Conservatism reborn in twisted sisterhood

 
"INSECURITY CAMERAS": My review of the Czech avant-garde photo exhibit at the National Gallery of Art....

Labels: Commonweal, other people paid me to write this, the dark continent: europe in the twentieth century

posted by Eve at 4:55 PM

 
PASHERNATE LOVE: Camassia has a pretty fascinating response to my "Romoeroticism" column.

Labels: enemies of eros, Gay Catholic Whatnot

posted by Eve at 2:07 AM

 
KITCHEN ADVENTURES: BURGER TIME! I pretty much never cook meat, but this week the fever came upon me.

I used ground beef, jalapenos, salt, freshly-ground pepper, a couple different kinds of rolls (mealhada, and then today something where I don't know its name), butter, cinnamon, cayenne, cumin, ground ginger, dried thyme, and Port Salut cheese.

What I did: I'd never actually made my own patties before. First I sliced the rolls in half lengthwise and put them cut-side-down in the toaster oven, letting the yummy breadcrumbs fall onto the cutting board. Then I finely diced a jalapeno. Then, at last, I grabbed a big handful of ground beef and began working it.

I'd thought I could just make a big flat patty with a depression in the center (to help it cook). This turned out to be surprisingly difficult. So I ended up doing what all the recipes had told me to do, and making a much rounder patty with a depressed center (your "sort of like the American electorate!" joke there). I got the jalapeno all worked into the meat. Then it went into the pan, on high. I don't have a grill, or even a grill pan, so I just put it in a flat nonstick and hoped for the best. I spiced it with (in about this order) cumin and/or thyme, salt, ginger, and a bit of cinnamon. Once it was really sizzling I started toasting the roll halves.

I let this thing cook for a while--much longer than I had in the past. I was worried about the smoke alarm, and while I never saw or even really smelled smoke, I could feel it catching in my throat. Nonetheless, I turned the burgers without making the alarm sound. I let the burgers cook just as much on the other side while I sliced up some Port Salut. Then I turned them one last time, ground some pepper over them and added the sliced cheese and a bit of cayenne, and buttered the bottom halves of the rolls.

The result: stupidly delicious. Seriously, this was amazing. I'd never been really satisfied with home-cooked burgers before, because I hadn't let them cook quite long enough. When you can grill a burger it's fine to worry about whether the inside will still be a deep pink, because you're guaranteed a caramelized outside crust. But in a saute pan you've got to be much more patient.

The herbs, spices, and jalapeno didn't overwhelm the burger at all. The Port Salut was... melty and yummy, a rich but nonaggressive taste. I'd almost call it a hyper-cheddar.

I don't plan to do this often, but for Independence Day week it was pretty swift.

Labels: kitchen adventures

posted by Eve at 12:44 AM

 
"I have never felt like this before," Louis pressed on. "Passion has happened to me before; I'm a man, after all. But generally I preferred to ignore it, to get on with my work." This was true enough; it had always seemed to Louis that a fundamental desire to take postal courses was being sublimated by other people into sexual activity; that he was at the root of things.
--Malcolm Bradbury, Eating People Is Wrong
posted by Eve at 12:40 AM

 
SHE NEEDS YOU/MORE THAN SHE LOVES YOU: An email in response to my post about tradition and iconicity:

First, you suggest that tradition's primary purpose is to create a persona out of an impersonal thing (like a place or an institution) so that individual human beings might truly love it. But it seems to me that this position reduces love to an exclusively inter-personal phenomenon. I will accept that love cannot exist apart from the relationship between persons, but consider that (theologically) the act of God's creation is sometimes described as an overflowing of the Love within the Trinity. Thus, God loves rocks and trees though they are impersonal.

Might we not say that human love of institutions, places, etc. result from a similar overflowing. A Frenchman does not first love France, but rather his family, and then, later, his love overflows into the place that made his family possible, and the institutions that gave it shape. Under this scheme, tradition does not create a persona but rather forms a shifting network of channels into which love may overflow. Love allows us to see the beauty of the beloved even where it is concealed from plain sight. Just so, loving the beloved allows us to love what the beloved loves, and to love what brought the beloved into being, and to love a thousand other things as well. And as love overflows, so do we become privy to ever more beauty.

And tradition, by binding people together and to institutions, customs, foods, ways, stories, etc. etc. makes the flow of love from one thing to the next easier and more regular. But I think you miss something if you say a French person loves France more fully as personified rather than as experienced.

