Alan Dundes on the Qur'an

Fables of the Ancients? Folklore in the Qur'an by Alan Dundes
"The most renowned folklorist of his time" tackles the Qur'an

I'll bet that everyone who knew him has a favorite Alan Dundes story. Here's a couple of mine. To understand both, you have to know that Dundes was larger than life in many ways, including physically. I somehow don't want to apply the adjective "fat" to him, although, yes, he was. Some called him "a tank," others, "a rhino." He was so formal and so formidable that I resort to an old-fashioned word, "portly."

I only ever saw him in a charcoal gray suit, white shirt, and dark tie. And he knew everything about his field. Students would line up in chairs along the back of his office wall. They would approach, timidly, one by one. They would burble about their family's traditional Persian Nawruz celebration, or a Yiddish joke, or a Peruvian children's game, that is, material that they had stored in their mind's attic among their most intimate and cherished memories, and that they thought belonged to them alone, and Dundes would immediately provide the student with numerous citations to scholarly articles addressing the very obscure factoid they thought they'd never fully understand. After their encounter with Dundes, they walked out of his office into an expanded world, a world of meaning and wonder in which they were playing a vital part every time they told that half-remembered joke, every time they played that childhood game. You aren't alone, the scholarship Dundes introduced students to said. There are others who told the same joke, played the same games. There is a meaning to all this; there is a story; it is dense and rich and everlasting.

So, yes, Dundes was big. And he was funny as hell. Hundreds of students registered for his classes, which were held in an auditorium. He was up there on stage making us laugh, and then inviting us to eye-opening, even outrageous interpretations of every day events. He'd weave in something as ordinary as a traffic sign, cite some Freud, tell a joke, and before you knew it your mind was pinging around like an explorer's finger on a globe and you had the sense that life is a wonderful mystery and this guy possessed many of the clues.

One day he introduced a particularly complex lecture. You had to hang on every word to grok the unfolding revelation. When he finished, many of us thought we were in the presence of the smartest guy on a campus with many Nobel Laureates.

At that moment, a young blonde asked a stupid question. Her question suggested to us that she hadn't really been listening to the lecture, and that she didn't care that she was revealing that she hadn't been listening to the lecture. Her question insulted, and deflated, Dundes. Impatient, aware of his own worth Dundes sniffed, "That was a stupid question."

We all gasped. A minute before we had been surfing with him a wave of joyful discovery. Her cluelessness, and his dismissal, crashed us onto a jetty's boulders.

Dundes, dark and massive, paced a few steps; the auditorium was so hushed we could hear the stage floorboards creak beneath him. Dundes wasn't just arrogant. He was also charming. His bonhomie returned. He stopped and turned to the young lady. "I'm sorry," he said to her, in his most tender, grandfatherly aural caress. "I shouldn't have said that. There's no such thing as a stupid question."

We exhaled.

Dundes paced to the edge of the stage. He swung his bulk around dramatically and shouted, "But that came pretty damn close!"

We exploded in laughter.

One of the regrets of my life is that I found it hard to interact with Dundes, and he found it hard to interact with me. I'm blue collar. I swept floors and swabbed toilets before and after his lectures to work my way through Berkeley grad school. His father was a lawyer; mine, a coal miner. He went to Yale, I, as he reminded me with typical bluntness, got my BA at an "undistinguished state school." Dundes told a dumb Polak joke in class. I went to his office and we yelled at each other. I operated on the assumption that he hated me; it was only after I finished that I learned from someone else that he had "pulled strings he didn't know existed" to get me funding. Ironically, we shared a common ancestral homeland: Poland.

