”. Did they find it? Will they find it? What is its source? Woolf has them finding their memories as she returns to the waking.

“Our eyes darken; we hear no steps beside us; we see no lady spread her ghostly cloak” as the ghostly couple finds them “sound asleep, love upon their lips”. The “faces that search the sleepers and seek their hidden joy” lift “the lids upon” the eyes of the sleepers, reuttering the words “safe, safe, safe” with the pulse of the house.

The sleeping couple awake with a cry, “is this your buried treasure? The light in the heart.”

Was it a dream. Was it reality? Were they ever awake? What is this joy? Where is the haunting? All of this is left lingering in the waking. And yet Woolf has similtaneously created an atmospheric setting using language to both obscure and reveal, tapping into the untold fears and joys that frame the tension of the story. All using the genre of the haunted house story as a means of playing with the basic conventions.

Or consider The Mark on the Wall, where a singular individual finds themselves fascinated by this seemingly mundane mark on the wall they had not noticed before. “How readily our thoughts swarm upon a new object”, it reads, “lifting it a little way, as ants carry a blade of straw so feverishly, and then leave it.” This basic conception is used to explore some basic ruminations of existential crisis, particuarly where it relates to our relationship to nature, or the physical reality we occupy. “Here is nature” the indiviual surmises, “once more at her old game of self-preservation.” This pushes back against our tendency to rely on learnedness and intellectualism and knowledge. “I understand Nature’s game” they say, and it leaves the living wanting.

And yet, in these moments of uncertainty we, meaning humanity, tend to attach ourselves to the tangible, to the lived, breathed, felt realities that shape that which we can percieve. We “worship the chest of drawers, worship solidity, worship reality, worship the impersonal world which is a proof of some existence other than ours.” The mark on the wall becomes our fascination. And yet this sits in tension with the greater realities of this world, such as the war that informs this characters context, forcing us time and time again to seek after that which is not concrete, the mystery. As she asks in the final story of the collection, A Summing Up, “which view is the right one?”

These same patterns and intentions and sensibilies run straight through all of her stories, interconnecting threads and characters as she goes. All of them find their own genres and conventions to play with, using it to broach the ambiguity of the basic questions and concerns she chased after over her life and career. One in which “the most extraordinary doubts possessed (her)” (Solid Objects). And yet she refuses to “give it up”. Her stories are equally defined by when “they go” and when they “find” (The New Dress). Part of the beauty of the Unwritten Novel, where she writes “wherever I go, mysterious figures, I see you…”

Book Journal 2023: Flood and Fury: Old Testament Violence and The Shalom of God
Author: Matthew Lynch

The tagline on the back cover poses the question “what do we do with a God who enacts and condones violence”. Narrowing in on two of the most essential narratives in the Bible associated with violence- the flood story and the Canannite conquest- he works to transform that question into one more in tune with how scripture itself functions as both a sacred and literary work. If the above question is relevant to many of us today attempting to engage this work as a cross cultural movement into an unfamiliar language and worldview, learning the questions the authors and readers of scripture were asking in their world can be helpful in navigating the “challenge of violence in scripture”.

There is a good deal in Lynch’s analysis of these two central narratives that was familiar to me in terms of approach and information, albeit being one of the most concise and accessible treatments of these approaches and ideas that I have come across in a good while. And then there were some wonderful surprises. Some truly paradigm shifting surprises that left me wishing I could put this in the hands of as many people as possible. This was especially true when it came to the conquest narratives. I’ve spent a whole lot less time there than I have with the flood narrative, so that’s where I was most fully engaged.

A quick and cursory summation: central to his claims about these texts is the basic concession that part of the challenge of engaging the text is the existence of contrasting views inherent within the text operating in dialogue. This is of course the result of differing points of perspective being contained and retained and preserved with intention on the part of the Biblical editors. One of the central concerns that emerges from this process is, if God indeed spoke into and acted within history, how does this shape, and indeed reshape their understanding of their present circumstance when it comes to knowing who God is by the way God acts in and for the world.