Secondly, I would like to make a distinction... you mention the Church as one of the "fictive women" alongside Marianne and Israel. The Church, however, must be distinguished because the Church is in some sense a real Being with an existence distinct (if not independent) from its constitutent parts. France is the people of France and their ways, land, and all the things to which the people of France are bound. The Church, however, is the Union between God and man, which is a Unity in the image of the Unity between the Persons of God. And just as the three Persons of God make up a single Being Who is not merely three Persons existing in a certain relationship to one another, so the Church is a single (eschatological) Being. Consider that Marianne (a fiction) is the symbol of France, but the symbol of the Church is Mary.

That being said, the Church is a Unity as well as being a truly human institution (that is the mystery of the Incarnation, right?) and thus is formed by tradition as any other human institution. I think this actually lends support to my "overflow" model of tradition, since the idea that tradition builds up the Church into a persona would set up two parallel and conflicting symbologies -- one of Marianne and one of Mary.

so yeah, that's awesome.

Some quick responses: I really do believe love is "an exclusively interpersonal phenomenon." I'm not sure how to defend this belief--I've tried a couple of paragraphs and deleted all of them--but actually I don't think my interlocutor is really disagreeing here, he's just pointing out that tradition might be explained without rejecting that basic belief.

I'm still not sure he's right, though. If I love France as an overflowing of my love for my family, can I ever serve France when that would damage my family? Can I have some ideal of France with which my family members would disagree?

The Unabomber was turned in by his brother. I've been convinced of a vision of America which is very different from the vision of ditto embraced by my family. Can we really negotiate these conflicting and shifting loyalties without personifying nationhood--and even, sometimes, putting those personified nations above other forms of personal loyalty?

I very much agree with the distinction between the Church and "Marianne." In fact, I generally think that Christianity (like Judaism) cuts the Gordian knot of philosophy by presenting an object of love Who is simultaneously a moral arbiter.

Labels: conservatism considered as a helix of semiprecious stones, eros, iconicity, suspicion of tradition's so new wave

posted by Eve at 10:08 PM

 
You don't have to be blogwatching, but it helps...

Holy Whapping provides awesome Philip Neri/celebrity-cardboard-cutout action! Via Sparrow Fallen.

In other weird saint news, yesterday was the feast of Saints Processus and Martinian, patrons of wardens, jailers, and prison police. (That's because St. Paul converted them when he was imprisoned, and they suffered martyrdom proclaiming the Gospel their prisoner taught them.) Today is the feast of St. Thomas, but I think you can find the Caravaggio painting by yourself.

Overlawyered turns ten! For all your corporate-collusion-with-government-regulation needs!

My column at Inside Catholic has provoked much comments-boxing. For the moment I feel no further desire to box, but I thought I'd point it out. And I really will talk about problems and tensions with renewing the Catholic tradition of vowed friendship... either later tonight, or on Sunday. They, uh, won't be the same problems these commenters seem to batten on.

And the current Commonweal has a really good, basic piece on religious abuse at Guantanamo. I don't think it's online yet.

Labels: torture, weird saints

posted by Eve at 9:00 PM

 
I WAS WRONG. "Gypsy Presents: 'Waiting for Gorgo'" is my favorite MST3K riff.

So far.

Labels: lol, they do not move

posted by Eve at 8:59 PM

 
The dead woman whom I adore keeps her distance. ...

Where is the cocoon of noise and need?
I am an uneaten meal, a full glass.
--Anna Harrison, "Need," in the current Commonweal. You really, really should read the whole poem.

Labels: they recognized Him in the breaking of the bread

posted by Eve at 8:57 PM

 
As other lifestyles become more acceptable, you must choose whether to get married and whether to have children. You develop your own sense of self by continually examining your situation, reflecting on it, and deciding whether to alter your behavior as a result. People pay attention to their experiences and make changes in their lives if they are not satisfied. They want to continue to grow and change throughout adulthood.
--Andrew Cherlin, Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today

Notice how the last two sentences say exactly opposite things! Throughout this book (which is generally good), Cherlin uses "grow and change" to mean "place preexisting wants and personality traits above role and obligation." It's kind of obvious that sticking it out, placing role and obligation first, might change you more--challenge you more, certainly.

Labels: marriage, vocation

posted by Eve at 2:52 AM

 
"ROMOEROTICISM": My take on the collision of Corpus Christi and Gay Pride, at Inside Catholic....

