Subzero Sunday round-up

A compendium of reading recommendations for a weekend of unforgiving outside conditions

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Minus six here, at 8:55. You know the drill: Put some comfort food on the stove, slip into your fuzziest slippers, pour another cup of coffee and curl up with the latest Precipice Roundup.

Good book reviews work as standalone pieces. We have a couple of those today.

At Hedgehog Review, Stephen Westich goes through Paul Elie’s The Last Supper: Art, Faith, Sex and Controversy in the 1980s and unpacks the problems it presents.

The review is titled “Jesus in the Junk Shop,” a title that bears considerable weight as Elie’s argument unfolds:

It was an age of global connection and heaving, irreversible changes at every level of American life—mass culture, mass media, mass consumption, mass production, mass murder, the vernacular Mass. And yet, let me draw your attention to a secondhand shop in Manhattan. Where, in that musty wonderland of secrets, mysteries, and improbable juxtapositions, a man with funny hair rummages around. We don’t know what was there. Perhaps an old eggbeater, some pants, a World War II helmet slightly damaged, its owner long gone. Stuff. Then the man with the funny hair finds something he likes. It is a terra-cotta reproduction of Leonardo’s Last Supper in relief. In fact, it is not a reproduction. It is a reproduction of a reproduction of a reproduction. This suits the man just fine. He likes it and takes it home, where he will do great things with it.

The man is Andy Warhol. The flea-market booty will play a role in the massive undertaking at the end of his life: a series of works that engage with Leonardo’s Last Supper. Then undergoing extensive restoration, Leonardo’s painting dominated the news. Influential art patron Alexander Iolas sought to capitalize on the publicity by commissioning Warhol (for one million dollars) to create works that responded to it. Warhol created numerous variations on the Renaissance work, themselves iterations of the numerous iterations available in mass production, such as the terra cotta he found at the flea market. Hence, one of the most iconic religious images shakes hands with pop art. In Paul Elie’s The Last Supper, Warhol’s work is pivotal in its processing of controversies about art and sexuality through religious motifs, something Elie characterizes as the “crypto-religious.”

Investigating the crypto-religious is Elie’s venture in this book. Readers of Elie’s first two books, The Life You Save May Be Your Own and Reinventing Bach, will be familiar with his interest in complicating the boundary between secular and sacred with close readings of literary and musical works through the lens of their makers’ spiritual struggles and developments. One way he expands on these ideas in The Last Supper is by foregrounding the visual arts in his analysis. But a second, more central expansion comes from his concept of the crypto-religious. He borrows the term from the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz, who wrote to Thomas Merton that “I have always been crypto-religious and in a conflict with the political aspect of Polish Catholicism.” For Miłosz, this meant concealing his religious inclinations within his homeland’s Communist regime and alluding to early Christians hiding in Roman crypts. Elie expands the phrase to cover much more: “Crypto-religious art is work that incorporates religious words and images and motifs but expresses something other than conventional belief. It’s work that raises the question of what the person who made it believes, so that the question of what it means to believe is crucial to the work’s effect: as you see it, hear it, read it, listen to it, you wind up reflecting on your own beliefs.”

But where is the locus of belief?

To argue this claim philosophically would mean, at the very least, finding stable categories for “conventional beliefs” and identifying which motifs and words have an inherent religiosity to them that transcends context. Such a task’s complexity would be exceeded only by its tedium. Elie recognizes this and shrewdly explains that his intentions are best understood in “narrative terms,” in which one pays careful attention to the works’ contexts and conditions of production as well as what intentions and outcomes can reasonably be attributed to the creators. This means that not every work that alludes to, or engages with, religious imagery is necessarily crypto-religious in Elie’s sense. To help clarify the distinction, let’s take two films that rely heavily on the Gospel accounts of Christ’s life, are saturated with highly charged religious imagery, and were both highly controversial for their handling of that material: Monty Python’s Life of Brian and Martin Scorsese’s The Last Temptation of Christ. For Elie, Scorsese’s film is crypto-religious because the work deeply engages with the filmmaker’s own beliefs and struggles and attempts to come to terms with his Catholicism. I don’t think Elie would consider Life of Brian crypto-religious, because the Monty Python troupe do not seem to have approached the material in order to wrestle with their beliefs but rather from a more stable position of skepticism and critique—the primary criterion being the mode of artistic creation rather than the use of religious imagery in general, or the reaction of religious groups.

Indeed, crypto or not, religious imagery and theological thinking have played a major role in the production of modern and contemporary art throughout the past century, although until recently that aspect of artwork has mostly been willfully ignored by critics and art historians. However, in the past decade or so it has become a rich discourse with the arrival of such books as Thomas Crow’s No Idols (2017), Joseph Masheck’s Faith in Art (2023), and Jonathan A. Anderson’s The Invisibility of Religion in Contemporary Art (2025). These approaches reflect a broader societal trend that challenges the hegemony of secular narratives of cultural analysis—a shift that is key to Elie’s work.