This becomes especially complex once we begin to contrast shifting points in Israel’s own formation, locating within their story majority-minority points of view. This becomes a stepping point for navigating an important facet of scripture for us reading from our own vantage point as foreigners “into” the culture and language of their day; the role of internal critique. This becomes hugely important for engaging scripture from the outside looking in, as so often the tendency is to assume our role as judge and jury of the other, and such an act of othering, of which assumptions of our being “more” evolved and civilized and them more archaic belongs, is the best way for us to ensure that we miss and misappropriate what the text is doing in its world. A crucial point of perspective is to remember the movement present in the biblical narrative- enslavement, liberation, exile- and to understand that someone looking at this story from the point of exile is to going to be asking particular questions that a liberated or enslaved peope are not. When it comes to being good readers of scripture, and when it comes to learning how to allow these stories to shape us from our present vantage point this side of Jesus’ resurrection, we have to allow these different realities to exist in conversation.

One example when it comes to being good readers of Joshua. Noting how it speaks from the perspective of having arrived in the land and having been unsettled from the land, and how this perspective writes, using an intentional literary design, the “conquest” story in the light of the Exodus narrative, can help bind us to the bigger picture of a people contending with both promise and failure. This only becomes more apparent when connecting the conquest with the flood narrative, illuminating how it was that the ancient readers and authors saw a world to be in contention with the enslaving “spiritual powers”. This plays the connection between Joshua and the Exodus in direct relationship to the true conflict. It also gives us a way of teasing out how it is that we make sense of seeming points of contention when it comes to violent acts commanded by and attributed to the hand of God and a voice that witnesses to the character of God pointing to a different and opposing way of acting in and for the world, including the Canannites. If God did indeed speak into and act within the world in a revelatory fashion (as their convictions held to be), the question that follows, in line with the flood story (itself connecting us back to Geneis 1-5), is how does this character shape the way we live together in our present context. This is what we find in careful readings of the ever changing rules that follow an established people being prepared to take residence in the land within a world filled with violence. As readers of scripture it might feel puzzling at first glance to imagine a seemingly violent text being opposed to such violence, and yet as careful readers such a vision can come alive in transformative ways when we become attune to the larger narrative at play. Not least of which is reckoning the “”liturgical” presence of Joshua, a liturgy bent not on the story of displacing a people but in displacing the idols that hold the world in the grip of violence. Joshua on this front becomes a story of the completed Exodus, one that leads straight into the reality of exile on the basis of these same idols shadowing the greater vision of a liberated creation. Which of course leads to a new Joshua (Jesus), which careful readers can note is told through a Gospel story patterned after the Exodus and the Exile, the very thing that translates it as a “new covenant” story. A completion of both stories brought up together in God’s liberating work for the whole of creation.

A brilliant book, which blends important scholarly interest with pastoral intent. Especially formative for those who struggle to reconcile the sacredness of scripture with pertinent and important questions about the problem of its seeming violent depiction of God. It appeals to a narrative approach mixed with literary and historical criticism, but in a way that upholds the central conviction in the revelatory act of God in and for the world. It holds scripture as sacred, and is intently interested in the question of who God is based on how God acts in and for the world. The character of God should be at the forefront of the narrative, and when we allow the text to speak on its own terms it should draw us closer to knowledge of who this God is. Books like this are an extremely helpful resource then for learning how to become better readers and more faithful adherents to the story contained within in.

Reading Journal 2023: The Color Purple
Author: Alice Walker

My feelings about this classic are complex. Real, but complex. Alice Walker’s exploration of the lives of African American women is both stark and raw in its appraoch. Nothing is buried here, and the book glides through many an uncomfortable reality without censorship. If that does leave the emotional experience a bit at arms length, I feel like this is intentional. It felt to me like Walker wanted to ensure that such human experiences also retained their context and their distinctiveness. She shapes a language both familiar and foreign all at the same time.

