THREE LINKS: 1. 101 projects for artists and illustrators. I'm having a lot of fun recasting these as writing exercises--designing a magazine cover on a current news event would become writing a New York Post headline.... Basically, what exercises like this train you to do, I think, is to notice things you'd otherwise overlook--to consider every kind of art a possible source of inspiration. Via Journalista.

2. Nat Hentoff writes:

...In 2002, Arar, a software engineer and citizen of Canada, was kidnapped and flown by the CIA to Syria, where for 10 months he was held in an underground cell seven feet high, three feet wide, and six feet deep ("like a grave," he said). The persistent tortures he underwent finally forced him to make a false confession of connections to Al Qaeda.

On his release, Syrian officials admitted there was a total lack of evidence against him. Then, after a two-year inquiry and its 1,200-page report by a Canadian commission--in which the United States refused to participate--Dennis O'Connor, the chief justice of the Ontario Court of Appeal, said, "I'm able to say categorically that there is no evidence to indicate that Mr. Arar has committed any offense or that his activities constitute a threat to the security of Canada." ...

On December 7, 2006, the commissioner of the RCMP, Giuliano Zaccardelli, resigned because he had mishandled the case, saying he had "made a mistake" in not being aware of the false information the RCMP had given the CIA.

In this country, you will not be surprised to learn, no one--at the CIA, the Justice Department, or in Dick Cheney's office of "dark arts"--has resigned or admitted any error at all.

Instead, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales was asked at a press conference whether the Justice Department might at least offer Arar--who can't find a job and still suffers from the effects of his stay in the grave-like Syrian cell--an apology. Astonishingly, since Arar's ordeal has been reported in detail in mainstream American newspapers as well as in the foreign press, Gonzales actually said: "We were not responsible for Mr. Arar's removal to Syria. I'm not aware that he was tortured, and I haven't read the [Canadian] commission report. He was initially detained because his name appeared on terrorist lists, and he was deported according to our immigration laws."

The attorney general did not mention that his Justice Department approved the removal of Arar or the special accommodations for Arar in a CIA plane, bound not for Canada, where he is a citizen, but for Syria's torture chambers. And Gonzales has yet to answer the insistent questions on that brutal rerouting from senators Leahy and Arlen Specter.

more (via Mark Shea)

3. Washington Post story on the DC Archdiocese's promotion of Confession--ads, how-to guides, extended confessional hours, and more. Via Amy Welborn.

...Regular celebration of this sacrament [of Penance and Reconciliation, alias "Confession"] will help you form your conscience; it will give you strength in your daily fight against sin; and it will help you to gain the full freedom that is yours as children of God. ...

Let us remind our culture of people like Blessed Luis Magna Servin, one of our newest American blesseds, a devoted husband and father, martyred in Mexico in 1928. Facing a firing squad, he was able to speak words of forgiveness to the soldiers about to execute him: “I pardon you and I promise you that on arriving in the presence of God you are the first ones I will intercede for. Viva Cristo Rey! Viva Santa Maria de Guadalupe!”

--Abp. Gomez of San Antonio's pastoral letter on the Sacrament of Reconciliation (via Amy Welborn b/c I can't open PDFs on this computer, but the entire letter is here)

The struggle between Japan and China was always a fight between brothers within the "Asian Family." ...It had been my belief during all these days that we must regard this struggle as a method of making the Chinese undergo self reflection. We do not do this because we hate them, but on the contrary we love them too much.
--General Matsui Iwane, quoted in Iris Chang, The Rape of Nanking: The Forgotten Holocaust of World War II

The Rat gave me this book a few years ago, and I'm really glad I finally got around to reading it. A harrowing history of savage cruelty, incredible courage, and politically-expedient amnesia.

BABY NAMES OF THE EARLY CHRISTIANS:

...In Christian nomenclature, the so-called “humiliating names” or “shameful names” form a distinctive group. These names, when not defamatory, were sometimes used by some faithful as a life-long act of modesty, precisely because of their unpleasant significance…

more (via Amy Welborn)

THIS STORY OF TREES IN NIGER strongly reminds me of Hernando de Soto's excellent The Mystery of Capital.

THE THIRSTY MUSE: TIM POWERS, THE STRESS OF HER REGARD. Just finished the third novel I've read from this excellent dark fantasist. I had more problems with this one than with Declare or Last Call: For the first time ever with this guy, I thought occasional sentences were simply overwritten; the structure didn't always work for me; and at times the "he intuitively understood that the magic worked in way X and not way Z" stuff got intrusive and handwavey. Also, I'm at a disadvantage, because on the top level this is a novel about the Romantic poets dealing with vampires, and I am not immediately inclined to care about the Romantic poets. Write me a book about Philip Larkin dealing with vampires!

But. Once again, this is a fantasy of salvage, in which the characters pay terrible costs. The underlying idea of the book reminded me strongly of a bit of writing advice I read once: "When you don't know what to do with your plot, take your character and figure out what would be the absolute worst thing to befall this particular person. Then do that."

I really, really liked how Powers portrayed the shifts of strength and weakness in his characters, the stiffening of resolve and the exhausted surrender. It's easy to write about the moment of declaration, much harder to write about the temptations and backsliding and grueling loneliness of life afterward.

I also felt like the emotional payoffs were more evenly-distributed throughout the book than they were in Last Call (and yeah, I realize this cuts against my uncertainty about the book's structure). I'm glad I read this, and I'd definitely recommend it (after you read Declare, though!).

And yes: I love the title.

IT IS THE BEATING OF THAT HIDEOUS HORSE!: (I'm so sorry. Can you tell I've been waiting months to use that headline?)

Some thoughts on Eyes Wide Shut--a movie, I should say, that I'm still mulling over. It can't be dismissed, even if my ultimate judgment remains "tries hard, finds subject difficult." I apologize, once more, for the length of this.

First, The American Scene links to Lee Siegel's defense of the movie. The first half of it isn't addressed to me, since I was well-served by Sean Collins's previous discussion of the movie (I'm pretty sure that's why I Netflix'd it) rather than ill-served by hype and anti-hype. But I thought this was right-on and worth highlighting:

...In the novel, the password Bill uses to gain entrance to the orgy is "Denmark." In the movie, it is "Fidelio." Remarkably no critic I've quoted even brought up the password. This is a pretty bad lapse for reviews that called Kubrick's meditation on marriage an empty aesthetic exercise, since the opera Fidelio is Beethoven's hymn to conjugal love. Indeed, Kubrick structures his film with gorgeously subtle references to Fidelio and Christmas and Ovid and Homer though none of the critics here interpreted any of these allusions either. Nothing of the sort exists in Schnitzler's tale.

review is here

Siegel also says this:

...Our tame middle-class critics so wanted Kubrick's orgy to be dark and dangerous and full of sexual energy, but Kubrick wanted to show that sex without emotion is ritualistic, contrived, and in thrall to authority and fear. He was too wild for them. Everyone droned on about how unerotic Kubrick's orgy is, but no one talked about how intensely erotic is Bill's fantasy of Alice
making love with the naval officer. It is so erotic because Alice is the object not only of Bill's desire but also of his love.

I think the first point is probably right (and therefore I was wrong to want the orgy scene to have the lambent eroticism of the best parts of O), but I didn't find the Alice-fantasy scenes erotic at all. The black-and-white felt cliched; the whole thing did. That actually worked for me--I'm thinking that jealous fantasies, like most projections of the self onto the beloved, are usually cliched.

There's lots of other close-reading-y stuff in Siegel's review, some of it acute and some of it... well, maybe. It's very much worth reading (despite its defensiveness) if you are interested in the movie.

I agree with Sean that we've probably reached the "agree to disagree" point (although I am still mulling). I do want to say two (relatively) quick things, the first a clarification of a place where I think my poor phrasing gave the wrong impression and the second an acknowledgment of a place where Sean is probably right about our divergent reactions to the movie. (Oh, and he shouldn't feel weird about bringing up my underlying beliefs--I totally agree with him that our differences there are part of what's going on here.)

The first: I think my second post, especially, at times implied something I don't believe on either a religious or an aesthetic level: that children are what makes marriage real. On a religious level, this isn't my belief. (I was reminded of something I noticed during those theology of the body seminars I went to over the summer--when Jesus points to Adam and Eve as models of married life, He's pointing to a marriage that doesn't, as yet, have children. They do eventually--Cain, founder of cities!--but they serve as models for men and women before that happens.) On an aesthetic level, I definitely think you could remove Helena from Eyes Wide Shut and still have an earthquake in the marriage be big enough for the impact the movie wants.