The concept of the crypto-religious is central to the book, but it is a diagnostic tool, not the diagnosis itself. Elie freely admits that much of the interpretive work of figures such as Prince and Madonna, Toni Morrison, Andres Serrano, and Wim Wenders, to name a few, recapitulates that of other scholars. He takes up these threads and weaves them together to track the fate of crypto-religious artists and their works as they played out in the public sphere from the 1960s to the 1980s and ask why such impulses have ultimately died out in our own time, something he finds lamentable.

Another great review I’ve come across is Mark Bott’s reflections on Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian at Front Porch Republic.

He launches into his examination via a passage from Wendell Berry’s poetry:

And high
Up the birds rose into sights against the darkening
Clouds. They tossed themselves among the fading
Landscapes of the sky like rags, as in
Abandonment to the summons their blood knew.

Like the birds in Wendell Berry’s poem, “September 2,” we hear a summons our blood knows. It is a summons to belonging. Aristotle tells us we are political animals, and scripture says “it is not good for man to be alone.” We reject the summons at our peril. Fortunately, something inside us strongly inclines us to respond. We want to belong. And yet this desire is as dangerous as it is necessary. Sometimes, we accept the summons even when it means walking into the Devil’s arms and letting him violate our body and soul.

This is the theme of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian. Set in Mexico and the American Southwest of 1849, the novel offers a fictionalized account of real crimes credited to a sadistic group of scalp-hunters known as the Glanton gang. The gang includes the Kid, the novel’s protagonist, and Judge Holden, the antagonist. The original account of Holden comes from a book by Samuel Chamberlain called My Confession. According to Chamberlain, Holden lusted after “blood and women” and was suspected of raping and murding a ten-year-old girl. McCarthy’s Holden is much worse, and his sexual appetites include children of both sexes. The Kid initially keeps his distance from Holden, though they ride in the same company of scalp-hunters, and on several occasions Holden makes explicit his desire for the Kid. But in the end, after watching the Judge destroy so many others, the Kid chooses to give himself to Holden’s depredations. It’s a disturbing conclusion to one of the most disturbing novels ever written, and readers are left wondering why. I think it’s simple: the Kid chose the Judge because he was lonely.

A bit later, the Kid has an experience that forever forecloses on his allowing transcendence into his life:

At age twenty-eight, which is an accomplishment considering what all he sustained, the Kid is nearly halfway through his life, life expectancy being around forty at that time. He joins five other hired men to escort a group of pilgrims “through the wilderness to their homes halfway across the continent.” A week into the journey and the Kid quits his post. Later, however, he finds them all lying “hacked and butchered among the stones in every attitude.” The dead had huddled beneath a cross, but, like so many such moments, the cross and the God it implies did not (or could not) stop its penitents from being assaulted. The scene stirs something within the Kid. He discovers “alone and upright in a small niche in the rocks an old woman kneeling in a faded rebozo with her eyes cast down.” The Kid approaches the woman and speaks more to her than he does at any other time in the novel. “He spoke to her in a low voice. He told her that he was an American and that he was a long way from the country of his birth and that he had no family and that he had traveled much and seen many things and had been at war and endured hardships. He told her that he would convey her to a safe place…for he could not leave her in this place or she would surely die.” But when the Kid touches the woman, he discovers that she “has been dead in that place for years.” This seals the Kid’s fate. Even when he finally tries to confess his sins and show charity to another person, he is rejected.

In the post “Thomas Edison and the Female Brain” at his Substack, Dan Gardner argues that brilliance in one area doesn’t necessarily transfer to others:

In the course of researching my book on the history of technology, I recently read a long interview with Thomas Edison that appeared in Good Housekeeping.

The year was 1912. Electricity networks were spreading at a furious pace and inventors were delivering new electrical contraptions at almost as quickly. The electric fan. The electric iron. The electric washing machine. The electric vacuum. It seemed every day brought word of another electric wonder.

So Good Housekeeping asked the Wizard of Menlo Park, the genius inventor who had done more than any other to usher in this dazzling electric age, what it meant for the future of the household. And women.

Which is strange when you think about it.

Edison was very knowledgable about the science of electricity. He knew as much or more about electrical engineering than any living person. But was he an expert on people and society? No. So why ask him about the future of people and society?

The answer lies in technological determinism: Good Housekeeping has assumed that technology shapes society, not the other way around. So to know what a new technology means for humanity’s future, you don’t ask someone with insight into humanity. You ask something with insight into technology.

And Edison obliged. Because he, too, was a technological determinist.

Any of this sound familiar? Yeah. Look at all the ink spilled about what AI means for the future of humanity. Who do we go to for answers? The technologists.

The same old, stupid mistake marches on.

And Edison’s drudge-to-engineer theory of how women were going to rapidly “evolve” is a humdinger:

Thomas Edison, 1912:

The housewife’s work, in days to come will amount to little more than superintendence, not of Norah, fresh from Ireland, or Gretchen, fresh from Germany, but of simplified electrical appliances; and that is why I said, to start with, that electricity will change the housewives of the future from drudges into engineers.

