A LOT OF QUESTIONS NOBODY EVER ASKED: (a.k.a. the Queer No One Reads!)

So I'm completely addicted to two features of the Washington Blade: Bitch Session (guilty pleasure #214c, and no you don't get a link), and Queery. This latter is a newish thing where they ask the same relatively well-chosen questions to different people every week. And I find myself desperately fascinated. So... I can't stand this any longer... I will answer, in the hopes of exorcising the obsession. (Or prolonging it. Tomayto, tomahto.) (Don't you feel for my confessors, right now?)

How long have you been out and who was the hardest person to tell?
I don't have a great answer to the first question. The intense, abiding sense of difference came very early. Learning the words for "gay" and "lesbian" was such a relief. I felt like I'd named, and captured, whatever it was I'd felt from such an early age. That turned out not to be true, really... but it was a little bit true, at least adjacent to the truth. Coming out to myself did actually help, a lot, even if it turned out not to be the end of the story.

For the second... I was sorry to disappoint my parents (who reacted pretty amazingly, for which I'm deeply grateful). In a lot of ways it's been harder to "come out" as Catholic than as gay, which is nobody's fault, just kind of a fact of life.

Who's your gay hero?
Oscar Wilde. LOL OBVS.

What is Washington's best nightspot, past or present?
The Lincoln Memorial, with a spiked ice cream soda and a friend.

If gay marriage were legal, would you tie the knot?
No need to answer this one, I think.

What non-gay issue are you most passionate about?
Hard to choose, these days, between abortion and torture. I'm agin' 'em.

What historical outcome would you change?
This is one of the sillier questions really. Oh, whatevs, the second election of Marion Barry. Or the closing of the Doodle. Whichever.

What has been the most memorable pop culture moment of your lifetime?
Watching Morrissey end a concert by making the sign of the Cross.

On what reality TV show would you fare best?
Is there one for incompetent people?

What item of clothing has been in your closet since high school?
Oh, man. I still have a barely-there black tourist t-shirt from Bourbon Street, acquired at Village Thrift in Laurel, MD. That's probably the only thing.

If your life were a book, what would the title be?
Sin: A User's Guide

If science discovered a way to change sexual orientation, what would you do?
I've thought about this a bit--although more in terms of whether I should pray for change of orientation, and whether my complete emotional revolt against that concept is actually justified--and I still don't understand it. So much of my personality would be affected. I would still have the exceptionally useful past experience of same-sex attraction, so that's good; but I just don't know who I would be.

Would I have a harder time writing? Would I have a harder time being faithful to Christ? Both of those are really obvious possibilities given the way my dykery has shaped my life.

So I settle for praying for "what God wants for me," and asking for Oscar Wilde's intercession (see above!), and generally trying not to claw at myself.

What do you believe in beyond the physical world?
I believe that objects in the world are words spoken by God.

What would you order for your last meal?
Cheeseburger with butter. French fries. Bourbon on the rocks, and keep it coming!

What would you walk across hot coals for?
Another fairly silly question. I would walk across hot coals for anything really worthwhile which could somehow be attained by my traversing hot coals. The number of possible goals to be attained in this way seems limited.

What gay stereotype annoys you most?
Well, given that it annoyed me earlier tonight, I suppose I have to say the idea that all gay Catholics' conflict with God is the same conflict.

But actually, it's the idea that it really, super matters why you're gay. I don't believe that and neither should you. If you have problems which play some role in your sexuality, address those problems--not because they "make you gay," but because they're problems! If you don't, then there is no need to obsess about your memories. Everyone has awful things happen to them. Everyone makes bad choices. Address those things because they're awful and bad, but don't assume that your sexual orientation is a result of those things.

What is the best gay film ever made?
The Bride of Frankenstein.

Oh, fine: Withnail and I.

Oh, come on, you want a genre movie? Farewell, My Concubine. I bet you'd be satisfied now, if you weren't crying your eyes out.

What is the most overrated social custom?
Shaking hands at the Kiss of Peace. Like, either kiss, or leave me alone! LOL BOURGEOIS CHRISTIANITY.

What trophy or prize do you most covet?
The Lambda Literary Award. You think I'm joking.

What’s your advice for gay teens?
Mistrust yourself. Have eros for truth. Love your friends unstintingly. Get out of your own way.

Why Washington?
On the one hand, home is anywhere you hang your head. On the other--this is my beloved city, my district of chaos, my heartbreak city, my hell's half-acre of home. I love this town.

Part of it felt good, like a normal conversation you'd have with someone you met at a party or with a new neighbor. But also it was like there were four different people there. The two people having the normal conversation and the person touching the body with the salve and the person with the body with the sores.
--Rebecca Brown, The Gifts of the Body

BLOG/RELIEF: BACON LOVE IN THE AFTERNOON. So far, I have only gotten one taker for the blog/relief posts, perhaps because I posted after most people had already given to relief efforts. However! Lots of places still need money, so if any of these ideas intrigue you, donate & let me know and I will still comply with your wish. (And thanks to Noli Irritare Leones for linking to the list....)

So, MSB asked for recipes involving bacon. Mmmmm bacon. Here are several.

First of all, I've discussed bacony things a few times here on the blog. I don't recommend bacon-wrapped enoki. I have eaten Mexican Radio Sandwiches many, many times since I made that initial post, and they are scrumptious and very easy.

Due to some of this week's bacon adventures, I strongly suspect that using parchment paper rather than foil would have transformed spicy honeyed bacon from a blackened, delicious mess into a mahogany, glazy delicious artwork. If I had to make one recipe with bacon, it'd be that one. ...I'd use a spoon to coat the bacon with the honey, though, due to previous burnination issues. (I also note that switching from foil to parchment paper has allowed me to cook fantastic fries without setting off my smoke alarm!)

I also made corn with bacon this week. This is ridiculously easy. I did it like this, but you can add just about anything to this stuff....

Get yourself one ear of corn per person, let's say two maybe three slices of bacon per person, some whole milk or cream, and hot red pepper flakes. Shuck the corn and use a knife to cut the kernels off into a saute pan. (This is a lot easier than I'd thought it would be.) Put the bacon on a baking tray lined with parchment paper, and cook for about 20 minutes at 375. (Your oven may vary, a lot, so check up on it if you're making bacon in the oven for the first time.) While the bacon is cooking, saute the corn in butter, then add the milk or cream and the hot pepper flakes, and cook all of that down until the corn is tender and most of the liquid is gone--I found that this took about the same amount of time as the bacon-cooking took. When the bacon is ready, let it cool enough to handle and chop it into yummy frizzly bits, then top the corn mix with those bits and consume.

Or you could try mashed potatoes with bacon, again, super easy and you can add whatever you like. First, cook the bacon on a parchment paper-lined tray, as above. Chop a baking potato into two-inch dice or thereabouts. Boil salted water. Plunk the potato in and cook 20-25 minutes, until tender. Mash the potato with much butter, some milk or cream, and whatever else you like--I used corn, but other obvious options are scallions, chives, sour cream, and lemon zest--and then chop the cooked bacon and scatter it all about. Eat with freshly-ground black pepper. Yum yum.

Tonight I'll make a stock with the lemon rinds and corncob, plus bay leaves.

THE LAST HORROR ROUNDTABLE. Nooooooooooooo! You can still get all the old ones, though, here; there's some possibility that my weekend will be tanked by that link.

The acknowledgement of the sexual aspect of living beings is an acceptance of lack (where the recognition that "I am sexed" stands for "I am not everything"); it is a sign of both our limitation and communality. Sexual difference thus reveals that we are neither universal (i.e. sex-less) nor singular.
--Joanna Zylinska, On Spiders, Cyborgs, and Being Scared: The Feminine and the Sublime

(via)

SCHRODINGER'S SQUID IS THE GAYEST SQUID. I have a short story, "Retroactive Continuity," in the current issue of Doublethink. It's the one about the netsuke squid. (Inspired by an anecdote from Maggie Gallagher's Abolition of Marriage, by the way.) The story doesn't seem to be online, but I'll let you know if that changes.

(something vaguely resembling an explanation of the post title here)

THE SHOULDER BONE IS NOT CONNECTED TO THE LUNG BONE!!! So why is my shoulder hurting so badly (I slept on it funny, but not funny ha-ha) even as my lungs slowly clear of oobleck?

Frustrated.

ME ON MARRIAGE: Given the CA decision, I've put up links to some of my older posts and articles on same-sex marriage, at MarriageDebate....

THE YALE DAILY NEWS FROM WEDNESDAY, MAY 21... 1969. Completely fascinating, from the front-page articles to the dry-cleaning ads. No joke.

Via E-Pression.

PUSH ME AROUND: Blog/relief part two. So the last time I did a blog/relief drive, people did do stuff. I'm going to try that again.

