EveTushnet.com

2012-02-03T01:42:00.003-05:00

DEEPLY I LOVE ONLY LIFE. AND YOUR MONEY. Why did nobody tell me that there's a movie in which Barbara Stanwyck becomes a gold-digging kept woman because she reads Nietzsche?

2012-02-03T01:40:00.002-05:00

We may well wonder whether the general disparagement of wanting to be loved may not be a typically modern phenomenon, still another form of modern man's claim to equality with God.
--Josef Pieper, About Love; quoted in Friendship: A Study in Theological Ethics

2012-01-26T21:45:00.002-05:00

DANCE, PUPPETS! DANCE FOR ME! Do any of you all have recommendations for books on choreography? I have several starting points but would be interested in comments; I'm especially looking for analysis of specific shows and choreographic choices, rather than more basic how-to stuff. Thanks!

2012-01-26T19:51:00.002-05:00

OKAY THEN!

The online producers at CBS posted a photo slideshow the other day that appeared under the following rather literal headline:

Activists Hold Annual March For Life On Roe v. Wade Anniversary

So, just thinking out loud, what percentage of the pictures in this gallery would you expect to be of, well, the thousands and thousands of activists who traveled to Washington, D.C., in order to take part in the annual March For Life on the anniversary of Roe v. Wade?

If you guessed anything other than zero, you would be wrong.

There are literally no pictures of any pro-lifers in this feature.

more--in the comments you can read that the slideshow was changed to be 50/50 marchers/protesters sometime today. This (Mollie's comment at 7.47 pm) is also worth noting.

2012-01-26T01:16:00.001-05:00

"GRITTY PHOTOGRAPHS OF '80S NEW YORK." #6 is actually lovely.

2012-01-26T01:11:00.001-05:00

"FRANCE PLANS 'NAPOLEONLAND.'" Continuing a theme from the previous link.

“Napoleonland”, the brainchild of former French minister and history buff Yves Jégo, is being touted as a rival to Disneyland – assuming, that is, it can gather the £180 million needed to leave the drawing board. ...

Other curious potential attractions include a ski run through a battlefield "surrounded by the frozen bodies of soldiers and horses" and a recreation of Louis XVI being guillotined during the revolution – the precursor to Napoleon’s rise to power.

"It's going to be fun for the family,” he Mr Jégo told the Times.

2012-01-26T01:09:00.001-05:00

"SWITZERLAND'S 'DEMENTIAVILLE' DESIGNED TO MIRROR THE PAST." Via Ratty.

2012-01-26T01:06:00.002-05:00

Service to the neighbor may also take on a shape very hard to fit into the limits and constraints of society--a love akin to what Daniel Day Williams has called Franciscan love or what Gene Outka has described in discussing love as self-sacrifice. Such a love, because it seeks its own no more than Christ did, breaks through all the normal forms of life in society. Free of all claims to power, privilege, and possession--free even of all desires except the one overmastering desire to follow Christ--this type of Christian lover goes out in search of his neighbor.
--Gilbert Meilaender, Friendship: A Study in Theological Ethics

2012-01-21T01:19:00.001-05:00

"TO THE MOTHER WITH ONLY ONE CHILD." Beautiful, and fairly raw:

Dear Mother of Only One Child,

Don’t say it. Before the words can even pass your lips, let me beg you: don’t say, “Wow, you have nine kids? I thought it was hard with just my one!”

My dear, it is hard. You’re not being a wuss or a whiner when you feel like your life is hard. I know, because I remember having “only one child.” You may not even believe how many times I stop and reflect on how much easier my life is, now that I have nine children.

All right, so there is a lot more laundry. Keeping up with each child’s needs, and making sure they all get enough attention, is a constant worry. And a stomach bug is pretty much the end of the world, when nine digestive tracts are afflicted.

But I remember having only one child, and it was hard—so very hard. Some of the difficulties were just practical: I didn’t know what I was doing, had to learn everything. People pushed me around because I was young and inexperienced. But even worse were the emotional struggles of learning to be a mother.

2012-01-18T01:45:00.005-05:00

DEVELOPING CONFLICTS: Some quick thoughts about Time Stands Still, at the Studio Theater through 2/12.

The play is about a war photographer and her reporter boyfriend; when she's almost killed on the job, they retreat to their Brooklyn apartment and try to figure out how to move forward with their lives. There are only two supporting characters, Richard the somewhat plastic editor and his new fiancee Mandy the cliched, saccharine Americaness. (After one scene with Mandy I found myself thinking, "Wait, but I thought this play was written by a woman?" It wasn't.)

There are a lot of problems with this play. It can be cheap and predictable (of course the photographer's much-divorced, horrible father is a conservative Christian! of course Mandy is much younger than Richard!) and the big-idea lines are often pat. The shifts in audience identification are what you might expect: Mandy gets her moments, etc. The actual war-zone descriptions are a bit tinny--I wasn't super surprised to find out after the show, from the playwright bio in the program, that David Margulies wrote it because he was troubled by his life in Connecticut rather than because he was troubled by his many trips to Iraq, you know?

That said, the play's heart is clearly in its portrayal of "emerging adulthood," anchorless people who are no longer as young as they act, people to whom life is starting to catch up.

I think one contrast between Sarah the photographer and Jamie the reporter/boyfriend is that he's trying to be a man, and she's trying to be an adult. Her task is more straightforward, and she's a more straightforward character in general. The way longing for connection and stability shapes a man is portrayed very keenly and subtly here. (I initially thought that Sarah had been captured, and that the suppressed aggression in Jamie's haunted eyes would come forward more directly. That didn't happen, and I think the play is better for it. Holly Twyford is pretty terrific as Sarah, but on the basis of those sunken eyes I'm giving the award here to Greg McFadden as Jamie.)

There are also some hints about the ways in which disaster-journalism requires the complicity of the suffering locals; the ethical dilemmas inherent in the practice are sharpened when the locals don't hand themselves over to the camera.

I'm glad I saw this and I'd generally recommend it, despite its flaws.

2012-01-18T01:42:00.001-05:00

ABSINTHE MAKES THE HEART GROW FONDER: The second video here is very, very fun. For TKB on the slight chance she hasn't seen it already.

2012-01-18T01:39:00.002-05:00

THE BEST FAKE FOREIGN-POLICY TWITTER FEEDS. Via DrunkenPredator, who gets a spot on the list!

2012-01-18T01:38:00.000-05:00

MOVIES FROM AN ALTERNATE UNIVERSE. Some of these are very fun. Via Flavorwire.

2012-01-17T05:01:00.001-05:00

JUST A BEACH AND A PRETTY GIRL: Photos of NYC teen life in the late '70s and '80s.

2012-01-17T01:57:00.004-05:00

SOME SMALL THOUGHTS ON REPETITIVE PRAYER: I know it's easy to criticize repeated prayers because they can seem rote, dissolving into jabberwocky. But having just finished a prayer in which I really did forget my place and get kind of mixed up, I was struck by how apt that experience is--how well it fits our experience of long-term spiritual life and struggle.

I mean, we forget parts of our pain, too, or get mixed up about which parts go where. They sometimes become rote parts of our lives, acknowledged but barely recognized. And then we're suddenly startled by some fragment of self-knowledge and it glints like broken glass. This happens with repeated prayers as well. Some previously-overlooked phrase will suddenly envelop me like wings, or hit hard on a bruise. Repetition is a way of allowing ourselves to be surprised by what arises in the course of what might seem like an ordinary night's prayer.

It also keeps us from thinking that spiritual problems get "solved," finished. The struggle may feel rote one day, mumbled through quickly and gotten over with, but it in fact does have to be repeated in all its manifold forms, this day and the next and the next.

(Somewhat more coherent thoughts from me on repetitive prayer here.)

2012-01-17T00:57:00.002-05:00

"BONDS OF AFFECTION": I review Ethan J. Leib's Friend v. Friend: The Transformation of Friendship--And What the Law Has to Do With It, in the current issue of Commonweal. Link is subscribers-only, at least for now.

2012-01-17T00:50:00.002-05:00

...SO FAR FROM THE UNITED STATES:

...This attitude is fairly common among African-Americans addicts in poor neighborhoods in most large US cities; ironically, while the biggest complaint about AA and NA among skeptical middle-class white addicts is the dependence on a Higher Power, in urban black communities 12-step recovery groups are marginalized because they aren't explicitly allied with any church. In addition, the confessional mode of "sharing" that defines the AA fellowship is alien to the ethic of African- neighborhoods, where airing your dirty laundry in public is disappoved of rather than viewed as a method of establishing trust and fellowship. For the same reason, professional psychotherapy is frequently dismissed as a "white" treatment; given the church's influence, mental health issues are widely viewed as caused by a lack of faith remedied by more regular attendance at Bible study.

When I was new to doing social work in the black community, this widespread attitude confused me and frustrated my efforts to help my black clients. An an ex-junkie, I could vow for the benefits to be gained from both recovery groups and therapy. A North Philly church lady coworker set me straight. “A lot of black don't feel that AA and therapy are alien to everything they know," she told me. "If you got problems you just go to church on Sunday and scream your head off and then everything’s fine."

But for Susan, it turned out, everything wasn’t fine. While Jesus and the church were pulling her in one direction, the judicial system had made an unwelcome appearance and was pulling her in another. The entire time Susan was in prison, the state of Pennsylvania was running a tab on all the welfare dollars her mother received in her children’s names. Consequently, per state law, Susan was held responsible for the total amount upon her release, and soon the welfare department came calling to get its money back.

In our sessions, Susan showed me a raft of increasingly threatening official letters with eye-popping dollar figures that had her practically hyperventilating. The state wanted in excess of $25,000, and wanted it now.

A hearing was scheduled at the Bucks County Courthouse, where Susan was asked to provide documents proving that she had a job and could start paying her child support debt or face returning to jail in contempt of a court order. Obviously, on her janitor’s survival wages Susan had absolutely no capacity to both pay the state and keep a roof over her head. This Sophie's choice is a common dilemma for tens of thousands of single mothers returning to the community from prison who owe the state for the dollars their children depended on in their mother’s absence.

Many states require the moms behind bars to assume the burden of child support if they wish to keep their children from being lost in the foster care system. Yet the vast majority are like Susan, devoid of resources except the pennies she might ear from her prison job—and what loving mother (it need hardly be noted the crack addicts and prostitutes do not negate materal love) would even think twice about "defrauding" the system to provide her children with at least minimal security?

