Long Overdue
News, new subscribers, and Aristotle's take on 'Saul Gone'
Word on the Pond
I’m overdue, but here I am.
I hope these dog days have been as full and exciting for you as they have been for me. At any rate, my wife and I brought our infant son home from the hospital a month ago—as far as tiny crocodiles go, he’s our first; the firstborn of a firstborn Miller twice over.
So while I’m delighted… and while fatigue of this variety is a splendid problem to have, I hope your summer has been a little more restful than mine.
By Way of City Journal
If you’re a new reader, then welcome.
Honored to have you and please, mind the gap.
A good number of you found me after seeing my article ‘Tragic, Cautionary and Thrilling’ in City Journal magazine. If you’re given me a vote of confidence by subscribing then for that, I’m much obliged… and I’m safely bettering that you’ve A) read my article, and B) that you’ve watched some, or all of the now finished crime drama Better Call Saul.
No harm if you haven’t. If you fancy a short primer on what Better Call Saul is all about…my City Journal article lays out a decent summary.
To that end, I’ll be dropping my quick thoughts on the series finale, the series as a whole, and how the Breaking Bad-Better Call Saul universe cooks its own brand of Aristotelian tragic structure.
As I often say and will say again, There Will Be Spoilers.
For a short introduction, this monthly rag is more or less what the tagline says—an essay that tees off on a book I’ve read, a show I’ve watched, an author I’ve interviewed, or something along those lines.
While I welcome readers from all walks and all interests, it’s only fair that I let you know what jersey I wear when game day comes. Knowing what team I play for, (for starters, it’s not the one that rhymes with shmogressive…) might be a courtesy as much as it is an invitation; and some of you might be less flabbergasted when I kick the ball a certain way.
To that end, and without expounding at length where I’ve already done so, those who landed here from City Journal should know that I’m a believing, protestant Apostles creed Christian, (as I write this, I’m tempted to boost the phrase Christian Humanist from one Scott Postma; he wears it proudly in his own newsletter Rumbling Toward Heaven).
Scribbling here, I also aim for my audience, and many of them rank among the sharp, Bible and Hebrew quoting, tittering over Lewis and Chesterton variety.
I love it.
And with pastors, parents, fellow Substack authors, filmmakers, creators, teachers, set builders and at least one U.K. author and journalist that I know of… they’re an incredible group.
To that end and given the age I live in, I’m often wranging the modern, the secular, the political, and the increasingly crazy—Orwell, Ray Bradbury, Anton Chekhov, the Ottawa Truckers, Watership Down, Squid Game, Kanye West, writing guru Steven Pressfield and Better Call Saul—to name a few.
While my faith convictions color everything I write, I’m confident that readers who don’t share them, but sense something rousing and piquant in the Western tradition—in Shakespeare or Aristotle, in Judeo-Christian literature, in pushing back against the secular-left-mother Gaia holy war, or in pondering what Thomas Sowell calls the tragic or ‘constrained’ vision of human nature and the world around us—will find themselves in good company.
As good a company as a swamp of curious, bookish, crocodiles can be.
So there you go.
Pull up a chair and grab a cocktail—and if my introduction raises any questions or concerns, feel free to browse the archive, or scan my early mission statement and see how that lands.
In other news, and on the heels of my son being born, the crocodiles have their own announcement:
Tip Jar’s Open
To those who asked me how they can support this content financially… well, here’s how.
Rather than going with Substack’s built-in monthly subscription—which has no one-time donation option and lops off a generous 10 % for its own operating costs—I’ve made a Shelf of Crocodiles tip jar on Ko-fi.com, a zero-charge donation platform for content creators.
When you see this…
Know that it’s my call to action; a nudge to contribute financially if you enjoy this content and would like to keep it coming.
All that to say, reading is free, browsing is free, and subscribing is free.
I’d love to keep it that way.