If you email me and tell me that you have made even a small contribution (monetary, in-kind, blood, volunteer, whatever) to disaster relief since seeing this post, I will write any of the things in the list below (you pick) and post it here.

I'm offering blog posts for people who donate to charities, especially those which address the horror in China and in Burma.

some thoughts for where you can donate (Burma focus)--please email me if you have further suggestions

My disclaimer from last time: I know you guys are already doing amazing things. This is just to reward the people who have given, and to do the things I can rather than focusing on the things I can't do.

OK, the things:

1) Five more things I know but cannot prove

2) A Spenserian stanza, about a topic of your choosing, though I will feel free to warp that topic

3) my thoughts on any Shakespearean character except Iago (because I did him last time)

4) Five ways of completing the sentence, "I am a conservative because...", with explanations!

5) Five gay-lit books you haven't read, but you should have

6) another "Politics of Dancing" entry

7) a recipe, with a key ingredient of your choice

8) a commentary on any poem by Emily Dickinson

9) a comics recommendation, if you tell me one movie you really, really love

10) ...something else you want to harass me about--ask anything that doesn't require me to talk about other people (i.e. nothing too personal), and I promise I will answer, if you give.

JOHN HEARD ON NEWMAN'S BEATIFICATION.

ABSOLUTELY FABULOUS: This article by Alan Bray, about Christian recognition of same-sex loving friendship in the Western Church, is just amazing. It's via the awesome John Heard, who seems to think it needs a disclaimer; I really don't. I'm guessing that Bray eventually takes his research to places I wouldn't go. (The headline goes there, but that likely isn't his fault.) But this particular article is beautiful, insightful, heartfelt, just overflowing with everything I want from research into our past. For me, one of the greatest treasures of the Catholic church has been Her rich history of same-sex love--hey, Morrissey's made half of his career off just listing queer Catholics.

This Bray piece was inspiring: It took Catholic moral concerns seriously--love doesn't hallow every sin, here. And yet the focus of the piece was on finding models for same-sex Catholic love.

Honestly, I choked up. This is a lovely article and you all should read it.

PLANNER'S PUNCH: I'm really only posting this because otherwise I might forget that I wanted to use the post title. Being a "pater" is metaphysically horrible for the paternalists--whereas those on whom they exercise their expertise will generally work around the paters' proclamations, with relatively less harm to the subjects' souls. "Structures of sin" (which are our only contemporary options, I suspect) are always metaphysically worse for the people in power. But bureaucracy is the sweatshop of the urban welfare state--men and women in poverty spend at least as many hours filling out forms, and trying to understand them, with failure to understand them producing its own tragedies....

...The trouble with soft-paternalism is not so much that it's a bad idea or that it's anti-freedom (it isn't), but rather that it leads us to value the wrong things in our leaders.

more

COME TO PAPA: More on mintiness. So after I'd done my growling about the Pope, I found some really lovely, inspiring accounts of Benedict XVI's visit. I'm going to keep these in mind the next time I'm tempted to skid from a historical, cautious mintiness into a defensive callousness. It's beautiful, in itself, to be able to see the beauty of the Bride of Christ in the person of the Pope.

scroll down to "a personal reflection"

I can't ever make posts like this without gay references

SOMETHING NASTY IN THE WOODSHED OF MY LUNGS: Well, that was a refreshingly random post with which to leave you all! My apologies to readers. I was traveling, and then coughing. I managed to contract bronchitis (say it like Lenny Bruce! Bronchhhhhhitis!) and have been spending a lot of time pulling the covers over my head, coughing, and feeling sorry for myself. (Note to parents: I AM FINE. I have antibiotics. This is an unusually mild bout of respiratory annoyance, I saw the doctor today, I will be utterly status quo ante by Thursday.) Anyway, posting may be limited. I have a lot to say, though, so we'll see.

"THE ONLY ENTERPRISES THAT REALLY FOCUS ON THE FUTURE": Just ran across a several-years-old email in which I recalled a conversation between two friends--an evangelical Christian, and an ex-evangelical financier--in which the financier praised "religion and the stock market" for being, in fact, the only enterprises etc. An earlier moment in that same conversation involved the evangelical noting that all the worldly glory of the nations would pass away, and the financier replying, "Yeah, I'm really struck by the way the dollar hasn't recovered despite the strong U.S. economy!"

BIOLOGY IN SCIENCE FICTION BLOG. Looks fascinating; will link what I find as I trawl through its archives. Via Mumpsimus.

ONE OF THE FUNNIEST "GO FUG YOURSELF" ENTRIES EVER. I can't do it justice. Just go read.

INSIDE OF A CATHOLIC, IT'S TOO DARK TO READ: My book column for Inside Catholic is on Heloise and Abelard, in that order.

(And yes, I've been waiting to use this post title for weeks.)

"OH! FRABIUSCE DIES!": "Jabberwocky" in Latin. ZOMG.

THE MEN FROM THE PIGS: James Lasdun, The Horned Man. A quick, creepy little fable about a gender studies professor who finds his life and identity slipping from his grasp as he becomes enmeshed in the circumstances surrounding a series of brutal murders. It's... let's say Philip Roth by way of Edgar Allan Poe. It's a fierce and reactionary tale, a horror novel under the skin. The descriptions are especially lovely--"the park, where the snow was now lying in raised veins along every shiny black branch and twig, forming an exact white replica of each tree."

I'm not sure whether it's too schematic. I was a bit twitchy on that subject, since several recent conversations with the Rattus had reminded me of the limits and failures of schematic fiction--and come on, it's a doppelganger tale, they're always a little bit geometry-of-symbols. Still, I think there's enough dark weirdness here to overcome the math.

OVERSTATEMENTS A SPECIALTY...: Clio writes,

Are you really so indifferent to the Church as a "supportive" structure? It seems to me that as the Bride of Christ, it has a duty to be supportive in the right way, and in as much as the Bride fails to achieve this, she is neglecting her responsibilities.

It's a fair cop. I was very much emphasizing one angle on the question of how to understand the Church because it had come up several times in several different contexts recently; but yeah, that post was only half the story at most. The other half is our own role and responsibilities as members of the body of Christ. (Like I've said, Catholics are probably the number one reason people leave the Catholic Church....) I was trying to grapple with what we do when those responsibilities aren't fulfilled--how to see and love the beauty of the Church even when its members signally fail.

The real tragedy of the action lies in the perfect sincerity with which they both played the comedy of sanctity.
--Etienne Gilson, Heloise and Abelard

THE SPIRIT AND THE BRIDE SAY, "EVERYBODY BE COOL! THIS IS A STICKUP!": So the other day I figured out why the Pope makes me feel minty.

I've talked about this before: The Pope does not stir immortal longings in me. He's a guy in an interesting car.

But when he was in town, I had to grapple with the reasons I was so thoroughly disconnected from his visit. I mean, the DCPD was out in force, and I couldn't be bothered to stir from my lair.

I think a really big piece of it is that I'm (depending on how you count) Jewish, or half-Jewish, or something. Not non-Jewish, is what I am. And so in order to become Catholic, I had to do a lot of work disentangling "the Church as the Bride of Christ" from "the Church as what a bunch of Catholics do." Because if We Are Church, then the 1096 Crusaders Are Church, and frequently the Pogromists Are Church, and many, many Nazis Are Church.

(What's awesome is how many people think I've never considered this shocking perspective. Like, yeah, I went to a 70% Jewish high school, and helped start the Gay/Straight Alliance there, but feel free to believe that I totally shut my brain off when I started worrying about the Catholic Church. And I really desperately need heterosexuals and gentiles to remind me of my responsibilities here, because otherwise I totally wouldn't know.)

(Bitter is the new sweet, baby.)

But yeah--I guess what's especially strange for me is hearing people who were raised Catholic talk about the Church as if it's a group of people in a room, who may be "supportive" or may be not. When to me, it's the Bride of Christ or it's nothing. If I had to pick a religion based on which people were more awesome, there's just no way I'd be Catholic. If it's a bunch of people in "the bright room called day" of history, why on earth would anyone convert?

If the Catholic Church is just your experience, you should stop. Because that bunch of people has done horrible things. That bunch of people is not a good-enough grounding for ethics.

THEY CALLED YOUR FAILURES ART: I was at Yale for most of my preceding absence; and so yeah, I've heard about Alisa Shvarts. (Why am I the only person I know who seems to care if she's Jewish?*) I don't have anything to say in public except--isn't she just insisting, yet again, that something once considered sublime is really banal? My uterus is just as boring as my parents' front yard. Even if you agree--does it trouble you that that stance necessarily produces the opposite of art?

*eta: Should probably have attempted to explain this parenthetical, even though my concern here is something I have a very hard time articulating. For whatever reason (Pharaoh, even??) I have a stronger emotional reaction to Shvarts's whole deal if she's Jewish--it becomes even more saddening to me. In other words, this parenthetical is about my emotions, not her actions.