I wouldn’t doubt that readers experiences of this book will be shaped by the narrative approach as well. Walker tells the story of two sisters, tCelie and Nettie, seperated by birth and hanging on the hope that they will one day be reuinited. The primary perspective is that of Celie’s and we gain this perspective not through prose but through a collection of letters, first between Celie and God, and secondly, in the back half of the book, between Celie and Nettie. This singular perspective keeps the book intimate in both scale and depiction. Thus the depiction of domestic and sexual abuse is left largely without outside commentary. The experiences of Celie and Nettie speak for themselves, unsettling us all the more as we hear Celie processing these dynamics in particular and almost normalizing ways.

That intimacy and lack of commentary though does not mean a lack of a genuine arc. Who these characters are in the beginning of the story is not who they are at the end. The world isn’t reshaped or hidden away in light of this essential transfromation, it simply becomes part of how these characters learn to see the spirit and reconcile things like love and joy within such a world. Its engrossing. Its also quite powerful in its own, uncensored an unfiltered way.

Part of my challenge was that I was reading this book at the same time as I was reading another one (The Lost Year). I was so taken with The Lost Year, in a fresh addition to my all-timers list kind of way, that it kept stealing me away from The Color Purple. Thus, when I finished The Lost Year and came back to The Color Purple, I knew I was reading something powerful and profound, and was legitimately hearing and feeling that truth as I went, but I found myself relegating it to a cerebral experience rather than an emotional one, Which admittedly is more on me than the book, but it does speak to the books overall approach. Saying that, there is little doubt that this book is a classic in the truest sense of the word, and a must read, especially as a cultural touchpoint.

Reading Journal 2023: The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing In a Toxic Culture
Author: Gabor and Daniel Mate

Might be the biggest letdown of the year for me given its hype. That’s what happens when you wait forever for your Library hold to become available.

And that is not to suggest that there weren’t bits and pieces here and there that I found helpful and provoking. I liked that he notes the prevailing defintion of myth as “a story that is untrue”, and the way he calls back to a more approrpriate use of myth as storied beliefs that anchor us in what is true. I appreciated his rejection of dualism when it comes to mind and body, spirit and flesh, and I do like how he names the modern obsession with heatlh and wellness and calls it into question. But there is so much in this book that feels inconsistent, questionable, and problematic Some of it veers well into the territory of pseudo-science. Some of it reaches for gross uses of unsubstantiated cause and effect, even using anectdotal evidences by way of a smattering of personal stories of “healing” to reinforce it.

Perhaps its worst sin though is just how negative and defeatist the book’s outlook is. To be fair, it tries to convince us that it is not, but the convcitons that inform its thesis are only reinforced by the confessions of its final chapter. if I was to take this all at face value, then the overall message is that I am essentially doomed to die early for reasons a, b, and c (and its a wonder that I haven’t already), and dying early is essentially betraying my basic responsiblity to life/the world/people (that’s a bit uncertain what he means there).

The basic premise is this. Our world has a problem, and this global problem is essentially uknown and unseen to most people. Our problem is systemic, scocietal, and, although this point is also unclear, globally based. Part of the reason the problem is unknown and unseen is because the problem has become normalized by the “myth of normal”. This means, we have simply bought into a narrative (myth), nnormalized it, and continue to believe that this story tells the truth about our society. Fixing the problem then means challenging the myth and discovering a new one that more closely adheres to the truth about the current state of our society (or world).

This problem is defined as an epidemic health crisis. Rather than address it as a problem of the body, the two Mates want to argue that the problem is actually rooted in the mind. The mind then is intricately connected to the body. The problem of the mind boils down to one word- trauma- and Mate takes the time to flesh out two kinds of trauma. One describes those obvious external factors that we all know and understand (a car crash, the loss of parents, natural disasters, just to name a few). The other describes what we might call smaller traumas that might seem mundane and inconsequential, but they actually carry more weight based on their general invisibility and their cumulative effect. These traumas are at the root of most of the illnesses modern society faces.

