KITCHEN ADVENTURES: ABSOLUTELY CRABULOUS. So here's two things that worked!

Crab/Peach Ceviche: I purchased four snow crab "clusters" (legs in a bunch, with meat at the end) and a "Southern peach," both on sale. I chopped the peach and plunked it in a bowl.

Then I warily approached the crab. Let's just say... I don't own a clawcracker; I barely know a crab from a crayfish; and in general, the insects of the sea are not my bag. So I was armed with a dull knife and a lot of determination, against a crab with all kinds of prickly spiny bits and horrible hard armor. The result was an embarrassing display of unskill. I got crab in my hair! Eventually I did learn, more or less, how to extract the crab meat in big chunks rather than tiny shreds. Still, I am not a crab-wrangler--more of a crab-wrangloon. (...Sorry.)

So then I mixed up the crab and the peach, sliced a small amount of sweet onion and mixed it in, and squeezed two lemon halves over the lot. Stuck it in the fridge for at least 20 minutes. Took it out, tasted, and despaired: The food was bland and the crab/peach flavors hadn't melded at all. Miserably, thinking about the grocery bill I'd committed in the service of this idiocy, I spiced the mixture. I used quite a bit of (in order from most to least) cayenne and black pepper, and a little of (ditto) cumin, five-spice powder, and cinnamon. Stir stir stir. I tasted it again. Hope sprang eternal!

Back in the fridge. Another half-hour's chillin' like a villain. Tasted again.

Oh yeah, I'm a rock star. This was great! I tore a couple store-bought corn tortillas into quarters and toasted them in the toaster oven, so they curled up and got crispity, and mounded some crab/peach on top. This was absolutely delightful. The tortillas weren't even too flavorful (they were cheap is what they were), but the crunchity of them was terrific. Later I used the rest as the filling for quesadillas (I used Sargento's "Mexican blend" shredded cheese, because sometimes things are popular for a reason) and these too were delicious. Spicy, elusive, filling, and savory-sweet; the crab and peach flavors meshed perfectly once they had some common spices to hang on to.

I also made stock from all the crab armor plus the lemon halves and peach pit. (Yeah, I doubt the peach made a difference.) I barely covered all of that with water, brought it to a boil, and simmered for... I think about an hour and a half. I added a tad bit too much salt--shaky hand--but not so much that I can't fix it through judicious use of starch (pasta in soup, e.g.) and being careful not to add too much stock to any one dish. The result was richly-flavored with both seafood and citrus, and I really can't wait to use it in a soup.

Made-Rites Gone Mod: This was much simpler! I browned ground beef in a pan. My mom's recipe says, "Pour off excess grease," but I'm guessing ground beef is leaner now or something, since I really didn't have to do that at all. I added a little can of Campbell's condensed tomato soup, a guesswork amount of Quaker Oats, and some more sliced sweet onion, and set myself to stirring and spicing.

My mom's recipe says, "When it's thick enough, it's done." She also recommends ketchup, which I didn't have and didn't use; instead, I flavored with (in about this order) black pepper, dried basil, cayenne, cinnamon, and cumin. I halved, toasted, and buttered a mealhada roll. My mom says to serve this with a tomato slice on the roll. I couldn't bring myself to do it--no tomato I got from a D.C. Safeway is going to compete with a farmstand tomato from Iowa, you know?--although if I'd had some fresh sorrel leaves I might've put them on the roll with a few tomato or onion slices to keep the sloppy meatness from wilting the leaves. (I also do think some chopped hot peppers would be good here.) Anyway, instead, I just served up the meat on the buns.

And it was delicious. I'm sure the spices helped--all of the Made-Rites recipes I've found have used more flavoring components than my mom's recipe, and although obviously nothing is better than my mom's food (for reasons delineated in this important treatise) I do think the cinnamon etc. helped a lot. But the oatmeal was also a crucial ingredient: I was right to think that it affected not only the texture but also the flavor. I really liked this.

My basic thought here is that this recipe accommodates a lot of different tastes: It's a base, not a completed thought. If you know which flavors you like, you should be able to add those flavors to Made-Rites in a satisfying way. If you're not a cayenne-and-cinnamon freak like me, you can still make this recipe delicious by substituting the flavors you love into the very rich, satisfying beef/tomato/oatmeal/bread basic idea.