In winter especially, with the traffic and nearby housing projects unhidden by foliage, you felt the thinness of the romantic illusion of [the college]--something between a country estate and a medieval seat of learning--that it seemed intent on purveying; its closeness to nonexistence.
--James Lasdun, The Horned Man

NAVEL ATTACK!: Hooray--tagged for a meme about me!

What I was doing ten years ago: Making a complete fool of myself, in the most traditional undergraduate ways. Also, enjoying my first month as a Catholic! Oh, that first Confession comes so depressingly quickly....

Five things on my To-Do list today: 1. Laundry
2. Personal and work emails
3. Dinner
4. Preparation for week-long trip: Do dishes, take out all trash, make hard-boiled eggs for the journey, check when Metro opens, reset alarm, and pack. And probably something else I'm forgetting.
5. Mail The Seventh Victim back to Netflix, once I've finished watching the commentary.

Things I would do if I were a billionaire: Develop secret identity. Become superhero and/or supervillain. Wear awesome costume, possibly featuring feathers and sparkly things.

Three of my bad habits: Wow, Clio's pretty much work for me, too: "1. Procrastination.
"2. Day-dreaming. (A form of the above.)"
3. I don't think I read terribly wicked blogs, so for my third, I'll say spending too much money. Or for something more serious, postponing Confession, which isn't about procrastination so much as shame and self-delusion ("I can do it on my own!" LOL NO).

Five places I've lived: I can only remember four: Madison, WI; Santa Monica, CA; New Haven, CT; and the District of Chaos, imagination's capital, Downed City, home sweet hopeless.

Five jobs I've had: I haven't. I've pretty much been a journalist and a think-tank thunker and that's it. Yes, I can hear you from here.

Five books I've recently read: Ohhh this spring has been bad for reading. Sherman Alexie's The Toughest Indian in the World (which I liked a lot, but which sometimes got a bit too Look At My Acute Social Observations! for me--like David Brooks, but with Indians, which admittedly is an improvement); Revelation; the Gospel of Matthew; four Bagthorpe Saga books which I'm counting all together; and Heinrich von Kleist's mind-boggling, terrific Penthesilea, on recommendation from the Cigarette Smoking Blogger. With illustrations by Maurice Sendak, for that extra hit of vertiginous monstrosity!

YEAH.

MEET ZE MONSTA: A reader writes:

Eve,

Just saw your post on monsters. I just finished a terrific commentary on Aristotle's Poetics by Michael Davis, The Poetry of Philosophy. He makes the point that Aristotle's contrast of epic and tragedy at the end has this function: epic presents the strange to us (monsters, e.g.) so that we wonder at its strangeness, and then are led to the contemplation of ordinary life, which comes to light in the contrast with epic's strangeness. Tragedy presents ordinary life itself as strange, which also leads to the contemplation of the ordinary. In both cases, the ordinary is invisible until it is contrasted with the strange (epic) or made to seem strange (tragedy). Poetry thus provides us with the service of allowing contemplation of real life. Monsters do this by their very strangeness, which we cannot but notice. The deliberate contradictoriness that your author points out, Aristotle would say, is not (at least in good poetry) done in order to deconstruct our categorical impositions, or some other foolish thing, but to bring to our notice how the depicted object differs from what is real, and therefore to bring what is real to our notice where before it would have remained invisible and unexamined. The monster, in fact, depends on the prior fixity of real life. If real life had no fixity, there would be no need for a monster. Further, the monster itself would be invisible (as would everything else), and so the entire life of philosophy would be unavailable.

Anyway, hope that makes sense. ...

TH

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: PACK YOUR KNIVES AND GO! OK, so I'm a total geek, and decided to do modified, cheapjack versions of some of the challenges from "Top Chef." Thus far none of them have turned out ridiculously well, so I'm also giving you guys a bonus adventure at the end, from several months ago....

season 1, episode 1, "signature dish": I... don't have one, you know? I just cook stuff. So I made spicy squid with capellini. I blanched 1/4 lb. squid (boil water, dump in squid, cook 30-40 seconds, dump into colander and rinse in very cold water--yes, should be ice water, but as we've discussed, my freezer doesn't work). Then sliced the bodies into rings, melted butter in a pan with lime juice, cooked the squid in the lime butter with minced garlic, chopped plum tomato, cayenne, black pepper, possibly cumin?, and a hint of cinnamon, and ate it with the angel hair pasta and more butter.

the verdict: Better luck next time! I think the problem here was that I made too much pasta, and/or didn't cook the pasta in the sauce. When I could taste the lime and squid and cinnamon, it was delicious!--but those flavors got overwhelmed by the starch. I'm terrible at judging how much capellini to make. Using a broth of some kind, ideally something like lime-garlic-jalapeno(-shrimp?) stock made with a cinnamon stick, might also have helped.

s1, e4: gas station: The challenge was to make a dish using only things you could buy at a gas station, plus dried herbs and spices. My apartment building has a very well-stocked convenience store, so I raided that, but tried to confine myself to things I might plausibly find at a less-well-stocked gas station.

So I made a croissant sandwich with Munster cheese and spicy black beans. I cooked canned beans with cayenne, black pepper, cumin, cinnamon, a bit of curry powder, and I think a bit of chili powder, then cut the croissant in half lengthwise, topped the halves with cheese slices, and toasted it in the toaster oven. Then filled the sandwich with the black beans.

verdict: The beans were great! But I knew they would be. That combination of flavors is hard to ruin. The croissant, on the other hand... didn't work, at all. I'd hoped it would crisp on the bottom, with the melted cheese on top. Instead, it got soggy and limp.

s1, e2: fruit plate: This was really supposed to be a challenge about "knife skills." I have the hand-eye coordination of a monkfish. So I just tried to use fruits and cheeses that would taste good together. I used a pink lady apple, an Asian pear, some goat gouda, some Parrano (a nutty, grainy, delicious yellowy-orangey cheese), and some Morbier. I also tried out black pepper and balsamic vinegar on the fruit.

verdict: Hmmm. The fruit went really well with the Parrano (and also the pepper; not so much the vinegar). Fruit + goat gouda was okay. The Morbier was too stinky for me, and not nearly stinky enough for my cheese-loving snacking companion.

I think the leftovers here would've been really good in scrambled eggs. I ended up not doing that, but I think if you diced the fruits, the Parrano, and the gouda, you'd be ready to go.

and now, success: Whiskey Pork with Apples & Onions. I made this a while ago, as I said, so I don't really remember how long I cooked everything. Besides which, my oven doesn't always seem to work the way recipes think it should--sometimes it cooks much faster than predicted--so I tend to play it by ear, check up on the food and stir it and so forth.

Anyway, this is what I did: Turned oven to 375. Thickly sliced a red baking apple. Covered a baking tray with foil. Laid the apple slices on the tray, doused them with Jack Daniels, peppered them, added cayenne I think (possibly I only added cayenne to the pork--as you may have noticed, I'm crazy about it), and cooked for maybe ten, twenty minutes. Then stirred the apple and added two pork loin... chops? The things you get at the store that say "pork loin on sale." A bit more whiskey, more pepper, cayenne. Back into the oven. Cookity for ten to fifteen minutes, while chopping a peeled medium onion into big chunks. Turned the pork, stirred the apple, added the onion. Cookity for fifteenish minutes more. Stirred, tasted; it was ready. Consumed!

verdict: Oooh this was good. Moist, porky, whiskeyed, peppery, sweet. I microwaved the leftovers for lunch the next day and it was still fantastic. This is obviously more of a wintry, comfort-food dish, but I'm going to keep it in the repertoire, for sure.

I received some help from Cooking with Booze.

TWEED FOR WEED. Photos from a Yale anti-Drug War protest. Yeah, I was pretty fond of the sign reading, "I couldn't protest the Drug War on 4/20 because I was in church."

Families Against Mandatory Minimums
"Battlefield Conversions"
Law Enforcement Against Prohibition

HOW DO YOU SAY "WOOT" IN BRITISH?: Go congratulate the Rattus!!!

(more blogging soon btw)

AMY WELBORN, ON POPE BENEDICT ON THE SEXUAL ABUSE CRISIS.

CERVUS AND LEADERSHIP: Tonight's work at the pregnancy center made me realize I need to think more about the ways in which counseling is leadership. I tend to think--almost certainly over-dichotomizing--that there are at least two possible paradigms for what we do, leadership and social work, and I need to work in the former category.

There are ways in which that's true. Leadership requires creation of an individual persona--the mask of command. It requires personal relationship and intimacy. Although I would never claim to be the friend of the women I counsel--I don't risk nearly enough in our relationship to claim that title--I do give out my phone number a lot, for example, in part because I need to be available, open, personal rather than systematic.