My point was more that once you introduce Helena, you have to use her either mechanistically or symbolically, and the movie chose the former. She's a token to raise the stakes of infidelity at the outset, and she's a reward at the end, but she isn't affected by her parents' discord and she doesn't affect them; and I think that's both untrue-to-life and a missed narrative opportunity.

In the hypothetical EWS-without-Helena, I am pretty sure the final lines would still feel like mutual self-absorption to me. Some bad alchemy of dialogue/concept and performance made it come across as wish-fulfillment (this may just be me, but I felt like Kidman's voice even went kind of candy-colored at the very end), a return to status quo ante, an attempt to resolve the problem of sex by ignoring it. What Mrs. Dr. proposes is both necessary and radically insufficient for addressing what they've been through. I didn't buy that she would suggest it so soon, and I also thought the movie didn't recognize its insufficiency. The weird irrelevant-presence of Helena only heightened the underlying problems with the scene.

Second thing: Sean suggests that we diverged on the movie because he was reading its ending as a depiction of guilt and shame and I was reading it as a narrative about sin. That might be a big part of it, yeah. It's possible we're using words in different ways, here, but I think part of my problem is that in my view shame (especially) often traps people, forces a kind of miserable ingrowing of the personality, a self-swallowing that's both terribly painful for the person undergoing it and totally useless to himself and anyone around him. The language of sin, by contrast, implies the possibility and requirement of repentance and redemption; a particular person may not fulfill that requirement, but it's still embedded in the language.

And so while I saw Dr Harford as consumed by shame in his breakdown, that to me is not a state of mind that leads to resolution (or anything good!), and so I was disconcerted to see it (and its characteristic absence of actions of repentance, vs. expressions of misery) presented as the means to a renewed marriage....

I know I said before that my problem was Cruise's performance--he wasn't amazing enough to sell me on repentance-without-change--and now I think I'm saying something slightly different, that no matter how good his performance I still would have read it as shame rather than penitence. I'm not sure which is right; maybe both.

"BLOG FOR ALL THINGS SQUID": Via Ratty, of course.

Of all the names I've been called in my life, "Madam Chairsquid" is one of them.

*waves tentacles menacingly*

THE END OF TIBET:

It has been only a few months since Zangmo and her friend fled Tibet on foot over the Himalayas to this squat, block-shaped center for Tibetan refugees in India. The two women had been imprisoned along with a group of other nuns, some for as long as sixteen years. They were first arrested in 1990 for staging a protest in Lhasa, the capital of Tibet, to demonstrate their outrage over China's continuing presence in their native land. As the women chanted "Free Tibet," Chinese police moved quickly, knocking them to the ground and dragging them to jail before their protest could attract attention. Inside the prison, Chinese authorities subjected the nuns to a brutal routine. "Police stuck electric prods into my vagina and then hung me from the ceiling," Zangmo says softly. Her voice doesn't waver, but she looks away. Some of her friends lost consciousness as soon as guards pushed the cattle prods inside them, but Zangmo remained alert throughout the torture. "I was totally, totally frightened," she says.

Police eventually transferred the women to Drapchi, the most feared prison in Lhasa. According to human rights organizations like the International Campaign for Tibet, there are hundreds of political prisoners in Tibet, the majority of them Buddhist clergy. Scores have died from torture at the hands of Chinese authorities: electric shock, hanging, forced blood extraction.

"They tried to pull my arms out of my sockets, and beat my legs and arms with metal bars and shocked me," recalls Phuntsog Nyidron, another nun who was imprisoned at Drapchi. "I was worried they could easily kill me." After repeated beatings, a monk named Lobsang Choephel hanged himself at Drapchi, his body dangling from the iron bars of his cell.

The punishment was most severe for those who refused to give up their faith. "In Drapchi, there were numerous demonstrations," Zangmo says. One day, four nuns refused to renounce their Buddhist beliefs in front of the Chinese guards. "They were beaten until they died." Zangmo stares at the floor and starts to cry, her voice breaking. "They died together." [...]

In public, China has announced new policies promoting tolerance of Buddhism. Beijing has lavished funds on restoring the Potala Palace, for example, and thrown open monasteries to tourists. But across the city from the Potala, a senior monk living in a crumbling earthen hut describes what is really happening. "Plainclothes security are all over the monastery," he tells me.

"There's never a time when the monks are together that the public security bureau isn't watching them. The Chinese hold 'patriotic campaigns,' and all the monks are forced to renounce the Dalai Lama."

Like many Tibetans I speak with, the monk asks that his name not be used, for fear of reprisals. Chinese security agents, he says, have cracked down on interactions with foreign visitors. "When I first came here, it wasn't illegal for monks to talk to foreigners," the monk says. "Now it is."

more (via The Rat)

FIGURED THIS WOULD INTEREST MANY OF MY READERS:

After watching the film of Children of Men*, I didn't go back to P.D. James's originating novel, which I've never read, but farther back, to Brian Aldiss's Greybeard, first published in 1964, a novel I last read somewhere between ten and fifteen years ago.

I went back to Greybeard because other than remembering that it is about a future Earth where humans are infertile, I had no memory of its incidents or characters, only a vague recollection of the book's tone and affect, which I remembered as being like a soft, pastoral requiem -- immensely lyrical, unbearably and unrelievedly sad.

more

WAKING UP IS HARD TO DO: In which I revise and extend my remarks on Eyes Wide Shut.

First of all, I should reiterate that the whole "EWS as horror movie" thing is 100% Sean Collins's insight, and 0% mine. A couple people have given me props for it, so again, it isn't my idea, and I doubt I would ever have gotten it on my own. Viewing EWS as a horror movie totally added not only to my understanding of the movie, but also to my enjoyment of it, so I'm really grateful to Sean for getting it.

Anyway. Josiah Neeley writes:

...A friend of mine, who is a bit of a womanizer, says that it's the scariest movie he's ever seen. I'm not so sure I agree that the movie is about committing adultery in your heart, though. What drives Cruise throughout the film is not really lust so much as a semi-conscious desire to "even the score" and thereby get rid of the feeling that he's been cuckolded. (The scene where those random street toughs bump into Cruise and shout anti-gay slurs at him is illustrative of this). What set Kidman off, and led her to tell Cruise about the soldier in the first place, was the fact that Cruise wasn't jealous when told that another man was hitting on his wife but was instead turned on by the thought. So I think the film is more of a psychological thriller than a moral one. Cruise is presented a with a series of temptations that normally wouldn't be much of a temptation (just as the girls at the party at the beginning of the film weren't a real temptation for him), but because of what's happened with Kidman he feels almost compelled to give in. Each temptation is more depraved than the last (first plain adultery, then prostitution, then basically child prostitution,and finally a sadistic orgy) representing a kind of descent into hell, until the woman dying after the party snaps him out of it enough that he can actually *talk* to his wife about it all.

The good girl/bad girl thing was interesting. What would you make of the fact that the woman who saves Cruise at the end is the one who he saves at the beginning of the film?

My only real complaint with the film aesthetically was that stupid music that played throughout the second half of the film whenever there wasn't any dialogue (made more annoying by my sense that the only reason it was there was to fill up the silence). That doesn't have anything to do with what you wrote. But it's something I've been wanting to get off my chest for a while now.

Quickly: I think the sequence of events reinforces my belief that the movie is centrally concerned with "adultery in one's heart." Kidman's character commits it, then needs reassurance that her sin was important, and her insistence precipitates the rest of the film's events, all of which are mental/spiritual rather than carnal.

As for the "bad girls" question... I think, if anything, the point Josiah raises makes the movie creepier. The well-being of the women Ziegler et al. exploit is explicitly raised as a major issue... and then just dropped.

Sean Collins responds to my review here. Some thoughts:

To return to the horror framework, we can consider Bill and Alice Harford (but mostly Bill) to be this film's "final girl." Sure, he survived, but I challenge you to listen to the way he sobs "I'll tell you everything," or see the red eyes of his wife after he does so, or listen to that sadder and wiser conversation they have at the toy store in the film's final scene, and say nothing has changed for them.