I would also like to note that butter on the roll is not optional.

ANY OLD, ANY OLD IRON: Iron Man. So this isn't really a review. It's a growl. I wanted something that maybe no Iron Man movie in the foreseeable future can provide.

This is the thing: Tony Stark, a.k.a. Iron Man, is a defense contractor who becomes a superhero. That's an inescapable part of his whole deal. If you make a movie about him, you make a movie about weapons contracting.

So this movie has lots of jaw-jaw about how hurting people is bad, but also fighting Hitler is good, and it's really just a lot of bafflegab with a level of political philosophy well below the average seventh-grade civics classroom. Iron Man talks out of both sides of its mouth and we're not even supposed to notice!

But, you know, I adored the filmishness of The Mask of Fu Manchu, a.k.a. "What If Special Effects Hated the Chinese?"

So while I really do think the Iron Man movie is pretty much decapitated by its need to simultaneously respond to and ignore contemporary American realities... I do also think that Robert Downey Jr. is fantastic, really well beyond anything I'd expect; the dialogue is great unless it involves either political philosophy or people dressed in metal suits; Gwyneth Paltrow breaks her streak of annoying the pants off me, by being really lovely in a major role!; Terence Howard is good; it could've been more stupid, I reckon maybe; and if you bracket every philosophical thought you've ever had, this is a fun movie.

I couldn't do it, dude. I love the dancer's grace with which Downey made even throwaway scenes memorable; but as a whole product, this didn't work for me. I love Tony Stark--and this film made him even more Patsy Stone-ish than usual!--but that wasn't quite enough.

AND A STAR TO STEER HER BY: I think I used the same blog post headline for last year's Fathers' Day... and it's still true, because it will always be true. I know I've steered this bark into strange waters... but my mom and dad were always the constellations by which I oriented myself, even when they couldn't be my compasses.

MADE-RITE MADNESS!!! Yes, I will post more about that "I am a conservative because" post. I've gotten some good questions in email, and welcome more comments from anyone who wants to send 'em. (And yes, I find it hilarious that Ross Douthat's understanding of conservatism is so completely different from mine! I like Ross a lot, but... "I'm conservative because I feel fluffy about contemporary America" is just not my bag, man. See Helen's headline for more.)

But that's not for today. For today, you get Made-Rite recipes--so many! so conflicting! so Iowan!--which are giving me a major Made-Rite jones. My mom's delicious recipe is super simple and includes condensed tomato soup and oatmeal. I'm guessing the oatmeal is to stretch the family's meat budget... but it also helped give her Made-Rites a unique taste and texture I never got from other people's boring old sloppy joes. This weekend I will engage in a bit of Made-Rite madness of my own (cinnamon seems like an obvious addition, plus maybe jalapenos or some other pepper), and post the results. OM NOM NOM NOM.

(Oh, and yes I did try the spicy honeyed bacon on parchment paper, and yes it was much prettier and just as tasty! I had to stir it more and cook it longer, but the overall dish was fantastic.)

BATTER-FRY MY HEART, THREE-PERSONED GOD!

DUALISM, ZOMBIES, AND PERSISTENTLY CONSCIOUS HEADS. How can you resist?

SAVAGE LOVE, OR THE OPERA GUIDE TO DATING.

THE SUBTEXT IS RAPIDLY BECOMING TEXT: Here I am taking those Implicit Associations tests. This post ends on a rough note....

[and eta: I'm not sure how much all this "tells you," but it struck me as interesting and worth posting about, especially given that I'm--say it with me!--self-obsessed.]

The first one told me I somewhat preferred, in this order, Clinton-Obama-McCain. My answer to the initial "about whom do you feel most fluffy?" question was (I think) McCain (come on, he's a war hero)-Clinton (I felt sorry for her)-Obama (messiah), although in terms of politics... nothing neither way, you know? I guess McCain if you don't think his waterboarding vote is indicative of future results; then Obama because he's Obama; then Clinton ditto. In reality, I can't justify a vote for any of them, and answered "Ron Paul" to all the "how would you vote?" questions out of sheer perversity. ANYWAY, what I'm trying to say is that I think this implicit association test accurately reported my subconscious fluffy feelings as vs. my conscious fluffy feelings, but didn't accurately guess how I might vote, which gets at both the strengths and weaknesses of the method. Your raw self isn't necessarily your real self--the self who acts in the world is conditioned by, but not limited to, your instinctive emotional reactions. But see below.