The other part of this thesis is that these traumas connnect to the self, and the self connects to the world, with this relationship flowing in both directions. What’s clear though is that Mate sides with the reality of social formation, placing the primary formative principle in the the external factors that shape our humanity. This means trauma is rooted just as readily in our daily experiences of this world as it does in systemic realities such as racism, capitalism and poverty.

At one point Mate cites the universal consensus that “what are called the developmental origins of adult disease begin in the womb.” Sure, later he tries to weave this into a suggestion that awareness of this fact creates agency, but no amount of agency feels able enough to tackle that problem, especially when it is a given that we are every bit the product of our environment when we are older. Compoounding that issue is that our earliest attachment reltationships, which are notoriously volatile, determine how we cope and how we are able to cope. And at the heart of these coping mechanisms is the need for psychological healing, which includes dealing with the different facets of trauma like guilt and shame, anxiety and stress.

Mate also makes sweeping appeals to nature when it comes to understanding the problem and potential ways of dealing with it. These appeaals are to what we might call positive aspects of our nature, which include compassion and community and care. He makes the strong statement that we are, in fact, the only species that acts contrary to our nature, which is a rather confusing sentiment. More so, its uncertain what Mate wants to do with the not so lovely aspects of our nature, besides sweeping them under the rug or giving them their own category as opposing forces to our true nature. This is really a massive part of the inherent weakness of the book. He wants to say that there is a small minority of examples of healthy people that demonstrate a single unifying trait- a willingness to buck the trends and push back aganst the norms. If this is a mark of health, then more people need to do the same. But is this really true? The people least likely to experience trauma are the fittest, however we define fit in modern day society outside of the merely physical. They are the ones at the top of society by given governning measures, they are the ones with specific gene pools, upper class society, money, natural talent, ect ect.. They are in fact the normals of society. Worse yet, Mates appeal to a global societal falls short when measuring it against how societies generally operated, which is on smaller scales with given nationalist interests. Sure, care and community and compassion apply in this sense, but there is no good, logical reason to suggest that this would or could function on a global level. Thus, what Mate is really drawing out is how those on the bottom rings (and not just economically, but socially) of our particular socties where tauma is most prevelant can and should pursue healing. But he doesn’t have a grounding for why we should care about this.

There is some important nuance that Mate brings with something like the five kinds of compassion (Possibility, Truth, Recognition, Curiousity and Understanding, and Ordinary). But this is hardly enough to temper his sweeping claims and assumptions. It still faces the prison of these basic realities- society is killing me, the system is killing me, biology is killing me, I am killing me, others are killing me, existence is killing me. So hey, here’s the answer- learn how to live and the problems will take care of themselves, maybe, if we’re lucky and buck the odds. Simple, right?

I think Mate is right on the idea that dualism (division between spirit and mind). I think he is right to to note and define the problem of trauma. I think he is right to note that trauma is rooted in intergenerational an inherited trauma. I think he is right to note that the issues we face are not individual but systemic, and that notions of personhood flow from those external factors that shape and form us. I even think he’s right on the taking modern day health and wellness culture to task.

But I think his fundamental flaw, beyond his appeal to pseudo science and sweeping claims that don’t feel like they have much grounding, is the way he turns health into ideology without the grounding of an actual worldview. Or the points where we do get some semblance of a worldview are the places where his claims contradict his actual beliefs, or where his beliefs become incoherent in light of his claims. This is where the negative outlook becomes especially dangerous.

The icing on the cake is, of course, the thing that is fueling all of this. Its the thing I could see coming from a mile away, because it has become that predictable. His convictions are born from his experience with pyschedelics (ayahuasca). This turns his claims essentially spiritual in nature, coloring around the edges of the doom and gloom. This experience proves to him that his sense of reality had been closed off, that the mind is far more powerful than even he had once imagined, and that manipulating the mind through the power of nature is the key to curing our health problems.