He's totally right about Dr Harford as the "final girl." And this is the point where I'm most willing to admit that my own preferences may be skewing my response to the movie. I'm really, really resistant to professions of feeling bad--especially male professions of feeling bad, see above re possibly skewed response to movie--unless accompanied by changes in behavior. I think if I had entered into Cruise's performance in that scene, many of my problems with the movie would have dissipated; I can think of actors who could probably have sold me on his misery. But you have to be really, really, really good to sell me on repentance without change.

I understand that Cruise's character feels really bad. People feel really bad about what they do all the time. And then they "walk back in the revolving door, and do it all again." Some of that is just life. But some of it is a genuine question (which yeah, I put to myself all the time) of how much you're really sorry, if you don't actually change your life.

PS: With regards to their daughter, the absence of any major plot points concerning which was a big sticking point for Eve, I just didn't think she played a particularly relevant part in their erotic and sexual lives. Given what I know to be Eve's political and philosophical bedrock, I can see why this might strike her as a lacuna; given my own sexual outlook, it didn't.

So... it's okay that Helena is marginal to her parents' erotic and sexual lives, because actual children are marginal to their parents' ditto? Yeah, that isn't persuasive to me.

Moreover, Helena is a wasted opportunity from a narrative perspective. I said in my earlier post that the obvious sex as generativity vs. sex as destruction dichotomy wasn't the only way to use Helena; there are about a million ways she could be made important, in the way that actual children are important to their actual parents' erotic lives. She's a daughter, for example: Can Dr Harford look at her without wondering if she will grow up to be misused by men? She's a sign of hope, that no matter how much two people screw up their relationship, they can still produce a child unearned and amazing. She's a sign that his relationship with his wife is about more than just the two of them: Both of them have bonds of responsibility that extend far beyond the self, to a dependent child who loves them.

I really thought the movie was setting us up for some payoff there, in part because Mrs. Dr. makes it clear that her imaginary soldier fling happened after her child was born. I thought the movie's ending would move its protagonists (Josiah Neeley's email suggests why maybe Kidman's character should be considered as much a protagonist as her husband) into the realm of deepened responsibility that comes with deepened love. Instead, Helena runs ahead of and away from them, as their final lines reinforce their mutual self-absorption. Their child really is treated as an accessory to the central fact of their couplehood. It's hard for me to believe that Dr Harford has substantively changed his attitude toward vulnerable women when he seems so uninterested and perfunctory toward his own daughter.

Again, I definitely don't think we're supposed to feel that Bill had no responsibility to the woman at the orgy (or Leelee Sobieski, for that matter) other than "to avoid them," nor that he was untouched by guilt over what befell them thanks to his unwillingness to do anything about it. In an ideal/real world he'd have called the cops the next day, but in the dream logic of the film, he woke up, and by then it's too late to go back and rescue characters from your nightmare.

Okay, I think I understand the nature of Sean's criticism here--it's a point about genre. It's absurd to think that Alice would be concerned about, I don't know, the Red Queen's political prisoners, after her return from Wonderland. You wake up, and while your dream can still affect you, you can no longer affect the dream.

That helplessness might be experienced as tragedy. And exploring or at least showing that tragedy might have "redeemed" EWS for me. It's hard to say, because I don't think the movie actually presents this helplessness as tragic.

It's also really hard for me to see EWS as a dream-narrative for two reasons: 1. Yeah, sexual exploitation of women is a lot more normal than cards cutting off people's heads for tart mismanagement. The movie wants the emotional frisson of real sexual cruelty, with no corresponding responsibility.
2. There's no "entering the dream" moment. The colors are already intensified, the music already insistent, from the first moment. The Wizard of Oz was obvious, and I understand that you can use other methods to shift into dream-narrative, but I don't think I can identify a moment when EWS shifted from black-and-white to Technicolor. It did obviously shift back at the end, though. And while on one level I think that's right--we do slip slowly into dreams (and into sin), while often jerking sharply out of them--on another level it made it really hard for me to view the orgy/exploitation scenes as make-believe, something the characters could leave behind once they awoke.

Look, I know that "in dreams begin responsibilities" is a cliche, but... it's kind of frustrating to me that I think all my problems with EWS are really the same problem repeated in different places, and if that problem were solved in even one place, I would probably be able to suspend my disbelief about the other places. I really wanted to like this movie: It's amazing to look at, and, like I said, I thought the leads were good and the basic idea behind the movie was awesome. And then I felt like it failed to deliver on its promise.

Um. Sorry for writing a book, here, people. I hope this was interesting to someone. Like I said, I really do think you should watch this if it sounds even remotely interesting.

MASTODON IVORY AND MARTYR'S PASTE.

YOU DON'T HAVE TO GO HOME, BUT YOU CAN'T STAY HERE: I've already raved about Tim Powers's incredible novel, Declare. And yes, you should read that right this second. I've managed to snare at least three people into reading it, and all three have admitted that it was great.

I recently finished an earlier Powers novel, Last Call. I don't have a huge amount to say about it. It struck me as fantasy-horror, not just fantasy. Lots of people I like get really into Tarot symbolism and Jungian whatnot; if you're one of those people, I'm pretty sure I can guarantee that this novel will flip your switch. For me, Tarot was a passing fancy, whereas the Cambridge spy ring (implicated in Declare) was true love.

But I'll say two things for sure: 1.) This novel reminded me of everything I love about Stephen King. The gritty, blue-collar atmosphere; the battle between self-deception and self-knowledge; the descriptions of alcohol and need. Susan, in Last Call, reminded me strongly of both Pet Sematary and The Shining--and those are the King novels I think will still be remembered "when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits." I need to re-read Dostoyevsky's Gambler; but even the fact that this book reminded me of that one should let you know how painful and acute it was.

2.) I was okay with this book until the last, let's say, 150 pp. Then I needed to know. I stayed up all night reading. My heart pounded. Partly, okay, yes, that's because Last Call tapped into my deep-rooted obsessions with humiliation and sacrifice. But I'm pretty sure that, whoever you are, it taps into some of your deep-rooted obsessions too.

I think maybe all great fantasy is about salvage. Great fantasy, I think maybe, requires characters to sacrifice everything on behalf of something; and it's the everything and the something which determine the story.

HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY! HERE'S A REVIEW OF "EYES WIDE SHUT"! Okay, the dumb basic response is that I'm really glad I saw this. That said (with some spoilers, so if you are like me and hate spoilers, please know that you should put this movie in your Netflix queue instanter, even though you will probably dislike it):

1. Sean Collins is obviously right that it's a horror film. He gets at lots of the details that make it "'Eyes Wide Shut,' from the director of 'The Shining'!", and I agree with every word of his write-up; but I think he misses the dumb basic point: Most horror films have the moral, "Don't!" And in that sense, EWS is a horror movie about committing adultery in your heart.

Don't.

2. It's so amazing, as a movie. The colors are astonishing--the cobalt blues and neon oranges of Van Gogh's madness. The acting--I honestly didn't know that Nicole Kidman or Tom Cruise could act at all, and now... yeah, okay. I get it. Especially for Kidman. She's melodramatic in a way that makes it part of her character and her world; she makes every studied gesture a statement about the world in which all her gestures would need to be studied and perfect. The rushing, pulsing camera was amazing, especially in the taxi scenes. The ideas behind the movie--what if sex were the instrument of horror? what if physical contact weren't necessary for that to happen?--are brilliant.

3. But.

The movie pulls back before the brink--before every brink. How are its protagonists changed by the end? What have their experiences cost them? I can't think of anything.

The Cruise-Kidman couple have a daughter. I thought perhaps she would be the key to the movie: sex as generativity vs. sex as destructive weapon. That didn't happen, which is fine--that particular opposition is something I feel like I understand pretty well, and I'd really be more intrigued by alternative dichotomies. (Horror, I think, feeds on dichotomies.) But Helena's role in the plot turned out to be deeply disturbing to me: It seemed like she was a token doled out to the survivors as a reward for good behavior--like the blue and pink molded plastic figurines in the LIFE boardgame.

4. Nudity. EWS needed (female) nudity, in the way that Pauline Reage's Story of O needs explicit descriptions. The movie tried hard to get us to recognize that we weren't seeing girls' bushes for no reason: The huge painting of a naked lady, in Ziegler's suite, was probably the most obvious example. Her genitals were always hidden--ostentatiously hidden--by the scenery, whereas the actual genitals of the actress who played Ziegler's brief inamorata were constantly on display. So clearly we're supposed to think something about the fact that women's bodies (and not male bodies, ever) are displayed for us here.