Leadership involves me in complicity with the client and her choices. The social-work paradigm, to the limited extent to which I understand it, involves the counselor in complicity with "the system," capitalism and the welfare state, and the pressures it imposes on the client. ("Client," a social-work term.) Catholic charity and social justice work seems to me to swing wildly between these two complicities, in ways which sometimes make sense and/or are equalizing, and sometimes make no sense and/or are condescending.

Nonetheless, there are ways in which the social-work paradigm is necessary for what we do. To take an obvious example--a lot of boyfriends want to come and sit in on our counseling sessions with their possibly-pregnant girlfriends. These boyfriends are pretty evenly divided between awesome, supportive, loving guys... and controlling/drunk/generally-loserish schmucks. In order to persuade group #2 that we don't see them as members of group #2, we lean heavily on language like, "I'm sorry, it's our center's policy that we always do the first part of the counseling one-on-one. Afterwards, you can come on back and we can all talk together." That's system-based, non-individualized, anti-leadership talk, and it really helps.

Still... I need to think about when each paradigm is appropriate, and how to play to my strengths, which--to the extent that I even have any--are all in the area of leadership, not social work, or not the construction I'm calling "social work." I'm pretty sure one thing I can do is pray more often with our Christian clients, and pray in more traditional Christian, Catholic language--I think "may Christ our Lord shelter you in His wounds" is actually more appropriate to my leadership persona than the standard evangelical "I just thank Jesus for bringing us here today" stuff which makes me really self-conscious and fake.

Comments, questions, suggestions, howls of execration?

THE CHEATIN' SONG AS FRACTAL: This post made me think of the fourth section of this one. And check out section five for an entirely Eve-approved use of the term "distilled"!

Also, me vs. realism.

PITY THIS BUSY MONSTER, MANUNKIND: This post about Junji Ito's horror manga Uzumaki (h/t Sean Collins) made me think about a couple of things. First, I realized that I have a harder time with cosmic-horror than with small-scale horror, and so realized that if I went back to Uzumaki knowing that cosmic horror was on its way, I wouldn't be disappointed by the later volumes, and might get a lot more out of them.

But also! There's this:

In his superb The Philosophy of Horror: Or, Paradoxes of the Heart, Noel Carroll argues that monsters are central to the effects of horror, and the primary trait of these monsters—beyond their obvious malicious intent--is their impurity, defined by their “interstitiality and categorical contradictoriness” (43). As human beings, we structure the world into mutually exclusive categories and respond with dismay and revulsion when we encounter something or someone that doesn’t fit into that worldview--i.e. a monster.

(link)

And I couldn't help thinking: OK, but so here, Christ is a monster (in a monstrance!)--genre-crossing God and man. The Eucharist is a monster, bread and flesh and God. The Trinity is a monster, three and one. The Mass is a monster, now and always.

And man is a monster, several times over: clay and breath, soul and flesh, consciousness and meat, sinner and imago Dei.

I don't have a huge amount to say about this, really. One: Monster horror is self-recognition. Two: Possibly the best genre for the Crucifixion is horror, not tragedy. Three: Not all "impurity" is the same kind of impurity.

If people have more to say... I'd like to hear it.

ROMOPHOBIA--THE WORST DISEASE: Speaking of things I haven't read yet, the Cigarette Smoking Blogger has posted her senior essay: "Decadence, Christianity, and Oscar Wilde's Conversion to Catholicism." I've been putting it off for fear that reading it will cause me to explode from sheer awesome.

(Was a bit conflicted whether this post title was the best possible punk reference; would also entertain nominations of, "When Two Heavens Clash." 1877, and we are going mad....)

MARRIAGE MAKES THE BOURGEOISIE AND THE REBEL: The Institute for Marriage and Public Policy has collected the Pope's statements on marriage (PDF). Learn the secret connection between weddings and world peace!

(...I haven't read it yet.)

RIDDLING WHILE FOAM BURNS: I just saw The Way Things Go.

In a seemingly-abandoned warehouse, an incredibly complex apparatus has been set up, with no apparent purpose save its own destruction--and glory. A slowly untwisting garbage bag sets off a chain reaction of rusty, low-rent, slow, implacable old objects. The camera moves in relentlessly; the soundtrack is intensely tactile; there are menacing knives, whistling kettles, huge wooden spools rolling all catawampus toward an inevitable destination. There are unnatural combinations, like the burning foam, and eerie puns, like the shoes that walk by themselves. The action accelerates, but mostly decelerates, its rhythm winding you up into a fever of anticipation. What if it won't work? What if it doesn't work? ...But you know it will work.

Oh my gosh, you guys. This is basically a horror movie where nothing bad happens!

Incredibly highly recommended. Parents and teachers might really love this as a science hook for their kids--I haven't watched the special features, but I'm pretty sure the physics and chemistry of the crazily awesome Rube Goldberg contraption get explained--but really, I loved this for its funhouse reflection of horror. Many thanks to the Rat.

(Title credited to Nord and Bert Couldn't Make Head or Tail of It.)

THE FOUNTAIN OF BETHESDA, MD: Claw of the Conciliator writes,

Just saw your new Weakerthans article. Just FYI, in case you don't know: St. Boniface and St. Vital are the names of two neighborhoods here in Winnipeg. St. Boniface is the historically French one, and St. Vital is a fairly upper-middle-class one that people make a lot of jokes about. I guess because it's got a high proportion of rich kids with time on their hands there's a lot of wild parties and whatnot.

I did not know that! Because the alternative would make me look dumb (and, to be fair, the line does specifically ask for the saints'/neighborhoods' intercession), I stick to the story that it's a double reference....

ENEMIES OF EROS: It's startling how much of contemporary rhetoric is expended to get us to view sex as banal, rather than sublime.... I guess it hurts less that way?

Or: "We're just roommates," says the last man; and he blinks.

"LITURGY OF THE OTHER HOURS": In which I rant about the Weakerthans, at Godspy.

NEVER BEAST TODAY: So it took me until yesterday to figure out that this post about the Beast in Revelation might somehow be connected to the 200-proof, killer distillation of present-tense in, "I Am that I Am."

AM I A TORTURER?

...It got even hotter in the Conex container, the kind you see on top of 18-wheelers, where Ben kept his prisoners. Not uncommonly the thermometer inside read 135, even 145 degrees. The Conex box was the first stop for all prisoners brought to the base, most of them Iraqis swept up during mass raids. Ben kept them blindfolded, their hands bound behind their backs with plastic zip ties, without food or sleep, for up to 48 hours at a time.

more
Via Noli Irritare Leones.

No constaba el nombre del heresiarca, pero sí la noticia de su doctrina, formulada en palabras casí idénticas a las repetidas por él, aunque--tal vez--literariamente inferiores.
--"Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"

UNQUIET GRAVES: Horror movie reviews. Or, really, snacks. In the order in which I saw them:

Audition: Japanese horror; incredibly scary and suspenseful until the climax begins, about 20-30 minutes from the end. After that it devolved, from my perspective, into standard-issue icky-creepy-ouch. I loved the setup (widower auditions women for role of next wife, but becomes enthralled by intensely frightening beautiful lady with a secret) but the climax felt way too horror-movie, rather than actually horrifying. Still: scariest gray bag in movie history, you ask me.

May: I feel like I must have been missing something. It struck me as utterly predictable indie-Psycho. I'm pretty sure that people liked this movie for a reason, so if you did, please don't think I'm saying you're wrong: I'm saying I don't get it, and I'd be interested to hear what you think I didn't grasp here.

...I also saw Session 9 around the same time I saw these two movies, and between the three of them, I got thoroughly sick of "being hurt by others makes you a bad person" storylines. "I live in the weak and the wounded"--an idea that's more cruel than it is true; anti-Christian; and, three movies in a row, just wearying.

I actually got a lot out of Session 9, and I'll say the following four things with certainty: It looks absolutely amazing (it was filmed in a real, abandoned mental hospital, an enormous complex of sorrow--this setting is the reason to see the movie), it has a terrific blue-collar setup, the actors are great, and there are too many red herrings. It's a memorable and beautifully-shot movie. I'm not sure what, if anything, I have to say about mental illness in horror; Session 9 equivocates between being a movie about past suffering and being a movie about creepy people. I didn't like the fact that the movie didn't even seem to realize that it was exploitive.

It's a powerful B-movie, basically. I love B-movies, but a lot of them... not so much with the thinking.

Ringu and then The Ring: It's probably easier to talk about these two together, even though it might well be true that people generally prefer whichever one they saw first. I strongly preferred Ringu.