If you do check out the donation page, you’ll see the option of making a one-time donation in increments of $5 ‘coffees’ (buying me one coffee nets $5, two coffees $10, and so on…) along with the option of setting up a recurring monthly amount.
A Few Suggestions:
$5 to $15 (one or three coffees) = one atta boy!
$20 to $25 (four to five coffees) = roughly the cost of a printed literary quarterly.
$5 or 10 monthly = bless your heart.
$25 a month or anything higher = royal patronage, King James style. If you go this route, I’ll be getting in touch with some fashion of Croc-ish perks (if you’re in the area, maybe I’ll start by doing your laundry once a week).
To my estimate, if Shelf of Crocodiles hovers around $50 a month in donations, that would be enough to help me and a few contributing writers produce one short croc bite, and one longform essay a month, annually.
On this note, you can also support us by sharing directly, or by following the crocodiles on Twitter, Instagram, or Facebook. We—myself, crocodiles, other readers, and a handful of contributing authors—always appreciate it and often cross promote.
We’ll also send some stickers to anyone who contributes…or anyone who wants them and gives me an address.
*Just a heads up: Ko-fi operates through Paypal.com or Stripe. If you don’t have one of those accounts setup, Ko-fi has an easy guide on how to make one in a few steps.
If you wish to donate but have a concern with Ko-fi, or with either of those options, send a DM over and we’ll figure something out.
From the Commonplace:
To the tune of Thomas Sowell’s tragic vision, which its base assumptions of knowledge diffused through millions of choices and windfall gains compounded over time, the late Jacques Barzun writes:
“The notion of western culture as a solid block having but one meaning is contrary to fact. The West has been an endless series of opposites—in religion, politics, art, morals, and manners…. To denounce does not free from the self what it hates, any more than ignoring the past shuts off its influence.
Look at the youth walking the street with ears plugged into a portable radio: he is tied to the lives of Marconi and of the composer being broadcast…the ardent follower of Martin Luther King might well pause over the leader’s given names, which evoke ideas from the Protestant Reformation and link the Twentieth Century to the Sixteenth. On the workaday plane, anyone receiving some form of social security is the beneficiary of a long line of theories and activists along which are found such disparates as Florence Nightingale, the Comte de Saint-Simon, Bismarck, and Bernard Shaw.
To see these connections is also to see that the fruits of western culture—human rights, social benefits, machinery—have not sprouted out of the ground like weeds; they are the work of innumerable heads and hands*”
-From Dawn to Decadence1
*Not forgetting the Invisible One.
On ‘Saul Gone’
True to form, and with spoilers to follow…Better Call Saul ended on a high note.
Even as ‘Saul Gone’ satisfied, the high-octane, deadly, and looooong-brewing showdowns earlier this season made it feel a little underwhelming. But where the focus narrowed to Bob Odenkirk’s Saul Goodman, what would happen to him post Breaking Bad, and whether or not he’d astonish us with one last glimpse of Jimmy McGill, the affable if mischievous underdog he was at the start of the series, I wasn’t disappointed.
Watching Saul, a lifelong master of conning people and breaking rules, abandon a sweet plea bargain for an in-court confession while ex-wife Kim Wexler looks on was a bracing moment… and rather hopeful given Breaking Bad’s taste for strict, moral punishment.
I wasn’t left breathless; not in the way I was when Walter White bared his soul and confessed Oedipus-worthy guilt to his stricken wife Skyler in the Breaking Bad finale. Of course, there’s no topping ‘Baby Blue’ as a sign-off song while the camera pans upward from a deceased Walt surrounded by pieces of his true and only love—containers, dials, and lab paraphernalia, symbols of the chemistry itself.
Saul’s confession after one doozy of a crime bender, and his calm acceptance of life in prison at a Supermax-style hellhole (with more visits of reconciled, ex-wife Kim Wexler to come?) feels squishy by comparison.
But it’s both probable and astonishing… well within Aristotle's strike zone.