Well... not only did EWS ignore the most startling and compelling moods of O (the sunlight slanting through late afternoon) in favor of a cliched Black Mass orgy. More importantly, the strictures of Hollywood stardom (maybe?) required that Kidman never get quite as naked as her female cohorts. So we see them from the front, but she's only naked from the back. That difference reinforces the sense already invited by the movie's ending: There are good girls and bad girls. Good girls shouldn't be cheated on, even in your head, and you should have sex with them and display their nudity tastefully from the back. Bad girls may get killed and raped and even photographed in full-frontal, and your only responsibility is to avoid them. No guilt attaches to you if you leave them to be destroyed.

In the end, I think EWS is a shocking, brilliant, hollow movie. Deep on the outside; shallow within.

HUGH HEWITT INTERVIEWS A COLONEL WHO SAYS TORTURE IS WRONG. What a shocker. Cruelty isn't what the soldiers I know believe we should be doing. That isn't the country they love, the country for whom they risk their lives daily.

I've tried to write this post about fifteen times now, and keep failing; so, despite my total failure to explain why, please, please pray for all our soldiers, past and present. Every one I know is keeping his or her honor brighter than the day.

edited to give the guy his proper rank

FOR "THOSE WHO HAD TO ENDURE HIGH SCHOOL WITHOUT THE GRACE OF BAPTISM." This wasn't my story; but people who know me well will hear the symmetries.

LATE HAVE I LOVED THEE, CYNARA, IN MY FASHION!

DEFINITIONS AND DESIRES: Some day I'll stop linking to every other post Disputed Mutability makes. Today is not that day. Ted Haggard, self-understanding, shifting attractions, and incompleteness.

RESTORE-HABEAS.ORG: OK, three caveats: I do not know very much about this proposed act. I can't read the text, because opening a PDF will crash this computer. (I will print it out tomorrow.) And I don't have a senator. But a bill that "will restore Habeas Corpus protections to detainees, bar information acquired through torture from being introduced as evidence in trials, and limit presidential authority to interpret the meaning and application of the Geneva Conventions" sounds pretty good to me. Apparently it will be introduced tomorrow (Wednesday), so if you do have a senator, now is the time to check it out. Also, of course, feel free to send me any links to discussion of the bill (pro or con) since nothing has turned up in the course of my usual rounds.

...The lead interrogator at the DIF had given me specific instructions: I was to deprive the detainee of sleep during my 12-hour shift by opening his cell every hour, forcing him to stand in a corner and stripping him of his clothes. Three years later the tables have turned. It is rare that I sleep through the night without a visit from this man. His memory harasses me as I once harassed him.

more
(via Mark Shea and Unqualified Offerings)

DIAMONDS ARE FOREVER: Philip Roth's most recent novel, Everyman, is excellent. Ratty vets his books before I read them, and she singled this one out as action I should get in on.

It's... well, it's sort of the miniature Sabbath's Theater. That's just not possible, really: Sabbath's Theater is Roth's masterwork (so far), a novel completely one-step-beyond--not a "good Roth novel," but a great thing in the world. It's devastating, and its length is part of how it gets its effects. Everyman is necessarily diminished by the contrast. But the themes, and the musicality of the writing, are similar: Everyman has the same rhythm of crescendo and new movement, or diminuendo and new movement, or repeated motif. Its structure isn't dependent on plot, on causal connection, but on a rhythm of intensity, relief, and exhaustion.

When Ratty told me about the explanation of the title (it's the name of the jewelry store owned by the protagonist's father), I was skeptical. Why would you need an explanation? Either the book earns the archetypal title or it doesn't. But when I got to the passage where the store gets named, it was really powerful: commerce vs death (diamonds are forever), assimilation vs outsider status (if you call yourself "everyman," maybe every man will buy from you), an attempt to resolve all the conflicts on both the ethnic and the metaphysical levels of the American Dream.

I really, really liked this.

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: PRODUCT PLACEMENT. Trader Joe's Cuban Mojito Simmer Sauce.

It's... ooohh. It's bright and tangy and kicky and all those fun things. So far I've used it on my normal spaghetti sauce (= chop up garlic, plum tomatoes, mushrooms, and sweet onions) in place of olive oil, and that was great. Throw in cayenne, though, because this isn't really spicy.

But the real fun comes when you get an avocado all up in there. Go and get yourself a black, very slightly yielding avocado--ripe but not squishy. You want an avocado that will kind of mash when you try to cut it. Then coarsely chop some garlic; simmer it in this awesome simmer sauce; chop yourself a tomato, this avocado you've found (a really ripe one is incredibly easy to skin and pit--just cut halfway through until you hit the pit, then cut around the pit, then cut around the rind or scoop out the innards), a medium-sized jalapeno, whatever else you want. Cookity cookity. Maybe a bit more simmer sauce. Chop up some asadero cheese: very melty, very yummy.

I've been having this with pasta, which I realize is unorthodox; for me, it worked out, and I'd suggest a pasta like fusilli or rotelle (not penne--too thin--or spaghetti), but others will prefer this as a spread for thick toast, or some other thing. The pasta dishes reheat brilliantly in the microwave. If you do this as a pasta topping, just cook the pasta; drain it; butter it significantly (don't skimp! Butter makes it better!); mix in the asadero cubes; then top with this amazing avocado thing you've created.

It's so good. I really want to try mojito-sauce beef chili. (And this!) I usually prefer to cook from scratch, but this is just exceptionally awesome and fun.

OOOHHH... IT'S EVEN KIND OF SHAPED LIKE A GIRL!: "Manolo says, for the Manolo nothing gets him through the middle of the cold winter week better than the pictures of the beautiful shoes...." So shiny and sexy and shoe-y!

IN WHICH I'M EITHER A MORON, OR SECRETLY BRILLIANT: Cacciaguida writes,

"we aren't who we are"....and of course, neither is Iago: "I am not what I am."

Didn't notice that.

THE SODOM AND GOMORRAH SHOW: I have a review of the Met's show of portraits from Weimar Germany, in the current Commonweal. Click at own risk etc etc etc.

THAT'S WHAT YOU GET FOR HAVING FUN: Notes from a weekend in New Haven.

* It's possible--I'm not saying it's a good idea, I'm just saying it's possible--to consider Alyosha Karamazov as a zoon politikon. This isn't really true of the other brothers.

* I seem to equivocate on the difference between "belief" and "feeling." I'm starting to suspect that I call things feelings if I mistrust them, and beliefs if I don't. That can't possibly be the right terminology. I need to find a better way of talking about the fact that certain types of longing do imply facts about the world while other types of longing lead to a pointillist, self-sunken, disconnected view of life. CS Lewis says this, in "The Weight of Glory":

...[W]e remain conscious of a desire which no natural happiness will satisfy. But is there any reason to suppose that reality offers any satisfaction to it? 'Nor does the being hungry prove that we have bread.' But I think it may be urged that this misses the point. A man's physical hunger does not prove that man will get any bread; he may die of starvation on a raft in the Atlantic. But surely a man's hunger does prove that he comes of a race which repairs its body by eating and inhabits a world where eatable substances exist. In the same way, though I do not believe (I wish I did) that my desire for Paradise proves that I shall enjoy it, I think it a pretty good indication that such a thing exists and that some men will. A man may love a woman and not win her; but it would be very odd if the phenomenon called 'falling in love' occurred in a sexless world.

* I had a really challenging, awesome discussion of the Fall. This led into a dispute over whether responsibility could ever be a part of love (I now think I was right, and it can, because promises are a part of love) and a dispute over whether the Fall changed humans intrinsically or solely changed our circumstances--whether the exile is internal, a warping of humanity, not only the lack of the Garden but the lack of the kind of self who could stand the Garden.

And here I think I may have been wrong--I think I may have been overly wedded to the language of the Fall as imposing an "inclination to sin." As my interlocutor pointed out, if that's true, it's really hard to understand how Adam and Eve managed to sin at all--as he pointed out, it's not like they held out for a long time! And there can't really be an intelligible reason for sin, I think--all sins are like Iago's sins.

But I do think it's right to say that we're not ourselves after the Fall. It isn't only our circumstances that changed. It's our ability to be distilled, to be the kind of love we as individuals might best exemplify; we aren't who we are, which is why, as Nietzsche says, we have to become what we are. I think this way of talking acknowledges the (to me) obvious damage in the self, not only in our circumstances. (I'm reminded here of the really excellent passage from Perelandra in which the Earth man in Paradise wishes he could go outside for a smoke--he wants to be free of the stress of God's regard.)

