{"id":318,"date":"2007-12-03T14:38:20","date_gmt":"2007-12-03T14:38:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/viamedia\/2007\/12\/culture-notes.html"},"modified":"2007-12-03T14:38:20","modified_gmt":"2007-12-03T14:38:20","slug":"culture-notes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/12\/culture-notes.html","title":{"rendered":"Culture notes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Yeah, there’s some culture around here. A bit.
\nFirst, any of you who were scandalized by the cover of Eleanor Dundy’s book on my sidebar can rest easy – it’s read and I’m about to review it: The Dud Avocado. <\/a><\/em>
\nI was tuned into this book by Terry Teachout<\/a>, arts critic, biographer and blogger extraordinaire. He penned an introduction to the new NYRB edition, which was just published this year. Here’s the full text of the intro. <\/a>
\nIt’s a really delightful book, but not quite as madcap as I expected – I mean, it is certainly madcap, but it packs a subtle moral punch as well. The protagonist is a young American woman living in Paris in the 50’s. She’s there..why? Simply because when, as a teen, she attempted to run away, a relative promised that if she would just stay put and finish college, she would have, at the end of it, two years’ worth of money with which she could do what she liked.
\nSo she goes to Paris.
\nOnce there, she gets involved with a married diplomat, who already has not only a wife, but also a mistress. She hangs out with various artists and poseurs<\/em>, finds some acting work, loses her passport, heads to the south of France with some others, becomes part of a movie about a bullfighter, finds out some very unpleasant truths, witnesses some tragedy, and heads back to the States.
\nAs Terry writes:<\/p>\n

\n

Now The Dud Avocado<\/em> is out again in the United States, and I\u2019ll bet money that some dewy-eyed young critic is going to read it for the first time and write an essay about how Sally Jay Gorce, Elaine Dundy\u2019s adorably scatty heroine, was the spiritual grandmother of Bridget Jones. To which I say\u2026 nothing. I actually kind of like poor old Bridget, but if you want to properly place The Dud Avocado<\/em> in the grand scheme of things, you should look not forward to Chick Lit but backward to Daisy Miller<\/font><\/a>. <\/a>Sally is Daisy debauched, an innocent ambassador from the new world who crosses the Atlantic, loses her virginity, and learns in the fullness of time that experience, while not all it\u2019s cracked up to be, is nothing if not inevitable \u2014 and that Europe, for all its sophisticated ways, is no longer the keeper of the flame of Western civilization. Paris may be \u201cthe rich man\u2019s plaything, the craftsman\u2019s tool, the artist\u2019s anguish, and the world\u2019s largest champagne factory,\u201d but you don\u2019t have to live there to live, and once Sally gets to know some of its not-so-nice residents, she has a flash of full-fledged epiphany that is no less believable for having popped up in the middle of a comic novel:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cThey are corrupt \u2014 corrupt,\u201d I kept saying to myself, over and over again, as I paced around the room. It was the first time I\u2019d ever used that word about people I actually knew, and again the idea that I could take a moral stand \u2014 or rather, that I couldn\u2019t avoid taking one \u2014 filled me with the same confusion it had that morning.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Observant to a fault, with the kind of writing that paints\u00a0concise pictures of the exterior world while at the same time letting you know exactly what is going on inside, funny and painful. The ending struck me as a bit odd, but after reading about her life, I wondered if it essentially reflected her sense of the beginnings of her relationship with husband Kenneth Tynan. I don’t know. But nonetheless, you can’t help but love a book filled with sentences like this:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cA rowdy bunch on the whole, they were most of them so violently individualistic as to be practically interchangeable.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

2. Michael and I went to see No Country for Old Men <\/em>the other night. I’ve not read the book, so I went into it cold, just expecting what one would expect out of a Coen brothers\/Cormac McCarthy product – artful violence, terse, edgy maybe even poetic dialogue, good acting and great faces.<\/p>\n

Yup.<\/p>\n

It was okay. I need to ponder it a bit more, but I did feel the old Coen emptiness at the heart of it, fighting the Tommy Lee Jones character’s moral sensibility for center stage. I am not sure who won.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Yeah, there’s some culture around here. A bit. First, any of you who were scandalized by the cover of Eleanor Dundy’s book on my sidebar can rest easy – it’s read and I’m about to review it: The Dud Avocado. I was tuned into this book by Terry Teachout, arts critic, biographer and blogger extraordinaire.…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":180,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-318","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"yoast_head":"\nCulture notes - Via Media<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/12\/culture-notes.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Culture notes - Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"Yeah, there’s some culture around here. A bit. First, any of you who were scandalized by the cover of Eleanor Dundy’s book on my sidebar can rest easy – it’s read and I’m about to review it: The Dud Avocado. I was tuned into this book by Terry Teachout, arts critic, biographer and blogger extraordinaire.…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/12\/culture-notes.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Via Media\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2007-12-03T14:38:20+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"awelborn\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Culture notes - Via Media","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/12\/culture-notes.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Culture notes - Via Media","og_description":"Yeah, there’s some culture around here. A bit. First, any of you who were scandalized by the cover of Eleanor Dundy’s book on my sidebar can rest easy – it’s read and I’m about to review it: The Dud Avocado. I was tuned into this book by Terry Teachout, arts critic, biographer and blogger extraordinaire.…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/12\/culture-notes.html","og_site_name":"Via Media","article_published_time":"2007-12-03T14:38:20+00:00","author":"awelborn","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/12\/culture-notes.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/12\/culture-notes.html","name":"Culture notes - Via Media","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website"},"datePublished":"2007-12-03T14:38:20+00:00","dateModified":"2007-12-03T14:38:20+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/12\/culture-notes.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/12\/culture-notes.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/2007\/12\/culture-notes.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Culture notes"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/","name":"Via Media","description":"Amy Welborn","potentialAction":[{"@type":"SearchAction","target":{"@type":"EntryPoint","urlTemplate":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/?s={search_term_string}"},"query-input":{"@type":"PropertyValueSpecification","valueRequired":true,"valueName":"search_term_string"}}],"inLanguage":"en-US"},{"@type":"Person","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/aea2dcda1635c9c2d6030d9c7595725a","name":"awelborn","image":{"@type":"ImageObject","inLanguage":"en-US","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/#\/schema\/person\/image\/","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","contentUrl":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-content\/wphb-cache\/gravatar\/9f2\/9f2100183464289fedc5b8a621c15110x96.jpg","caption":"awelborn"},"description":"Amy Welborn was born in 1960, the only child of a now-retired professor of political science, a teacher-librarian-artist mother,deceased since 2001, was a teacher, librarian and artist. The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=318"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/318\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=318"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=318"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=318"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}