"THE DEATH-HAUNTED ART OF FRIENDSHIP": Catholic Lane has been generous enough to let me do a whole series on this topic! The introductory installment is here. Please do let me know if there's something I should be sure to look at or something you'd especially like me to touch on.

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

IT'S FUN TO LOSE AND TO PRETEND: Kathleen Hanna on the secret history of "Smells Like Teen Spirit." Rough language and imagery, and obviously I don't agree with her re: pregnancy centers, but if you can listen to this without crying then maybe you need to recalibrate. (And some guys in the audience hoot when she first mentions stripping, because... because agony and irony are side by side on my piano keys?)

Here we are now; entertain us.

"I AM A YOUNG MAN." I know it's hard to believe, but I had never seen The Hunger before last night! It was just as awesome as I'd hoped, lush and not gory and very sad. I liked that vampirism was really horrible--sexual, yes, but not some sanitized metaphor. The music is great, the cast is stellar, and while I'm glad I went into it knowing that the ending lacks what the philosophers call "sense," it was very emotionally-effective. Few horror movies focus on fear of aging and its humiliations without demonizing the elderly, IME; this movie didn't pull many punches on those subjects, but identified with the sufferers rather than being disgusted by them. (Cf the kissing-old-Bowie scene.) Really glad I saw this.

SOMEDAY ALL THIS WILL BE PICTURESQUE RUINS: Final Mountain Goats post (for now).

First, some links from others. Light on Dark Water talks about the gallows humor of Tallahassee.

AM suggests that Goats fans check out Wovenhand, and offers this ferocious, Soviet-surrealism video as evidence. (He says it "would fit well with your 'so far from God so far from the United States' tag.") Well worth your time. I haven't read this interview yet.

And both CR and HEAR pointed me toward this video of Darnielle covering Ace of Base. Awesome. I love watching people love things.

And now some short notes on albums.

We Shall All Be Healed: This grew on me. (Like a fungus, yes, I know.) At first it's scraps and postcards and bad broken memories from a really unpleasant time of life, a friend handcuffed to a hospital bed; and then it sort of comes together into the getting-clean album, cotton balls in the top drawer. The persistent punishment of not being trusted. There's a lot of resignation to consequences ("You're gonna do what you want to do, no matter what I ask of you," which works both ways, from the addict to the cop or from the lover to the addict). Man, this guy really tries hard to hope in a hard-up world.

The Life of the World to Come: Another entry in the death-haunted art of friendship, with song titles from Scripture, sometimes comforting and sometimes... the other things that Scripture is. "And if my prayer go unanswered, that's okay" reminded me of the Weakerthans' "I want to call requests down heating vents/and hear them answered with a whispered 'no'," and in general I could just point you to my Weakerthans review piece instead of writing about this album.

The title of the last song pretty much says it all: "Ezekiel 7 and the Permanent Efficacy of Grace."

All Eternals Deck: "Estate Sale Sign": Yeah, if you liked Everything Must Go you might check this one out too. Similar metaphor, similar meaning, similarly awesome, with the urgency acknowledged rather than denied as long as possible.

"The Autopsy Garland": "Deco cufflinks and cognac by the glass," REALLY nice use of hard consonants. "You don't want to see these guys without their masks on. Or their gloves."

I know the title of this song is the reason I had this thought, but it's still true: Fans of the MGs should read Kathy Shaidle's poetry.

I pose before a lined and numbered wall,
my head like shot-glassed whisky.

...AND NEW THINGS TO HIDE: My review of "Hide/Seek," the *~*controversial*~* gay-themed exhibit at the National Portrait Gallery, is up at the Commonweal website. I'll post some notes which didn't make it into the final draft in a bit. The exhibit runs through February 13 so you really, really should go if you're interested in the subject matter and you're in the area.

But families, even if only the married couple, are not just close friends. In the family, we feel we are near to the deepest mysteries of life and death.
--Putting Liberalism in Its Place

Eh, you guys already know what I'll say about these lines: Given how elegiac the literature of friendship actually is, I don't think Kahn's attempt to exclude friendship from the life-or-death domain of familial love really works.

UNDESIGNATED MOURNERS: Willard Moore replies to my posting of this post from Amy Ziettlow:

That seems a little strong, to say that we have "no exterior way to show grief." The poor build little memorials of plastic flowers, stuffed animals and candles; the rich endow memorial scholarships and awards; memorial websites are established; and graves are much better kept (and much more protected legally) than they were in the 18th and 19th century. We just don't express grief in our clothing, for whatever reason.