Edison goes on after this to explain how the price of electricity is dropping rapidly, which is driving the spread of electricity and the invention of new uses. All true.

But then he gets to the implications for humanity.

To diminish the necessity for utilizing man himself, or woman herself, as the motor-furnishing force for this life’s mechanical tasks, is to increase the potentiality of humanity’s brain power. When all our mental energy can be devoted to the highest tasks of which it may be capable, then shall we have made the greatest forward step in this world’s history. To so conserve our energy as to trend toward this eventuality is the tendency of the age.

It is there that electricity will play its greatest part in the development of woman-kind. It will not only permit women to more generally exercise their mental force, but will compel this exercise, and thus insure a brain development in them such as has been prevented in the past.

It will develop woman to that point where she can think straight. Direct thought is not at present an attribute of femininity. In this woman is now centuries, ages, even epochs behind man. That it is true is not her fault, but her misfortune, and the misfortune of the race.

Man must accept responsibility for it, for it has been through his superior physical strength that he has held his dominance over woman and delayed her growth. For ages woman was man’s chattel, and in such condition progress for her was impossible; now she is emerging into real sex independence, and the resulting outlook is a dazzling one.

This must be credited very largely to progression in mechanics; more especially to progression in electrical mechanics. Under these new influences woman’s brain will change and achieve new capabilities, both of effort and accomplishment.

Woman will grow more involved cross fibers and that will mean a new race of mankind.

Edison’s thinking here is a crude sort of Lamarckism. Named for the 18th century French zoologist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, Lamarckism is the idea that the characteristics an organism develops by use during its lifetime are passed on to its offspring. So the blacksmith who develops unusually strong arms from swinging hammers will have children with unusually strong arms. Despite the rise of Darwinism, Lamarckism was still a going concern in scientific circles on in 1912. So Edison wouldn’t have sounded as kooky then as he does now. Arrogant, certainly. The man is forecasting with certainty the evolution of humanity thanks to his own inventions. But maybe not so kooky.

“More involved cross fibers.” Wow.

In his latest post at his blog, Daren Jonescu bullet-points several things that Republicans have given lip service to. I’ll provide a few examples to give you a sense of what he’s setting up:

Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, shouted in horror at a federal government white paper that identified as “domestic terrorists” people who had committed no crimes but merely happened to oppose the ideology of the administration of that time, or to speak out with distrust against what they considered excessive and un-American government actions?

Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, would have been sick with anger at an American president who flat-out told reporters, in reference to an innocent man who was shot dead by federal agents without just cause, “You can’t have guns. You can’t walk in with guns. You can’t do that”? And when those millions would have used that occasion to warn, in every forum available to them, that the first major act of any tyranny in history was to disarm the citizenry so that only the government would have weapons?

Do you remember back in the days before 2016, when tens of millions of Americans, Republican Party voters, would have said that the greatest threat to the American republic was a socialistic administration that believed it had the authority to demand part ownership of corporations, to impose massive tax increases without congressional legislation by means of phony “emergency powers” fiats more radical than the tariffs that caused the Great Depression, and to micro-manage the world economy on personal whim?

Where’s he going with this? Here:

For years, as I now see, these millions, including the ones I once believed were friends, were merely telling themselves face-saving lies to rationalize their continual, repetitive, and predictable surrender to the Republican Party’s ruling establishment, hoping to appear for one another, and perhaps even to feel in their own hearts, less cowardly and tribal, less sheepish and unprincipled, than they really were — less pathetic and weak than those other Republican voters, the “establishment types,” whom these millions dubbed “Republicans In Name Only.” In truth, however, these millions, the so-called grassroots Republicans, the pretend Tea Party, the fake constitutionalists, were no better than the RINOs they ridiculed. Or rather they were worse, in that they lacked even the minimal courage to admit to themselves or to one another that they too were merely the critical mass of their betters, the ineffectual “tribe” serving as the slavishly dependent collective at the mercy of a cadre of billionaire profiteers, market-riggers, and anti-American global manipulators who see a constitutional republic as nothing but a hindrance to their agenda and a practical nuisance. These millions, for all their civil war bluster, all their communists-under-the-bed paranoia, and all their latter-day MAGA chanting, were never anything more in the end but reliable, hopelessly devoted Republican Party voters — my party right or wrong, my party constitutialist or authoritarian, my party free market or socialist — right to their country’s last breath.

Republican Party voters, and nothing more. Thanks in large part to these millions, that last breath seems closer every day.

Speaking of blogs, I’ve been doing a little posting at Late in the Day, the blog I’ve had since 2012, but had not posted to since last March. I’m going to use it to first explore thoughts that might later get fleshed out as Precipice essays.

“Well, Why Not? It’s Still Late in the Day.”

“Post-America Has Decided To Be One of the World’s Bad Actors”

“And Everybody’s Going To Get On His Or Her Particular High Horse, And Thus Does Post-America Edge Closer To Atomization”

That should sustain you until the soup is done.