Anyway, then I took a gay/straight association test, and hilariously became one of the 3% of people who "strongly" prefers gay to straight. LOL OBVS.

In all seriousness--on the one hand, this totally shores up my self-image! On the other: In the previous test, I screwed up a lot at the beginning, because I didn't really understand how the site worked, but eventually I settled down. In this test, I knew how it worked, and still noticed a genuine stuttering in my typing fingers when I was asked to associate heterosexuality with positive words and homosexuality with negative--like, I could kind of tell that the test was going the way it was, even though I'm surprised it was pronounced enough to be dubbed "strong" rather than "slight" or "moderate," which are the other two possibilities.

Also, it's hilarious to me that many of the "negative" words in this test (and not the previous one, which tended toward words like "friend" and "enemy") are words with which I have an ambiguous association at worst--"humiliation," "painful," and "tragic" are not words I use exclusively in negative contexts! I don't know how much that would have affected the results.

In a shocking twist--seriously, I expected this to come out differently and a lot more humiliatingly (there's that word again)--I apparently show no preference between black and white, like 17% of test-takers. ...But see below.

Again seriously, I suggest this is anecdotal evidence in favor of Afrocentric elementary education for white children. The negative words in this test seemed to overlap a bit with the gay one, but with more emphasis on disgust and maybe self-conscious cruelty rather than self-righteous pity, i.e. "horrible" and "agony" rather than "humiliation" and "tragedy."

And for the fourth test, I chose Jews vs. the World... and ended up "strongly" preferring Jews, like 14% of test-takers. That's another one I wasn't expecting at the beginning of the test... but by the end, I realized I was operating almost on autopilot in associating pleasant words ("celebration," lol this is a test about Purim isn't it?) with Judaism and negative words ("brutal," which... yeah, I can see where you're getting that) with "other religions." This turned out to feel very similar to taking the gay-straight test, in that I could kind of tell while it was happening that I was moving quickly to associate one side with good stuff and the other with bad. I don't know what that means. I do remember a wry grin when I'd "mistakenly" (the site notifies you when you screw up in this way) assigned the New Testament to the Jewish side.... By the way, this is a test where "no preference" gets the highest percentage (24%), and "so nice and Jewy!" seems more predominant than "Springtime for Hitler." I expect that's in large part an artifact of who takes these tests.

In a genuinely bizarre result, my subconscious "slightly" prefers Arab Muslims to others, apparently. I mean--I've known enough Ay-rabs to, I hope, not be a little bitch, but on the other hand, I just don't think this result accurately reflects my real degree of free-floating negativity toward Arab Muslim culture. (And yeah, I know that both prejudice and reason play a role in that, and whether you think it's mostly the former or mostly the latter I'm kind of ok with either, as long as you think we can talk.) As far as the experience of taking the test goes, I was not nearly on autopilot the way I was with the gay/straight and Jew/Gentile ones--I had to focus on this one. And I wonder if this result is actually an artifact of my having taken several of these tests already now. Do you get used to producing neutral responses? I suspect you do, which is why I've preserved the order in which I took the tests, so you can take the later ones with even more grains of salt than you would otherwise. I'm guessing the makers have discussed this somewhere on the site, but... I am as lazy as a white man. ;)

Or, whoa! Is this actually about black people?? The "Arab" associations are all just names, like the white ones--and lots of the "Arab" names are names I've really only personally encountered with your basic average black guys. (Why no women? Why Yousef, but not Fatima? Am I misremembering that?) I mean, I've personally known zero Arabs named Yousef, but at least one black kid; "Karim" is the hero of Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia, but also Kareem Abdul-Jabbar... you know? I have no idea what role this plays in my results.

I had "little or no" association between Native Americans and American-ness vs. foreignness... but on a more subjective level, I could feel myself struggling with this one, taking longer with each click, not going on autopilot. I think there's a level of confusion here which the test doesn't quite capture, and which, again, is very much not in keeping with my actual beliefs, but which did make itself felt subjectively while I was taking the test. (So it's useful even when the results aren't super illuminating.)