My response (lightly edited):

These are good points [...] but I do think there's something genuinely lost when we no
longer carry signals of our status as mourners around with us. A friend of mine lost his father several years back, and, because he came from a family in which this was traditional, he wore the black mourning band; I had no idea what it was, and teased him about it (yes, I realize there's a lesson here about keeping one's mouth shut), and while of course I was mortified when he explained, he did stop wearing it because no one around him knew what it signified. So there was no way to signal that he was one of the company of mourners. It's as if we've located grief outside ourselves, in the grave or the memorial site, compartmentalized it, when in fact of course it continues to walk around beside us.

The contemporary equivalent seems to be confined to younger people and poor people, who do get t-shirts silkscreened with pictures of their dead, and get tattoos. Even then, I think the voluntary nature of the gesture undercuts its power as a cultural signal.

UNMARKED: Amy Ziettlow at Family Scholars; especially appropriate for tomorrow's feast:

...A room on the back of the Overseer’s House contains a coffin from that time as well as mourning costumes and customs exhibits. I was most intrigued by this quote:

“Mourning, during the 18th and 19th centuries, was governed by a strict set of cultural rules. Clothing, in particular women’s clothing, was strictly dictated by cultural customs of the day. [...] Even children and children’s toys were not free from the cultural norms expected of those in mourning. Just as adult women, little girls were dressed in black, carried black fans, and even dressed their dolls in black garments. Clothing prescriptions went on for up to two years and in some cases women wore mourning garb their entire lives as a sign of absolute devotion to the deceased. Absurd by today’s standards, people of the day embraced these mourning customs to show that they mourned well.”

The last sentence, which I put in italics, stuck with me. I was first intrigued by the use of the word “absurd” especially when the people of that time would probably think our total lack of public acknowledgement of a death absurd. I wonder what they would think about how their mourning costumes are perceived in today’s culture. How people who wear all black are considered to be “weird,” Goths, or witches in our culture. If a man were seen wearing a black arm band today, we’d call Homeland Security presuming that he is a member of a radical sect who is planning on bombing something. I can hear them calling from history, saying, “Well, I guess they don’t have to wear mourning colors or costumes since they have adapted and created a new public way to acknowledge loss and suffering.” Oh wait, we haven’t done that. We have no exterior way to show grief let alone show that we have mourned well.

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THE SURVIVOR'S-GUILT GUIDE TO COLLEGE: My column for Inside Catholic.

It's that time of year again: Sultry heat punctuated by thunderstorms, back-to-school charity drives at church . . . and the publication of endless "college survival guides" for incoming freshmen.

At first glance, this clichéd phrase might seem a bit overstated. College isn't exactly the ascent of Everest, is it? And advice like, "Don't sleep through your classes" and, "Pack a selection of warm- and cold-weather clothes" does not really seem to warrant the drama of the word "survival."

But I've been on a year-long kick of reading college novels, both novels about professors and novels about students. And in among the themes I expected to find -- the attempted creation and inevitable defeat of a tolerant, liberal utopia, for example; or the humiliation of reason by forces ranging from sex (Philip Roth's hysterical short novel The Breast) to ancient religion (Donna Tartt's sublime, lurid Secret History) -- one entirely unexpected theme emerged.

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BE CAREFUL--TODAY MAY BE THE FIRST DAY OF THE REST OF YOUR LIFE: A post about how every sin is like a child.

[This post talks about other people. I'm 100% certain that no one, including both my best friend and the other people described, will be able to figure out what I'm talking about, which is the only reason I'm posting this. I've done a lot of awful stuff in public, because I'm awesome like that, so if you know me just assume that this post is about something worse than the thing you're thinking of.]

On Saturday I went with friends to revisit the National Gallery's “Sacred Made Real” exhibit (see below). It's a sufficiently intense exhibit that I couldn't take too much of it. So for a little while my friends were still in the dark monastic gallery rooms, studded with paintings and sculptures of God in agony, and I was standing in the big sunlit atrium staring out the window at an American boulevard. And I thought about you again.