* Every college student should read Donna Tartt's novel The Secret History. Ecstasy and its epigones.

* Apparently, I can enjoy a discussion of Cixous, Gadamer, and Lacan, as long as I can make it actually a conversation about Elaine Scarry and the Weakerthans. Score!

(Oh, and hey, people who have seen the Spanish art show at the Guggenheim: What does this image make you think of? ...Yeah, me too.)

* Almost every kind of fun I like seems to involve intellectual or social humiliation. Oh well. Offer it up.

* An exception: eating food! New Haven is such a wonderful city in which to feed. If you ever have the pleasure of visiting (it is, really, one of my favorite places, and I don't care what anyone says!), make sure you get a hamburger at the Doodle, stuffed mushrooms at Anna Liffey's (drinks also good, sincerely alcoholic and inexpensive, and perfectly situated a mere block from the confessionals of St Mary's!), and, if possible, baker's soup at Mory's. Just sink your muzzle in and experience creaturely happiness.

* Walter Olson, of Overlawyered fame, is really awesome. I mean, I knew that. I just thought you guys might want to know too. ...I also got to see Cacciaguida, who emphasized the power of Mozart; Alexander of Macedon, who spewed humility in all directions; Kira, who warred hilariously with the sky; this guy, who got to see Ennio Morricone, for which I think I might kill him!!!!; this guy, who forced me to back down on some of the belief/feeling stuff above; and many other people who skated the thin ice between the beautiful and the sublime. I had a wonderful time. It was very humiliating.

Like a blogwatch in the dark,
He can leave you feeling stark...

The Agitator: Your daily dose of helplessness against those with political power. It's where theodicy meets libertarianism! Here, pregnant woman vs. the police. And then there's this story of boy vs. dad. I'll spoil it: unhappy endings.

Amy Welborn: Saints of Selma. What an awesome picture! PBS is forgiven for Elmo.

Hit & Run: I didn't know they did an entire issue on Hurricane Katrina. I haven't read it, but seriously, this is the kind of thing Reason does really, really well. As soon as I get on top of work, I'll be going through this with intense interest. Also, why not apply for an internship there?

Mixolydian Mode: Brushed-on developer. Ohhh, so awesome. I want a darkroom so badly right now I can practically taste it. (It doesn't taste great, I gotta say--kinda yellowy and chemical.)

We were in Blogwatch--
Let's do it,
Let's break the law....

Amy Welborn:

There's a lot of discussion and (justifiable) fretting out there about why people leave the Cathoilc Church. It's a discussion we've had here, and will continue to have. But I want this thread to be something different, something I don't think I've seen before.

If you're a "revert"--why? What brought you back?

I'd imagine for most it will be a combination of things. And it doesn't matter why you "left"--although that will probably come into the discussion, too. What I mean to say is that if you "left" because after your parents had you baptized they never set foot in a Catholic church again, your story is just as interesting as that of the person who consciously left, as an adult.

more! more!

Cinecon: Victor is doing his year's-best list, and it's pretty fascinating. We have very different tastes, I think; but I read a Village Voice review of The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, and it made me want to run as far in the other direction as possible, whereas Victor's review makes me really wish I'd seen it.

Daniel Mitsui: In which St. Brigid prays for awesome.

First Things: A reply to Fr Oakes's post about heresy and whatnot. I realized, reading this, that I liked the initial post for all the Therese-y-ness, and I didn't pay tons of attention to the wittering about definitions of "heresy" or whatever. So I'll just say I think you can agree with both Fr Oakes and Stephen Barr, and I think that's where I am.

CANADA RIGHTS TEAM DECRIES CHINA "ORGAN TOURISM." Shocker. Via Ratty.

More here.

HERESY TODAY, THERESY TOMORROW: It's a cavalcade of puns in this very awesome post from Fr. Edward Oakes. Putting the "tiff" back in justification? All I can say is, the quotations from Therese fit in completely with everything I ever thought I understood about Catholic theology, so, you know, if you thought Catholics were all about rejecting a grace-centered perspective, have I got a saint for you! (I expect it helps that Augustine was always my go-to guy.) The post is long, but really worth your time.

I'm not in love with the modern world
I'm not in love with the modern world
It was a torch to drive the blogwatches back to the trees...

Family Scholars: "A Republican lawmaker is sponsoring General Assembly legislation that would make Virginia the first state to prohibit anonymous sperm donations." This is one of the possible approaches I suggested in my article on "third-party reproduction" (use of surrogates, egg donors, and sperm donors), which... might be online or might not. I am not sure if it is the best thing to do, but I'm very open to the possibility, and I hope the Virginia debate clarifies the issues. It looks like this may be the first debate on third-party reproductive issues informed by the voices of children conceived using these methods. More here and here ("victory over nature" or "victory over parenthood"? or both?).

Get Religion: Ted Haggard is kind of relentlessly not interesting to me. The hustler who outed him, by contrast....

Hit & Run: At last, a news item combining two of my favorite things: markets, and wolves. (Other girls had a horse phase; I had a wolf phase. We will pause now for a chorus of, "It shows!")

Holy Whapping:

8:00 PM. The Wonderful World of Scola Presents King Solomon's Mimes. The well-known cardinal introduces this showing of the classic adventure tale of love, death, lost gold, white greasepaint and really awful experimental liturgical dance. Starring Marcel Marceau as Alan Quatermain and vice versa. ...

9:00 PM. Monk. Obsessive. Compulsive. Discalced. Detective. Today's episode: Fr. Monk Does the Lavabo and Prolongs Mass for Three Extra Hours. Starring Tony Shalhoub. ...

THURSDAY...
10:30 PM. Father Ted: CSI: Miami. Rerun.

more (via La Welborn)

Indexed: I lol'd. Via the Club for Growth.

The American Scene: In which, if I were Ross, I would make the argument that porn might have lovely theory, but the practice is inevitably colonized by Hell. It's sort of a "Communism is pretty in theory but not in practice" argument. Now me, I don't agree with either of those claims--I think the labor theory of value sucks like few theories of value have sucked before, and porn is more or less defined by its crapulence--but maybe we can at least agree that the pornography industry is not actually made up of you and your feminist friends taking low-res photos in your basement. There is actually a thing out there called "the pornography industry" and it's a lot worse than Wal-Mart. And hey, maybe the nature of sex might even explain why....

WOMEN WITH SHADOWS. Amy Welborn on pro-life fiction. [ETA: Actually, both Amy's post and this one are more about abortion in fiction generally, not stuff that could be labeled "pro-life."] Comments also interesting--from Spike Milligan to A.S. Byatt--and I expect Cacciaguida would agree with the name-checking of Die Frau Ohne Schatten. I'd add David Adams Richards's novel Mercy Among the Children, and Jaime Hernandez's short comic "Flies on the Ceiling: The True Story of Isabel in Mexico" (maybe the most sad and frightening comic I've ever read). As long as we're here, I'll say that I have a published short story, "Why Can't He Be You?", which takes place at a conference for ex-abortion clinic workers, although that story is really more about the aftermath of conversion than it is about abortion.

Cupid, blogwatch your bow,
And let your arrow go
Straight to my lover's heart...

Godstime: New blog focusing on youth ministries. From JB, old-time friend of this blog. Very awesome. Via Amy Welborn.

And a review of Finder: Sin-Eater, a really excellent comic. Via Journalista.

Long before his final illness, he'd asked his rabbi to conduct his burial service entirely in Hebrew, as though Hebrew were the strongest answer that could be accorded death.
--Philip Roth, Everyman

THE BONFIRE MOTETS. Beautiful--a must-read post, really.

THE NUPTIAL MEANING OF THE MIND:
...What has always struck readers of the Continental Rationalists from Descartes to Kant is how all these Rationalists divide reason from desire (usually called by them, tellingly, the passions, meaning feelings that overwhelm us rather than longings that express our inmost nature). De Lubac, on the contrary, sees reason and desire as parts of the same whole, subsumed under the wider image of "heart," encompassing them both. And because desire is inherently outward in its aim, thereby testifying to a deficiency in the self, the same holds true of reason.
more

It may come as a surprise to some, but today--Monday, January 22--is a day of penance according to the particular law of the Latin rite in the United States.

This is why.

LAW ENFORCEMENT AGAINST PROHIBITION. Small, basic profile article. Reminded me of the excellent 2002 Reason piece, "Battlefield Conversions: Reason talks with three ex-warriors who now fight against the War on Drugs."