Labels: Gay Catholic Whatnot, iconicity, in the flesh, inside catholic, other people paid me to write this, romoeroticism

posted by Eve at 3:20 PM

 
LOYALTY BINDS ME: Some notes on Alan Bray, The Friend. The first thing to say is that I love this book. It's a study of the culture, rituals, ethics, and tensions of same-sex friendship in England, from 1000 AD through, essentially, the death of John Cardinal Newman.

I could not love this book more if it were made out of chocolate and shaped like Sophia Loren, with a cameo by Iron Man.

But now that I've got that out of my system: This is such a heartfelt book, and such a humble one. Alisdair MacIntyre rabbits on about how some virtues are necessary products of certain practices (like, chess isn't chess if you cheat); this book demonstrates how history as a practice can inculcate, or reflect, or strengthen, a genuinely spiritual humility. Bray can be wry, he can be pointed, but he's always ready to submit his preferred conclusions to the uncertainty of the evidence. This is basically the opposite of a polemic; it's a complication.

Okay... there are some twitches. Bray frequently, but super-briefly, falls into a utilitarian-universalism, where the *~*real*~* purpose of Christianity is friendship/reconciliation/social order. (To put the three terms in order from most awesome to least.) This is a complete anomaly from someone who generally goes out of his way to acknowledge alternate readings. It's a misunderstanding of tradition-in-general and English-Christianity-in-particular, since few robust traditions are simple enough to have one "real" purpose, one "central" concept. A tradition builds persona (see below!) precisely by being much more complex than this.

And Bray does have occasional fits of rhetorical Protestantism. I don't have any idea whether that reflects his actual beliefs--for all I know he was as Catholic as Morrissey when he wrote this book. But at least twice, to take the most notable example, he writes that a vowed same-sex friendship might be considered "more Christian" because it did not require the gatekeeping approval of a priest. I totally agree with him that a Christian pledge of love does not become less Christian in the absence of a dogcollar, but that isn't what he says; if you turn what he does say inside-out, like a glove, it imples that sacraments which require a priest are less Christian than those which don't. I doubt Bray himself would really argue that the Eucharist is less Christian than marriage! So I read this as a verbal tic, signifying a genuine defensiveness about the ability of the laity to sanctify their lives and loyalties, but not meant to be read too literally.

Speaking of the Eucharist, I love how thoroughly Bray has placed this sacrament at the heart of his book. Anyone interested in Eucharist as love-feast and as quintessential Christian prayer cannot afford to miss this book, for real.

Similarly, you can't read this book and then attend an ordinary American Mass without wanting to cry at the loss of the Kiss of Peace. The "handshake of peace" is a horrifying sign of how far we have come from the world of Bray's book.

This is not "weaponized" history. I think it does provide hope and succour for those of us who wish to create a fruitful, joyous, and sublime way of life for contemporary gay Catholics; but I'll talk tomorrow about some of the tensions and cautions this book outlines for that project. Bray's own position I think will be clear to anyone who reads the afterword, but even there, he speaks with the bone-deep humility of a historian who has fallen deeply in love with his subjects and will, therefore, respect their memory by not getting in the way. He doesn't put his own heart over their faces.

This book overlaps, at the very end, with the very beginning of Roden's Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture. It made me want to re-read Roden, to play the two off against one another.

I'll close by saying that he's a terrific stylist. I especially love his trick of ending each chapter with a cliffhanger!

Labels: Alan Bray, friendship, Gay Catholic Whatnot, I don't believe in modern love, love, turn your watch back about a hundred thousand years

posted by Eve at 10:37 PM

 
SHE LOOKS LIKE AN ANGEL... BUT I GOT WISE/SHE'S THE DEVIL IN DISGUISE!: Some exceptionally scattered thoughts on tradition and conservatism. These are propositions for discussion, not settled beliefs of mine. [I'll add links to older posts later, and remove this parenthesis.]

1. There's a difference in kind between a stereotype and a role. Actually, this one I'm fairly sure of; I'm just not sure how to cash out what that difference in kind really looks like. I've been using gender stereotypes vs. gender roles as a possible way into this question.

One possibility is that stereotypes are abstractions, character descriptions, whereas roles are characters. The Hysterical Woman is a cruel and insipid caricature; Eddie Monsoon is a wonderful monster. (Similarly for The Prude vs. Saffy Monsoon.)

I'm not sure that's quite accurate. I do think a preexisting personal representation of the role being somehow approached by our actions is part of the difference. That's what the saints are for. They break the conventions in keeping the Commandments, in Chesterton's very nice phrase, and thereby expand the possibilities for the rest of us. They show us new roles. Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila, these aren't stereotypes.