You and I were friends once. Not for too long. The reasons we're not close now are partly your fault, partly mine, partly just the inevitable nexus of circumstance and personality and nobody's fault but the big pinball machine of life.

But I can still think of scenes, moments, in which I sinned—and I had no idea, at that time, that I was sinning against you and that these sins would form part of the barrier between us later on. I (hope I) would never have done those things if I had known.

The thing with sin is, you cannot control it. You birth your sin and send it out into the world and then it does whatever it wants, to whomever it wants to do it to. You aren't totally helpless (except when you are), just as parents aren't totally helpless except when they are. They can educate their children, and you can try to mitigate your sin. Sometimes you can make some kind of partial amends. (I am not sure I believe that any sins are fully amended in this life. I'm not sure I believe in any real temporal reconciliation.) Sometimes the relationship you damaged heals, and sometimes it's even “stronger in the broken places,” as I think Hemingway said, and that isn't to your credit but you still get to enjoy it. But a lot of the time there is no way to attempt amends without causing your victim further pain. I can think of at least one person (not the main person this post is about) to whom I desperately want to apologize, but I know that reestablishing contact would be more likely to hurt than to help, and the attempt would be more about my guilt than about the other person's pain. I still pray for that person, which is pretty much all I can do now.

You can have high expectations for your sin, as parents have aspirations for their children. In the most vivid moments in which I sinned against my friend, I sometimes expected that my sins would bring us closer together. But you don't control it. You don't get to choose. Sin is not a domino rally, where if you were just acutely insightful enough you could see the whole pattern and predict and direct the repercussions of knocking over that very first domino. Sin is a lit match thrown into a fireworks factory: Sometimes nothing too bad happens to the people you love (I mean, you know, other than Jesus). Sometimes something beautiful happens, as God chooses to make your sin a source of grace for you or for others. But sometimes the catastrophe occurs, chaos come again. And you don't get to guide your sin or make it do what you want it to do or keep it from doing what you most desperately want it to avoid.

Sin is your child, and you are as helpless as any parent. I read once a mother, quoting someone else, saying that your child is “your heart walking around outside your body.” Sin is everything that isn't your heart, or shouldn't be, walking around outside your body—and, once the deed is done, outside your will.

"THIS HOUR AND WHAT IS DEAD": An amazing poem.

Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking
through bare rooms over my head,
opening and closing doors.
What could he be looking for in an empty house?
What could he possibly need there in heaven?

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"JOKING, OF COURSE": Three more quick thoughts about The Comedians and "Greeneland."

1. Honky-Talk Heroes: It's possible that you've heard the phrase, "What these people need is a honky!" It's usually used to describe a particular kind of movie--I haven't seen either of these, but Dances With Wolves and Avatar are pretty frequently cited as culprits--in which a nonwhite or coded-as-nonwhite culture can only stand up to its oppressors once it's been shown the way by the white-ass honky man. He is the best rebel of them all!

The Comedians both exploits and subverts this cliche, and I'd say it's about 30% exploitation and 70% subversion. So if you're interested in how white-dominated/mainstream movies presented race in the '60s, this is an Interesting Case. This is not the movie a black Catholic would make, and I think that's pretty obvious just from the casting and assumed audience. But it's still pretty intent on subverting this specific trope.

2. He Do the Priests in Different Voices: Graham Greene is really hard to take seriously. He gets overpraised by Catholics who envy the mid-20th-century moment when we seemed to be gaining the literary respect we really deserved in 1890. He then gets underestimated by people who think he's just a catechism with moving pictures.

What he really is, I think, is good enough. The basic elements of the Greene novels I've read are: This world is absurd and cruel, and you are helpless against its cruel absurdity; England is Haiti is Africa is everywhere, there's no geographical escape and white men are just scraped black men; justice is Hell; the Eucharist is mercy, but mercy must be accepted freely; the Catholic Church is the universal cynosure and everyone in the whole wide world thinks She's important.

Some of these points are obviously controversial! And I get that the specific way in which Greene lays the Church on with a trowel alienates many readers. It often doesn't work for me, because he tends to move too quickly from the character point--this actual character would say this actual prayer--to the symbolic. I'm hoping that I've learned from him, in my own Catholic novel (of which more in the next couple of days), how to integrate what characters do and what authors cry for.