Some of that was because, compared to the American remake, it maximized horror elements that always work for me (shots of the black and churning ocean) and minimized horror elements that never do (lugubrious children). I will say for certain that the soundtrack of Ringu is just miles beyond the predictable soundtrack of The Ring--Ringu's inhuman noises genuinely kept me up at night afterward, jolting awake at every little rumble or squeak. I'm pretty sure the acting is better, more physical and horrifying. Ringu is a scary, scary movie, with an awesomely uncompromising ending. (And yes, I realize there's one way in which the American ending is actually more merciless. I'm not sure why I still preferred the Japanese one--possibly just because the ending is deeply character-centered, and I cared about the Japanese characters more, see below.)

Sean Collins writes about the way in which the American version has certain culture-war/cautionary-tale elements. And I mean, yes, your parent is not your pal; but the addition of this cautionary element is the main reason I disliked the American version from the start, and only slowly got over myself and started noticing ways in which it was also good, and even the occasional improvement over the Japanese version. (You should see both, btw, although I agree with the friend who strongly urged me to see Ringu first.)

Anyway, the American characters are just so incredibly unpleasant! They're rude and annoying (yes, the kid too, very much so), and I didn't want to be around them. The Japanese characters are kind of generic, but generically likable. The lady even remembers to take off her shoes when she enters a creepy scary cabin she's casing! I think that makes the indictment of the story's ending more universal in the Japanese version: Cautionary tales are inherently less scary if you don't do the bad behavior in question, and I, you know, don't cuss in front of children, and I try not to do that obnoxious American "*sigh* I'm sorry, but not really" vocal inflection. Or maybe I can phrase it as: "Be as bad as you want, it doesn't matter" is less scary to me than, "Be as good as you can, it won't matter"....

ps: Possibly wrong, or banal, oversimplifying thought: Could it be said that The Ring turns its merciless storyline toward the horror of children as moral equals, and Ringu drives the same story toward the horror of family as hierarchy?

YOUR MOM'S A MAMMAL!: So today I finally got to see the new(ish) Hall of Mammals at the Museum of Natural History. It's so awesome!!!

The old Hall was totally fun, but basically just stuffed animals in poses behind glass. I loved it, but I don't think I ever learned much beyond, "Look! wolfs!" You needed more focus than a child can typically muster to not only read but also remember the wall captions.

The new Hall is improved in every way. The taxidermy is terrific: the leaping, clutching, clawing lionesses attacking their prey; the ickle vampire bat feasting on a fake human foot (!); the stalking jaguar and spraddle-legged giraffe and superb Cape porcupine. At least two critters were posed nursing at their mommies' teats, which I thought was absolutely adorable.

The interactive displays are geared to a child's level of ability and concentration, but manage to be fun and informative nonetheless. Guess which skull belongs to a nocturnal creature, and lift the flap for an answer! (It's the one with the bigger eyesockets.) Find the food sources hidden in the autumn forest! What's a monotreme, and why? (...Ew, is why, it turns out.) The new Hall understands that a "night monkey" is kind of cool, but "the world's only night monkey" is much cooler. Kids get interesting debates and ideas that could lead to future reading and learning, presented in a way they could easily remember: There's a dingo posed in spotlight, with a shadowed thylacine in the background; you can press a button to spotlight the thylacine, read a brief blurb on when the dingo displaced the thylacine, and see a photo of two dingos fastening on one prey animal, with an explanation that cooperative hunting is one reason the dingo may have triumphed over its ecological rival. There was really quite a lot of information in a brief caption, presented quickly but memorably, and in a way that engaged both reason and imagination.

I was really, really impressed. Wildly recommended!

"IN PRAISE OF DISENCHANTMENT": My Inside Catholic column, on superstition.

I've got a four-leaf clover
And it ain't done me a single lick of good --
I'm still a drunk and I'm still a loser
Living in a lousy neighborhood
-- Old 97's, "Four-Leaf Clover"

Bioy Casares había cenado conmigo esa noche y nos demoró una vasta polémica sobre la ejecución de una novela in primera persona, cuyo narrador omitiera o desfigurara los hechos e incurriera en diversas contradicciones, que permitieran a unos pocos lectores--a muy pocos lectores--la adivinación de una realidad atroz o banal. Desde el fondo remoto del corredor, el espejo nos acechaba. Descubrimos (en la alta noche ese descubrimiento es inevitable) que los espejos tienen algo monstruoso. Entonces Bioy Casares recordó que uno de los heresiarcas de Uqbar había declarado que los espejos y la cópula son abominables, porque multiplican el número de los hombres.
--Jorge Luis Borges, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius"--yes, I'm trying to read Spanish for the first time in at least ten years.

"NOTES ON THE MANAGEMENT OF SPOILED IDENTITY": I'm at the First Things blog, talking about Cards of Identity.

THOMAS A KEMPIS, ON THE PASSION OF CHRIST--includes an amazing reworking of the Song of Songs as a paean to the crucified Christ.

FRANCISCO DE ZURBARAN, "AGNUS DEI."

"THE CONSCIENCE OF MANNERS": My Inside Catholic book column, on Miss Manners....

GRAVES, AT MY COMMAND: The Cigarette Smoking Blogger replies to my post on Paglia; and "Blackadder" replies to my horror-anthology post with the awesomely-titled, "If Reanimating the Dead Is Wrong, I Don't Wanna Be Right."

I don't know that we necessarily disagree, although I need to ponder. My post was more about, "If you do a 'came back wrong' story, this is what I will need in order to feel satisfied by it."

Now, though, I really want to read stories about the returned dead in which they don't come back wrong--there are a lot of possibilities there, from an eerie coziness to harsh rejection of the "returned" by their terrified or resentful relatives to the kinds of issues I touched on in "Now and at the Hour" (PDF--something similar to the point Adam Greenwood makes at the Vox-Nova link). How did people treat Lazarus? What was it like for him, and those around him, when he came again to death?

I JUST FOUND the page at Ave Maria Press where you can order Faith at the Edge: A New Generation of Catholic Writers Reflect on Life, Love, Sex, and Other Mysteries ... a book I'm in. (I contributed a chapter on Gay Catholic Whatnot.)

LEFT AND LEAVING: InsideCatholic has a whole raft (a big raft) of responses to or riffs on that Pew survey on Americans' tumultuous religious lives. The whole megillah (...yeah, no) is here; my contribution is here; the one I liked best might be Mark Shea's, here. Amy Welborn is hosting a thread with some responses to my piece and to the entire feature--worth reading, including/especially the comments critical of my approach.

SURREALPOLITIK: I have a review in the current Commonweal of the Philadelphia Art Museum's Lee Miller retrospective. The review is subscribers-only now; I'll let you all know if that changes.

Miller--possibly my favorite visual artist, ever--went from fashion model to war correspondent, but despite her immense range and talent has never had a major retrospective until this one. Lots of photos here. An old post of mine on Miller here.

Further communication with her husband seemed hopeless. Between them yawned the chasm that divides those who have consumed champagne before breakfast from those who have not.
--Helen Cresswell, Bagthorpes Haunted

MORE FLIES ON GRAY VELVET: I should just give up and blogroll the Horror Roundtable, you know? This week's entry, on favorite horror locales, gets several terrific responses. (Someone else likes The Bat Whispers!!) I'm adding those Venice movies to my Netflix queue, pronto.

I also keep thinking about my if-only horror anthology. I'm going to talk more about it, which I hope will spark more comment or something rather than diminishing the concept. These are some thoughts on why I hooked each director to their especial trope.

Alain Cavalier, werewolf or serial killer: Therese is probably the best movie I've seen about a saint; and therefore it's a movie about the longing for Heaven, for theosis, for divinization. Werewolf is the opposite trope, man descended into animality rather than raised up into the Divine. I would love to see a werewolf movie with theology. Why is a wolf less terrifying than a werewolf? I think Cavalier could show us.

As for serial killer, Therese used tight close-ups and beautiful, high-contrast darkness/white light shots to convey an enclosed world with few, but intense, relationships. I'd love to see how Cavalier would convey a serial killer's world with many but shallow relationships, nothing below the surface except horror; or a world in which every other person is viewed, by the killer, as just another empty mirror.

Marc Cherry & Alfonso Cuaron, evil carnival: I, uh, loved Desperate Housewives s1 (and liked the next two seasons quite a bit), and also Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and also evil carnivals in all media, from Something Wicked This Way Comes (novel better than movie, though I like both) to "--And The Horses Hiss at Midnight" to Carnival of Souls to Siouxsie's Carousel. Also, I wanted some comedians.

Julie Dash, zombies or anything vodoun: I've said before that I prefer vodoun-style zombies to the Romero-and-after kind. There aren't too many of the kind of zombie movie I like, and all the ones I've seen have a colonialist overtone, even when they also incorporate implicit critiques of colonialism, as White Zombie does. Dash could do zombies without racism, or vodoun used in the way that Catholicism is used in The Exorcist. I'd love to see that.

