GUYS AND LADIES: My post about Damsels in Distress, at AmCon.

"THE DECLINE OF DECADENCE": I wish I had seen Damsels in Distress before its closing night here in DC, so I could tell you all to go see it! It was terrific--funnier and more wide-ranging in its satire than Metropolitan, I thought. In When Sisterhood Was in Flower, Florence King's obvious love for the '70s feminism she satirized made the satire itself sharper and brighter. WSWIF:70's feminism::Damsels:"Beauty will save the world."

"ALLAN BLOOM'S GUIDE TO COLLEGE." I did not expect the New Yorker to publish the sharpest thing I've read so far about the Closing of the American Mind anniversary!

For kids entering college fully trained in this liturgy of prudence and niceness, which I am anxiously imparting to my own young children, it’s not Bloom’s censoriousness they will resist. It’s his decadence.

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Also, this phrasing is just self-parodically Straussian: "I’m not a Straussian, but I was taught by Straussians and modelled my classroom methods on theirs...."

ENVISIONING A POST-CAMPUS AMERICA.

I'LL JUST LEAVE THIS HERE.

She was searching his eyes now--looking perhaps for the flickers of some silent story, an inner late late show.
--John Hersey, Too Far to Walk

ARS LONGA, UNIVERSITAS BREVIS: Uh, sorry for the probably-mangled Latin. Anyway, I don't really have much to say about my Gay Catholic Whatnot talk for Carnegie Mellon U's Newman Center. The audience seemed intrigued. I could intrigue audiences on your campus! Why not invite me? If you're not on the DC Metro I'd need you to pay for my transportation plus a nominal speaking fee, and feed and shelter me if I'm expected to stay overnight, but I would be very happy to have dinner w/students, do an extended Q&A, stay after the talk to speak with people privately, or whatever else I can do to reach out to students with questions on all things romoerotic.

The one thing I did want to mention is that one student (not from CMU, I think) described the atmosphere on her campus in a way which made it sound, to me, pretty vulgar. A lot of campus Catholic groups seem to do Bible study, prayer groups, and corporal works of mercy for those already within Mother Church, and focus their evangelization efforts on discussions of controversial issues. I wondered whether they'd do better to give students opportunities to encounter beauty. Why not show Therese (this one), or do posters with poetry from St John of the Cross or Thomas a Kempis's reworking of the Song of Songs as a hymn to Christ crucified?

There's more than one way to be countercultural; and contemporary college culture is so often banal (not only at secular colleges, either) that offering an encounter with sublimity might be the most oppositional thing campus Christians could do.

TRUST FALLS: My Inside Catholic column, on trust, mistrust, and conversion. I'm honestly not really satisfied with this one, but you all might find something interesting or useful in it--and there is fire, so hey. Please ignore the headline, which is a sardonic hangover from a completely different earlier draft.

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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THIRD VERSE SAME AS THE FIRST: In which I am interviewed about Gay Catholic Whatnot. This is a two-page condensation of a phone interview which I remember as being almost two hours long, so it sort of jolts around a lot; also, for "intimate" read "infinite"! (Freudian slip?) You might check out the "outtakes" as well. The interviewer was really good at persistently tracking me to my lair and making me justify my assertions, although again, you don't necessarily get the full force of that because of the length constraints.

MADAM CHAIRMAN, I AM CONFUSED. Why do people think official recognition and funding is a good thing for their organization? Surely we all know that having a bad reputation is the best way to attract the kinds of people a Christian would prefer!

DON'T LOOK NOW: Mini-reviews, mostly horror. I realized that there are a lot of books and movies I'm glad to have read or watched, even though I don't have enough to say about them to warrant a full-length post here. So this is a roundup of a bunch of things you might want to know about.

Hugh Kennedy, Everything Looks Impressive. Yale in the '80s; is the protagonist supposed to be unlikable and unwilling to learn? Class resentment, demi-dykery, survivor guilt. I've been reading a lot of college novels lately, and I'm surprised by the regularity with which survivor guilt surfaces as a theme. I note that Everything Looks Impressive is oddly reminiscent of The Sterile Cuckoo, a college novel written some 30 years earlier. The books' narrators are equally narcissistic, but Kennedy's guy isn't as sexist in his narcissism, so... that's something?

Bonus POR mention on page two or three, as a "neo-fascist organization." I love you too!

Recommended for Yale obsessives (boola boola!) and people with my intense interest in the college-novel genre.

Deadgirl: I watched this on Netflix Instant Viewing after reading this description at Kindertrauma. This is a horror flick with a truly rancid premise: Two high-school losers are exploring an abandoned asylum when they find a naked woman strapped to a bed, behind a door which hasn't been opened in so long that it rusted shut. What follows is gross and cruel and immensely sad.