This cruel no-win predicament drove Susan to desperation. “Do they know how hard it's going to be to hold down a job if I wind up in a homeless shelter?” she asked me. “Don’t they understand that I’m walking with the Lord and trying to get my life together?”

I accompanied her to the courthouse intending to speak with the judge and explain Susan’s special circumstances. I hoped that the court would grant leniency and allow me to continue working with Susan; she was off the streets, off drugs, back in housing, back to work. She was a success of the system. How could Bucks County not do the right thing and hold off on onerous monthly support payments until she was a little more stable?

But the judge, a middle aged, white Republican appointee in a county notorious for its GOP family court judges with a special beef againstblack women from Philadelphia running up welfare bills on their county’s tab while sitting in jail, refused even to give us a word at the bar of the court. He asked Susan for documentation proving her employment status and when she told him her job at the church was paid under the table, he snarled derisively, “Isn’t that the American way?” clearly insinuating that Susan was not only a common criminal, but a tax-dodging welfare mother, too.

Susan protested the high amount of the monthly support payment, explaining that if she paid the debt she couldn’t afford a place to live. I will never forget how painful it was, watching this woman, who had never in her life caught a single break, have to stand before the American justice system and nearly beg for mercy. But for this black woman in this white judge's courtroom there was no mercy to be had. Her criminal record of violent crime, her drug addiction, her prostitution—all of her vices outweighed the spiritual transformation and personal rehabilitation she had experienced in prison, not to mention her clean-as-a-whistle record in her new life.

The judge merely mocked her, saying, “You’ve got a place to live now: Bucks County Correctional Facility for 90 days.” The public defender tried to interject but the judge was already calling for the next case.

more (the title is really not what the piece is about, actually)

2012-01-17T00:47:00.002-05:00

I can only note that Mitya thought of Grushenka's past as definitively passed. He looked upon that past with infinite compassion, and decided with all the fire of his passion that once Grushenka told him she loved him and would marry him, a completely new Grushenka would begin at once, and together with her a completely new Dmitri Fyodorovich, with no vices now, but virtues only: they would forgive each other and start their life quite anew.
--TBK. Oh Mitya, you walking train wreck of a person. "When I get off the wheel, I'm going to stop...."

2012-01-14T21:34:00.004-05:00

TELL THEM THAT I'M YOUR GUN: I'm currently putting together the pieces for a science-fiction novel which will have as one of its themes the work of peacemaking. How can peace be built--not merely the absence of war, but a place of reconciliation and restitution?

So recommend things to me! If this idea makes you think of books, movies, whatever, why not email me? There's a link on the sidebar, or it's eve_tushnet@yahoo.com .

I note that this is not a pacifist novel and I'm not super interested in that argument; I'm interested in stories of peacemaking. (Stories which take place within severely disciplined and controlled environments with obvious power systems, like military units or prisons, and stories about people who themselves are kind of crazy and chaotic and not obviously peaceful, are especially welcome.)

Here, have a picture. (Via Andrew Sullivan.)

eta: In case this helps provoke ideas: I think I'm mostly looking for nonfiction, though fiction is also definitely welcome; and I'm very interested in stories of institutions designed/ostensibly designed to promote peace, reconciliation, healing, or rehabilitation which instead become complicit in violence and degradation. ...And thanks very much, to those who have already written with suggestions.

2012-01-14T17:42:00.006-05:00

LET IT ALL GO: 2011 BEST-OF. I'm sorry this is so late!

Best books read (nonfiction): David Carr, The Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life--His Own
Johnny Weir, Welcome to My World--a perfect cocktail of humility and glamour!
Christopher C. Roberts, Creation and Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage (video talk here and my comments on it here)
Judith Deutsch Kornblatt, Doubly Chosen: Jewish Identity, The Soviet Intelligentsia, And the Russian Orthodox Church
Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, And Think About Marrying

and it's just so different from the others that it deserves its own category, but I read the Sayings of the Desert Fathers for the first time this past year, and I know I'll be returning to them.

Best books read for the first time (fiction/whatnot): Imre Kertész, Fateless
Yukio Mishima, The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea
Christopher Coe, I Look Divine
Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods
Adam Foulds, The Quickening Maze

Best movies watched for the first time: Of Gods and Men
Solaris
Ladies and Gentlemen, The Fabulous Stains!
Ivan's Childhood
This Gun for Hire

also should be mentioned: Attack the Block (more), A Boy Called Charlie Brown, Black Caesar, Everything Must Go, The Hunger, I Start Counting, The Island (Остров), Less Than Zero, The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum, Macbeth (1979), The Nun's Story, Smoke Signals, The Virgin Spring

Best theater (etc): The Mariinsky Ballet, Anna Karenina
"Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?", Arena Stage
"Venus in Fur," Studio Theatre
Mariinsky, Giselle
"King Lear," Synetic Theater (I ultimately didn't think this production worked--it was a kind of commedia dell'arte/Eurotrash interpretation--but it was interestingly wrong!)

Best blog posts: "Stronger at the Broken Places"
"The Proper Basis for Marriage Is a Mutual Misunderstanding" (service journalism)
"How a Thrill Becomes a Law"
Notes from the Oriented to Love retreat
A series of posts, which I wish I could redo but which still have value, on the Mountain Goats

and a bit more service journalism: a list, with notes, of my favorite children's novels from Diana Wynne Jones

Best things I wrote (nonfiction, non-blog): "Beyond Liberalism," my essay for Cato Unbound's symposium on "traditionalism in a futuristic world" (and the follow-up, "Tradition's Comedies of Error"; my other follow-up, "Who Put the Tradition in 'Traditional Marriage'?", is fine but not as good)
"Flawed Reflection" (my review of the oh-so-controversial "Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture" exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery"
"Breaking 'The Rules'" (review of Extravagant Expectations and Premarital Sex in America)
"How to Convert" (title is misleading!)

...And wow, I think that's it, since my Weekly Standard reviews are subscribers-only. Uh, I'll do better this year! Ouch.

2012-01-14T17:09:00.002-05:00

UNCONVENTIONAL: I couldn't sleep after Black Caesar, so I decided to just throw on The Nun's Story and watch until I decided to go to bed. I ended up watching, totally engrossed, until the entire huge long movie was over.

Audrey Hepburn plays a Belgian girl who enters a religious order, hoping to be sent to the Congo as a nurse. The movie follows her deep spiritual struggles, mostly but not entirely revolving around questions of pride and obedience. The harshness of the religious regime under which she lives isn't prettified, but this story goes far beyond easy "individualism vs. repression" conflicts. This comes out most clearly when World War II breaks out--the nun's obedience is tested even more deeply, but at the same time she's also struggling with vengefulness and refusal to forgive her enemies.

The major flaw of the movie is that the racism of the Belgian Catholics isn't just portrayed, but basically embedded in the movie's narrative. The easiest example is the way in which all of the supporting characters are vivid and memorable except the one Congolese character with a speaking role, who is a pious cartoon. But that example is just the most obvious sign of a problem which really runs throughout the Congo sequence, even though the culture of the people is presented with quite a bit of affection and some respect.

Hepburn is fantastic. Like I said, I'd assumed that I would watch maybe an hour and then hit pause. I just couldn't. I couldn't stop watching her. Many of the supporting actors are as vivid as their characters, but this is really a one-woman show.

2012-01-14T17:04:00.002-05:00

I'M GONNA GIT YOU SUCKER-PUNCH: So I went in to Black Caesar thinking it would be your typical blaxploitation fare: a social consciousness, definitely, but mostly just righteous fun. Friday Foster for dudes.

Do not do this, people! Good grief. Black Caesar is a terrific movie, but it is a real punch in the face. The racism depicted is brutal and nearly constant, and although the devastation criminal activity causes in families can be seen in a lot of blaxploitation movies (like Foxy Brown) it seemed especially raw and painful here. This left me feeling sad and kind of shattered.

Again: It's a great movie. But wow, like reaching in for your Cracker Jack prize and getting your hand chewed off.

2012-01-14T16:36:00.003-05:00

ALL MY SINS MISREMEMBERED: Review of David Carr's Night of the Gun: A Reporter Investigates the Darkest Story of His Life--His Own. I've read a bunch of addiction memoirs this past year, and this is the one which spoke to me the most, by far. Carr is a reporter and editor (currently writing for the New York Times, but I promise not to hold that against him), and he decided to use his investigative techniques to figure out what really happened during his years of addiction to alcohol and cocaine. He did interviews and reviewed the documentary record--rehab admittance reports, police reports, all the old bad memories.

You can tell what he found from the Norman Mailer tagline he uses: "Who could tell anymore where was what? Liars controlled the locks." Some of his mismemories turned out to make him seem worse than he'd really been--but mostly he found that he'd been much more of a thug and a loser than he'd let himself remember. He'd hurt women, made violent threats, and even after a rock-bottom night on which he left his infant twin daughters alone in the car while he smoked crack, he took months to finally get clean. (He'd remembered that as the turning point. And it was... but big trucks make wide turns, and they take some time.)

Carr's prose style is roughed-up, not quite tabloid, with a fine streak of gallows humor. (The chapter on his relapse is titled, "Additional Research.") The book is also deeply forgiving, with compassion toward literally everyone who crossed the path of Carr's trainwreck: not just his first wife, the dealer, but also, for example, the people who ran his last rehab, a somewhat ramshackle affair with too much emphasis on humiliation and restriction for your own good ("There is no humility without humiliation," as Mother Theresa said, but that doesn't mean it's a good idea to take it on yourself to humble others) but a lot of genuine love and companionship. Maybe the best example of this aspect of the book is Carr's description of Jayson Blair, whom he clearly views as a fellow addict, fellow newspaperman, and fellow human being--not a catchphrase.

Carr was raised Catholic, in a deeply loving family. I'm sure this is one reason the book spoke to me so much; I'm guessing books with more familial dysfunction will speak more to people who came from more cruel, tumultuous, or broken homes. His descriptions of his own faith, a matter of trust and need and accepting the lack of answers, struck me as powerful and poignant. I may have choked up a bit when he described lying on a couch during a period of brutal cancer treatment, listening to one of his little girls upstairs, guiding her sister through a childlike prayer to Mary. There are snapshots of the ways in which editing can be a leadership role. (I interned at the Washington City Paper while Carr was EIC there, and from my perspective he was a fantastic leader, although he gives ample evidence for an opposing point of view in the book!)

