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the breakfast table: An e-mail conversation about the news of the day.

Eric Mendelsohn, Daniel Mendelsohn, and Jennifer Mendelsohn

the breakfast table
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from: Daniel Mendelsohn

Pope, Schmope--Be an Inquisitor!

Posted Monday, March 13, 2000, at 12:22 PM ET

Hi Jen & Er,

Yes Jen, the Pope's apology is the big story this a.m. (although I feel compelled to direct your attention to the passing of Walter Dana, 96, who as you may know did more than anyone else to promote the polka in postwar American culture). To be perfectly serious, I found this asking-for-forgiveness-for-the-havoc-we-have-wreaked idea rather moving. There is something profoundly touching about the idea of this man, who knows he is about to die, getting his moral house in order and, just as the New Millennium gets going, trying to do the same for his church. (I can't imagine, say, George W. Bush doing the same for the institution he represents.) I have never been able to figure the pope out: On the one hand, there is the dogmatic and doctrinal rigidity, and on the other there are these impressive and quite theatrical gestures of great, expansive, boundary-crossing humanity. At any rate, I was really struck by the Lenten homily, too, even though the euphemisms are a tad hilarious. Which reminds me: Did you guys notice at the bottom of the same page as the Times' We're-really-sorry-for-the-Spanish Inquisition article the smaller item about the pope's meeting with the Jewish grandson of the man who was the pope's landlord in prewar Poland? The grandson has been trying to reclaim the house, and the Vatican has (aside from timely photo-ops) been signally uncooperative. Is there a Pulitzer for page layout?

Of course I watched the Sopranos, silly. Edie was particularly great, I thought. Although it occurred to me during her prayer-in-the-hospital scene that Carmela often speaks a more elegant English than most college professors I know. Maybe only when she prays.

Out of some impulse left over from the late 1980s, I am trying to slog through Vanity Fair's April Oscar-hysteria issue. Should I be upset that I don't recognize a single person on the cover (although I wondered briefly how I might get my home phone number to No. 5 and No. 7)? Is this a sign of Encroaching Old Age? Hmm. It was all curiously flat, I found--very second-string stories and personages. Do we need one more story about Katzenberg/Eisner/whoever? Uh-uh. Or about Garbo? Nah. Isn't there a point at which they just realize there's nothing more to be said or read? And I must say I find everything about Judy Garland to be obliteratingly depressing. Although my friend Bob, who's reviewing that new Garland bio for the Times and knows I am working on a piece about the new Tom Stoppard play, called me to tell me that Judy's favorite poet as a young girl was (are you ready for this?) A. E. Housman. Which, to my mind at least, demonstrates that there is a God. And I have no doubt that He will forgive Vanity Fair for its past 2,000 years of 200-lb. Oscar issues ...

Speaking of mags, did you see, by the way, that the first issue of the new AOL-Time Warner publication Real Simple will feature an article about "how to tell which family member dirties the most laundry"? Real Simpleton.

OK, I have to start my day. L. just rang to say that P. has conjunctivitis, which apparently he caught at day care, and so, of course, I now notice (neurotically and without any medical grounds, no doubt) that my eyes are red and a tad ... crusty. And tonight I'm supposed to be on this JCC panel featuring gay Jewish writers, and I'm sure there will be dozens of cute nice eligible Jewish bachelors in attendance, and of course I'll look like a leper with oozing, medieval eyes. Sigh. Talk to you guys soon.

Love,
Dan

the breakfast table
entries
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from: Daniel Mendelsohn

Pope, Schmope--Be an Inquisitor!

Posted Monday, March 13, 2000, at 12:22 PM ET
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Eric Mendelsohn is the writer/director of the film Judy Berlin, currently in theaters and starring Madeline Kahn, Edie Falco, Barbara Barrie, and Julie Kavner. Daniel Mendelsohn is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review, and the New York Observer, a lecturer in classics at Princeton University, and the author of The Elusive Embrace: Desire and the Riddle of Identity (click here to buy it). Jennifer Mendelsohn is Slate's Washington, D.C.-based "Keeping Tabs" columnist.
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Highlights from The Fray:


Don't the Mendelsohns remind you of J.D.Salinger's Glass family of precocious children?

--Patti

(To reply, click here.)