This is a horror movie about misogyny, and abuse of power more generally, which isn't itself misogynist. It's extremely hard to watch. I found it totally effective. (I'm not convinced that it fully earns its ending, but I also don't think it could really end any other way, so I'm willing to go along.) The color scheme is appropriately raw, moldy, and corrupt.

Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching: Experimental horror novel in which a house in Dover, England develops a malevolent power and personality, which it uses to destroy the local immigrants and the women of the house. There are some real shivers here, and the fragmented, multiple-narrator style makes the mystery more compelling and frightening rather than serving to distance the reader from the events.

Sudden Fear: Joan Crawford's husband is trying to kill her! She's so fantastic in this, with her giant eyes and man-face and her telenovela acting style. There are some nice noir shots as well, including a gorgeous shot from above as Crawford runs down a dark street. Very easy to watch despite the relative predictability of the story.

The Experiment: German suspense flick based on the Stanford Prison Experiment. Moritz Bleibtreu is terrific! Unfortunately, the film doesn't get over the most basic hurdle: It's really hard to make a fictionalized version of the actual events which is even as horrifying as what really happened. So despite some raw moments and tough-to-watch scenes (I was struck by the early glimpse of the prisoners' feet unprotected in sandals while the guards wore heavy boots) the movie still feels tarted-up and tinfoil compared to the visceral events on which it was based. The romance subplot is also distracting and kitschy.

My Little Eye: Fluffy C-level horror movie about a group of twentysomethings recruited for a reality-show webcast which requires them to live in a creepy old camera-riddled house together for six months. If anyone leaves, everyone forfeits the million-dollar prize money. I enjoyed the Breakfast Club echoes, both explicit and implied.

TRYING HARD TO BECOME WHATEVER THEY ARE: Over the weekend I watched "Transgeneration," a Sundance Channel/LOGO documentary series following four transgendered college students (well, one is a grad student) over the course of a year. I'd been putting this off a) because I have an aversion to this exact kind of self-voyeurizing, reality-TV documentary (it's related to my disapproval of biographies) and b) I thought it might be depressing. But in the event, the kids were so captivating that it was really easy to sit down and watch the whole thing all the way through. Here are a few scattered notes.

First, the cast of characters: a Filipina-American from a poorer background, a Smith College student from Oklahoma, an engineering-major geek from a well-off family, and an Armenian Cypriot graduate student. Plus lots of their friends and relations. I really liked both the diversity of backgrounds and the decision to include a lot of scenes with friends. You really get a sense that these students are creating communities of other transgendered people. There are a lot of contrasts and parallels here, watching which friendships break down and which gain strength over the course of the year. This isn't a documentary about just four people; it's also about the people on whom they rely, and who rely on them.

Second, holy cats these people are desperately undergraduate! (Well, the grad student is more grown-up, but he spends a lot of time with undergrads.) They're variously self-absorbed, melodramatic, hyperpolitical, and judgmental. They're alternately dizzy and diligent, they're fumbling through first romances (you definitely get a sense of the ways in which being transgendered meant they didn't have standard high-school experiences), they're convinced they can change the world.

All of these ridiculously undergraduate characteristics do play out through their gender identities and transitions, but aren't reducible to those identities--sort of like, I was 19 when I converted to Catholicism, and I think I lived out my conversion in a fairly self-absorbed and melodramatic way, but that doesn't mean Catholicism promotes self-absorption and melodrama. Just that if you're 19 at Yale, you may well live out your conversion in ways which reflect other aspects of the 19-year-old Yalien mindset.

Third, yeah, Americans are way too comfortable on camera. TJ, the Armenian Cypriot, seemed the least likely to film himself--am I misremembering that?--and in his segments back home there were moments when someone would bar the camera from pursuing, or wave the camera away so that real intimacy could be created. Raci, the Filipina-American, also had one relative who took her aside for an off-camera conversation. But the white, non-immigrant folks seemed ridiculously at ease being filmed and, again, frequently filmed themselves as well. I suppose as a Christian I can't be too hardcore about the idea that privacy, being unwatched, is something to preserve and honor--I mean, God is always watching even when you take a smoke break!--but I just can't imagine treating the camera with the nonchalance that these kids (and to a lesser extent their parents) do.