On the other hand, of course, one could argue that pictures of landmarks I've never seen are a fairly awful way of indicating us vs. them; and there was one white lady I kept coding as Indian, which, you know, I bet she was a Cherokee princess in a former life, like every other white lady. So although I'm willing to accept that I'm prejudiced here (how could I not be?), I also don't think this test is set up quite as well as the previous ones. If you show me a big rock, I'm not sure how I should know that it's Wyoming rather than Nepal unless I read the caption--and by the time I read the caption, I've already gotten past the initial gut response which is supposed to be the thing these tests capture.

...Oh. Well, okay, here's one that hurts. "Your data suggest a strong association of Black Americans with Weapons compared to White Americans." That makes me more trigger-happy than the most common response, by the way... which is, uncomfortingly, only a "moderate" association between black folk and gunplay.

And again--I could feel this one as it was happening. Incredibly creepy... in large part because, out of all the "implicit associations" tests I took, this is by far the one most likely to produce hair-trigger responses in real life. I understand why people counsel women to "trust your gut"--it's all too easy to convince yourself that the guy walking just too close behind you late at night isn't really trying to scare you. But I see my "results" screen here and I think of all the black guys who were shot dead while reaching for their i.d. The other implicit-assocs tests can be to some extent corraled and corrected for by the conscious mind. Physical fear, on the other hand... I don't know what to do with this. Except to post it, and say, look at this.

RIP HARRIET MCBRYDE JOHNSON. A truly eloquent disability-rights activist--here she is in full force.

Via Megan McArdle.

BLOG/RELIEF: RIGHT TURN ON RED. JWB donated to disaster relief, and asked for five ways of completing the sentence, "I am a conservative because…". [lightly edited for clarity]

First, some caveats: 1) Yes, I could also do five ways of completing the sentence, "I am a liberal because…" and maybe at least three ways for, "I am on the Left because…". (Maybe.) Those would probably be more boring than the conservatism answers, for a number of reasons: I'm liberal in the way that Americans are inescapably liberal, and that's not exciting; I was raised on the Left, so my conservatism requires more introspection and gnawing-on than the other options; liberalism is a more clearly-delineated tradition, by which I mean that it makes more sense to call Aristophanes a conservative than to call Socrates a liberal (although you could make a case against the former and in favor of the latter, if you for some reason wanted to), and Leftism is even more clearly-delineated; and for reasons having much more to do with my personality than with the merits of any political philosophy, I'm more interested in working out the ways in which I'm conservative than the ways in which I'm liberal or leftist.

2) The ideas below are not going to get you to a welfare policy, or many other specific policy positions. They're part of the general philosophy I consult when I need to work out what I think of an issue, but I do understand that you can get to different places from these premises. So, like, don't yell at me because you agree with the premise but think it leads to different conclusions--I'm laying out the platform from which we can begin a discussion of political philosophy, not the end-state.

3) These are ideas I'm chewing on at the moment. (And perhaps for that reason, this list is neither as interesting nor as coherent as I'd like!) It is entirely possible that what I hope is "the next conservatism" is actually "the conservatism I made up in my mind"… or maybe even "the next liberalism," although I doubt that sincerely, which is one major reason I call myself a conservative even while disagreeing radically with most Americans who use the term.

Uh, okay, enough disclaimers. Let's get out the candles, the whiskey, and the Crab Rangoon, and start talking!

…because power corrupts. First of all, get it out of your system: Insert snark about current administration here. I'll likely agree. But this is one basis of my remaining feathers of libertarianism. I see people on the Left correctly identifying various loci of power in the private sector, like corporations, and attempting to use the government to limit that power. First off, I hope we can all keep in mind that corporations give us butter and disco, and for this we should be grateful. But also, isn’t this strategy a bit like the old woman who swallowed the fly? It’s not great to have a fly inside you, but that doesn't mean swallowing a spider is the right response…. See my second post about Wendell Berry for more.

Look, I volunteer at a crisis pregnancy center. I see the grinding edge of capitalism (as well as, of course, the hard consequences of replacing daddy with the dole). That doesn't mean shifting yet more power to the people who brought you the DEA is the best response.