One thing which really struck me about The Night of the Gun is that although his catastrophe days make up the majority of the page count, the book feels like it's much more about recovery and sobriety. Maybe that's because the entire project of the book is a recovery project, so even the darkest parts are embedded in a project of rebuilding the personal integrity shattered by active addiction. It seems like a lot of memoirists fumble for words when trying to describe both the work and the joys of sobriety. There can be a sense that the mere absence of pain is such a relief, in itself, that there's nothing left to describe, just a blank space. Carr really conveys so vividly the working, loving life of gratitude and creation and service.

2012-01-14T16:30:00.000-05:00

And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit.
--Ecclesiastes 1:17

2012-01-10T00:09:00.000-05:00

LET'S PLAY: ANCIENT GREEK PUNISHMENT!

2012-01-10T00:08:00.002-05:00

"SEEING LIKE A STATE": I review Collaborators, in which Mikhail Bulgakov meets Joseph Stalin and hijinks ensue....

2012-01-10T00:07:00.001-05:00

SENT TO ME BY A FRIEND WHO TITLED THE EMAIL, "PROGRESS IN HISTORY."

2012-01-10T00:00:00.001-05:00

While engaged in a dispute as to the existence of a God, Henry Shanks stabbed Adam Weimer to the heart and escaped arrest. TX1883
--Tweets of Old offers further evidence that Texas is partly Russia

2011-12-23T02:56:00.001-05:00

Some sages of our own decadence have made a serious attack on the family. They have impugned it, as I think wrongly; and its defenders have defended it, and defended it wrongly. The common defence of the family is that, amid the stress and fickleness of life, it is peaceful, pleasant, and at one. But there is another defence of the family which is possible, and to me evident; this defence is that the family is not peaceful and not pleasant and not at one....

The modern writers who have suggested, in a more or less open manner, that the family is a bad institution, have generally confined themselves to suggesting, with much sharpness, bitterness, or pathos, that perhaps the family is not always very congenial. Of course the family is a good institution because it is uncongenial. It is wholesome precisely because it contains so many divergencies and varieties. It is, as the sentimentalists say, like a little kingdom, and, like most other little kingdoms, is generally in a state of something resembling anarchy. It is exactly because our brother George is not interested in our religious difficulties, but is interested in the Trocadero Restaurant, that the family has some of the bracing qualities of the commonwealth. It is precisely because our uncle Henry does not approve of the theatrical ambitions of our sister Sarah that the family is like humanity. The men and women who, for good reasons and bad, revolt against the family, are, for good reasons and bad, simply revolting against mankind. Aunt Elizabeth is unreasonable, like mankind. Papa is excitable, like mankind. Our youngest brother is mischievous, like mankind. Grandpapa is stupid, like the world; he is old, like the world.

--GK Chesterton, Heretics. Also via RB. Merry Christmas!

2011-12-21T21:21:00.003-05:00

Then live, my strength, anchor of weary ships,
Safe shore and land at last, thou, for my wreck,
My honour, thou, and my abiding rest,
My city safe for a bewildered heart.
That though the plains and mountains and the sea
Between us are, that which no earth can hold
Still follows thee, and love’s own singing follows,
Longing that all things may be well with thee.
Christ who first gave thee for a friend to me,
Christ keep thee well, where’er thou art, for me.
Earth’s self shall go and the swift wheel of heaven
Perish and pass, before our love shall cease.
Do but remember me, as I do thee,
And God, who brought us on this earth together,
Bring us together to his house of heaven.
--Hrabanus Maurus (a Benedictine monk and archbishop), addressed to Abbot Grimold of St. Gall. From Mediaeval Latin Lyrics (pdf), tr. Helen Waddell, and via RB.

2011-12-19T23:29:00.000-05:00

"HOW ARE LOVE AND PITY RELATED?" Via... JWB?

2011-12-17T00:27:00.005-05:00

THEY'VE GOT THE FINEST HOME MOVIES THAT YOU HAVE EVER SEEN: Did you know that Less Than Zero is a Christmas movie? It's festive and totally appropriate!

No, it's actually a 1987 adaptation of a Bret Ellis novel; Robert Downey Jr. plays a downward-spiraling coke addict, which was, let's say, a triumph of method acting. It's set in LA, it opens with this song, it's glossy and Swatch-colored from start to finish, its dialogue is on-the-nose ("Did you girls know that you have television sets between your legs?"), and all the players deliver their lines in a kind of actressy drunken rant. I get why people might watch this for camp value. But I loved it pretty unreservedly and found it genuinely painful to watch. Downey is terrific, and Jamie Gertz and Andrew McCarthy (I know!) worked really well because they always sounded fake--they sounded like people who weren't sure how to say the things they had to say. The movie hits very hard on something David Carr also writes really powerfully about in The Night of the Gun: When you've broken a sufficient number of promises, to yourself or to others, there's no way to speak words that can be trusted, and the attempt to do so only makes you more painfully aware of your own untrustworthiness.

The ending is OTT in a way I didn't care for (eta: it's really AfterSchool Special-ish), but whatever, I'm not trying to defend this movie to you. I'm trying to say that I got a lot from what it was doing.

2011-12-17T00:25:00.000-05:00

A cunning and obstinate buffoon, Fyodor Pavlovich, while he had a very firm character "in certain things in life," as he himself put it, showed, to his own surprise, even a rather weakish character in certain other "things in life." And he knew which ones, he knew and was afraid of many things. In certain things in life one had to be on one's guard, and that was difficult without a faithful man. And Grigory was a most faithful man. It even so happened that many times in the course of his career, Fyodor Pavlovich might have been beaten, and beaten badly, but Grigory always came to his rescue, though he admonished him each time afterwards. But Fyodor Pavlovich would not have been afraid of beatings alone: there were higher occasions, even rather subtle and complicated ones, when Fyodor Pavlovich himself would have been unable, perhaps, to explain this remarkable need for a close and faithful man that he would sometimes, all of a sudden, momentarily and inconceivably, begin to feel in himself. These occasions were almost morbid: most depraved, and, in his sensuality, almost as cruel as a wicked insect, Fyodor Pavlovich at times suddenly felt in himself, in his drunken moments, a spiritual fear, a moral shock, that almost, so to speak, resounded physically in his soul. "On those occasions it's as if my soul were fluttering in my throat," he sometimes used to say. And at such moments he was glad that nearby, close at hand, maybe not in the same room but in the cottage, there was such a man, firm, devoted, not at all like himself, not depraved, who, though he saw all this depravity going on and knew all the secrets, still put up with it all out of devotion, did not protest, and--above all--did not reproach him or threaten him with anything either in this age or in the age to come; and who would defend him if need be--from whom? From someone unknown, but terrible and dangerous. The thing precisely was that there should be another man, ancient and amicable, who could be summoned in a morbid moment, so that he could look him in the face and perhaps exchange a few words, even quite irrelevant words, and if it's all right and he does not get angry, then somehow it eases the heart, but if he gets angry, well, then it's a little sadder.
--TBK

2011-12-16T22:22:00.000-05:00

"You see, stupid as I am, I still keep thinking about it, I keep thinking, every once in a while, of course, not all the time. Surely it's impossible, I think, that the devils will forget to drag me down to their place with their hooks when I die. And then I think: hooks? Where do they get them? What are they made of? Iron? Where do they forge them? Have they got some kind of factory down there? You know, in the monastery the monks probably believe there's a ceiling in hell, for instance. Now me, I'm ready to believe in hell, only there shouldn't be any ceiling; that would be, as it were, more refined, more enlightened, more Lutheran, in other words. Does it really make any difference--with a ceiling or without a ceiling? But that's what the damned question is all about! Because if there's no ceiling, then there are no hooks. And if there are no hooks, the whole thing falls apart, which, again, is unlikely, because then who will drag me down with hooks, because if they don't drag me down, what then, and where is there any justice in the world? Il faudrait les inventer, those hooks, just for me, for me alone. Because you have no idea, Alyosha, what a stinker I am...!"

"No, there are no hooks there," Alyosha said quietly and seriously, studying his father.

"Yes, yes. Only shadows of hooks. I know, I know."
--The Brothers Karamazov (tr Richard Pevear and Larissa Volonkhosky)

2011-12-14T00:27:00.005-05:00

"THE PROPER BASIS FOR MARRIAGE IS A MUTUAL MISUNDERSTANDING": Notes I didn't use for my review of Premarital Sex in America. Sorry about the length! I thought this book did a good job of advancing the ball in terms of our understanding of American ideas about marriage and sex. It's worth your time. Everything that follows is something I thought as a result of this book, not necessarily something the book said itself, unless it's in quotation marks.

Oh, and: I snagged the epigraph for my review from the Cigarette Smoking Blog.

p1: "premarital" no longer typically implies sex between two people who eventually do marry one another--pre-marital sex. (Although Maggie Gallagher points out that according to the CDC, "32 percent of currently married women under the age of 45 say they have had only one sex partner in their life. ... If the data are accurate, they suggest there are at least as many adult women under the age of 45 who have never had sex with anyone but their husband as there are gay people in the general population.")

p34: Especially after high school, oral sex isn't an alternative to intercourse; it's a warmup. Thinking of it as a birth control strategy, a means of maintaining "technical virginity," etc, requires a lot of naivete about human nature.

p60: 1/5 of sexually-active young men have had sex on the first day of knowing someone! And only 13% of s.a.y.m. have waited more than a year for sex.

pp 60-1: men w/fewer economic resources tend to have more partners, not fewer

p61: guys who've had more partners tend to be quicker to perceive women as less attractive after sex

(With all of these correlations and statistics, the point is not to say, "There are no exceptions, and people never change!" If you don't think this stuff applies to you, maybe it doesn't!--although I do generally think we're less exceptional than we'd like. And the stats might help you see places where you or someone you love does fit the average models, and therefore where you do need to put more conscious effort into changing or into addressing their issues. Knowing what kind of emotional baggage many people bring away from the experiences you've had can help you jettison that baggage--in part by suggesting that you're not uniquely messed-up if these are issues you have. Anyway, this is one of the many, many things I wanted to say in the AFF piece to mitigate its advice-column or preachy quality, but I ran out of room....)

p64: Birth control has made women slightly more like men (i.e. able to have relatively less-consequential, less-costly sex) rather than making men more like women (i.e. desiring high-cost, high-commitment sex)

p88: A girl says oral sex is "vulgar" but women should be nice and "giving" in relationships and do it anyway. This gets at one aspect of what you might call the Dan Savage worldview which I hadn't considered: If social norms shift such that the default is more like the "Good, Giving, and Game" model where you do the sex act you'd (strongly, in the case of anal sex, as Regnerus and Uecker find) prefer not to do, women have to give in a lot more often than men. (Assuming that this shift in social norms doesn't radically shift which sex acts men vs women object to and how strongly.) The "GGG" model can be just another way of playing on women's altruism--and our preference for justifying our actions as altruism even when there are a lot of other motives in play.