And finally, one thing I really wish the documentary had spent more--or really any--time on is the possibility of outside pressure toward transition. There were at least two people, a friend and a doctor, who seemed to me to be pushing students to resolve their ambiguities and hesitations into clear, final narratives of transsexuality. And I wonder if parents don't also apply some of this pressure. There are ways in which "I was always already a man, and I'm taking all the possible medical steps RIGHT NOW to express that manhood physically" is easier to understand than "I'm really not sure what's best for me right now, and I'm not totally sure where I'll be in a year, and maybe I need to spend some more time in-between even though it's astonishingly uncomfortable and I know I don't want to stay here forever." It's totally impossible to tell how much outside pressure really mattered, because the highly edited nature of the documentary means we're not seeing this year the way the students saw it. But I do wish the question had been addressed.

That said, I definitely recommend this series if you're at all interested in the subject. It's available on Netflix to order or to watch instantly on your computer. ...The deleted scenes on the DVD didn't add much, IMO.

"IT IS THE LAST DREAM OF CHILDREN TO BE FOREVER UNTOUCHED." In other news, I finished the draft of the novel. This epigraph brought to you by the Zami: A New Spelling of My Name Foundation, and also the letter Q.

THREE LINKS. First, in honor of the 75th anniversary of the Yale Political Union, the only article you'll ever need about the ypu.

But also: Noli Irritare Leones turned me on to these two interesting posts: a friendship contract; and the "moral murkiness" of charity. The latter link has a terrific story of a fistfight, and reminds me of my post about pregnancy center counseling, leadership, and complicity.

"Conservatism is my sexual preference."
--the FC, around 5 a.m. Sunday morning

IVY-COVERED PROFESSORS, WITH IVY-COVERED...: Tell me your favorite novels set on college campuses?

FIRST THINGS is doing a survey of college experiences, especially w/r/t religion on campus. Go throw your two cents in the hat!

EVE'S ADVICE TO THE LOVELORN: Just a bit more on that APA thing.

Some commenters have suggested that requiring only gay people to abstain is differential treatment which constitutes discrimination. This claim prompted a series of thoughts, which I present here, ranging from most relevant to the APA to least; the ones most relevant to the APA are least interesting to me, though, and vice very versa.

"It's Lent." "Well, when you get it back, come up and see me sometime!": Does the APA prohibit marital-status discrimination? If so, it seems that unmarried heterosexuals are "similarly situated" to homosexuals at completely-Christian-conduct-code colleges; if required abstinence is discrimination, and marital-status discrimination is barred, unmarried heteros can get just as indignant as gay people.

And yet that isn't the issue. I wonder why!

(Sex is the new religion, and the gay-liberation movement is the new Caesaropapism.)

Juno and Mary: Actually, I suspect you could also bring a claim of sex discrimination against anti-fornication colleges, given that only women get pregnant, thus only women might be faced with the choice between dismissal from their jobs or clandestine abortion.

That's one of many, many reasons I don't actually support the C-C-C-C colleges.

But again: Why hasn't this issue been raised? Possibly--and I don't know the players, so I'm just raising this as a possibility--because gay and straight people have a very easy time isolating themselves from the other group's tragedies, in this culture. I wrote about that here. Although this is a stupid idea for many reasons, I still do wish that every straight evangelical could be forced to spend time at a gay-youth group, like the Sexual Minority Youth Assistance League here in DC, and every gay-liberationist could be forced to hold the hand of a woman sobbing because of an unwanted pregnancy or a decades-past abortion.

There's really enough suffering to go around.

A woman taken in adultery: This whole kerfuffle got me thinking about how I would reshape C-C-C-C colleges, if I could. Because I do get that the gutter-punching, "here comes everybody," bar-brawl style of a Yale (or Georgetown, or Notre Dame) education isn't necessary for or beneficial to everyone.

I guess I'd say that you could replace conduct codes with: a) parables of transgression and forgiveness. This is how Jesus did it, you know? What if your college conduct guide told you stories of how you could be forgiven academic, sexual, even criminal transgressions? What if they gave examples of confession, penance, and communal re-embrace--not just rules?

b) a requirement that you profess certain beliefs, and/or not speak against them. I like this less, but it does get at the key claim that heresy is worse than acknowledged sin. It would also distinguish interestingly between sins which are commonplace at university yet kept quiet (drunkenness, lechery, hypocrisy); those which are commonplace and condemned (dishonesty, plagiarism); and those which are commonplace and argued for strenuously as human rights (no need to list them!). Sinners of all kinds would be welcome; heretics would be advised not to attempt to spread their heresies.

Neither of these are what I, personally, would want in a college--I basically would want Yale, and hey!, I got her--but they're better than a cocoon of complete conduct-code conformity.

I SHOULD BE DRINKING A TOAST TO ABSENT FRIENDS/INSTEAD OF THESE COMEDIANS. The inimitable Abhay Khosla on Scott Pilgrim.