…because man is made in the image of God. This is something whose immediate application to politics I'm still struggling with. It obviously comes out in torture. I want to think hard about how it relates to the next item:

…because we are dependent rational creatures. Liberalism, and other processes of applying the acid of Reason to social forms, tends to work very well for competent, rational people with the wherewithal to display their competence and reasoning power. It has a much harder time understanding unchosen responsibility, unchosen debility, and other forms of dependence. Abortion and euthanasia are logical consequences of liberalism.

This is the primary, and best, critique of liberalism by the Left--and one of the Left's great failures in the contemporary era is that it has failed to apply its defense of the defenseless to the old, the sick, and especially the unborn. Understanding why the Left failed here, what it got importantly right and why it came to ignore its own best impulses, seems like a basic project for any "next conservatism" I'd approve.

(I wonder if this Orwell essay isn't a good place to start? Understanding dependence requires understanding our universal dependence on God....)

…because religion is the heart of culture. And by "religion," I mean an understanding of the nature of love.

And also, a related but separate thought: Culture includes, but surpasses, government, and can't be untangled from government. That was part of what knocked me out of my "conservative libertarian" phase--while obviously you need to give specific attention to specific issues, in a way that this post just isn't going to attempt, I basically no longer believe that you can sustain a good-enough society with a rights-shaped governing philosophy. (This is related to my suggestion here that it becomes hardest to separate Christianity from politics when citizens disagree on the nature of justice.)

…because traditions give meaning and beauty to necessary suffering. That's one of the very few interesting things I said in that AFF marriage roundtable. The pithier way to say it--which is probably closer to what I mean, anyway--is, "because I prefer the suffering of constraint to the suffering of alienation"… but I wanted to give you guys something original-ish, not just the Cigarette Smoking Blog's commonplace book! (And I can't find the link where that phrase is roughly from, so if she wants to send it, I'd be grateful.)

(I speculated half-jokingly at one point to the Rattus that left-wing novels were about how suffering is bad, and right-wing novels were about how suffering is good…. Dunno if that's true, and would love to hear examples, counterexamples, and theories….)

Tradition, like constraint, is based in relationship. So it should come as no surprise that ideologies of choice and reflexive suspicion of tradition dissolve the social forms that sustain relationships, and leave freedom, relief from the previous form of suffering, banality, and alienation in their place. This is pretty much the entire point of my senior essay, a.k.a. Nietzsche vs. Eros: This Time It's Personal.

It's also one of the really insightful points in The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression, which is my current reading--I'm on chapter three. The guy's critique of modern alienation is about four hundred times better than his proposed fluffy, "Believe in whatever!" solution, but I still really appreciate that he understands that meaninglessness is worse than pain.

MEMORIES OF THOSE SWEET YESTERDAYS, SPENT WITH SQUID: Oh hey! My short story, "Retroactive Continuity," is online!

BLOG/RELIEF: "And if you don't know what a friend of Dorothy is, ask a policeman--or one in five Tory MPs." Noli Irritare Leones gave to disaster relief, and asked for five gay-lit books you haven't read, but you should.

My criteria here were kind of sketchy, so I ended up making a list of thirteen-ish books in all. The first five are books I've never discussed in depth on the blog. The next batch are ones I've written about before, some of which are only marginally gay-lit, and I'm just linking you to old reviews. Then there's a bonus!

These first five are in rough order of when I read them, most recent last.

Leslie Feinberg, Stone Butch Blues. I wrote about this a bit here. It's an autobiographical novel and it's really hard to read, which is why you should read it. I read this almost 15 years ago and I still think about scenes from it when I try to interweave public policy and empathy.

Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: This is a basic, fairly early study of "romantic friendship" between women. It's big and fat and full of terrific stories of accomplished women and the women they loved. It chronicles the growing anxiety over women's love (see below for more)--women had a longer grace period than men in this respect, but Faderman points out how quickly people focused on women's colleges, etc, as possible intro courses for lesbianism.

Faderman has been criticized (though not so much with this book as with e.g. Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers) for imposing a narrative which doesn't really match or adequately empathize with and understand the experiences she's describing. I don't know to what extent that criticism is warranted. I found Surpassing the Love of Men really helpful, at the time I read it, for the way it showed eros and philia and agape as different but often coincidental and frequently shifting. It gave me a framework for understanding my own experiences of love and friendship; it pushed me to acknowledge that different cultural moments had understood sexuality in different ways, and therefore gave me a certain amount of skepticism about my own culture's way of understanding the tangle of experiences we've decided to call "being gay"; and it gave me a degree of freedom, a kind of permission to say that sometimes what I felt was eros and sometimes it was philia and sometimes I wasn't sure, or it changed from day to day, or it was complicated.