My second story took place more than a decade later, in 2005. I had my PhD, had published work that I assessed was as good as the standard Dundes' superb oeuvre had set for me, and, given that we were now thousands of miles apart and communicating via email, I found it easier to talk to him. I thought that maybe, just maybe, I might someday ask permission to address him by his first name. I sent him an email asking for prayer for my academic career. He responded in an email that enveloped me in a completely new atmosphere. I no longer felt that I was one of a handful of students lining the back of his office wall, awaiting my brief encounter with the great man. He spoke to me as if I were his equal, even his intimate. He spoke about faith. I was overwhelmed. Suddenly I had to relearn how to interact with him. I devoted quiet time to contemplating how to respond to this new Prof. Dundes. And then a friend phoned me and said that he thought that the New York Times obituary for Alan Dundes had been too short. Dundes had collapsed and died of a heart attack while teaching a class he had once taught me, and so many others. To the last, I never got to say all of what I wanted to say to him, in the way that I yearned to say it.

The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America by Coleman Hughes. Book Review.

The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America
Coleman Hughes is a charismatic spokesman for good ideas

 

The End of Race Politics: Arguments for a Colorblind America was published on February 6, 2024, by Thesis, an imprint of Penguin Random House. Thesis was established in spring, 2023 in order to publish "urgent idea-driven nonfiction by thought leaders, journalists, and experts with a strong point of view." The book is 235 pages long, inclusive of appendices, notes, and index. The pages are small. The font is not. The book is a quick read.

 

The End of Race Politics has been very positively blurbed by the intellectual celebrities Steven Pinker, Sam Harris, John McWhorter, and Glenn Loury. The average rating of its sixty-four Amazon reviews is 4.8 out of five stars.

 

Author Coleman Hughes was born in 1996. He grew up in the chic suburb of Montclair, New Jersey, home of Stephen Colbert, Christina Ricci, and other celebrities. He graduated from Columbia in 2020 with a degree in philosophy. He has previously worked for the Manhattan Institute and as an editor at its City Journal. Hughes hosts a YouTube channel. He is an atheist, he is handsome, he speaks in a calm and methodical way, and he is black.

 

The End of Race Politics argues against ideas promoted by prominent race hustlers like Ibram X. Kendi, Robin DiAngelo, and the leaders of Black Lives Matter. Hughes argues for a colorblind society, the triumph of merit over Affirmative Action, and uplift for black people starting with rigorous charter schools. Hughes harnesses social science research to buttress his points.

 

For decades, I've been reading work that pushes back against leftist approaches to race. Almost twenty-five years ago, I read Hating Whitey by David Horowitz. It was as if the scales fell from my eyes. I'm purposely using the "scales fell from my eyes" cliché because my experience was cliched. I was a graduate student at the time, who had spent most of my life on school campuses and in left-wing organizations. Horowitz was speaking truths that were buried, and silent, deep inside me. Truths that I didn't think anyone was allowed to say. Truths that, once I saw them in print, changed me forever.

 

I went on to read authors dubbed "black conservatives." Shelby Steele's fever-pitch outrage encased, like a stiletto in a velvet-lined box, in Steele's elegant prose, rendered him my "most quoted" black conservative author. Jason L. Riley's deployment of key statistics; Larry Elder's in-your-face boldness; John McWhorter's fearless integrity; Glenn Loury's firehose of facts; Thomas Sowell's wide-ranging consideration of middleman minority theory; and Candace Owens' outrageous willingness to state what we all know to be true, that George Floyd was a lousy role model: all these authors and all their gifts produced page-turning works and must-watch videos. I remember individual pages from their work where I encountered something I'd never known before, or was invited to put ideas together in a way that I never had before.

 

The End of Race Politics was not, for this reader, that kind of work. It is, though, the ideal book for a certain kind of reader. Hughes' style is calm and methodical. He's like Mr. Rogers without the personal warmth. Unlike Steele, he does not recount personal stories that engender rage or sorrow. Steele yearned to be a batboy as a youth but was denied because his skin color excluded him from segregated ballparks. Steele describes white academics robbing him of his own accomplishments. "You didn't get to where you are today because of your own efforts," white liberals insisted to Steele. "You are where you are today because of white liberal benefaction." There's none of that kind of engaging and instructive anecdote in Hughes' book. The book is, for the most part, impersonal and dry. Ideas are clearly if unexcitingly expressed in simple, unadorned prose that should be transparent even to high school readers.