[ETA: I should make clear that I think this gender imbalance is an unintended consequence of the "GGG" idea. I mean, I don't think Dan Savage came up with this phrase in order to prey on women's insecurities! But I do think it plays into some of those insecurities.]

p104: "Hooking up" is more common at elite universities than lower-tier ones. Elite-U students are too focused on their educations and future careers to make time for an intense relationship, basically, but they still want sex.

p107: imbalanced campus sex ratios (i.e. more women per man--an increasingly common situation) lowers women's control of sexual relationships

p110: The authors imply that there isn't a script for regretting casual sex--they write as if seeking out sex is scripted but regretting it is more authentic or less socially-condoned, and I'm not convinced that's true.

p126: if college sex ratios remain the same "for long," 26 of 100 women will have to marry down educationally

p137: there's a minority of women for whom "no strings attached" sex is the ideal (though, p157, not an especially workable one). What I take from this is that there's a need to convey, culturally, that this preference is less beautiful, that beauty requires vulnerability. (One danger is that in making that point we might unintentionally sound like we're invoking Love in the Western World-style anti-marriage romantic tropes.)

p141: Very weak link between sexual behavior and depression in men (unlike the correlations for women between, e.g., more sex partners and a higher incidence of depression)--did they look for links to aggression or self-destructive behaviors? In other words, when we look for "depression" are we ignoring how the same emotional distress might manifest in people with more testosterone? They mention that men often express hurt differently, pp162-3, but don't really explore the idea.

p152: "The Sex Itself Is Not the Problem"--it's number of partners. Currently being in a sexual relationship typically makes women feel better. "Indeed, the sex is operating as it tends to--bonding persons, deepening relationships, and fostering greater interpersonal intimacy."

p161: "One study of casual sex in college notes that the most likely pairing is between self-confident men and distressed, depressed women."

They also explore the direction of the causal arrow here (i.e. which came first, higher incidence of depression or higher number of partners?)

p177: Catholics marry "early" (before age 24) second-last after black Protestants! And that's even though Hispanic men are more likely to marry early. "Catholics, Jews, and the religiously-unaffiliated." I know there are a lot of reasons for those numbers, but I am pretty sure it's not a good sign for the spiritual and vocational formation of Our Young People.

p182: I would like to distance myself from the authors' sunshiney reading of our economic crisis. That is all.

p183: Young adults believe that identity-formation should happen before marriage, as vs. marriage being one of the biggest sources and shapers of identity; p185: If you change within marriage that's viewed as a threat to the marriage, so marriage requires you to stop changing and to have already done your identity-formation. This seems to me to be a result, in part, of divorce "scripts" like, "He's not the man I married." We don't hear nearly enough about how to reshape or renew a marriage when a spouse changes.

p186: wishful thinking and misinformation about peak fertility

p188-9: parental resistance to young marriage--this is a major factor

p190: learning to be "good in bed" as a "transferable skill set," rather than learning to please the specific person you love and marry

p194: idealization of marriage means no relationship can live up to it

p220: the effects of childhood/youth mobility on later marriage outcomes: maybe "they get used to breakups." p221: Early geographic mobility is correlated with both liberalism and a higher number of sex partners--and the sex-partners correlation remains even after various common-sense things are controlled for like race, age, socioeconomic status, and parents' marital status.

p231: In discussing demography, the authors use this phrase: "the unintended byproducts of often rational and optimal decisions by regular people to have fewer children and a life richer in economic success and personal experiences." I have bolded the part that is bizarre and telling.

p232: The fruits of the Second Demographic Transition are money and freedom

p234: "Blues grow... by conversion... higher education and social class mobility. Reds tend to grow by reproduction."

p234: "Reds" are guiltier, more conflicted (earlier we've seen how much they're torn between a script in which marriage and family life is the primary goal and a script in which career and economic stability is the primary goal--and those scripts really do conflict for them). They're torn between two worldviews, marginalized--they don't stand within their own POV the way "blues" seem to. (Obviously this is wildly generalizing, but as a wild generalization I think it works. There's a reason I wish I'd titled my review of Red Families vs. Blue Families, a book written from an intensely "blue" perspective, "Written by the Victors.")

And on that depressing note, I guess I'll end. I like the authors' decision not to do the obligatory last chapter where they offer their ten-point plan for cultural renewal. You'll note that I couldn't resist it myself. They're humbler than me.

2011-12-14T00:15:00.001-05:00

“Have you seen the listening snake?”
bramble clutches for his bride,
Lately she was by his side,
Woodbine, with her gummy hands.

In the ground the mottled snake
Listens for the dawn of day;
Listens, listening death away,
Till the day burst winter’s bands.
--from John Gray, "The Vines--To Andre Chevrillon," whole thing here

2011-12-13T20:16:00.001-05:00

"BREAKING 'THE RULES'": In which I review a couple books:

Why don’t Americans know how to get and stay married? Whatever we think the word means we still value marriage very highly: The National Marriage Project and the Gallup poll organization have found that between 80 and 90 percent of American teens want to get married someday. And yet we delay, we divorce, and we churn through relationships so quickly that in 2004 only 61 percent of American children were living with both of their biological parents. Why can’t we get and keep what we say we want?

Maybe we lack role models. As we wander around aimlessly, the pejorative term “extended adolescence” has become the euphemism “emerging adulthood.” Kate Bolick’s much discussed Atlantic article, “All the Single Ladies,” seems to offer this explanation for its author’s eventual surrender to singleness.

And yet two recent books argue that a big part of our problem is that we do have role models, conventions, cultural mores, and rules to follow. It’s just that the rules don’t work. Paul Hollander’s Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Romantic Love in America and Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker’s Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, And Think About Marrying take very different approaches to the question of how Americans mate and marry. Extravagant Expectations is a work of pop-philosophy that muses about how modernity and the Romantic movement have influenced personals ads and internet dating. Premarital Sex is a research-based look at the sexual practices and beliefs of young Americans from a broad range of class, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Yet both end up arguing that Americans today are working from fairly well-defined “scripts” about love, dating, marriage--and selfhood. Perhaps, they conclude, our marriage problems ultimately spring from a flawed understanding of what it means to become an adult.

more

I'm not really satisfied with this piece, and I ended up leaving out a lot of important stuff from the Regnerus/Uecker book, so later I'll post some of my notes from that book.

2011-12-13T20:15:00.000-05:00

IT'S LIKE THEY KNOW ME.

2011-12-13T20:01:00.000-05:00

Last night as I was sleeping,
I dreamt—marvelous error!—
that I had a beehive
here inside my heart.
And the golden bees
were making white combs
and sweet honey
from my old failures.
--Antonio Machado; whole thing is here

2011-12-08T22:00:00.002-05:00

SINCE IT'S THE FEAST OF THE IMMACULATE CONCEPTION (for two more hours), here's Peggy Fleming, "Ave Maria." (And Nicole Bobek's lovely program from the same event.)

2011-12-01T23:02:00.004-05:00

DO THE RIGHT THING: I don't care much about Tolkein, but I liked how this post (via Wesley Hill) delineates two different kinds of morality tale: the one about the difficulty of knowing which choice is right, and the one about the difficulty of doing the good even when you know it.

Tangentially: I've just watched two recent adaptations of Oscar Wilde, An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest. I really don't approve of how much they mistrust their audience (they're very tarted-up with chase scenes and self-referential inside jokes and that sort of thing, and the language is mostly simplified) so I don't think I recommend them, even though I did like a lot of things I think most people wouldn't, such as Minnie Driver. I always like her. Anyway, the story of An Ideal Husband is strong enough that it's still very moving. Earnest is harder to get right--so much of its humor depends on the contrast between the ridiculous triviality of its characters' scruples and objections, and the genuine emotional weight of those scruples' consequences. You have to make it both dizzy and poignant.

Both of them are morality plays, of course; in Husband the wrongdoing is really serious, while in Earnest it's the exact opposite of that. There's a sort of meta-moral to be drawn from the fact that the forgiveness which makes the comedic ending possible is the same in both plays.

2011-12-01T22:58:00.003-05:00

NEW YORK TIMES STORY BINGO 2011. Not always quite on-target (the aura-cleansing one) and it's not like Fashion Week clothes are supposed to be off-the-rack wearable, but enough of this works that I will allow it. Via IP, but I'm adding this lady to the blogroll because she is funny and interesting and so are her commenters.

2011-12-01T15:47:00.001-05:00

AN OPIUM-ADDICTED SAINT. And one who was actually forbidden to receive Communion for decades due to his addiction.

2011-12-01T15:38:00.005-05:00

AND THE RED DEATH HELD DOMINION OVER ALL! Christopher Coe's I Look Divine is a slender, self-consciously perfect little poison gem of a book. It's a novel about two brothers in the 1960s through the 1980s: the narrator is obsessed with his brother Nicholas, and Nicholas is enraptured by himself. The book begins as the narrator is preparing to clean out Nicholas's apartment after his untimely death, and so a lot of the glassy humor has a dark tinge.

This may be the actual gayest book I've ever read, which is really saying something. It deploys the imagery of homosexuality as narcissism. And yet in its final paragraphs this claustrophobic, folie-a-deux novel opens up into a kind of Dance of Death in which we see that Nicholas's ideal of personal victory through style and sexual conquest is not an exclusively gay pursuit. Across time and culture, humans assert and exalt themselves in the teeth of death.

This book is a perfect combination of brittle witticisms and haunted memorial. Like I said, the gayest thing I've ever read.

