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

OH RIGHT, I FORGOT ABOUT: "She’ll defend Catholic moralists one moment, but defend prostitutes and bad girls the next."

I knew I liked her for a reason. Now praise drunks!

SUSIE THEN REMOVED HER MASK/AND CAUSED A MIGHTY STIR: Just so everyone's clear, 1. Here are some of my favorite posts by Helen Rittelmeyer. These posts in no way exhaust her awesomeness; they merely give you what Lady Holliday in The Great Muppet Caper would call "a soupcon--Marie, I don't think we should chew gum!"

"Decadence, Christianity, And Oscar Wilde's Conversion to Catholicism." My own senior essay changed my life. If mine hadn't, hers might've.

"Toward a Bioethics of Love"

In defense of shame (my post against; but you should read hers first)

A review of three books I read (in part) because she owned them.

All my posts tagged w/her name

2. Apparently Todd Seavey lived twenty-and-some years without ever meeting an agent provocateur until Helen. His naivete, while potentially endearing when played by Joseph Cotten, should in no way impair your reading of her actual work, which is much more Marlene Dietrich than Anne Hathaway.

BACK... AND ON THE ATTACK!

THE CIGARETTE SMOKING BLOG rides again!

"TOWARD A BIOETHICS OF LOVE." Helen Rittelmeyer's provocative piece on "what conservatism can offer disability activism":

My sister’s genetic disorder is too unusual to have a name. If it seems like the person I’m talking to won’t understand a medical description—grand mal seizures, nonverbal, severe-to-profound mental retardation—the layman’s version is that she’s a 10-month-old mind trapped in a 20-year-old body.

I am not often asked whether there is a cure. When I heard the question for the first time, only a year ago, my answer, which appalled the questioner, was that my family probably wouldn’t be interested in one.

more

There's a discussion here if you want comments-boxing. I'm not sure I have anything useful to say yet. I will note that when Christ appeared to the apostles in His glory, the glorified body still bore the wounds of crucifixion.... Anyway, I'd really, really like to hear other people's thoughts on this, so if you have links to send, send 'em--I'll do a link round-up soonish.

AT THE END OF THIS TUNNEL OF GUILT AND SHAME THERE MUST BE A LIGHT OF SOME KIND: Helen's most recent post on shame rounds up all of her arguments to date, and is therefore invaluable. I still stand by the argument I made in her comments box--humiliation often brings spiritual fruit to the shamed, but humiliating others is a form of cruelty which will condemn those who practice it--but I wanted to talk here about one way in which I do believe in "shame culture."

(Ah, before we move on: I also agree with the class-based critique of shame culture, and it's part of the motivation for this post. I don't think there's ever been a shame culture in which poverty wasn't considered shameful--no, read that post first--so that's obviously anti-Christian. And yet there have definitely been vocational subcultures in which underclass background and even female sex weren't treated like crimes.)

Vocational training rests on shame culture. (Helen offers evidence here.) If you discern any kind of creative vocation, you are seeking to enter into a strict community of practice. This community uses harsh methods to teach you how to fulfill your vocation (think Kitchen Confidential) and promotes storylines, narratives of saints and villains, which show you how to live your vocation (newspapermen: All the President's Men) and how not to (Shattered Glass).

This vocation-based shame culture is far less cruel than a universal shame culture, in my opinion, because it is obvious that everyone judging you has submitted to roughly the same standards, and because you are being judged on performance you explicitly chose to make public. Anthony Bourdain can tell you your broccolini is so burnt it looks like something dredged up from Bob Marley's closet because you know he got yelled at and berated by chefs for years. Plus, you chose to present your broccolini to the outside world, your customer base, and not solely your friends, so you've submitted yourself to justice (for strangers!) rather than mercy.

(This btw is part of the intrinsic humility of entrepreneurship. If America can add anything to Catholic practice perhaps she can add this understanding of business as submission.)

The above claims are only partly true. Of course, if you have societal privilege then that privilege will affect how you're judged and which standards--spoken or unspoken--you must meet. To use the chef example again, Anthony Bourdain has written pretty harshly about the difference between the huge numbers of Latinos in the kitchen vs. the tiny numbers of Latino chefs who earn high honors. It's not because brown guys can't cook or run a kitchen, you know? Nonetheless, vocation-as-subculture is a real thing, and vocations build real solidarity, within which harsh chastisement and shaming can be done without self-aggrandizement on the part of the chastiser.

The intense emotion this vocational submission evokes was brought home to me in the Top Chef finale, when the amazing, lovely, super-cute and gentle (and hometown honey!) Carla Hall broke down in tears because she had failed to present good food to the judges. She was ashamed in front of her profession. And I understood: You should be. When you do inadequate work, you should be ashamed. If you aren't, you never understood your profession to begin with.