HAPPY BIRTHDAY DOLLY PARTON.

I got nothin' else. Just, you know, go listen to The Essential Dolly Parton. Because she is so thoroughly awesome; and it's her birthday.

Blog and watch,
Time and space--

Disputed Mutability: What does a Christian owe the lover to whom he's made a vow? --powerful discussion.

And this is just one of those American things, like the vulture in As I Lay Dying--just because it shuffles its feet all over my country doesn't mean I have to agree with it. "Of course, Jack does not exhibit all of Christ's traits. He embraces the efficacy of violence, and how horrific means can be justified by a noble end." Oh, you think? --No, I'm seriously disturbed by this article, and would very much appreciate any links replying to it.

Also, I watched Breaker Morant last night. It was amazing. If anyone wants to argue that it isn't an inherently anti-war movie, please email me, because I get the impression that anti-pacifists are really into it, and I don't know why.

AN INTERESTING THING I HAVEN'T READ: Oasis, new magazine on living the Christian faith in Arabic societies. Via Amy Welborn. (For some reason the text on the website is huge on my screen--this happens with a few other sites too--so I will have to wait until I'm at a different computer to check it out. If anyone knows how to fix this problem, let me know....)

But strength still goes out from your thorns
and from your abysses the sound of music.
Your shadows lie on my heart like roses
and your nights are like strong wine.
--Gertrude von le Fort

via Claw of the Conciliator

BLOG OF IRAQI JOURNALISTS WORKING FOR THE MCCLATCHY NEWSPAPER GROUP. Via Unqualified Offerings, who excerpts here. (FWIW--at this point, I really don't think I deserve an opinion on Iraq; the only informed political decision I could make is prayer, which is probably all I should ever have done. Anyway, go away and read the journalists' blog.)

HAY UNA DISCOTECA POR AQUI?: OK, I'm just a country mile behind the world, but I am listening to the Pet Shop Boys' Fundamental for the first time and it is made of gold-plated awesome.

...And yes, I know what it's about, they're not exactly being subtle. As Quentin Crisp and Jesus might say, no one escapes my love.

AND HIS MOTHER GOES TO MEETINGS, WHILE HIS FATHER PULLS THE MAID: Uh, on a totally different note from the posts below, I've recently become addicted to Desperate Housewives. (Some spoilers for s2 follow.) I've only watched the first two seasons--and yeah, the second season is weaker than the first (more on that in a moment), but really, this is a great series. It's really, really rare that I find a TV show--or really anything popular, sigh--that I think genuinely respects women. The women in DH are crazy people, yeah, but awesome crazy, in a way we can root for. I was kind of reminded of Absolutely Fabulous; which is pretty much my highest compliment. (OK, yes, AbFab is much better. That's not the point.)

It's also (and I don't think this is unrelated) a deeply conservative show, at least in the first season. It's bourgeois without being complacent. And it manages (again, more in the first season) to evoke empathy for people on both sides of real, painful conflicts. Even Andrew the sociopath and even Susan the child-woman (yeah, not a fan of hers) have a deep poignance and resonance. It's a ferociously pro-motherhood and pro-marriage show, it's moralizing in that noir way, and it takes religion (especially Catholicism, she noted with a fierce partisan nod!) very seriously. It's also, and I'm not sure why it took me until now to mention this, totally hilarious. I would recommend at least the first season to everybody.

In the second season, some of the pacing is off. And the show decreases both its conservatism and its empathy. Sometimes the lessened conservatism really works--I think it's part of what was going on in the tragically underutilized Bree-and-Justin sub-sub-subplot. And sometimes the lessened empathy works too--Sister Mary Hotpants was probably my favorite subplot of the entire second season, and she's really just a villain. (ZOMG, the church catfight is better than chocolate!!!) She doesn't have an inner life. But that's okay because she's hilarious and provokes a lot of fun, interesting stuff from the main characters. ...But, and maybe I won't be able to back this up if people challenge me on it, I felt like the first season was less willing to encourage viewers to root for the Wisteria Lane ladies against women in equally complex and vulnerable situations. The Solises'-birthmom storyline was the one where I really felt that most strongly: The birth mother is in a morally dubious, complicit, vulnerable position, not unlike Gaby Solis, so why is she a class-based caricature? Ugh.

Nonetheless. For the most part, this show is funny, sharp, and--I hate that this is so rare--actually in favor of, you know, women. And so I am in favor of it.

THE ART OF WAR: LEE MILLER. Lee Miller is my favorite photographer ever, which probably makes her my favorite visual artist ever. (I have this theory that photography is the visual art most like literature, just as architecture is the visual art most like music. Yeah, now's not the time to explain.) This post is all stemming from a conversation w/Ratty while I was in Princeton over New Year's.

She started as a fashion photographer and Surrealist. But this post is about her war photography. She photographed London in the Blitz, and then went into Europe with the US Army (on assignment for Vogue, if memory serves). She was one of the first Americans to see the death camps.

Her WWII photographs basically do everything right. They're intensely tied to their historical moment. The people and things they depict are intensely themselves. But they're also freighted with emotional and existential weight--her photos are about us, now, as well as being about them, then. I have a xerox of one of her pictures on my wall: the silhouette of a beautiful opera singer, singing in the bombed-out ruins of (I think) the Dresden opera house. It's a picture of Germany in World War II; it's also a picture of the Fall. It's an amazing composition, all blackness and angles and off-centered shaken, broken beauty--but the artistry doesn't call attention to itself. The artistry doesn't leach out the subject matter and make it suddenly a photo all about Lee Miller. (I feel like, and maybe this is a cliched opinion I should reconsider, Robert Mapplethorpe's photos tend to vampirize their subject matter and become photos all about Mapplethorpe--diminishing the photos' possibilities rather than deepening them.) Miller's astonishing grasp of (especially) framing and angular lines gives her photos poignance. You're lifted out of them first by their often horrifying subject matter; then by her brilliance; but she always, always returns you, lets you go back into the photo with a deeper sense of sympathy and a sense of deeper layers of meaning in the picture and the experience it depicts.

That deepening of sympathy happens even when maybe Miller didn't want it to. She has one excruciating photo of a dead blonde teenager--the daughter of a prominent SS official, I think. (My copy of The Lives of Lee Miller is loaned out at the moment.) The girl and her family all killed themselves in advance of the Allies' troops. Miller's caption: "This is a good German. She is dead."

Yeah. And yet--it's completely impossible to look at that sprawled, humiliated, film-star perfect body, and stop at the caption's wry cruelty. Miller shot the girl with the dignity and instinctively empathetic quality of the subjects of portraits. The photo is complicated and it hurts, where the caption is meant to duck away from the hurt.

I think Miller's Surrealist background really helped her war pictures. Partly, it's just that Surrealism is emotionalist, all breathy and shuddery and blood pulsing beneath tender skin. You're immediately put on terrain drawn from dreams, not documentaries.

But also, the Surrealists had a talent for making things look completely themselves and yet also mysterious, pregnant with some unseen and non-obvious meaning. Magritte's textures are totally realistic. When he paints fur, it looks like it would feel like fur. There's a thisness in Surrealism, like that Chesterton quote:

That strangeness of things, which is the light in all poetry, and indeed in all art, is really connected with their otherness; or what is called their objectivity. ...According to Aquinas, the object becomes a part of the mind; nay, according to Aquinas, the mind actually becomes the object. But, as one commentator acutely puts it, it only becomes the object and does not create the object. In other words, the object is an object; it can and does exist outside the mind, or in the absence of the mind. And therefore it enlarges the mind of which it becomes a part. The mind conquers a new province like an emperor; but only because the mind has answered the bell like a servant. ...For this feeding upon fact is itself; as an organ it has an object which is objective; this eating of the strange strong meat of reality.

Surrealism isn't anti-realism--it's maybe even the opposite of anti-realism. It's a genre in which things are always both themselves and shadows of something bigger.

I'm struck by the fact that a Surrealist was one of the greatest depictors of a conflict about, in large part, what it is to be human, who is human, and what it means that we can do almost anything to a living human. I don't have anything really to say there. I just think it's striking.

THIS WAY FOR THE GAS, LADIES AND GENTLEMEN: Three very scattered points on this excellent collection of short fiction by a Polish Holocaust survivor.