2011-12-01T15:08:00.004-05:00

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: BREAKFAST OF CHAMPIONS. Mostly my leftover adventures this post-Thanksgiving have been far from adventurous: turkey sandwich, toasted turkey sandwich with cranberry sauce and apple and munster, soup with leftover whatnot, macaroni and cheese with leftover whatnot. All tasty, none innovative. But! I had most of a can of cranberry sauce left over, and I pretty much never eat it except with turkey, so I had to get creative. And so yesterday and today I have had what might actually be the best breakfast food I have ever eaten anywhere, even England.

The recipe is stupidly simple. You need chickpea flour (yes, this is another socca recipe!), cayenne, salt, cinnamon, dried rosemary, butter, water, and cranberry sauce.

To make the batter, mix all the dry ingredients together and add water. Just guess how much if you've made socca before; if not, here's a recipe with quantities. While you're mixing...

Brown the butter very slightly in a pan. To do this, melt it... let it get foamy... then there will be a point where you can see that it is just starting to shimmer from golden into tan.

That's when you pour the batter in. Let the pancake cook until it starts to bubble on top and slides very easily along the buttered pan when pushed by a spatula. Flip it and brown the other side.

Plate with the sauce, say grace, and devour! Best accompanied by a glass of whole milk.

This is immensely tasty: sweet but not too sweet, spicy enough to play really well with the cranberry sauce, and filling. I've tried making savory socca with an egg and some milk replacing the water in the batter, and that was great; it would probably make this dish even better, assuming improvement is possible. I seriously loved this and am already wishing it were breakfast time again.

2011-12-01T15:04:00.002-05:00

By definition, the language of liberalism fails to engage on common terms with the communion of saints and the lordship of Christ.
--Christopher C. Roberts, Creation and Covenant: The Significance of Sexual Difference in the Moral Theology of Marriage

One thing I found heartening at Oriented to Love was how many of us--from quite varying religious, philosophical, and political perspectives--made strong critiques of the liberal rights-framework as applied to homosexuality, without backing away from our commitment to seeking justice for LGBT people. A bit more on that, probably, in the write-up I'm doing for PRISM magazine.

2011-11-26T18:52:00.002-05:00

JUST TO REMIND YOU, BEFORE ADVENT: Daniel Mitsui's November series on Christian artwork of death continues. Click here for the front page, but don't miss this requiem chasuble, these souls in purgatory, this death's-head rosary, and this ossuary (one of several he's posted).

2011-11-26T18:41:00.003-05:00

I would say that those men are beasts rather than human beings who declare that a man ought to live in such a way as to be to no one a source of consolation, to no one a source even of grief or burden; to take no delight in the good fortune of another, or impart to others no bitterness because of their own misfortune, caring to cherish no one and to be cherished by no one.
--Aelred (the character) in St. Aelred, Spiritual Friendship. I have been thinking about the spiritual harm done when I am too proud to be a burden on others.

2011-11-19T19:51:00.001-05:00

There might be another way. Maybe I could pay to get this done, pay someone to pack up and empty this place out. There must be companies you can call, the way you do when you move, companies that come with cartons, with padded wrap, and do it for you.

There must be a way to get it done, without doing it yourself.
--I Look Divine

2011-11-18T22:01:00.003-05:00

"FOR AS LONG AS SPINOZA IS A JEW, HE SPEAKS AS A JEW, EVEN IF WHAT HE SAYS IS FAR FROM JEWISH." Fantastic blog post from The Groom's Family (Soviet Russia->Israeli Jewish->Orthodox Christian convert, you should be reading her already!) about David Ives's play about the trial of Baruch Spinoza. I wrote about it here. Ah, the interplay between control and powerlessness (in the face of the state, and in the face of the community) is so well-described in this post, and her closing thought is so ferocious. Fantastic stuff.

2011-11-18T20:27:00.000-05:00

I DO NOT THINK I HAVE USED THESE TWO TAGS TOGETHER BEFORE. Also, I have learned a new term.

2011-11-18T19:30:00.002-05:00

He used to pretend that pencils were long cigarette holders and would glide around rooms flicking ashes into flowerpots, saying things like, "Daddy, don't be droll."
--Christopher Coe, I Look Divine

2011-11-15T18:12:00.003-05:00

UP THY CHIMNEYS, ENGLAND, ENGLAND: The Cigarette Smoking Blog on Sir Roger Casement.

2011-11-15T17:29:00.003-05:00

A FOUR-LETTER WORD: [edited to correct spelling!] I just got back from "Oriented to Love," a pretty intense retreat dedicated to exploring issues in gay Christian life. It was organized by Kristyn Komarnicki of PRISM magazine, and it found what I thought was an unexpectedly necessary balance of emotional, intellectual, and spiritual work. So here's a series of one-liners, the punchlines I took away from our time together. Misreadings are mine, as always. In chronological order. Your thoughts always more than welcome! Filling may be hot.

* Sexual wholeness is more a property of communities or churches than it is of individuals.

* This is third-hand, so bear with me, but one reading of the parable of the Good Samaritan is that when the story is finished and Jesus asks, "Who was his neighbor?" and the Pharisee says, "The one who showed him mercy"... the Pharisee is placed in the role of the wounded man. The one who thought of himself in the powerful role, the role of the man extending his hand in charity, instead sees himself as the wounded man in need of mercy. And Jesus not only acknowledges his wounds and dirtiness and pledges to cleanse, heal, and forgive him, but also gives him the task of going and doing likewise--now from a position of gratitude and humility, rather than a never-sullied position of privilege and power.

* We were asked to think of three concrete ways God has shown us mercy. I had a few in mind, but after hearing from several of the other participants I realized that I had only identified places where I have been lucky. Privilege, basic health, good work, and financial security are things I'm immensely grateful for, but God's mercy is a fiercer thing.

* We were supposed to read slips of paper and react in some way to the words or sentences on the slips. One woman read out, "I don't believe people are born gay because the Bible says homosexuality is a sin." And she got this blunt matter-of-fact look on her face and said, basically, that this was clearly illogical because she was born with the inclinations to envy, to covet, and to many other sins.

There are at least two readings of this response, and I think it speaks so much to the good will of the retreats' participants (and organizer!) that I don't think any of us took the uncharitable one. But it wouldn't be hard, in a less open, vulnerable, and trusting group, to assume that she was cordoning herself off into the logical sphere where actual gay people's actual experiences are kind of irrelevant, in the same way that you don't ask about love or emotions when you're trying to solve a math problem.

Instead, it was obvious that her head and her heart were pulling in tandem. And what I at least was able to take away from her explanation was that we very often support what might even be accurate conclusions with premises and forms of argument which undermine our own spiritual practice. In attempting to explain an opposition to gay sex, which I share, we might unwittingly deny our own reverse heliotropism, our own longing for sin, in a way which can warp our self-understanding and ability to discern our own vocations.

* One guy noted, with terrific insight, that our culture defines maturity by the possession and exercise of power. This gets at what I was trying to say to the Yale Political Union; it's pretty obviously un-Christian.

* One of those words on the slips was "lifestyle." And this made me think about why "style" is a compliment, "way of life" is a neutral term, "vocation" is a Christian term... and yet "lifestyle" is a shallow consumer-culture term, a product demographic. So then I imagined someone confiding in a friend, "Man, that guy really lives out his vocation with such panache! He really has a lifestyle."

* As at the Fordham conference, I think this conversation was hobbled by a crisis of authority. All of us need a source of authority outside the self, both so that we can communicate with one another and so that we can become bigger than our preexisting selves. But when we radically disagree not only on the specific identity of that authority but on how She might be found, of course philosophical dialogue will necessarily falter.

Your thoughts? Comments, wild fancies, howls of fury?

2011-11-15T17:28:00.001-05:00

The most reliable callings are born from reflecting on a situation that is more or less imposed on us. A vocation is nearly always a way of accepting a situation that was first of all considered a limitation.
--Roger Mehl, Love and Society

2011-11-14T22:49:00.000-05:00

Fasting is not dieting. Fasting is not about keeping a Christian version of kosher. Fasting is about hunger and humility (which is increased as we allow ourselves to become weak). Fasting is about allowing our heart to break.
--from here; via... somebody on Facebook

2011-11-12T21:01:00.002-05:00

COUNTERCULTURE, AND THE COUNTERTOPS: Last night I saw Martha Marcy May Marlene, and I have exactly two points to make about this movie.

1. She is a canvas. The lead actress is all giant eyes and vulnerability, and she lets you read her, she lets you turn her into a giant projection screen for anything you really wanted to see played out with long lashes. Her entire character is "I am who you need me to be!" and she doesn't let go of it for more than five seconds at a stretch.

2. Not everyone can live/like millionaires. Wow, I thought the bourgeois perfection in which Martha was trapped was presented with such terrifying balance. We could easily see exactly where her sister was coming from, even as we also saw the vertiginous superiority/inferiority Martha/Marcy May felt. Your house is too big = You are better than me at doing what I have always been told I should do. Your husband doesn't yell until he has to = You think giving in just because a man yells is really shameful.

Their relationship is sketchy and yet realistic, believable. You don't blame the older sister for not "saving" Martha. You don't blame Martha for wanting to get away from the nice people.

2011-11-12T19:40:00.001-05:00

THIS IS BEAUTIFUL. Soulful, well-choreographed, heart-wrenching. I could watch this every day.

2011-11-12T19:38:00.002-05:00

PHOTOGRAPHY IN THE STYLE OF TRADITIONAL CHINESE PAINTING. Via the Rattus.

2011-11-12T19:35:00.002-05:00

THIS COUNTRY IS A GUN AND YOU ARE THE SILENCERS:

...As throughout the review, Gray is being a little unfair to Pinker here. (The book isn’t quite so blithe about mass incarceration as Gray makes it sound.) But his example gets at an important point about what you might call the hiddenness of contemporary violence, and the extent to which modern people can afford to recoil at various forms of cruelty not because they’ve completely gone away, but because they take place offstage, behind society’s scenes, in forms that most people don’t experience directly and therefore don’t need to reconcile themselves to.

So we regard public executions as an anachronistic barbarity, to say nothing of flogging, the stocks, and other pre-modern forms of punishment. But we’re kept safe from crime by a penal system that locks lawbreakers away in a self-enclosed world pervaded by hidden cruelties and unacknowledged forms of torture. We have a growing distaste for cruelty to animals, manifest in polls, pop culture, foxhunting bans, you name it. But the vegetarian minority notwithstanding, our daily meals come from factory farms and industrial slaughterhouses where animals are treated in ways that would make our gorges rise if we ever actually confronted them. And more provocatively, of course, there’s the case of infanticide: Common in premodern societies, abhorred in our more civilized age … unless, of course, you count the million-plus abortions in America every year, perhaps the most common and the most concealed form of violence that our society accepts.