Well, not really though, because most people can’t afford to see a Shaman. But if they could, all our problems would go away, because that’s the way to deal with the epidemic crisis. As it is, he will take one for the team and dole out his now God given wisdom for the rest of us. The end result? This overstuffed book full of doom and gloom and packaged in candy an gloss.

If I sound cynical, its because I am. I’ve seen this story play out countless times with the same results, and it always seems extraordinarily odd that people unwillng to see reality through a certain lens are suddenly willing to afford credence to such experiences, particularly when ones worldview can describe precisely what these experiences are- manipulations of the mind. All of these words written about attending for reality and trauma, only to come to a point where the value somehow is rewriting the story in a way that medicates this reality straight out of us. It creates a mess of contradictions and confusions and dangerous inconsistencies.

And yes, I say this as someone who believeas in the existence of God an who holds a religious worldview.

Film Journal 2023: The Killer
Directed by David Fincher

Came into this one with high hopes. Found myself slightly let down. I feel like I understand what it wanted to be- a smart, patient, artsy thriller. I also feel like it thinks it’s better than it actually ends up being on all those fronts. A bit deceptive even to that end.

The film wastes no time setting the stage for the existential crisis that drives it. There is a nihilism to the way it plays out its main characters point of perspective on the world, and in many senses it feels set up to challenge that perspective and take him on a transformative arc over the course of these structured and subsequent killings. That’s really where the issues begin, as I found the main character, played by Micheael Fassbender in a visibly physical performance, is never really fleshed out beyond the fatalism. He ends up very one note and uninteresting.

The other issue I had was the way the film is structured. The film moves us mostly through different points in America, following the killer from city to city as he chases after the implications of a job gone wrong. We get, by design, these different locations, each which become repetitive as we find him in similar situations saying similar things and straddling that similar line between staying consumed with his point of perspective or being challenged to reconsider. The film had a chance to use a particular event to play out some complicated and nuanced motivations, but instead it seems to be more interesting in going for style. And even there, it felt a bit like it only really had one trick up its sleeve.

The idea is strong enough though to at least keep it afloat. There is also one really cool fight scene that employs an old school approach about a third of the way through the film. And the philosophical interests were enough to at least hint at what this could have been had it taken that seriously and actually lived up to its ambitions. Instead, I found the majority of this to be treading water.

Film Journal 2023: Anatomy of a Fall
Directed by Justine Triet

At one point during this riveting legal thriller, one of the characters ruminates about the uncertainties surrounding the issues on trial, suggesting that when we are faced with doubts about what is true and what is not, at some point we simply need to choose a side and decide what it is, or who it is, we are going to believe. This is the only way we can actually move forward in meaningful and constructive ways.

Anatomy of a Fall is largely a film about how we navigate those uncertain places. As the title suggests, at the center or the story is the investigation of a fall that results in one man’s death, a man who is both a husband and a father. The investigation itself digs into the details of what happened, attempting to determine if it was an accident, a suicide, or a murder.

It is within this that the film allows the term “anatomy” to play as allegory, both for it’s legal drama and the ensuing court case, but also for the characters themselves. It’s as much about the question of what happened as it is about the ways this event impacts the different people involved, beginning with the family itself.

And for as captivating as the court room drama is, it is in the character development that the tightly drawn and layered script really shines. The more the court case goes on, the more we get to know about the family dynamics, and it provides a way for the viewer to consider the intricacies of these relationships, especially where they are thrown into a state of such uncertainty. Its not just the results of the case that hang in the balance, but so much about who they are and their ability to move forward with any real sense of direction and intention in their lives. As one character suggests, when we can’t figure out the what, perhaps that’s when we start looking at the why.

The patient and attentive approach to the direction goes a long ways here, never pushing for concrete answers but rather sitting in the formative space of its relationships. It is rich with nuance, allowing the scenes to show rather than tell, and much of the game here for viewers is searching the different scenes for clues that might help us understand things just a little bit more than we did before.