Vocation is performance--even a hermit's vocation, which is why everyone always bothers hermits!--and so vocation necessarily partakes in shame culture, not just guilt culture.

On the other hand... two caveats. First, I wonder whether Christianity can really support a strong shame/guilt distinction at all--at least if that distinction is cast in Helen's terms, rather than e.g. Ron Belgau's.

God has already "found you out." You are always watched. The only thing I remember from Lewis's Perelandra is the moment when the narrator wishes he could go outside--away from God's eyes!--and just have a quick smoke to re-establish his privacy. This small, human reticence of the cigarette is not available to Christians. For us, guilt is shame. Wrongdoing is always a violation of relationship, even if the only One we betrayed is our Lord.

And the second caveat: How do we understand a profession with a strong vocational ethos, which has nonetheless a deeply conflicted relationship with truth or virtue?

The obvious example for me is tabloid journalism. I far prefer the "black and white and red all over" style to the missish, Brahmin assumptions of the New York Times; but Five-Star Final is a terrific portrait of the cruelties of that profession, the shame involved in shaming others.

So, some questions: If Helen embraces Edward G. Robinson's character's shame in 5SF--he's the tabloid editor who obsessively washes his hands, and by the way, he's amazing in this role--is she necessarily embracing his actions in humiliating others? Can there be different standards of gossip, avoidance of scandal, and charity for different professions? Can a shame culture be a humility culture--rather than, what seems much more likely, a "good-people" culture of Pharisaical (sp??) self-satisfaction?

Fight in my inbox!

AND IF I BUILT THIS FORTRESS AROUND YOUR HEARTH: Helen Rittelmeyer turns her politics-as-tribalism shtik, with which I usually disagree (maybe just because I'm too busy trying to build my own tribe from materials I find at home?), into a series of terrific insights, of which this

I can imagine a world in which fatherhood (or motherhood) is simply a matter of love and tenderness, but do we really want to relieve parents of the burden of leadership?

is the center. (Although the footnote is the best part.)

Go, read!

(And hey, be grateful I didn't title this post, "A Woman So Hearthless"!)

YOU LOSE YOUR GRIP/AND THEN YOU SLIP/INTO THE MASTERPIECE. Conservative aesthetics; and why you should be grateful to be one of the gouged-out sculptures of God.

I guess they won't
exchange the gifts
that you were meant to keep....

THINGS I'M READING: The NY Sun retrospective at Culture11... anytime you namecheck J. Jonah Jameson you get my attention!

Helen Rittelmeyer's senior essay: "Decadence, Christianity, And Oscar Wilde's Conversion to Catholicism." Profound and provocative. Your must-read for the day.

Nicola Karras's reply to objections.

PoMoCon praising Nalin Ranasinghe's literary look at Plato. I must read this!!!

A NEEDLESS ALEXANDRINE: One of the many reasons I recommended that post from Helen about aesthetics and conservatism is that she not only describes but demonstrates how traditions can be performed well or poorly. There is a standard, which is outside of the tradition itself narrowly construed but might be understood as "the spirit of the tradition," which neither disrupts or disavows the tradition nor performs it by rote.

You can make the analogy to Vatican II yourself, I'm sure!

SMALL IS BEAUTIFUL: Here, Helen Rittelmeyer says a lot, and doesn't wander off for decades the way I do below. If you want some sense of the intellectual situation on the Right, but you don't want to fight through the weeds below (or even if you do!), I highly recommend her post. I don't endorse everything--if you want to know what I think, I'm always a pretty good source--but this is an awesome post. Helen's always a few steps beyond, like Madness.

I want somebody to shove
I need somebody to shove
I want somebody to shove me.
--Soul Asylum, and yes, I'm ashamed to type that, but the 1990s were hard on all of us. It's a fun song.

She's my bus seductress, she smells of old cash,
Drinks Guinness off-duty, eats blogwatch and mash...

Light on Dark Water: "The Truth Hurts So This Should Be Painless"....

Megan McArdle: A reading list for an economic crisis. You know, in case you happen to run into one somewhere.

Postmodern Conservative: Ten songs for mass transit.

Claw of the Conciliator tipped me off to a fascinating interview with John K. of Propagandhi and (more relevantly to my interests!) the Weakerthans, in the current issue of Winnipeg's Geez magazine. Includes quite a bit of stuff about his religious upbringing and its influence on his songwriting.... Not online, but you can order it here.

And this poem, which I found via this interview with Helen Rittelmeyer, is much weirder and more awesome than it might at first appear. Check it out!