The Zone of Interest 2023: Movie Review

 

The Zone of Interest 2023
A Masterpiece from a TV Commercial Director

 

Friend, please do something for me. Put this article aside and find the nearest theater showing The Zone of Interest. Walk into the theater knowing as little as possible about it. Then return to this article so we can exchange notes. I need to talk about this movie with others.

 

The Zone of Interest is going to generate a great deal of talk. There will be debates and podcasts. There will be university courses and peer-reviewed scholarly articles. There will be a backlash industry pooh-poohing every accolade the film receives. If you wait too long, your chance to have your own experience of the film may slip out of your hands. You may feel, "The Zone of Interest is its own industry. Seeing it would be too much like homework. I'd prefer the latest superhero movie."

 

You may be thinking, "Another Holocaust film. They're just are fishing for an Academy Award! Why can't we have movies about other atrocities? And I don't like watching people being tortured."

 

First, there is no torture, and almost no violence, in this movie. I cry at movies and I didn't cry while watching Zone. Days later, while merely thinking about it, I cried. I had nightmares. Even in my nightmares, there was no blood. There were merely well-groomed, clean people behaving in accord with their value system, their character, and their mental defenses. And we need Holocaust movies because the Holocaust was a big deal. And we can have movies about other atrocities, too, like Twelve Years a Slave and Killers of the Flower Moon.

 

Zone is universal and timeless, like W. H. Auden's poem "Shield of Achilles," which uses Jesus' crucifixion and Achilles' shield to discuss twentieth-century atrocity. Both Auden's poem and Zone say as much about slavery or the Cambodian Killing Fields or the Gulag as films directly addressing those topics.

 

I recommend Zone to every thinking adult. I say "thinking" because a subset of viewers are not getting this movie. There are some negative fan reviews online. These say that the film is "boring." "Nothing happens," they complain. "There is no plot." Bless their hearts.

 

Thinking adults are capable of observing. "To observe" implies an increase in cognitive activity from "to watch." If you know how to observe, you will get Zone.

 

Filmmaker Alfonso Cuaron, winner of four Academy Awards, said, that Zone is "probably the most important film of this century, both from the standpoint of his cinematic approach and the complexity of its theme." And if you are thinking, "Oh, this movie sounds too artsy-fartsy. I like more direct fare," don't let that stop you. Glazer got his start in that most democratic of forms, the TV commercial, where he depicted drinking a Guiness beer as tantamount to being a white stallion emerging from ocean surf. Glazer knows how to create images that penetrate to your lizard brain. He wields that magic here, not to sell beer, but to bring you closer to yourself, your own lowest fears and highest prayers.

 

In the article, below, I will summarize the plot, and then discuss the filmmaker, his approach, and the history he addresses. 

Freud's Last Session: A new film misses the real Freud, the real Lewis, the real Atheism, and the real Christianity

 

Freud's Last Session
A new film misses the real Freud, the real Lewis, the real Atheism, and the real Christianity

 

Freud's Last Session was released on December 22, 2023, by Sony Pictures Classics. The two-hour film depicts a fictional 1939 debate between an 83-year-old Sigmund Freud and a 40-year-old C. S. Lewis, the Oxford literature "don," or university teacher, who would go on to write the bestselling children's book series, The Chronicles of Narnia. Sir Anthony Hopkins stars as Freud. Matthew Goode plays Lewis.

 

Freud's Last Session is not a bad film, but it's not a particularly good one, either. And the film doesn't accurately represent either Freud's atheism or Lewis' faith. The film depicts Freud as an intellectual giant who positions science against faith. Lewis, in contrast, is reduced to sputtering in the face of the great man. In real life, as opposed to reel life, Freud's atheism rested, not on science, but on his own arrogance and ethnocentric bigotry. In this, Freud is a perfect, if anachronistic, exemplar of today's New Atheists.