Part of that process is allowing each voice the freedom to speak and to say what they will from their own point of perspective. Where voices clash, this becomes integral to drawing out a minutia of hope in what feels like an increasingly hopeless situation. We might see different things and interpret the same things differently, and that becomes part of the bigger picture at play. As one character suggests, we can’t take a moment and make it everything. A moment is a moment, and every moment has the power to tell the story as it will in it’s own way. And yet this is precisely where those doubts become necessary decisions. Its one thing for a trial case to be proven beyond a doubt, it’s quite another to live within the decisions that follow. No matter the trial, no matter how much we want to believe in something conclusive, it is still left to those looking in from the outside to make their own decisions about what it is they are going to believe. And that’s really where the true trial happens, in the everyday of our lives, in the eyes of the public, in the ebb and flow of our relationships with the people we feel we know, or should know, the best.

Decisions remain necessary. Decisions have implications. They hold the power to tell the story and control the truth in that everydayness. Can we be okay with that fact of our human existence? True to form, the film leaves that question for viewers to decide for themselves.

Reading Journal 2023: Milwaukee Mayhem: Murder and Mystery in the Cream City’s First Century
Author: Matthew Prigge

I visited Brewtown, or Cream City last summer. While I had been to and through Chicago a few times over the years, I had always been intrigued by its much smaller counterpart barely an hour north over the Wisconsin border..

When one speaks highly of a place, it’s usually with the phrase “character’. And character is typically closely related to history. The less history, the less character.

Milwaukee has history, but as this books title suggests, that history is connected to its murder and mayhem. So much so it is literally imprinted into the place’s cultural evolution. When we were there it seemed every bit as vital to know about its Harley’s and its brews as it was to know the history of its fascination with the madness. A place made of ghosts and horror stories. And no matter how the city has been built up around these stories, boasting spacious streets, historical neighborhoods, a grassroots vibe, and a definite rivertown spirit, there remains a sense of fascination with the cities shadowy corners and darker edges. Something to embrace and to celebrate as part of its character.

I had picked this book up at one of the local shoots, but I decided to hold off until spooky season to give it a read. It’s not exactly what I expected. I was hoping for something more narrative driven and substantive. Something with a bit more reflection and commentary. What this is instead is a series of short true stories that fit into one of the following four categories- Murder, Accidents, Vice, and Secrets.

Which is not to say it’s bad. I really liked the opening intro which sets the stage for the history of mayhem, formulated as it is around the river and it’s brides. The East-West divide, as it typically goes. When one doesn’t like the other? Just tear down their bridge.

For what it is though, a very casual romp through stories with limited but verified data, it’s a fun read. It was easy for me to imagine these stories through recalling the still existing streets and buildings today, especially from our Dahmer walking tour.

Gotta love when a small city sitting in shadow of the much bigger metropolis down the road finds their own way by just embracing the crazy. As they say, history breeds character, and Milwaukee has a good dose of it to share.

Reading Journal 2023: Sleep
Author: Lynn Biederstadt

Picked this up at my local bookshop. A random paperback with an alluring and interesting cover. Felt like it would be a good fit for spooky season, and it turned out to be a decent page turner. It’s not out and out scary as far as horror goes, but it’s the sort of thing that works to unsettle you psychologically.

It’ follows a photo journalist, a wealthy man with issues, a murderer, and a sleep specialist, all of whom are being targeted by Sleep.

As the synopsis says, Sleep is waiting to rip the world apart, and when that’s the case, even the insomnia becomes a nightmare. Much of the unsettledness of it all relates to the existential crisis of sleeps association with deat.h. certainly there is terror in imagining the dream giving way to nothingness, but the real struggle here is depicted as more of an engagement with the true terrors that huant us in our sleep. Not the things that end life, but the things that redner life meaningless.

If that sounds heavy, it’s actually more entertaining than a deep philopshical exploration. But there is enough substance here to keep it real.