2011-11-12T19:31:00.002-05:00

EVERY YEAR, Daniel Mitsui dedicates the month of November to memento moris (mementos mori?) and other Christian artistry of death. Every year, I forget to tell you guys until it's been a couple weeks! But definitely check out his typically stark and sublime collection of death masks, dances of death, Outside Over There-style tombs, and even an alphabet of death.

2011-11-03T18:50:00.003-04:00

NEVER FORGET WHAT IT FELT LIKE TO LIVE IN ROOMS LIKE THESE: GetReligion excerpts the discussion of faith from an NPR interview with David Carr, former Washington City Paper editor-in-chief and the author of one of the very best books I've read this year, The Night of the Gun. I'll write more about his book when I do my year-end roundup, but for now I'll just say that I found his comments on NPR characteristically relatable and down-to-earth and humbled.

2011-11-03T01:35:00.000-04:00

NEW RULES SLASHING CRACK COCAINE SENTENCES GO INTO EFFECT.

2011-11-03T00:33:00.002-04:00

If a composition has no strangeness, there is no virtue in its stability. Stability without strangeness is the work of a commonplace hand; strangeness without stability, of an immature hand.
--Gong Xian

(from the wall caption to a really haunting ink painting in this terrific exhibit--there's a hut in the foreground, all soft brushstrokes for the thatch roof and the surrounding trees and wooden bridge, but in the distance there are dark mountains--and behind the tall dark mountains, an even taller one, pale, elusive.)

2011-10-30T20:41:00.002-04:00

OR, R: WE MAKE AN IDOL OF OUR FEAR AND CALL IT CHOICE. Just a reminder that I'm speaking at the Yale Political Union at 7.30 pm this Tuesday, in Davies Auditorium, keynoting a debate on "R: Your Twenties are not for Experimentation." That wasn't my phrasing, but it will allow me to talk about vocation and how our identities are reshaped by love. Facebook event page is here.

2011-10-30T20:40:00.002-04:00

A PRIEST CONTEMPLATES GAGARIN'S FEAT. Via TKB.

2011-10-30T20:39:00.000-04:00

CREEPY SKATING FOR HALLOWEEN. Must be seen to be believed.

2011-10-30T20:38:00.000-04:00

TENTACLE POT PIE!

2011-10-30T20:13:00.002-04:00

I had long been haunted by the Russian conception of the humilated Christ, the lame Christ limping through Russia, begging his bread; the Christ who, all through the ages, might return to the earth and come even to sinners to win their compassion by his need. Now, in the flash of a second, I knew that this dream is a fact; not a dream, not the fantasy of a devout people, not the prerogative of the Russians, but Christ in man...

Although [the vision] did not prevent me from sinning again, it showed me what sin is, especially those sins done in the name of "love," so often held to be "harmless"--for to sin with one whom you loved was to blaspheme Christ in that person; it was to spit on Him, perhaps to crucify Him. I saw too the reverence that everyone must have for a sinner; instead of condoning his sin, which is in reality his utmost sorrow, one must comfort Christ who is suffering in him. And this reverence must be paid to those sinners whose souls seem to be dead, because it is Christ, who is the life of the soul, who is dead in them; they are his tombs, and Christ in the tomb is potentially the risen Christ. For the same reason, no one of us who has fallen into mortal sin himself must ever lose hope....

I knew too that since Christ is One in all men, as He is One in countless Hosts, everyone is included in Him; there can be no outcasts, no excommunicates, excepting those who excommunicate themselves--and they too may be saved, Christ rising from death in them.

Christ is everywhere; in Him every kind of life has a meaning and has an influence on every other kind of life.

--Caryll Houselander; via

2011-10-28T23:45:00.004-04:00

CUSTODIAN OF SOULS: Without meaning to make any specific claims about the law of the "ministerial exception" to certain employment-discrimination statutes, I did want to note something which has struck me. Stanley Fish (via dotCommonweal) puts it in his parenthetical:

If the ministerial exemption is to have any bite, there must be a way of distinguishing employees central to a religious association’s core activities from employees who play only a supporting role (the example always given is janitors).

(link)

Why would we assume that the janitor could not hold a ministerial position? It seems to me that there are some class assumptions here--or at least assumptions which separate manual labor from religious life, with the latter conceived as a completely intellectual, disincarnate affair. Ministering is about talking, not about mopping. Why?

A church, or parachurch institution, might decide that it wants to ensure that all its employees are Christian (or adhere to some standard of behavior which might put the institution crosswise to antidiscrimination laws) because it wants to ensure that its space is safe, welcoming, and dedicated to service in Christ. "Everyone you encounter here is part of our mission," they might say. "Everyone here is ready to listen, to talk, and to be with you, and if you don't feel comfortable bringing your questions or thoughts or needs to some div-school ministerial type, just talk to whomever you find."

They might also specifically notice that janitors come into contact with desperate people and humiliated people--the pregnant girl crying in the stall, the homeless man trying to wash his clothes in the sink, the addict passed out or vomiting, the soccer mom who was having an awful day before she menstruated through her skirt. Maybe they would be especially concerned about the spiritual formation of janitors, who can choose whether to respond to these situations with tact, comfort, succor, or "not my job, pal" indifference--or worse.

(They might also want to recruit janitors from low-income people who have gone through some of their programs, but that is kind of a side note I think.)

Again, I'm not particularly interested in how this basically spiritual perspective-shift would or should affect the interpretation of the law. And I think many, maybe most, Christian organizations are well-served by having positions which are open to those who don't already share their beliefs. But I do think the "(LOL but obviously not the janitors)" approach hides some assumptions which should be challenged.

Halloween is also the feast day of St. Alphonsus Rodriguez, a 16th-century hall porter in the Jesuit monastery on Majorca. My saint-a-day book says, "He was an invaluable spiritual adviser to many of the faithful." He's the patron of porters. There are no small parts, as the man said.

2011-10-28T16:50:00.001-04:00

The Persecution & Assassination of Charlie Brown as Performed by the Inmates of the Asylum of St. Paul Under the Direction of Lucy van Pelt
--Jesse Walker pitches a play; via VJ Morton

2011-10-26T01:36:00.002-04:00

STRONGER AT THE BROKEN PLACES: I've been thinking a bit about the use of language of "brokenness" in discussions of Christianity and homosexuality, and why I rebel against both that language and other people's reaction against it. I'll try to just briefly make some tentative points; tomorrow I'll have an even more tentative post soliciting alternative ways of discussing or describing the Church's prohibition on gay sex (rather than the alternative vocations open to gay people, where I feel much more certain of what I want to say--I am much more confident in what I want to say about the "yes" than what I'd say about the "no," but the picture is incomplete without both, I think).

The good thing about the language of brokenness should be obvious: It's humbling.

There's a contemporary American tendency to insist that we're good people, or that through bourgeois productivity and respectability we purchase indulgences and can therefore create our own Christian doctrine. (I can't remember where I read the tart aphorism, "Europeans don't believe in God, so they do whatever they want. Americans do whatever they want and call that Christianity.") At the very least we demand to be recognized as just as good as you. To say that we're broken is considered morbid or even offensive; to say that we might actually be unusually or distinctively broken is considered repulsive.

I am basically in favor of almost anything which prompts an admission of weakness, vulnerability, or similarly un-American expressions of spiritual poverty. To the extent that actual existing gay Christians use language of brokenness to express our need for unconditional surrender to God, I find it beautiful and spiritually-fruitful; I didn't share some readers' negative reaction to this language in Wesley Hill's Washed and Waiting, for example. (And I thought he either avoided or explicitly countered most of the negative aspects of brokenness language which I'll discuss in a moment.)

That said, here are some reasons I don't use that language myself.

First, I still do suspect that straight Christians often use "We're all broken!"/"The ground is level at the foot of the Cross"-type language, when discussing homosexuality, as a kind of rhetorical toll to be paid before you can get to the thing you're actually interested in talking about, which is Other People's Problems. If there's a danger of pharisaism for gay Christians who insist they're not broken, not like those messed-up addicts or crazy people (We Are Respectable Homos!), there's also a danger of pharisaism for straight Christians who want to use the language of brokenness when discussing situations they've never been in.

Second, and relatedly, using language of brokenness in the context of an already-stigmatized group has the obvious potential to provoke shame rather than humility, despair rather than surrender to God. I don't know that I need to go into detail here really, do I? Gay pride is wrong, but it's the wrong response to gay shame.

Thirdly, what do you do with a broken thing? I mean, you either throw it out or fix it, right? The imagery does not conduce to viewing homosexuality as a potential source of insight for the Christian. It's not a metaphor which suggests vocation. It's a metaphor in which one's orientation is a problem to be solved or at best endured. Even imagery of woundedness is more complex, insofar as wounds, in Christian thought, are not solely healed but sometimes glorified.

And finally, the language has been handled so much in this context that it's a cliche, a coin with its face worn off. When you say "brokenness" and "gay" in the same sentence I think a lot of people can only hear the five thousand previous times someone has used the metaphor, no matter what you personally intend to say with it.

But there's enough good in it that I wonder if it can be rescued, revived. After all, there are ways of describing a broken place as a place of insight--that's where the light gets in.

So I'm posting this more as a provocation than anything else: Talk to me more about brokenness. It isn't a metaphor which comes naturally to me and it's easier for me to see the limitations than the insights or beauty it can provide. But I think there's some poetry to be found here if we're willing to look for it: Are you broken like a wave, coming home on sharp rocks? Are you broken like a voice deepening into manhood? Are you broken like the Eucharist?

2011-10-26T01:21:00.002-04:00

CATS AND KITTENS: SOME MOVIE NOTES. Recently watched:

Sweet Smell of Success: This is still one of my very favorite movies. Ferocious and scathing and sad. Tony Curtis is unbelievably charismatic in his sordid, humiliated role; Burt Lancaster is terrifying. Glorious stuff. This time around, I especially noticed how often little sister Susie slipped in some candy-coated cruelty--she may lisp a bit, but she's clearly related to her brother, acidic and even calculating.