Hirokazu Koreeda, ghost ship: I've seen two movies by this guy, Maborosi and Nobody Knows. Ghost-ship movies get much of their resonance, for me, from those images of the brooding, anti-meaning ocean, an unintelligible sublime that's the opposite of God. Maborosi proves that Koreeda (? not sure which is his surname, actually) could do that. Ghost-ship movies also require the contrast between the ocean outside and the tight, enclosed, human-infested spaces of the ship--"terra firma in inner man"--and Nobody Knows proves that HK could do that part too.

Richard O'Brien, sometimes they come back: Heh, this was more random: I wanted O'Brien, because he's awesome and hilarious, and I wanted "sometimes they come back" because I'm obsessed with it yet find few examples of it done the way I want.

Pet Sematary (novel, not movie) was amazing, King's best work; but most "came back wrong" stories rely on an over-easy assertion that it's wrong to cheat death without any sense of why that might be true. My most blatant example of this is the Buffy episode right after "The Body"--I can't remember the title, but if you've seen it you know the one I mean--where there's an explicit conversation about why bringing back the dead might be wrong, but you never get anything beyond, "Uh, it might not work."

Pet Sematary, I think, actually shows the protagonist's confusion of love with self-comfort and self-projection from fairly early on in the story--what he wants back is only partly the dead beloved. Mostly he wants to stop hurting--which is incredibly sympathetic... but not quite the same thing. And so it makes sense to me that he gets back nothing but a familiar skin filled with projected horror. It resonates with CS Lewis's observation, in A Grief Observed, that death replaced the real and surprising beloved with cliched, sentimental, self-projecting and predictable memories and fantasies of her: It's just false to say she "lived on in his memory."

THE REAGAN HORROR PICTURE SHOW: Shock Treatment. This is "the other Richard O'Brien movie," basically: a quasi-sequel to The Rocky Horror Picture Show. And if you're thinking there's a reason lightning didn't strike twice, you're right--but Shock Treatment is still immensely, totally fun, and you guys should see it! I loved it.

It opens with a fairly tame satire of feel-good television and local boosterism, at the Denton (Home of Happiness) TV station. Even at the start, three of the most notable aspects of the movie are in place: The tunes are incredibly catchy (I have "Denton, Denton U.S.A.!" ringing in my head right now...), the style is '80s rather than '70s (it's incredibly fun to hear O'Brien tackle the first hints of MTV pop and New Wave), and the satire is much broader and more open than in RHPS. Rocky Horror isn't fundamentally satirical; Shock Treatment is. I'm guessing that's one reason the much more protean RHPS is the one that became a cult hit. You would definitely not find lyrics about Denton's "tolerance for/the ethnic races" in Rocky. Similarly, there's a later, really fun song, which ends with the lines, "Faggots/are maggots!/Thank God I'm a man," which: too broad for Rocky by a country mile.

Its themes are almost eerily '80s in their specificity: marital breakdown (Brad and Janet are in trouble, and the shock treatment of the title is intended to make Brad a better husband), anxieties of masculinity, and the nexus of consumerism and televangelism. This is a much more bourgeois movie than Rocky. (And, sadly, much less gay.) It's less sexy, too, with the exception of a brief, fondly perverse interlude between O'Brien's character (not Riffraff) and Patricia Quinn's (not Magenta).

Random note: Susan Sarandon was replaced by Jessica Harper as Janet. This works not only because Harper is good enough to handle the fairly blank role, but also because her voice is much darker and huskier than Sarandon's, which is a fun, unexpected interpretation of Janet's changed personality after marriage. She's certainly not an iconic actress like Sarandon; but she doesn't have to be.

PROBLEM W/LINKS: For a while now, using the "copy shortcut" function to create links to a specific blog post here has produced something with a tail that looks like this: ...#7726700524016777480#7726700524016777480

when it should look like this: ...#7726700524016777480

Does anyone know how to fix? People have been linking to me, and the links take you to the top of the month's archives, rather than anchoring to the specific post they want to cite.

(Also, of course, if you're linking to me, you can erase the extra tail manually when you create the link. My apologies for the inconvenience!)

"SHE TREATS POEMS LIKE PICTURES": Unqualified Offerings gives a more charitable, and quite interesting, reading of one of the problems I had with Sexual Personae. Comments also interesting.

"APHRODITE TRIED AND FAILED": Elizabeth Hand, Generation Loss. I would have loved this book in junior high.

Partly, that's because I could recognize good prose! Generation Loss is a lit-suspense novel about a washed-up junkie photographer (the awful title is a photo-jargon term, not that that's an excuse) who travels to darkest Maine to interview a reclusive artist, and stumbles into a decades-long, "the '70s were evil"-style mystery surrounding an abandoned artists' colony. The descriptions of Maine's harsh beauty are terrific--some of the best nature writing I've read in a while--and the metaphors and assorted prosy flotsam are frequently great. The use and rhythmic recurrence of symbolism (the vicious fisher cats, the snapping turtles...) reminded me of Stephen King, which from me is a big compliment.

And the novel stars two really horrible women who are nonetheless charismatic and compelling. I mean... Cass, the washout, is the only person who knows that her ex-girlfriend died in the World Trade Center on 9/11; she sees missing-person flyers for her, but doesn't tell the woman's family what happened. I'm amazed that I nonetheless wanted to read about her, rather than just growling, "Yeah, whatever, Hand, you think you're so edgy" and hurling the book away in disgust.

There are hints of Donna Tartt territory, "looking for ekstasis in all the wrong places," although this book is just much less intelligent than The Secret History. And several of the book's themes or elements are things I really love: "out of the past," photography, and characters who are worthless until they're needed, to name three.

What ruins the novel is its underlying worldview. One of the central ideas of the book, introduced very early, is that this is the story of how Cass dealt with one of the defining moments of her life: the moment when she didn't fight her rapist. (I think this is paralleled to her 9/11 awfulness, above, and resolved in the same later sequence of actions; I really don't like this parallel, but as prose, it's done pretty subtly.) I'm... really interested in reading about responses to violence, and in fact, this question is the reason I kept reading when, early on, the prose was all cussy and attitudinal.

But this is a story of redemptive violence--albeit one without the usual American echoes or photonegatives of the Gospel. And it turns out that while I'm deeply drawn to stories of redemptive violence, I can't stand those stories when they're presented with moralizing and death-fetishism, both of which are strongly present in the book's climax and denouement. (If you read the novel: the two places where the phrase "Good girl" appears? Haaaaaaaate.) Or to put it another way, stories of redemptive violence work as tragedy. They don't work, at all, as a gothed-out Girl Scout Handbook.

THE BEST FORTUNE COOKIE EVER. Via About Last Night.

LATE-NIGHT DOUBLE FEATURE PICTURE SHOW. I watched One, Two, Three and You Can Count on Me last night. Very scattered thoughts follow.

One, Two, Three (Billy Wilder satire on Coca-Cola exec in divided Berlin) wasn't really my thing--lots of rapid-fire yelling to make the script seem wittier than it is. Hanns Lothar, as the exec's assistant of dubious wartime background, was terrific, stealing scenes from James Cagney left and right. (So to speak.)

But the opening scenes really worked for me, because of their bad taste. I mean this: The humor in the movie is often really skin-crawling in its breezy evocation of the Nazi and Soviet terrors. It isn't usually very witty, unexpected, or penetrating humor--stuff like, the Coke exec's wife responds to her husband's demands with a wry, "Yes, mein Fuhrer"--but it's really, really tasteless, and that's exactly the right move. It's the humor of a society rebuilt on bad conscience, harsh power differentials which nobody talks about unless they need to make threats, and a ferocious need to look away, to focus on the surface rather than any underlying horrors. The jokes in this movie are the opposite of a Truth and Reconciliation Committee. It's a terrific atmosphere, and I think I'm hoping for something similar when the first season of the new Battlestar Galactica finally surfaces in my Netflix queue.

You Can Count on Me is a comedy-drama with about 10% of the former to 90% of the latter. It's small-town realism about a brother, a sister, and the sister's son, all of whom (and really all of the other characters) are adrift and seeking a purpose, something greater than a mere escape.

I want to say I Netflix'd it because Terry Teachout said it was such an accurate picture of small-town life. I'm certainly not the person to ask about that aspect... but I usually don't like realist movies, and I liked this one a lot. The characters and their dilemmas are believable and compelling; the movie is almost two hours long, but never seemed to drag. The director's commentary, which I watched afterward, is only intermittently interesting, but it did explain that the director doesn't share certain perspectives which nonetheless get portrayed with quiet tenderness in the movie.

I don't know that I have anything interesting at all to say about this movie, but it was very good. And it continues my Matthew Broderick streak--I have never yet seen him in a bad movie!