1. This book is a lot better than it has to be. With any book about actual horrors, the subject matter alone will command attention. This Way for the Gas is spare and almost affectless, which I guess you'd expect, but an individual sensibility and talent comes through very strongly.

2. There's a lot of portrayal of complicity. Specifically, the narrator (whose name and circumstances link him with the author, Tadeusz Borowski) often gets through the horror of Auschwitz by laughing at others worse off than himself. It's ferocious and effective, never hammered on too hard, never overdone, just an unmerciful picture of how one person changed. ...There's also a lot of emphasis on how life worked in the death camps: the ways people found to create some kind of structure or community in a place designed to prove that humans can be made completely helpless, and anything at all could be done to them.

3. For whatever reason, I kept contrasting the portrayal of nature in these stories with Shusaku Endo's Silence, about a missionary in Japan during a period of intense persecution. In Silence, the narrative is really tightly internal, tied to the missionary's thoughts and confusions, but now and then it will swoop outward and focus intensely on a tree or rain or earth, sort of stare at that for a little while and then sink back into the missionary's skull. This Way for the Gas weaves description into the narrative. I'm not sure if that's a Japanese vs. Western difference. The effect on me, as a reader, was that Silence made me feel more trapped, and made nature and weather seem more "outside," more "other," wearying and deadly but also somehow kept apart from the cruelty of men. This Way for the Gas made me feel as if nature itself was being corrupted, enlisted to hurt humans.

With a bit of a mind-flip
You're into the blogwatch...

Awesome article on Hitchcock's music. Via A&L Daily.

"Surviving (and thriving) on $12,000 a year." Via Ratty. I agree with her that the last section is the most striking.

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: CHEESE SALES. I really need to learn that "on sale" is not the same as "cheap." Nonetheless!

First of all, I stuffed these cute little Mexican sweet peppers with Gruyere. Basically, I just snipped off both ends of a lot of peppers, stuffed 'em with wodges of Gruyere, rubbed olive oil on the peppers, and roasted them in a 375 oven for a while--I forget how long--stirring once. This was delicious, but I had expected the peppers to be kickier. Instead they were sweet and even kind of bland. Jalapeno matchsticks (stuffed into the peppers with the Gruyere) would have been a big help... but jalapenos are never on sale.

And then there were two variations on lazy man's macaroni and cheese: one with asadero (yum--a little tart) and one with Wensleydale (amazing!--total melty comfort food).

Later in the week, there should be a report on snails. Why were snails on sale? ...Oh, and real posting very soon, people. For now you just get links and cheese.

ACECAKES:

Oscar Wilde, poet, playwright, gay icon and deathbed convert to Catholicism, has been paid a rare tribute by the Vatican. His aphorisms are quoted in a collection of maxims and witticisms for Christians that has been published by one of the Pope's closest aides. ...

Father Sapienza said that he wanted to "stimulate a reawakening in certain Catholic circles". Christianity was intended to be a radical cure, not a humdrum remedy for the common cold: "Our role is to be a thorn in the flesh, to move people's consciences and to tackle what today is the No 1 enemy of religion--indifference."

more

In love's blogwatch domain...

Family Scholars: "Should we two mommies tell our child who our sperm donor was?"

ShoeBlogs: "With these upon your feets the Donatists and the Pelagians would not stand the chance."

The Rat: A drink for the Withnail & I drinking game!

THE WITHNAIL & I DRINKING GAME. ZOMG. "The rules for the Withnail and I drinking game are very simple... just match Withnail drink-for-drink...."

The temple bell dies away
The scent of flowers in the evening
Is still tolling the bell
--Basho

Via Claw of the Conciliator

I'M IN NEW JERSEY and will be here until the fourth. Posting is unlikely until the sixth or so. See you in the New Year!

THAT WAS THE YEAR THAT WAS: Best-ofs. (Last year's list.)

Best movies I saw in '06: Apocalypse Now
The Apostle
Withnail & I
I Walked with a Zombie
Endgame

Best books read--non-fiction: The Imitation of Christ
On the Passion of Christ (more Thomas a Kempis)
The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
The Unmasking of Oscar Wilde
Spiritual Friendship

everything else a.k.a. Real Books: Anna Karenina
Silence
The End of the Affair
The Man in the High Castle (more)
Bloodchild and Other Stories

things I said: In which I attend an ex-gay conference (scroll down for lots and lots of posts, then up for reactions...)
notes from a theology of the body seminar (more)
reluctant defense of St Anselm's "proof of God"
She thinks I still care (gay identity stuff) and the dance remix
"real torture"

And that is all that is known for certain about the appearance of Mankind on this Earth. He was an anomaly from the beginning. He was a Perfect Creation in a world specially made for him: and yet he fits it badly.
--RA Lafferty, Serpent's Egg

THE ESSENTIAL TALLIS SCHOLARS: I'm listening to this cd now, and it is fantastic. If it weren't nine minutes long I'd put the first track, Gregorio Allegri's "Miserere," on every mix I ever make for anyone. That shivering soprano gives it a science-fictiony, interstellar sound--a theremin-y thing maybe?--how repentance would sound in outer space. (...That's a compliment, yeah.) Just really great stuff.

A DESPERATE MOTHER IGNORES THE ODDS. Via The Rat.

(Somewhere in those days there was also an Italian snackery. The professor was walking me one evening--an unfortunate coincidence--and Irma crept by, just covered--no, overgrown--with spaghetti. I pretended not to know the dear, which bothers my conscience now. The prof, with many disdainful noises, tugged me away from this walking, dripping Italian meal. It was their first encounter, and led to many complications. At any rate her employment at Manrico's Blue Grotto was short, and somewhat disgusting too.)
--Irma and Jerry

Sometimes I feel I've got to
watch a blog...

Daniel Mitsui: "The feast of 18 December was commonly called, even in the liturgical books, S. Maria de la O, because on that day the clerics in the choir after Vespers used to utter a loud and protracted O, to express the longing of the universe for the coming of the Redeemer."

Family Scholars: The Washington Post has three articles on sperm donation and new family forms. This is the line that jumped out at me: "It's hypocritical of parents and medical professionals to assume that biological roots won't matter to the 'products' of the cryobanks' service, when the longing for a biological relationship is what brings customers to the banks in the first place."

And the Dappled Things Advent issue is up! This one looks really, really exciting, though I haven't had time to read it yet. Amy Welborn is in it!

In my own opinion, a lot of humans, and animals, spend too much time in "finding themselves." They often don't like what they find.
--Irma and Jerry

"I'M A RADICAL FEMINIST. NOT THE FUN KIND.": I propose a new rule for the internet: If you have not read at least four books by Andrea Dworkin--read them stem to stern--you are not allowed to type her name. If you have read zero books by ditto, typing her name will cause you to spontaneously combust.

This rule would make the world a better place.

I mean... in a shocking coincidence, four is exactly the number of Dworkin books I've read! And my point is not to defend her conclusions. Right-Wing Women and Woman Hating are both kind of awful and not worth your time.

But the thing to remember is that Andrea Dworkin was basically, at heart, a student of literature. She's Camille Paglia, if Paglia wrote more from the perspective of the lambs rather than that of the lions. Intercourse and several essays in Letters from a War Zone are worth reading for anyone who cares about literature--let alone the marginalia we call women. Read some of her work on pornography in conjunction with Elaine Scarry's work on torture in The Body in Pain--both talk about the way even the most seemingly innocuous household items could be turned into instruments of pain and humiliation.

Dworkin's unconvinced and unconvincing attempts to describe the coming feminist utopia are heartbreaking--she couldn't express hope, at all. She was a critic and a poet of despair.

But if you haven't read Intercourse, I'm pretty sure you'll be surprised. Fans of Dorothy Allison's collection Skin might really like it, for example.

APOCALYPSE NOW REDUX: Saw it on the big screen yesternight. The most important thing to say is that you should see any version at all of Apocalypse Now on the big screen, any chance you get. It's a breathtaking movie.

The other thing to say, though, is that the "redux" version pretty much sucks compared to the original release. It is more political, which is fine; but also more sentimental, lax, and bloated. The new scenes add crapulence without adding ferocity.

THE UNPLEASANTNESS AT THE BELLONA CLUB: Heh, I turned to this for comfort reading. It's a very strange book--one of the earliest Lord Peter mysteries. (I can't remember if it came before Whose Body? or not.) Confirmed my basic suspicions about Dorothy Sayers.