But honestly--if nothing in Greene's Catholicism moves you, I think you are missing some basic point of philosophy, some basic moment in what it is to be human. He is not a zoetrope catechism. He's a Catholic man of the twentieth century, with all that implies. He's a weird man who wants to be a weird saint but can't figure out how; he's a person who wants to be real.

3. Does Anybody Remember Laughter? I think I would pay huge amounts of money I don't have to anyone who would compare and contrast the use of "comedy" and "comedians" in this movie, vs. the use of ditto in Watchmen. Because I'm honestly not joking (...of course) when I say I think they're doing the same thing. Both works are, I think, assertions--in Greene's case explicit, in Moore's case denied--of meaning against the obvious sick joke of this world.

The punchline, which comes like a gut-punch, is: There is a God.

ETA: Argh sorry, that was overstated and misleading. Of course Watchmen is an atheist comic book and an anguished one. But I do think that among the various philosophical stances its characters put forward, there's a strong assertion that justice is more than the exercise of will, and therefore meaning is given rather than created. And I don't really think that stance makes sense without God, as I've said a bunch of times, even though again, Watchmen doesn't go there. But anyway, just wanted to clarify what I meant. I'm more interested in the compare/contrast in the use of "comedian" imagery, & shouldn't've overstated the rest of it....

I'M DANCING AS FANCY AS I CAN: I really loved the movie of The Business of Fancydancing. I mean, I loved it more than I loved The Toughest Indian in the World; I loved it more than any description could really justify, I think maybe.

One big part of my love was the star: Evan Adams. He's got a cocky, vulnerable, punchy grace. If you like Robert Downey Jr. but thought, "What if he were brown?" then I think this guy will push your buttons. The supporting actors are also really lovely but this movie is carried by its star.

But also. I know I missed a lot in this movie. I only listened to part of Sherman Alexie's commentary track, but even that short bit emphasized how many nuances I missed. What I saw was a movie about how we negotiate our unchosen identities, especially those identities which our surrounding culture lies about and tells us not to love. I saw a movie about the inevitable betrayals of the writer: Philip Roth territory (is "Agnes Roth" a callback? it must be), only with even more dead people in the wake of the writer. I saw a movie about loving someone with privilege you don't have, and how you can love him and reject him and evade him, and how he doesn't know what he's doing. (I've been on both sides of that maypole dance and I recognized both.)

By now you want to know what this movie's actually about, and I can't blame you. A gay American Indian writer who has transformed his, and other people's, reservation experiences into pricey lit (Quality Paperbacks with bright white pulp) returns to the rez for a friend's funeral. It's an experimental movie with some Marlon Riggs touches. I don't think the camera needed to swirl quite so voraciously during some of Seymour's (the author's) interview with a combative black inquisitrix.

But overall... this movie showcases the way the given order breaks your heart, only the movie has better pacing and more consistent acting. I don't know if I'd call it subtle. I'd definitely call it brilliant, and that matters a lot more.

I THOUGHT THAT IF YOU HAD AN ACOUSTIC GUITAR THEN IT MEANT THAT YOU WERE A PROTEST SINGER: For some reason my American Conservative column is about gentrification, and why all my oldest friends don't talk to me anymore. It's also about U Street, sex as the new politics and vice versa, melodrama, extremism, love, communards, and regret. Oh I can smile about it now but at the time it was terrible--

Subscribers-only, because if you can't sell memories what can you sell?

I glanced at my watch and realized I had to hurry back to school for the ringing of the next bell--I was on waiter duty at supper time. "How wonderful it must be to have long hours of freedom," I said.

Behind the glinting, anarchist's glasses Paul's eyes looked exhausted: "Someday you'll have more freedom than you'll want."
--The Beautiful Room Is Empty

You are throwing gold after me
I am drowning:
perhaps a fish can be
bribed
--Celan

Evening after evening, embassies
drift over, distilled
from thoughts,
hard as kings, hard as night,
into the hands of the grief-
constables:
--Celan (excerpt)

Cleared for this
departure too.

Song of the front wheel with
corona.

The rudder of dusk engages you,
your slit-
awake vein
untangles,

what's left of you, sets itself aslant,
you gain
altitude.
--Celan

ME: Where's this coming from? You were never cruel when you were alive. Not knowingly.

YOU: But now I sometimes wish I'd hurt you knowingly instead of accidentally. A deliberate kick is more real and intimate than an accidental one.
--Lives of the Circus Animals