Friday Foster: Pam Grier thwarts a race-war plot. That's really all you need to know. There are fashion shows, there is music, there are afros, there is liquor, there are car chases, it is very glamorous and there's lots of shooting! Parts of this are set in DC but it doesn't have any real local color, unfortunately.

The Tomb of Ligeia: Look, this movie has some schlock elements and you've just got to roll with that if you want to have fun here. The screeching demon cat never really works at all, and there's some awesomely bad dialogue ("Let's go for a walk." "A walk?" "Or a stroll! What does it matter?"), and a tiny hint of evil-sapphistry teasing (which is a bonus, really). But you also get really gorgeous sets, one and a half compelling performances (Vincent Price is terrific, and the romantic lead is serviceable when she's playing his contemporary love interest but much better when she's playing the dead/undead Ligeia), and an ultimately painful story about the undertow of grief and the triumph of past over present.

2011-10-26T01:19:00.001-04:00

AND SO I CAME TO CARTHAGE...: I will be keynoting a Yale Political Union debate next Tuesday, November 1, time and place TBA. The resolution is, "Your Twenties are not for Experimentation." Come and stick pins in!

2011-10-26T01:16:00.002-04:00

SOMETIMES I REALLY HATE IT WHEN I HAVE THE PERFECT TAGS FOR A POST:

Several days have now passed since Alabama's anti-immigration law, the harshest and most abusive in the nation, came into full effect. HB 56, a de facto criminalisation of migration, replaces any sensible immigration policy with the favorite solution these days: let's put them behind bars– and we might as well make a profit out of it.

The negative consequences of such shameful legislation have been felt immediately. Within hours, it had claimed its first victims – from the detention of a man who later turned out to be residing legally, to the massive fleeing of migrant workers and school children, to even cutting off water services to families or individuals who can't prove their legal status. It is the most draconian and oppressive set of provisions that this country, which claims to be the bastion of liberties and rights, has seen since the era of segregation.

Because anyone lacking the proper immigration papers is considered to be committing a crime, also entering into a "business transaction" with the individual in question would prompt criminal charges. ...

The difference between Alabama and adjoining states is that it is willing to go further down this track. Recently, John McMillan, agriculture commissioner, proposed that the farm work left behind by immigrant workers be supplied with inmate labor. Decatur, a private detention center about 50 miles to the north-west of Alabama, which had been unable to find jobs for inmates, has now witnessed record numbers of requests for labor (for an estimated 150 detainees a day).

more (via WAWIV)

2011-10-26T01:14:00.001-04:00

FREEDOM OF [REDACTED] ACT:

A proposed rule to the Freedom of Information Act would allow federal agencies to tell people requesting certain law-enforcement or national security documents that records don't exist—even when they do.

Under current FOIA practice, the government may withhold information and issue what's known as a Glomar denial that says it can neither confirm nor deny the existence of records.

The new proposal—part of a lengthy rule revision by the Department of Justice—would direct government agencies to "respond to the request as if the excluded records did not exist."

2011-10-26T01:13:00.000-04:00

In a remarkable account of a meeting he had with Charles Dickens in 1862, Dostoyevsky recalled that the British novelist told him: “All the good simple people in his novels, Little Nell, even the holy simpletons like Barnaby Rudge, are what he wanted to have been, and his villains were what he was (or rather, what he found in himself), his cruelty, his attacks of causeless enmity toward those who were helpless and looked to him for comfort, his shrinking from those whom he ought to love, being used up in what he wrote. There were two people in him, he told me: one who feels as he ought to feel and one who feels the opposite. From the one who feels the opposite I make my evil characters, from the one who feels as a man ought to feel I try to live my life. ‘Only two people?’ I asked.”
--here (via... IP? Wesley? not sure)

2011-10-20T21:24:00.002-04:00

THERE'S A SERIES ON PRAYING THE ROSARY THROUGH ART at Crisis. The Joyful Mysteries are here; I especially liked the choices for the Sorrowful Mysteries.

2011-10-18T19:11:00.004-04:00

THIS IS THE ONLY TEXT I WILL EVER BE ABLE TO SEND. In which I go through TFLN until I come up with twenty [ETA: ...plus] which work for famous authors. At that point I will have mercy on you people; but for now, let's do this thing. Rough language, asterisked-out but obvious, in the post which follows.

Caryl Churchill, The Skriker (especially since this is from the UK!):

There are apples in the microwave and a cup of twigs in the fridge. I think she's hiding in the pantry, I can hear her giggling. Leaving her to it.

Philip Roth, who will forever be saddled with precisely this public image (you should still read him!):

LOVE ME LIKE A KANGARO LOVES A POUCH YOU DUMB C***

I'm getting a bizarrely Jay MacInerney vibe from this one:

It was like the titanic mixed with those sad puppy commercials mixed with jello shots

and again (why do I associate him with puppies? is it just his American sentimentality? puppies and cocaine, I think that's my image of this dude's writing):

(717):

Seriously, I was a high class hooker. I was snorting shit Rachel, white powder, lines formed with credit cards, the dudes house was beautiful. Magnum condom. Adorable puppy dog. Pretty sure at some point I was sleeping on a washing machine. Boxing Gloves.
(717):

Those were the highlights of my night.

James Goldman:

(303):

Someone else needs to become the bad example in our group
(1-303):

But you wear shame so well

As soon as I saw this one I said, "Oh no! It's obviously an author I adore... but which one?!" In the end I think it's probably from The Liar, since that book is something of a pastiche-collage (-soi-disant-femme-fatale-manqué) of all the other books I've ever loved:

You are mentally unprepared to be exposed to my degree of perversion.

But I'd also accept Christopher Fry or maybe even Tom Stoppard (I could see the Communist-bourgeois husband in Rock'n'Roll saying something like this).

Obvious, but I'm going to go with Kingsley Amis for this one, just because of his brilliant "ontogeny replicates phylogeny"-style description of a hangover in Lucky Jim:

I drank entirely too much. My skin hurts to wear

A caricature of Cormac McCarthy:

Woke up with a raging boner...good feeling abt this trial

(I would also, of course, accept Sweeney Todd.)

Jane Wagner, The Search for Signs of Intelligent Life in the Universe ("Well I don't know, I guess she took the plant out and put her head in!"):

Um. That's my cat Laura. You put my cat in your mouth, and then you put my cat in your purse.

This is too easy, but Douglas Adams ("I felt like I was drunk." "What's so bad about being drunk?" "...Ever been a glass of water?"):

(850):

hungover and i feel like a burrito
(1-850):

like eating one or like you are one?
(850):

like i am one.

Quentin Crisp on the Blitz:

How bad does the situation have to be before its ok to attempt 'catastrophic event sex'?

I would also accept Tony Kushner.

Somebody in here has to be The Secret History, and I vote for this guy:

I'm very fluent in vodka, but that seems to be a whiskey dialect.

James Joyce (no, think about it and you'll see that I'm right... although, now that I'm hesitating, Guillermo Cabrera Infante would also work okayish):

i have at this current moment imbibed enough alcohol to float immerse or otherwise submerge a goat of respectable size. tequila

...Ronald Firbank:

If thou arrisest to consciousness before I, rise me to an office of alertness for occupations such as brunch. Warm Regards, your roommate.

I was hoping we'd get one from Djuna Barnes!

Oh god I may vomit into the teacup of debauchery.

Although actually that might've been Florence King again. Begin again.

Aristophanes!:

Well then. It seems like we have a Mexican standoff of genitals

Would it betray my lack of learning if I suggested Euripides?:

It's getting increasingly easier to use his emotional instability to my advantage. That's about all he has going for him right now.

JEAN GENET:

He needs to stop telling me how much he respects me. What does that even mean

(or possibly Pauline Réage, I'm not picky)

...also, while we're on the subject of Genet,

He makes this seasoned whore feel like a novice. I've met the one.

Walker Percy or even Wendell Berry (it's blatant enough for Berry, especially given the emoticon, but I like Percy better so I'll say it's him):

Congratulations!! You are the WINNER of a brand new BLOWJOB!! You can collect your prize between the hours of 12pm and 1pm today, anywhere you'd like!!! :)

oh and hey, as long as we're decrying the bourgeois pursuit of self,

I've come to the conclusion while folding laundry and watching porn that I may be dead inside.

Literally any college-satire novelist since 1959, but I will go with Hugh Kennedy:

We are getting high tomorrow and being statues at the cafeteria. Come find us.

WC Fields or Evelyn Waugh or practically anybody I like:

Little boy scout stared at me with judgmental looks while I bought 3 bottles of liquor but refused to buy popcorn from him

Okay, I can't help myself: Maggie Gallagher, since our contemporary marriage debate might be so different if she hadn't become pregnant in her senior year of college...:

the doctor said its the kinda of pregnant you dont recover from

(and on a serious note, you really should check out her first book, Enemies of Eros, and at least the chapter "The Meaning of Marriage" from her second--no matter what you think about gay issues, she's amazingly insightful on what it means to be an incarnate being--not someone who has a body, but someone who is a unity of body and soul)

OK, this one sounds kind of like a lame Allen Ginsberg, so... Laurence Ferlinghetti??? One of the stupider parts of The Ticket that Exploded?:

Is it possible to dent your eyeball? And how do you "accidentally" go cosmic bowling?

...or Douglas Adams again?

...or some of the student poetry from The Alfred G. Graebner Memorial High School Handbook of Rules and Regulations, which by the way is hilarious?

Caricature of Neil LaBute and/or David Mamet:

I'm not really into her personality. Not that we've ever looked for personality in women.
(515):

That's only a quality to look for in a second marriage.

Edgar Allan Poe:

What's the policy for hitting on a girl at a funeral? She seems more bored than sad.

Mark Z. Danielewski:

(313):

I can't tell which way is up. Too many corners around his house too. An arbitary assimilation of edges.
(1-313):

Christ, I swear you are the high man's Dr. Seuss.

Something about the "airports as liminal space" thing makes me really think of John Cheever for this one....:

(734):

Fact: Chilis at the airport in JAX will serve you shots of jack at 6:45 with breakfast. Ya I missed my flight.
(904):

So when does your new flight leave?
(734):

At my shot/hour ratio.... I leave in 16 shots. I love flying

JD's:

I tried telling the cop that I don't do drugs, and that if he'd just take me home I could prove it by showing him my D.A.R.E. certificate.