This of course doesn't help you when you can't find precedent for what you perceive as your vocation. And since I believe very strongly that vocation isn't a choice, I am still searching for other, more illuminating ways to cash out the difference between stereotype and role.

2. One way to tell that something is a tradition is if it can't be defended by reason alone. I've already written that tradition's primary purpose is to create a persona--to simultaneously give a place or institution an ethos, and give it a personality, making it a possible object of love. (Specifically, at least in the contexts where I've encountered traditional institutions, the institution becomes a fictive woman. It would be shockingly cheap [and cheaply shocking] to wonder if Germany's problem wasn't the idea of the Fatherland--but is there anything to be salvaged from this idea that fictive womanhood is better for us than fictive manhood?)

Anyway, putting gender questions aside, this definition of tradition should immediately show you the many points on which it is vulnerable.

a) Fictive womanhood is fictive. (Long cat is loooooooong!) There is no actual, individual, percept-rich "America" or "Marianne" or "Israel" or "Church." Reason-alone will always sever the cords of language and longing which held together shadow and substance... making it impossible for us to argue that the imperceptible (the persona) should be considered the substance, not the shadow.

b) Fictive womanhood is a fantastic alibi! This is why Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is simultaneously so central to my understanding of tradition's role, and so troubling. If we agree that tradition makes France an ethos and a beloved, must we agree that Marie Antoinette is the personification of that persona? Or to bring this down to the twentieth century: If tradition, then figurehead--whether monarch or dictator?

This is the darker side (the back!) of my post about how tradition gives grace to our necessary subordinations and submissions: Tradition, of course, can give graceful cover to our unnecessary subordinations as well.

c) Cultures lack an architecture. There is no science--and precious little art!--by which we can tell which elements of tradition are load-bearing. In any particular case, I can argue rationally that this element can be removed without destroying the iconic resonance, the persona, of our tradition. And in fact, I can always point to many, many cases in which prior rejections of traditional elements did not fatally damage what we now consider to be the nature of that tradition. This is both a strength of tradition--its ability to adapt, to recreate a cultural persona as adeptly as you and I recreate our own public faces when we undergo severe personal change, remaining recognizable to our friends despite the massive internal damage and recovery--and, in a rationalist age, a weakness. No individual fort can be defended, even though the attackers insist they're on our side.

d) Finally... how can you prove that your beloved should be loved? This is one of the very few questions where I can't think of a medieval Christian philosopher who has really provided a hard-and-fast, cash-value answer... which is a point in favor of medieval Christian philosophers. Never use an argument when a stained-glass window would suffice.

Labels: conservatism considered as a helix of semiprecious stones, iconicity, playing Jenga with culture, pour the liquor pour le droit, suspicion of tradition's so new wave, vocation

posted by Eve at 10:01 PM

 
AMY WINEHOUSE SINGS "BEAT IT."

Labels: Amy Winehouse, Michael Jackson died today in Los Angeles at age 50

posted by Eve at 12:56 AM

 
edited: de mortuis.

Labels: way the hell off-duty

posted by Eve at 12:51 AM

 
As in our own time the permafrost of modernity has at last begun to melt--and a more determinedly pluralistic world has bounded back into an often troubling life--the world we are seeing is not a strange new world, revealed as the glaciers draw back, but a strange old world: kinship, locality, embodiment, domesticity, affect. All of these things, but I would add that at times we are seeing them in something as actual--and as tangible--as the tomb of two friends buried in an English parish church. We did not see those tombs because they did not signify; but they are beginning to signify again.
--last lines of The Friend (not counting the afterword)

Labels: Alan Bray, friendship, suspicion of tradition's so new wave, turn your watch back about a hundred thousand years

posted by Eve at 12:47 AM

 
IT'S THE CIRCLE OF LIFE!: 1. Conservative, moralizing politician gets caught [EDITED to remove unnecessarily crass description; "gets caught" pretty much covers it...].

2. Conservative Christian commentator wails about how could he? with much throwing of the fiftieth stone. I would never!

3. Liberal commentator (Christian or not--all look same!) inveighs against the obvious Schadenfreude and piling-on of aforementioned conservative Christian types. Drink if they cite "Judge not, lest ye be judged"; drain your drink if they bother looking up the chapter and verse. Drain somebody else's drink if they specify that they're atheist and they really, really think adultery is bad, and they'd totally shame the initial bad guy as much as you would, but they just can't help themselves in pointing out the hypocrisy!

4. Bitchy blogger notes that patting yourself on the back for your rejection of pride might actually be... prideful. Thus, she judges your judgeyness of others' judging of sexual sin! It would be so awesome if this action were virtuous!