"THUS WE KNOW THE SQUID'S SECRET GENDER.": Sexual Personae. I'm developing a theory that you can tell more about a work of literary criticism by what doesn't appear in its index than by what does. One tendril of this theory posits that any lit-crit work is fundamentally unsound if it devotes more than two sentences to de Sade and not a one to Pauline Reage (our true nouvelle Heloise). I find both the theory and its subtheory (...so to speak) vindicated by Camille Paglia's Sexual Personae, a big, weird, brilliant, silly book that sometimes seemed more lacuna than presence.

This is a big-idea book, revolving around the opposition of mother-nature-chaos and son-reason-linearity-order. (And yes, I know that's an oversimplification, but I'm trying to give people some sense of what they're getting into, here....) Each of the sexual personae turns out to be one attempt among many to negotiate or conquer this opposition.

If you want to get the best of this book, I'd suggest starting with the chapters on Spenser and Dickinson and then seeing if you want more. I really love both authors, and was not sure I wanted Paglia getting her lipstick all over them, but her readings in those chapters are terrific--violent, erotic, brash, but always rooted firmly in the awesome texts. I think there may have been one minor problem with the Spenser chapter--it's been almost a month since I finished the book, so I may be misremembering, but I vaguely recall insufficient attention being paid to The Faerie Queene as a narrative progression rather than a series of episodes or incidents--but in general, these were fantastic, challenging chapters.

Paglia is better at picking her battles than many academics working the same Everything Is Either Phallic Or Vaginal territory. Several times, I found myself saying, "Oh, c'mon, you're just being trendy with that reading--this bit really isn't about daemonic lesbians or whatever"... but then she'd quote a few more passages from the same work, and I'd have to say, "Uh... you know, she's kind of on to something here." That didn't always happen--her reading of De Profundis as Wilde's sentimental return to his mommy is just infuriatingly bad, more on this in a moment--but it happened often enough that I'd say she earned the benefit of the doubt with me.

My real problem with Paglia, I think, is that she and I consider different things interesting and important--worth taking the time to explore on their own terms and as fully as possible. I summarized this to Ratty as, "She'll go to the mat for the belief that cats have rich inner lives, but she doesn't seem to think the Crucifixion is worth talking about."

I'm pretty sure her lack of attention to the Crucifixion is related to her disdain for King Lear ("obvious"--well, yes, Camille, torture is generally obvious, that's kind of the point of torture) and to the bathos of her utterly annoying misreadings of Wilde. (I will say that her take on The Importance of Being Earnest is fun and mostly right. Her failure, which is large but not devastating, is that she doesn't take the play as a narrative of conflict and resolution. Paglia points out lots of interesting things about that conflict, but she swerves around the fact that it is resolved, and that it would be a much less satisfying play without that resolution.) Paglia's unwillingness to consider suffering and powerlessness as points of view is as ideological as any Randroid's. You can see it in her oh-so-edgy approving use of the term "fascism"--seriously, lady often sounds like a repressed homosexual with a crush on a skinhead, and it's not a good look for her--and it genuinely warps her criticism.

I feel like I should mention the strenuous overwriting, so... here I am, mentioning it. "The real honeyed crotch in which we all drown is the womb-tomb of mother nature"--that's a completely random example from the page opposite the squiddess--there's one of those on every other page, and you just have to resign yourself to it. I'm tempted to say that this stuff got into the book because Paglia was trying to import the techniques of classroom performance into writing, and written lit-crit requires different performance techniques; not sure if I'm giving her too much credit, there.

...Finally, the title of this post is entirely within context. Respect, y'all.

Comments, criticisms, howls of execration? Email me with your chthonic and/or fascist insights....

THOMAS MANN ON THE GROTESQUE AS ANTI-BOURGEOIS STYLE. Oooh, shiny.

PRAYING WITH LIOR. This looks pretty fascinating:

An engrossing, wrenching and tender documentary film, PRAYING WITH LIOR introduces Lior Liebling, also called "the little rebbe." Lior has Down syndrome, and has spent his entire life praying with utter abandon. Is he a "spiritual genius" as many around him say? Or simply the vessel that contains everyone’s unfulfilled wishes and expectations? Lior – whose name means "my light" — lost his mother at age six, and her words and spirit hover over the film. While everyone agrees Lior is closer to God, he’s also a burden, a best friend, an inspiration, and an embarrassment, depending on which family member is speaking. As Lior approaches Bar Mitzvah, the Jewish coming-of-age ceremony different characters provides a window into life spent "praying with Lior." The movie poses difficult questions such as what is "disability" and who really talks to God? Told with intimacy and humor, PRAYING WITH LIOR is a family story, a triumph story, a grief story, a divinely-inspired story.

more

I'll try to see it if it comes to DC. Link via Amptoons.

"...The world of today is one in which religion, if it is to mean anything at all, must seem to have been invented by Bunyan and had teeth put into it by Dostoyevsky. This means that only those who have been indescribably wicked in the past can hope to be religious in the future: indeed, I would go further, and say that the only road to Rome nowadays is via Moscow. There are alternative by-ways: many intellectuals, for example, have a soft place in their hearts for drunkenness, moral cowardice, sexual quiddities, and other non-political vices, which, if practised frantically enough, serve, they say, as adequate preliminaries to the religious state. Some o fthem even argue that the two states are inseparable and that the man most likely to succeed is he who carries prayer in one holster and a really good vice in the other, firing each according to whim. Be that as it may, the fact remains that the old-fashioned notion of religion as a sort of everyday affair in which everyone can join has quite gone out: the only devout ones today are those who really have something to be devout about."
--Cards of Identity

FIVE FLIES ON GRAY VELVET: The current Horror Roundtable asks participants to name the five directors they'd want to do a horror anthology flick. (Via Sean Collins.) I decided to do five non-genre contenders; can't sleep, so added suggestions for possible tropes, as well. I genuinely would love to see every single one of these.

Alain Cavalier: werewolves; or serial killer
Marc Cherry: evil carnival (grar! actually he's a writer, of course, not a director--so okay, he'll write this one--why not get Alfonso Cuaron to direct, he seems all evil-carnivalish)
Julie Dash: zombies, or anything vodoun-related
Hirokazu Koreeda: ghost ship
another writer!: Richard O'Brien, because he's been on my mind, and I need him and Marc Cherry to balance this otherwise quite depressing line-up: Sometimes They Come Back

(Admittedly, I've only seen one film each by Cavalier and Dash--Therese [the 1986 one] and Daughters of the Dust, respectively--but I know what I like.)

Another inzombiac thought: Wouldn't (selected episodes from) the Metamorphoses make a great horror anthology?? Actaeon and Narcissus are the ones I thought of first, but you all should feel free to chime in with more possibilities, comments, elaborations, etc.

"Why, if one day Beau disappeared, how I would take on! I would search for him in every house in England; whenever I saw a man I would go up as close as possible to him and stare into his eyes, listen to his voice, study his walk and ways! I would sound alarms all through the country, and never rest until I found the man in whom Beau was hidden."
--Cards of Identity

KITCHEN ADVENTURE: SOUP IS GOOD FOOD. In which I make an onion soup.

Day One: Make steamed broccoli in the microwave, using the juice from a lemon. Eat that! Put the broccoli bits and bobs and the squozen lemon halves in a pot, barely cover with water, add some dried bay leaves, and make stock: Bring to a boil, then simmer about 40 minutes. You want a very lemony stock. Refrigerate overnight.

Day Two: Slice some onion. (I used one large yellow onion for one person.) Put water on to boil. Saute the onion with chopped garlic until it's browned but not burnt. I cooked it in a mix of butter and olive oil; I'm sure you could use just butter, not sure if it would work as well with just oil. This part required more stirring than I'd anticipated--this is not really a soup you can make without paying any attention.

When the water boils, add some pasta--I used fusilli, which were a perfect shape, small and stubby and ridgy. Small shells might also work well. You don't need a lot of pasta. Cook until you're about halfway to al dente, then drain the pasta and put it in the pan with the onion. Add enough stock for the pasta to soak it up and keep cooking. (I added stock twice--added more when the pasta soaked up the first schloop of stock.) Add a lot of black pepper, and cook until the pasta is ready. Pour soup into bowl, top with grated Parmesan cheese, say grace, and plant your face in the bowl.

the verdict: This was delicious. A great balance of onion, garlic, pepper, lemon, and Parmesan. I admit that it was more labor-intensive than I'd expected, so I'm not sure how often I'll make it (it isn't at all difficult--I'm just lazy), but it tasted great.

bonus tip: In general, you can get great results from pasta sauce by 1) cooking the pasta only halfway, 2) draining the pasta but reserving a couple cups or so of its cooking water, 3) putting the half-cooked pasta in the saucepan, and 4) cooking it the rest of the way in the sauce and as much of the reserved cooking water as you need to keep the sauce from drying out. This I learned from Christopher Kimball, "The Kitchen Detective," in Year's Best Food Writing 2004. He says: "The pasta and sauce will likely look drier than normal but will be moist and flavorful upon tasting."