[Eagle80 was of the opinion that the Mendelsohns were in fact The Sopranos of the literati. Stacy Grover asked How did so much cleverness end up in one family? and this brought the Missing Mendelsohn brothers to The Fray: Andrew said I often wonder that myself. And you haven't even heard from the rest of us yet!
And Matthew responded:]
I have to agree with my brother Andrew. I've been feeling like Zeppo Marx all week. I think Slate should host a Breakfast Table with the forgotten Mendelsohn brothers. Jennifer, Eric and Daniel can host a discussion about gay culture while Andrew and myself discuss biotech stocks. You'll learn more with them but you'll make more with us.

(To reply--or to follow the thread in more detail--click here.)


Thursday's entry: As for Jennifer and marriage, I believe she is the star of an upcoming Fox special called, Who wants to Marry A Mendelsohn? Should be good.

--Bill Watrous

(To reply, click here.)

[If you want to read the marriage proposal for Jennifer (and her response) click here. Yet another member of the Mendelsohn family, Jay, entered The Fray here. Marriage proposal for Dan is here. Sorry, Eric, no proposal, but lots of Fraygrants did like your film and one of them liked your photo.

But there were also Fray readers who wanted to discuss serious issues, or at least give a short, thrilling history of religion down the ages:]

Typical drivel from the pseudo-intellectual phenoms. Here's some of my drivel. Let's see: there were 12 tribes waiting for the Messiah, He comes, they kill kill him because he wanted to give Caesar what was Caesar's, they wanted power, all he wanted was your faith and devotion to a Greater Good. The various churches spring up, (no-one mentions the Orthodox Churches and the atrocities they committed), Popes are killed, moved to France, etc., they offer forgiveness of sins for money, and kill, all for power using the popular religion of the time. Then we have Protestantism, (no one mentions the 2.5 million Catholics Cromwell killed and the killing that has gone on since then in Ireland) Let's leave for the New World, Puritan brothers, so that we the church leaders can have the power over every bit of your life (Pat Robertson, Jerry Falwell, Al Sharpton, Pat Buchanan, et al) Oh yeah, you're a witch, die! (You also had a piece of land I wanted...)I am going to skip a century or two now... lets see Joseph Smith, ex-con, sees an angel called Baloney, no Maloney, no, Moroni... yeah that's the one. Yeah, Yeah, that's my wife...Morgan Fairchild...all 11 of them...God told me I could, I swear!

Well enough of this. People are the problem, not God, not Jesus, no matter what religion, faith, creed.

--St Pat

(To reply, click here.)


Is it possible that the pope's "doctrinal rigidity" and "gestures of expansive humanity" [Monday's entry] are of a piece? As I understand John Paul II's thinking, the humanity Mendelsohn admires arises almost entirely from the pope's dogmatic beliefs about God, man's nature, and the consequent requirements for living a good life. Liberals (and I don't intend that as a lazy epithet) should consider the possibility that the "humanity" they praise must rest either on certain irreducible truths or on a collection of insubstantial, albeit attractive, sentiments.

--Michael Pollard

(To reply, click here.)


Many have decried the pope's apology as a political ploy. I doubt it, if only for the reason that if it were, he would have vaguely referred to the Crusades and Inquisition as "youthful indiscretions" of a church that is now much more mature and therefore knows better as a result of the important lessons it has learned.

G Wiz

(To reply, click here.)


1. Gays (yawn). How over. How '90s.
2. Catholics. "Anti-Catholicism is the anti-Semitism of the intellectual."

--P.J.O'Connell

(To reply, click here.)


To P.J.O'Connell: Let's jump back in time to 1960...
Negros (yawn). How over. How 50's.
2. Jews. "Just ignore them and they'll go away."
It ain't over by a long shot!

--Dave

(To reply, click here.)


I'm glad Eric Mendelsohn cleared up the confusion over Beauty and the Beast. But I'm still not sure which Psycho he had in mind. Perkins or Vaughn? Or Christian Bale? I hope he clears this up before the Breakfast Table is wiped clear of bagel crumbs, the dishes go in the dishwasher, and he goes off to film The Magnificent Mendelsohns.

And, by the way, the poet Catullus [see Wednesday's entry] was really the Matt Drudge --or maybe Fray contributor--of his times. How low can you get?

--Eagle80

(To reply, click here.)

[The Catulluses of the modern age also discussed dogs, names, the Oscars, The Sopranos and many other Breakfast Table topics in The Fray this week.]

(3/17)

Washington Post
The Washington Post
OPINIONS
Topic A: Obama's Speech
| Pundits and diplomats respond.
Robinson: Sunshine in BerlinToles: Obama the UniterTelnaes: Meanwhile, McCain
PLUS » Stumped: Bring Back Bill Clinton