5. Lather, rinse, repent.

I know so many good people, I mean, where do I start?

UPDATE: [edited: ehhh, changed my mind about this.]

FURTHER UPDATED: Doesn't change what I say in this post, but this does offer context and assorted whatnot.

Labels: a hard man is good to find, bitter little lady, I thank God that my sins are not as the sins of this Republican, Philip Roth

posted by Eve at 11:06 PM

 
TURN YOUR WATCH, TURN YOUR WATCH BACK/ABOUT A HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS: I only remember two songs from my childhood, listening to "Q-107, Washington's Top 40!" I remember "Karma Chameleon," which for some reason I associate with the yellow schoolbus taking me to Jewish day camp.

And I remember "Billie Jean," on the playgrounds of Shepherd Elementary--a school named after a segregationist, where I doubt I knew fifteen other white kids, but the white kids I did know were almost all in the gifted-and-talented program, because that's the way racism works. That's why, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has said so often, you can't fix police brutality by painting the Policeman Barbies black. "Meritocracy" in a post-colonialist world is the worst caricature of Calvinism, where you're pre-damned and you're supposed to like it.

...Anyway. "ABC, easy as 1-2-3" was part of the old hand-clapping rhyme I learned, which sometimes ended, "We got the power!" with the Black Power fist. Nobody ever thought it was weird that a white girl did that ending. Nobody ever thought it was weird that black kids and white kids would pull their eyes up for the "Chinese, Japanese, Indian Chief!" rhyme.

(Sometimes we ended the ABC rhyme, "Now you got the chicken power!" I don't know what that signified!)

On Thursday, I was on my way to my volunteer stint with the Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center when an older black woman stopped me to ask if I'd heard: Had I heard that Michael Jackson died? I wasn't sure it was true until I got home, but I could pretty much hear in her voice that it was real.

Michael Jackson was part of the culture which formed me, and that's just inescapable, no matter your ultimate judgment of everything we heard about after the '80s.

Sean Collins does the caveats a lot better than I could.

Labels: Michael Jackson died today in Los Angeles at age 50, the day the world turned day-glo

posted by Eve at 10:41 PM

 
INSIDE OF A CATHOLIC, IT'S TOO DARK TO READ. Summer books recommendations... hey, I'm in this!

Labels: Alan Bray, Caroline Walker Bynum, comics, Cyril Pedrosa, inside catholic, mackerel-snapping

posted by Eve at 11:47 AM

 
What one then sees is a diverse set of practices that cannot be reduced to a single overarching motive but nonetheless employed the same rhetoric: practices of peacemaking, of countenance, of kinship. The same rhetoric that could ease the reconciliation of enemies could also enable the acceptance of a gift, or bind the affection of friends. It could enable adversaries to lay down a quarrel, without losing face. It could ease the passing of a gift, by its tactful indication that (as the language demonstrated in which a gift was offered) the giver also knew the limits beyond which the obligation it might create would not be pressed. And it could sustain by its binding force a true affection that might one day grow cold, through the infirmity of our natures. ...

The story I have set out to tell in this book is drawing near its end; but one final question remains, to which I now turn. What happened to the world I have described?
--The Friend

Labels: Alan Bray, friendship, I don't believe in modern love, suspicion of tradition's so new wave, turn your watch back about a hundred thousand years

posted by Eve at 11:43 AM

 
POSSIBLY MY FAVORITE MST3K JOKE EVER:

"Vatican II: The Final Reckoning!"

I think this might even beat the "Happy Saint Blaise Day!" throttling scene from Soultaker....

Labels: lol

posted by Eve at 9:50 PM

 
"I'M WITH CUPID": My review of Design for Living at the Shakespeare Theatre. With bonus Edward Albee!

(And yes, if you want to take this article as my partial rebuke to Jamie Kirchick, you may.)

Labels: Edward Albee, eros lo volt, Noel Coward

posted by Eve at 4:00 PM

 
Confusion was widespread in those years, but Empson countered it with a peculiarly British conception of ambiguity: “When I was crossing the fighting lines during the siege of Peking, to give my weekly lecture on Macbeth, a generous-minded peasant barred my way and said, pointing ahead: ‘That way lies death’”. Empson’s response was foggy, gnomic but swift: “Not for me, I have a British passport”.
--that same article about Angleton; whole piece is pretty fascinating

Labels: all of life is a choice of genre, New Haven in a heartless world, the dark continent: europe in the twentieth century

posted by Eve at 12:11 AM