CLOTHES READING: I have a review of the Met's "blog.mode: addressing fashion" show, at the Weekly Standard. Unfortunately, it's only available to subscribers, so I don't actually know if they used my "fashion lolcat" line.... The rest of the article is better than the opening, I think.

A VENDING MACHINE. FOR CROWS. (Via Rattus.)

"...But we know, don't we, that many an atom bomb is merely a Mrs Finch? Think of her as a piece of film, wedged deep in the unconscious. We cannot eject her, so we place behind her the powerful light of guilty evasiveness, which projects her upon the screen of the outer world, distorted into the likeness of a bomb. Thus we rid ourselves of an internal mother, by transforming her into an external explosive."

"Then the atom bomb does not exist?"

"Some of my colleagues say that it doesn't: they lump it in with the other internal problems, like road-accidents, industrial injuries, cancer, death, and so on. Personally, I'm a middle-of-the-road sort of man: I believe that machinery, and motor-cars in particular, are intrinsically dangerous. I even claim that they have the power of moving quite often in a direction opposite to the one demanded by their victim's neurosis...."
--Nigel Dennis, Cards of Identity (this maybe isn't the best quotation, but I'm really, really enjoying this book)

GARFIELD MINUS GARFIELD. Hee hee!! (Via Unqualified Offerings.)

FLANNERY O'CONNOR THING TOMORROW NIGHT IN D.C.: I can't go, but thought some of you all might be interested:

Subject: Flannery O'Connor Presentation

Crossroads and the John Paul II Cultural Center are glad to invite you to a discussion on the work of Flannery O'Connor with PAUL ELIE on Thursday, February 28th at 6:30 pm at the John Paul II Cultural Center, 3900 Harewood Road NE, Washington, DC. Opening remarks by Dana Gioia, NEA Chair.

The Event is free and open to the public. Light refreshments will
follow.

This is the third appointment in our "Pursuit of Happiness in Literature" series, which began on November 13th with "We are Such Stuff as Dreams are Made Of," a discussion of Shakespeare's sonnets with NEA Chair Dana Gioia and a presentation on Jack Kerouac led by Kevin Starr.

Coming up: "Gatsby and the Green Light," a discussion of the work of F. Scott Fitzgerald.

To know more about this initiative and for directions, visit http://www.crossroadsnyc.com/homeDC.html

But no matter how similar the clothes of men and women may appear, or how different, the arrangements of each are always being made with respect to the other. Male and female clothing, taken together, illustrates what people wish the relation between men and women to be, besides indicating the separate peace each sex is making with fashion or custom at any given time. Without looking at what men are wearing, it's impossible to understand women's clothes, and vice versa. The history of dress, including its current history, so far has to be perceived as a duet for men and women performing on the same stage. There may come a time when sexuality is not visualized in clothing as rightly divided into two main categories, but so far it still is.
--Sex and Suits, mostly for the second sentence

THE RUINED LIBRARY. Stunning. Via Ross Douthat, I think.

(And reminded me of my two-a.m. idea for a bumper sticker--"I'll be post-Christian in the post-apocalypse".... But then, a lot of things remind me of that bumper sticker.)

AFF MARRIAGE ROUNDTABLE PODCAST: Me, Jamie Alan Aycock, James Poulos, and Jonathan Rauch, on "Is Marriage Outdated?" The Cigarette Smoking Blogger picks out probably the most interesting thing I said (I was very scatterbrained) here....

Nature, of course, ordains that human beings be completed by clothing, not left bare in their own insufficient skins.
--Anne Hollander, Sex and Suits: The Evolution of Modern Dress (recommended by Manolo for the Men)

MOUTH WRITING CHECKS: I have unproductive insomnia and a lot of work-reading to do, so I'm not sure I can slap anything substantive up here until the weekend. But! at some point in the very near future, I should have posts on: Sexual Personae (and squid), "The Reagan Horror Picture Show," alienation fetish, and maybe authorial intent if I can think of a fourth point that's cooler than the three I've got now. And, of course, whatever else staggers (and swears) over the mental threshold.

HOLYWOOD: Barbara Nicolosi writes:
Act One Summer Programs--Applications Now Being Accepted!
Summer Screenwriting Program: The Act One Screenwriting Program trains talented Christians for careers as mainstream film and television writers. The program takes place in the heart of the Hollywood entertainment industry with intensive classroom instruction and mentoring from a world-class faculty of over 50 top-notch TV and movie writers, agents and producers. Among those you will learn from include Hollywood pros like Dean Batali (That 70s Show, Buffy the Vampire Slayer), Scott Derrickson (The Exorcism of Emily Rose), Monica Macer (Lost, Prison Break), Bill Marsilii (Deja Vu) and David McFadzean (Home Improvement, What Women Want).

"Act One helps the Christian writer overcome the temptation to ignore or
oversimplify the arduous task of integrating faith and creativity. It provides not only a serious investigation into the art and craft of screenwriting, but also a challenge to think deeply about content."
- Scott Derrickson, writer/director, The Exorcism of Emily Rose

Act One Summer Screenwriting Program
July 11 - August 4, 2008
Los Angeles, CA
Program Dates and Applications
Applications available at: http://www.actoneprogram.com/
Deadline: March 13, 2008 by 5:00 pm
**********************************************************
The Summer Entertainment Executive Program: In partnership with Pepperdine University's Graziadio School of Business & Management, Act One operates a rigorous 12-week training and internship program to prepare Christian entrepreneurs, attorneys, corporate executives and MBA's for executive careers in mainstream entertainment. Our elite faculty includes Hollywood professionals from the top networks, studios, agencies and production companies, including: Producers Ralph Winter (Fantastic Four, X-Men), Steve McEveety (The Passion of the Christ, Braveheart) & Howard Kazanjian (Raiders of the Lost Ark); TV Executive Producers Dean Batali (That 70's Show) & John Tinker (Boston Public, NCIS); Studio, Network and Agency Executives Jocelyn Diaz (Development Exec, ABC) & Terry Botwick (President, Vanguard Animation and Film; former Senior VP at CBS); Chuck Slocum (Assistant Executive Director, WGA West); Exhibitor Michael Pade (Executive VP, Regal Cinemas); Christian scholars Dallas Willard (The Divine Conspiracy) & Larry Poland (Master Media International); and many more.

Act One Executive Program 2008
June 5 - August 22, 2008
Los Angeles, CA
Applications available at: http://www.actoneprogram.com/
Deadline: March 14, 2008 by 12:00 pm
For more information visit http://www.actoneprogram.com/.

SAME GOOGLE, DIFFERENT WORLDS: Search requests which led viewers to this blog.

without a kazoo
Freaky state quarters
find something that is bizarre
biological control of week by fugees, bacteri
Jk rowling’s cleavage
what significant contributions did the jews make
sermon illustrations Daffy duck
carnival of souls lesbian [OM NOM NOM NOM!!!]
Donna Tartt Rene Girard
art vs children [Whoa, I actually kind of wrote about this.]
painting of pope cooking sauce
cruel chinese woman squid
the character og iago [“From this time forth, Og never will speak word.”] metro slime sea clone human DNA
I will never go to graduate school
persuasive writing spare me for turkey dinner william shakespeare
how far can you go without being gay [Schenectady.]
historical shark
chicken cacciaguida recipe
cayenne effect on dreams
spiritual meaning of artichoke
how do I become someone else
jesus painted on a saw blade
hack tushnet
theology of the body david bowie [An album title to beat "Confessions on a Dance Floor"!]
Exposit pizza
satisfying fattiness yummy

Society holds trials for the same reason that Shakespeare had comic relief in Macbeth. So try to make everyone laugh. Pleading innocent is usually the best way to do this.
--PJ O'Rourke, Modern Manners

MORE TORTURE LINKS. Religious Coalition Against Torture.

Stop Torture.

ACLU site.

My old series of posts on the subject. (Start there and scroll down.)

And if you have a senator, call today. I'm sorry I didn't see that earlier. Via Mark Shea and Stop Torture.

"THEOLOGY OF THE BODY IN PAIN." I review The Body in Pain, and talk about torture more generally, for Inside Catholic.

Beauty is an encroachment upon autonomy.
--Sexual Personae

"REPEAT THE SOUNDING JOY": I have a piece on repetitive prayer, in the newly-relaunched Godspy!

Romantic imagination faced evil without the organized certitudes of church and state. The power to punish was taken over by the self. Hence the nineteenth-century abundance of daemonic epiphanies of the double. The self ambushes, harasses, flails itself.
--Sexual Personae