The book starts out strong and raw. It starts like a book about shell-shock, about the aftermath of World War I on England--soldiers returning to a home that hadn't seen the war and couldn't comprehend it. The stakes feel very high and the emotions are real and (...obviously) relevant. There are these weird chapter titles taken from chess and card games, but they feel completely out of place, imported from more standard whodunnits.

By the end, though, the chapter titles have taken over. The plot mechanics don't quite work, and certainly don't add anything to the themes of shell-shock and postwar life. The novel ends all tidy, threads tucked in. This is pretty much the opposite of how a murder mystery should end, I think: The plot algebra should work better, and yet the reader should be left more unsettled, more convinced that tragedy and evil still roamed in the streets outside.

In both respects, Christie was a superior writer of mysteries. Unpleasantness is one of Sayers's best, and it can't hold a candle to Christie tales like Murder in Retrospect or The Mirror Crack'd from Side to Side, let alone her more famous novels.

And the blogwatch beating up the wrong guy--

Balkinization: "[Justice Posner] insists that it is 'common sense' that we should surrender rights given the situation we now face. But he neglects the crucial question of incentives, a strange omission for a scholar who has spent much of his distinguished career reminding us of their importance."

Hit & Run: Is Life in Prison Excessive for Smoking Pot?

End the War on Drugs.

Mexploitation: Technology and horror. I tried to comment on his site, but couldn't make it work, so here's what I would have said:

The Blair Witch Project--? That seems like a movie that did precisely what you're looking for. Or am I totally missing your point?

(I agree, by the way. I'd be interested in a look at the theme of trust in horror films--The Exorcist seems to turn on questions of trust/faith/verification, for example. The Changeling also struck me as a long, drawn-out, [irksome!] verification quest.)

He also has this good round-up post on female ghosts. I've written stuff working the La Llorona/Bloody Mary connection, so I was especially interested. The one name most obviously left off his list: Lilith.

Both links via Sean Collins.

Michael Dubruiel: "Luke tells us quite blatantly, for the really dense reader, that they recognized Him in the 'breaking of the bread.'" A lovely, brief meditation on weakness and Eucharist.

When I'd said that she could use my basement as temporary lodgings, I'd expected that she would rest, exercise, eat a bit from what I could snitch from Mrs. Thompson's kitchen. But not Irma. She was up at the first light of dawn, which came through a crack in the dirty window, and out to "find herself." Well, she looked in some very strange places, is all this cocker spaniel can say.
--George Selden, Irma and Jerry

CHORUS: Blessed, they are the truly blessed, who all their lives have never tasted devastation.
--Antigone (here, a different translation)

You're just a blogwatch to me, and you can't deliver...

Dappled Things: "There is a school of thought among some laypeople that Sacraments are valuable in themselves quite apart from any life of faith in Christ. One gets calls from non-practicing parents who want a 2-year-old baby baptized because he cries too much, and maybe it's because he never got baptized. I've heard well-intentioned laypeople suggest that other, totally non-practicing Catholics should receive Holy Communion because that will give them extra grace to change their lives. I've had people who never go to Mass want to go to Confession, because they have bad dreams and their nerves bother them. It's good that they believe in the power of the Sacraments, but the Sacraments are events of grace that depend not just upon the objective power of Christ, but also upon the subjective receptivity of the Catholic who receives them. Apart from the regular life of faith in Jesus Christ within His Church, the Sacraments make no sense at all and can come to be seen rather as magic rituals or lucky charms. Obviously, this applies to the Sacrament of Matrimony, too."

Disputations: "Each sacrament unites those three points in time: Christ's death on the Cross; the current moment; and the Last Day."

On a very different note: WANT.

Hit & Run: "Without making a big honking deal out of it, the choice of design and approach has a lot to say about how the artifacts of junk culture--from R. Crumb's encounters with L.B. Cole's bizarre 1940s comics noir to Art Spiegelman's fascination with Chester Gould's Dick Tracy to Jaime Hernandez having his imagination sparked by cheap wrestling mags and old Little Archie comics--feed and inspire works of art of greater ambition and deeper complexity."

Mumpsimus: EURYDICE: "Words can mean anything."

Life is like this. Blogwatch is that.

Amy Welborn on Ambrose and how bad it is now.

Authors talk about conspiracy theories and God. Includes James Morrow and Tim Powers. I haven't read yet. Via Hit & Run.

Ellen Willis RIP.

Supporters of pornography, on the other hand, do advocate such a dichotomy of body and soul. When one views the body as something of no consequence to the person, one has little regard for how the body is portrayed. The presumption is that the body is something apart from the person and so of no lasting consequence.
--the very, very good letter from Arlington Bp Paul Loverde on pornography, here (via Dappled Things, I think)

Also, canon law explained with help from "Plan 9 from Outer Space." I am not making that up. Via Relapsed Catholic.

WHY DO WE ALWAYS COME HERE? I GUESS WE'LL NEVER KNOW...: Search requests bringing people to this homely blog.

sublime rock music Edmund Burke
nietzsche rand kafka dostoevsky insane
i am the specific ordinary item
half-naked afrocentric fairies [...I am the first result.]
why do girls think I'm a jerk
tomato et angry firma
shakespeare porsche's plea for mercy [The quality of Mercedes is not strained...]
Girl gets naked during a Strip game of UNO [No link for obvious reasons, but--strip UNO... so tawdry and sadly-hilarious.]
lindsey is like
is dancing with your spouse a sin
lsd and dupont circle freak
Short Violent Poems
catholic question okay to say oh my
anti-Jew smurf conspiracy
there is nothing less sexy [from Saudi Arabia!!!!--and, humiliatingly, I am the first result here as well.]
whatever happened to lucynell crater [...my new favorite movie Bette Davis never made.]
what are the names of two rockstar with similar names sound like well-fed board games
largesse artichoke remember
does pope think that nietzsche was a bully
things to look at when blazed
judaism staggered
J. Jonah Jameson Hitler
a popped Inflatable shark
nice descriptions
knockies
last unicorn feminist critique [IS NOTHING SACRED????]
dumb men and masculinity
good explanations for getting married
economic Haikus
absolutely fabulous theodore dalrymple [Best. Search. Ever!]

CELEBRATE THE REPEAL OF PROHIBITION WITH MODERN DRUNKARD MAGAZINE!

And see below for a story from the war on drugs, she said, pointedly.

I said I don't live in Chicago
I don't know no Al Capone
There's a Windy City
In my blogwatch, alone...

(With thanks to Relapsed Catholic for reminding me to spin that one again.)

Angevin2: Songs about syphilis. And: "Am I totally a hopeless dork for thinking of Rene Girard whenever those Burger King ads come on that say 'The King's pain is your gain'?" Wow.

Family Scholars: Two links today on sperm and egg donation, new "family constellations," and the best interests of children. This blog is the best resource I've found for stories on that subject. "'When I saw the first picture, I just started to bawl,' she said, noting the family resemblance. 'I knew that he was my father.'"

Hit & Run: "The article details how the U.S. government was complicit in several murders carried out by Juarez drug cartel, including the kidnapping and murder of El Paso resident Luis Padilla -- who appears to have been a victim of mistaken identity. U.S. drug cops apparently took no action as their trusted informant helped in several homicides, including helping to purchase lime to dissolve the bodies of the victims. And when one highly-decorated DEA agent wrote an outraged letter of protest, high-ranking officials at the Department of Justice -- including DEA Administrator Karen Tandy -- chastised him, demoted him, and basically forced him to resign." (more)

1. I know nothing more about this stuff than what you can find at that link. But 2. if you see this as basically a story about informants, and informants are shady people, you're getting your hands dirty etc etc--keep in mind that we don't have to have all these informants. It's the war on drugs that keeps these "shady," murderous guys in business.

Virginia Postrel's comments on the idea of "liberaltarianism" are the most interesting I've seen so far. I, uh, haven't read the relevant article yet.

"FEAR OF COMMITMENT": I review Christopher Bram's novel Exiles in America for the Washington Blade. I have discovered the Bizarro Graham Greene!--ah, that isn't entirely fair, as Bram is a very good writer with prose and character strengths somewhat different from Greene's. I enjoyed the novel a lot. You'll have to read the review to get the "but," and an explanation of the Greene comparison.

EDITED: Oh bother. The link is broken. The Blade's web-fu team have been notified, and I'll let you know when the problem is fixed. In the meanwhile, if you're in the DC area you can pick up a paper printed on--exotically--paper.

EDITED AGAIN: It's back! Click here to read.