(I wonder--and this isn't my bailiwick, but here goes--whether Faderman's perspective might be helpful to a lot of teens, guy and girl, who are made by their peers and their culture to worry too much about what their love of same-sex friends might mean. I don't know if she'd give them breathing room, or spook them utterly. But I guess I'd recommend her to parents, at least, on the grounds that your kid might be going through something complicated, and it's okay to spend some time with the complications, whatever the end result is. Like, don't assume that your kids' same-sex attractions are "just" [just??] intense friendship, but also don't assume that they're sexual--just be ready to accept that either one might be the case, and you'll have to work with that....)

Stephen Fry, The Liar. I don't really know what to say about this except that it's the funniest book I've ever read, full stop. It's on this list because Ratty is the only straight person I've ever known who has found this book as heartbreakingly hilarious--or vice versa--as I do. I honestly can't explain it. Read the first few paragraphs of the novel (chapter 1, not the prologue--the bit in the changing room, with Anthony, the peg) and if you want more, I can guarantee you are in for an exceptional treat.

Andrew Sullivan, Love Undetectable: Essays on Sex, Friendship, and Survival. This is by far the best thing Sullivan's written; it galls me that it's also one of his relatively lesser-known books. I don't fully remember his stuff about confronting and refuting Christian and/or psychoanalytic rejections of homosexual acts--I vaguely remember that it was strident and unsatisfying. I don't care. The essay on friendship in the face of AIDS is alone worth the price of admission. The depictions of the epidemic, and of gay self-image before and during and after, are amazing.

This book poses philosophical problems that will still be with us "when men are fairy tales in books written by rabbits"--and yet those problems, of understanding and negotiating friendship and loss, are as immediate as the Weakerthans' last album. Parts of this book can be read with Augustine. 'Nuff said, you know?

Frederick Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture. Read on recommendation from Helen Rittelmeyer; and yeah, she's right. This book traces the development of experiences and artistic expressions of same-sex love from relative innocence to painful anxiety. It illuminates a world where to be Catholic was to be sexually suspect--I can only imagine the glee with which Roden discovered the term "Romophobia" used in his subjects' letters!--and where the sensuality and attention to la difference of Catholicism made my Church a natural home for the queer of both sexes.

OK, Roden has some tics of his time and place. He thinks he's paying unusual attention to the reality of religious experience--he thinks that other academics read religious ecstasy as a less-interesting version of sexual ecstasy, but he knows better--but, you know, "better" is relative. Compared to many contemporary academics, he's extraordinarily Cath-symp! But he still falls into the trap where you want to smack him and say, "Something is not always a phallus just because it's longer than it is wide!" The wounds of Christ... sometimes more interesting when they're wounds of Christ, not vaginal symbolism.

So yeah, you have to put up with some of that. But in return you get quotations of terrific poetry and sermons (I discovered Eliza Kearny through this book, and also realized that G.M. Hopkins's sermons are more to my taste than most of his poetry), and an entire way of life in which to be queer and Catholic was in some strange, important, fleeting ways intuitive.

I think that's still true; so I loved this book to little sparkly bits.

(Apparently it's "available on GoogleBooks," whatever that means. I'm writing this with an archaeopteryx quill.)

Now here are the books I've written about before, in order from most to least gay-lit, as a genre.

Kiriko Nananan, Blue. If you love the sub-genre of "aching adolescence" as much as I do, you owe it to yourself to check out this absolutely beautiful, subtle manga.

Derek Jarman, various. Demi-recommended.

Edmund White, Nocturnes for the King of Naples. Incredibly highly recommended.

Christopher Bram, Exiles in America. Demi-recommended.

Rebecca Brown, The Terrible Girls. Highly recommended.

The opera of "Death in Venice." Heh-heh-heh.

Pat Barker's WWI books. Low on the list because she doesn't quite fit the genre, even though there's gaiety for those who'd want it. Demi-recommended.

And, last but also last, the heterotextuality of Anna Karenina!

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.

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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.