Speaking of Aristotle…
Here’s a few terms from the Poetics2 that hash out tragedy in plain language:
Plausible but Astonishing - the recipe for a tragic plot worth its salt.
If something’s highly plausible given every prior event, and yet contrary or astonishing nonetheless, we’re pretty much hooked. That is, we’ve suspended our disbelief, engaged our problem-solving imagination, and touched on fear, pity, and cosmic wonder… all with one made-up story.
Reversal - a slide from good fortune to destruction.
Recognition - a change from ignorance to knowledge.
While Aristotle uses this term to describe moments when characters(like Oedipus) discover the truth of outward events, Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul give an individualistic, inward spin that’s really potent. When Walter White tells his wife ‘I did it for me,’ —as in, ‘every single time I excused cooking meth and committing crimes by saying it’s for the good of my family I was telling a bald-faced lie—the self-knowledge and utter honesty are blinding.
In effect, he’s admitting what very few intelligent, rational adults ever do: I’m the cause of the plague on Thebes.
Tragic Impulse* - a show of bravery or uprightness from an otherwise doomed, malicious character.
Think Macbeth fighting Macduff knowing he won’t win, or King Lear’s Edmund trying to save Cordelia’s life. To a lesser degree, Jimmy confessing his crimes and doing the time qualifies.
*The Tragic Impulse isn’t found in Poetics.
Back to Saul
The choice to lend Saul / Jimmy a small burst of tragic impulse was a good one… and while I’d point out that it’s only a faint glimmer of the true, inside-out redemption purchased on Calvary two thousand years ago, the general direction, like Jesse Pinkman’s giddy escape from a Neo-Nazi compound at the end of Breaking Bad, couldn’t be more clear.
At the same time, where Breaking Bad’s ending blew the light bulbs out, Better Call Saul opts for Chekhovian ambiguity.
Jimmy confesses, both to himself and everyone else.
But does he change?
On the bus ride to prison, and in a moment we might expect from a Tom Wolfe novel, his soon to be fellow inmates chant his name: Better! Call! Saul!
As many have pointed out, our brief glimpse of Jimmy’s prison routine finds him baking bread, (more or less the same purgatory as when he lived in hiding as Cinnabon manager Gene Takovic). Inside, though perhaps not at his own insistence, he goes by ‘Saul.’ When Kim Wexler comes to visit him, they mirror the image of the two of them in Episode One: two underdogs leaning against the concrete wall of the H.H.M. parking structure while they share a cigarette.
Our final glimpse of Jimmy (via Kim as she spies him out on the yard) blurs the image even more—as a sign of affection and another mirror of a moment he and Kim shared in the height of their Bonnie and Clyde shenanigans, he takes out his fingers, fires them like pistols, then blows the smoke away.
In a sense, he’s Jimmy and Saul forever, hopeful and honest, damned and dangerous.
Maybe that, along with prison being the best place for him, is the whole tragic point… and to the extent that, like Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul buried its ending right in the beginning, as far as drama goes, it’s a sublime achievement.
Like Shakespeare’s Macbeth, they’re Christian tragedies, writ large and in the visual, American, post-recession vulgate. They’re the kind every human, Greek, American, Christian, and agnostic alike needs to watch once in a long while.
Without fully endorsing a show with startling violence and plotlines that follows the drug racket to any and everyone, it’s the kind of drama that calmly points out what quivers inside us—and what, unfortunately, and without the soberest of truthful, unceasing, Biblical and ethical exhortation, we might easily become.
In the Bullpen:
I’ve more to say on the Breaking Bad-Better Call Saul phenomenon.
Too much more.
Meanwhile, and next time, I’m hoping to bridge some of the themes and moments from Better Call Saul to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
If you’ve stuck around this far, I think you’ll enjoy that when it comes out.
Happy reading and again, welcome.
Barzun, Jacques. From Dawn to Decadence, prologue (xiv). Harper Collins, 2000.
Aristotle, Poetics. Translated by Malcom Heath. Penguin, 1996.