Inside
NCR The
Rouault cover, the bottle deadline
A glance back over the years shows
NCR covers leaping from high hopes to low farce, from broken dreams to
glorious achievement in the world at large and the Catholic church up
close.
This week we decided to slow down the world to sidestep the
hectic and take time out for the ineffable, the mysterious world even art can
only hint at.
One revelation of this past year was the popularity of our
bi-weekly poetry page. Were not sure what this signifies in the great
scheme of things but were not complaining. At turbulent times throughout
human history, poetry has flourished. At times of unusual sorrow or joy,
average people often search for exalted ways to express a more intense life.
For whatever reason, the poems keep on pouring in to NCR. Perhaps
its a sense that were at some mighty intersection; or maybe
its just people being people when given the chance to string their most
magic thoughts together in public.
A poem by Jesuit Fr. Walt Bado about George Rouaults 1936
etching, Christ and the Two Disciples on the Way to Emmaus, led us
to the choice of cover.
Rouault was one of the truly distinctive Christian artists of this
century. He created an unholy stir in France when he gave up his conventional
style to reflect raw life in a more direct and emotional way.
This picture is an old story. About two people walking along a
country road in the days before cars. The road to Emmaus, as it happens. And
they are joined by a stranger who turns out to be Jesus, making them famous
forever. Only one of their names is mentioned, Cleopas, probably because he did
the talking. Theres a 50-50 chance the other was a woman, but she
didnt get a speaking part when the evangelists got around to writing the
story. Typical, many will say, typical of the men to leave the woman in the
shadow. But Rouault is giving the woman the benefit of the doubt, and
NCR is putting the whole thing on the cover.
Books are wonders of the world.
Commonplace now and taken for granted, heaped on shelves and gathering dust or
dumped after a quick read on the plane, they are nevertheless magic artifacts
that only a sophisticated species like ourselves could put together.
Even the average book is a mixture of dream and crass commerce.
Writers decide in a split second to write it, then sweat through the
consequences of that decision for long months or years. They wrestle with
agents and editors, wait hopefully for reviewers to love it and people to buy
it. Locked, meanwhile, in the dumb book are all those words waiting to get out
and make a difference.
We owe books and book people so much, we should raise them up and
carry them along and help them out any way we can. This is what NCR
tries to do once a year when we invite book lovers to swap stories about their
favorites. And readers seem eager to do this, want us to know about and love
the books they loved. This annual event has grown in volume now it takes
two issues of the paper to do it justice, and even at that we are forced to be
lean and mean and avoid repetitions.
NCRs Teresa Malcolm had the exciting but arduous task
of selecting and editing the mountain of opinionated choices. And speaking of
repetitions: As the letters came in we began to notice how shall I say?
a trend (I was going to say we began to smell a rat, which we did).
The same book kept popping up. Then another and another. A
three-book trend, to the exclusion of all others and all from the same
publisher appropriately praised each time. Sometimes all three books would be
mentioned, sometimes only one. Sometimes one of the three authors would praise
another of the three while manfully (yes) refraining from mentioning his own
book.
These encomia of the same three books from the same publishing
company came almost entirely by e-mail. Most came in a period of a couple of
days but they dribbled in for a week. Soon we could see patterns in the e-mail
addresses. Book 2 might be praised from the e-mail address of the author of
Book 3, but by a third, hitherto undetected party. Some efforts enjoyed more
ingenuity than others. Lets call the publishing company Bow-wow (not its
real name, dont even bother to read secret meanings into it!). Wrote one:
Ive come to love Bow-wows books over the last few
years. Another, clearly unsure what was the agenda of the conspiracy she
was involved in: I would like you to know that the book [one of the
three] is my favorite. You made a [sic] excellent choice in selecting this
book. It is definitely a must to have. Another that began Dear
Friends at NCR listed two of the three special books and ended:
Could you please send me several sample issues of NCR? I
guess this one figured that any paper that liked his two favorite books so well
must be worth checking out.
They sent 64 submissions in all: the same three books, with
honorable mention of a couple of others by the same authors and/or from the
same publisher.
We detected a few other efforts at similar collusion but not on
this grand scale. They all know who they are.
Sometimes its humiliating to be a book.
Our Oct. 1 issue invited readers to
join us in saying goodbye to the old century and millennium and welcoming the
new. We wrote: We propose a special supplement, a time capsule. We will
put our aspirations and apprehensions and resolutions and hopes in a bottle,
real or metaphorical, and send them on some sea into the vast future.
Readers seemed to agree this was a good idea because dozens of
contributions have already come in, from the humble haiku to longer poems to
essays to letters to posterity. There are complaints about the bad old past,
and high hopes the future will be better. I confess to being impressed by the
standard thus far, and think the mere trickle will become a torrent of entries
before the deadline of Nov. 15.
Note that, folks: The deadline is almost upon us.
Someone wrote to ask if photos might be included. Sure, if
theyre the right photos. Or other art that expresses hearts desire
at this epochal moment. There are no restrictions on subject matter so long as
its appropriate at the millennium. And no restrictions on length so long
as its short.
It will all go in the issue dated Dec. 31, 1999-Jan. 7, 2000
which should make it a collectors item to pass on to ones
grandchildren. We already mentioned we needed to find a real bottle of some
kind, and then some body of water on which to launch the bottle so that it will
come ashore God knows when and be read with amazement by posterity. I thought
this would be an irresistible challenge to the fertile imaginations of
NCR readers, but so far not a suggestion has been heard.
All contributions, suggestions and comments should be sent to
Message in a Bottle, NCR, 115 E. Armour Blvd., Kansas City MO 64111; or better
still, e-mail to ncrbottle@aol.com
-- Michael Farrell
National Catholic Reporter, November 5,
1999
|