And in conclusion, sound advice from William S. Burroughs:

Now you know for the next time you go in the basement to wear a helmet

(or possibly L. Frank Baum)

oh wait no, here's sound advice from George Pelecanos:

I should have known our good time had gone to shit when his ankle bracelet started flashing.

2011-10-18T17:37:00.002-04:00

COMING DISTRACTIONS: In this order, more Famous Authors' Texts from Last Night; two posts on what's good and bad about using the language of "brokenness" w/r/t homosexuality, and my tentative guidelines or preferences for future discussions of the theology of ditto; and a Halloween series featuring short stories, illustrations/paintings, music, and comics which I think will appeal to horror fans. I'm sorry I've been so incommunicada lately, but at least it means I have a lot of words stored up in my hump.... Oh and maybe a post on the other vocations crisis, for those of you who had a strong positive or negative reaction to this article. If you have thoughts about these topics already, please feel free to email me!

2011-10-18T12:56:00.001-04:00

"THE STYLITE." Via TA.

2011-10-18T01:54:00.000-04:00

YOU'RE WELCOME.

2011-10-11T17:46:00.001-04:00

The only really effective apologia for Christianity comes down to two arguments, namely, the saints the Church has produced and the art which has grown in her womb. .... A theologian who does not love art, poetry, music and nature can be dangerous. Blindness and deafness toward the beautiful are not incidental: they necessarily are reflected in his theology.
--Joseph Ratzinger, via Wesley Hill

2011-10-07T16:42:00.001-04:00

WOW, I AM TRYING AT LEAST THREE OF THESE BEFORE MONDAY. And there are more suggestions in the comments.

2011-10-07T14:10:00.001-04:00

"THE NEW BRIGHTON ROCK: BAD ROMANCE." In which I review a movie.

2011-10-06T20:52:00.002-04:00

IN THE NIGHT KITCHEN: A genuinely illuminating interview with Maurice Sendak. I was wary at first, thinking he might come across as self-impressed, but that really didn't happen (in my opinion):

...At 83, Sendak is still enraged by almost everything that crosses his landscape. In the first 10 minutes of our meeting, he gets through:

Ebooks: "I hate them. It's like making believe there's another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of sex. There isn't another kind of book! A book is a book is a book." ...

The term "children's illustrator" annoys him, since it seems to belittle his talent. "I have to accept my role. I will never kill myself like Vincent Van Gogh. Nor will I paint beautiful water lilies like Monet. I can't do that. I'm in the idiot role of being a kiddie book person." He and Eugene never considered bringing up children themselves, he says. He's sure he would have messed it up. His brother felt the same way: after their childhood, they were too dysfunctional. "They led desperate lives," he says of his parents. "They should have been crazy. And we – making fun of them. I remember when my brother was dying, he looked at me and his eyes were all teary. And he said, 'Why were we so unkind to Mama?' And I said, 'Don't do that. We were kids, we didn't understand. We didn't know she was crazy.'"

There was a partial reconciliation with his parents, a moment of understanding. They never made much of his work except once, when he was asked to illustrate a set of stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer, winner of the Nobel prize for literature in 1978. They were proud of that, he says. For the illustrations, Sendak went back to the family album. "There were the photographs my father had of his younger brothers, all handsome and interesting-looking, and the women with long hair and flowers. And I went through the album and picked some of my mother's relatives and some of my father's and drew them very acutely. And they cried. And I cried. So there was that. And there still is that."

more (also via A&LDaily)

2011-10-06T20:49:00.003-04:00

I GOT MYSELF A GUN/AND I CAN SHOOT DOWN EVERYONE/THINKING I JUST INVENTED SOME RELIGION:

Pinker’s attempt to ground the hope of peace in science is profoundly instructive, for it testifies to our enduring need for faith. We don’t need science to tell us that humans are violent animals. History and contemporary experience provide more than sufficient evidence. For liberal humanists, the role of science is, in effect, to explain away this evidence.

more (via A&LDaily)

2011-10-05T19:27:00.001-04:00

"YES, THAT IS AN EXAMPLE OF WHAT I WAS TALKING ABOUT."

2011-10-02T20:19:00.003-04:00

KEEPING IN MIND THAT I SPEAK ABOUT AS MUCH RUSSIAN AS A BOX OF ROCKS, and a box of Amerikanski rocks at that, can anyone recommend songs in Russian on YouTube? I'm trying to listen to things which are easy to understand and remember. Thanks....

2011-10-02T20:14:00.002-04:00

A FORTUNATE FALL... SALAD: KITCHEN ADVENTURES. Now, with puns even worse than usual!

Anyway, dinner tonight has been delicious. I chopped some kind of farmer's market crisp red apple--not too sweet or lush. Added thinly-sliced onion, fresh oregano, chopped black pepper Bellavitano cheese, and roughly-torn toasted baguette. Topped with a vinaigrette of ex-vir olive oil, a splash of sesame-ginger bottled dressing, and some spicy brown mustard.

This was awesome. Best when I got a little of everything on the fork. The oregano had a stronger flavor than I'd anticipated, so keep that in mind.

Tomorrow's projects include spicy carrot soup and roasted-carrot macaroni and cheese. We'll see what happens.

2011-09-30T01:22:00.002-04:00

TWO ANONYREADER COMMENTS ON FORDHAM-RELATED THINGS: Anonyreader #1:

I just listened to the panel you were on at Fordham, and I wanted to note something regarding one of the questions you were asked -- namely, the one concerning "celibacy as a sanction."

The traditional teaching of the Catholic Church is actually that celibacy is the highest way of life. See Session 24, Canon X of the Council of Trent. (That link goes to http://history.hanover.edu/texts/trent/ct24.html, in case the link doesn't work.)

This has been lost in modern times with the dominance first of the notion of the nuclear family, and then of sexual politics, and the Church's responses to both of these things. However... there it is.

Also, semi-tangentially, I found this article when I was looking up a website to cite the above canon (that's http://www.ts.mu.edu/content/51/51.3/51.3.4.pdf). Food for thought.

and anonyreader #2:

If you want to get rid of priestly awe, trying having a kid brother who is a priest. My brother [Redacted] was ordained a couple of years ago, and he is still just as goofy as he was as a kid, and a little too firmly Republican for my taste. But he's still a good priest. This also probably pertains to folks who form close friendships with priests. It's inevitable that one sees one's friends as complete humans, otherwise you are not really their friend.

I think a lot of people avoid friendship with priests because of some of the issues you were talking about. They distance themselves from them out of a reverential awe. While I think it's a good idea to maintain a certain distance from your confessor, or perhaps even your pastor, it would be beneficial for most lay people if they had a decently close friendship with a priest. (If priests only have priest friends, they become an insulated echo chamber, just like any other credential based group.)

I had a small problem with this line from your post. "These are reasons that a layperson-to-priest attitude of empathy at best, wry distance at worst, will serve both parties much better than a surfeit of awe." This may be true, as I said, when dealing with your own confessor, but with priests generally? Doesn't this instrumentalize priests, rather than treat them as full and complete human beings? If the awe of the laity makes it too easy for priests to cover up sins, I think it's a good idea for there to be people who are ready and willing to tell a priest he's wrong.

I value my friends the most who will tell me when I'm being a jerk. I certainly don't hesitate to tell [Redacted] when I think he's wrong, and I decline to call him Father or show him any more respect than I ever have, and I think that will ultimately be to his benefit.

Just some thoughts.

Thank you!

2011-09-30T00:48:00.001-04:00

"I worry that on Judgment Day my punishment will be that God will read aloud all the poems I could have written had my life been good."
--character of WH Auden, in The Habit of Art, now playing at the Studio Theater

[I don't actually recommend this play, I don't think--it's too baggy, there's too much on-the-nose dialogue, and while I get that the sordidness is a major part of the point, it isn't great enough to make me want to spend more time with its sordidness. Still, the acting is really good and there are some very fun lines and moments.]

2011-09-28T00:50:00.002-04:00

REALLY FANTASTIC INTERVIEW WITH ROCCO PALMO. Via WAWIV. I initially skipped this but went back to it on his recommendation and it was completely worth it.

2011-09-28T00:46:00.001-04:00

VIDEO OF MY PANEL AT THE FORDHAM "MORE THAN A MONOLOGUE: SEXUAL DIVERSITY AND THE CATHOLIC CHURCH" CONFERENCE. I'm sorry for how scatty I am here. This turned out to be the unofficial test-run of a newer and better version of my standard Gay Catholic Whatnot talk, and I kept adding and subtracting things almost right up to the moment I got up to speak, which did not serve the overall organization or coherence well. That said, I did say some things which I think were worthwhile, and the next iteration of this talk was much sharper.

2011-09-28T00:40:00.001-04:00

AN ATTACK OF MORNING GLORIES! My review of the Met's Japanese summer and fall art exhibit. You should all go see it! The review is currently subscribers-only, unfortunately.

2011-09-23T20:46:00.001-04:00

FIVE WAYS YOU KNOW IT'S TIME TO GET MARRIED. John Cheese:

Don't picture your relationship as two people pulling a wagon. It's like two legs carrying a person.

yeah, you know you should click

2011-09-23T18:23:00.000-04:00

"THE BEATITUDES IN PRISON": A PRISONER'S RESPONSE.

2011-09-23T18:00:00.000-04:00

“[Maureen Tucker] and I were friends but I always got the feeling that Moe disapproved of everything that the rest of us were doing on some basic level. Moe was raised a catholic and she was pretty strict at the time. She always wore pants. She brought one dress with her on every tour and I remember waking up on a Sunday morning after doing a show the night before and being really bleary eyed and seeing a pair of legs go out the door and realizing that was Moe! She was going to church and I'd never seen her in a dress before. She was very consistent about that. She wouldn't swear a lot, I would say never but I seem to remember occasionally. She was very proper in a lot of ways. She didn't expect anybody else to live up to her standards but she would occasionally not allow certain behavior. You weren't supposed to get into any explicit talk about sex with Moe around. She could drink, though.”
-- from an interview w/ Doug Yule circa 1994, describing life on the road circa 1969; via JWB

2011-09-21T15:33:00.001-04:00

CONCENTRATED ESSENCE OF '80S. Via VM. This just makes me happy.

2011-09-21T15:29:00.000-04:00

You had very sensitive and responsible young people suddenly attuned to certain cosmic questions that beckon us all, and expressing these concerns through acoustic guitars and lilting harmonies and pale melodies. I hate these people.
--Sterling Morrison, here, via JWB