FAIRYTALE IN TOKYO: Recently watched Tokyo Godfathers, based on Claw of the Conciliator's 2006 recommendation. (And yes, now you know exactly how long it takes something to go from the bottom of my Netflix queue to the top.) It's about three homeless people who find an abandoned baby on Christmas Eve. I really, really liked it, despite its sentimentality--the particular combination of sentimentality and harshness and melodrama and gentleness reminded me oddly of Sullivan's Travels. An old-fashioned approach to moviemaking.

Also, the characters don't have those giant Hello Kitty anime eyes. They often looked, to my desperately uneducated eyes, somewhat like the uglier caricatures in ukiyo-e. So if the eyes creep you out, don't worry, Netflix this anyway.

EROS AND EDUCATION: I know this is ridiculously late, but I've been distracted and all August humid-hazy in the brain. Here are some clarifying comments I made to X. Trapnel of Books Do Furnish a Room, about our brief dust-up. (Me, him, me.)

1) "I totally agree [that it's still possible for people with radically divergent premises and even languages/definitions to pursue truth together], and I'm sorry this particular approach to meta-discussion didn't highlight that agreement. BUT--and this is why so much philosophy goes so wrong--good debate on morals & politics (I still prefer 'virtue' as the word for this stuff) can only take place when there's a rich context of story and persona. If I want to talk about marriage (to use the easiest example to hand) I need to talk about the Song of Songs, not just more abstract nouns, and I need to create some sense of my persona in your mind.

"That's necessary b/c persuasion is leadership. We need to create some kind of relationship in order for you to understand what I'm saying. Huckabee (or the rhetorical strategy I'm calling 'Huckabee'!) fails here b/c he basically rejects any attempt to create a relationship with people who don't already share his conclusions. That's ridiculous, it's retreat, just the opposite of leadership.

"This is why a) good philosophical dialogues are superior to good philosophical treatises, and b) just about all of the work that has to be done to 'resurrect' virtue-talk must be done at the level of culture, not politics as such. (So Huckabee/'Huckabee' was already quite handicapped.)"

2) "I think we disagree on what aesthetics is, and where its limits are. Possibly I can clarify by saying that I'm talking about aesthetics as a philosophy of love, not a philosophy of taste? [edit: Should be, not solely as a philosophy of taste.] I mean, I disagree with you about 'de gustibus' anyway, but I think you can keep believing that and still end up on my side here."

[note: Of course it's possible to dispute taste! The guys at Project Rungay do it all the time, and often convince one another or their readers.]

[and here I say that leadership is not only about showing people something new to love, but also about revealing the secret identity of the beloved for whom they're already longing:] "I'm very OK with showing people how their own longings (aesthetic!) are answered by my worldview."

A LINK FOR THE CIGARETTE SMOKING BLOGGER. And, really, for the cigarette-smoking blogger in us all. Via Sean Collins.

VAMP: At Virginia Postrel's new blog "Deep Glamour: At the Intersection of Imagination and Desire," she muses:

Beyond the ordinary factors that give the Democrats an advantage this year, Barack Obama's glamour poses a huge problem for the McCain campaign. To destroy glamour, you have to change perceptions. You can try sober realism. But that lacks emotional punch. To strike at glamour's emotional core, horror and ridicule work better. Instead of telling the audience to ignore its desires and be rational, they replace desire with dread or derision. What was once inspirational becomes terrible or absurd.

(here)

To which a commenter acutely replies: "I don't think horror diminishes glamor, horror is a glamor of its own. Watch some vampire films if you doubt that."

"THE NIGHTMARE WORLD OF A VIRGIN'S DREAMS": I'll be posting every week at Ladyblog, a group blog at the newly-launched Culture11 site. Go check it out! A couple of the Yale Mafiosi are on board as well--Helen "Cigarette Smoking" Rittelmeyer and Nicola "Iqra'i" Karras.

My first post is about Repulsion.

"For in the final analysis every important cultural gesture comes down to a morality, a model for human behavior concentrated into a gesture."
--The Glass Bead Game (Joseph Knecht on classical music)

TEAR IT UP, PTERODACTYL: When Tim Gunn called Blayne's creation "like some kind of pterodactyl from a gay Jurassic Park" I finally knew what I want to be if I grow up.

...This isn't the real Project Runway post. That's about color and it will be here soonishish.

Since the end of the Middle Ages, intellectual life in Europe seems to have evolved along two major lines. The first of these was the liberation of thought and belief from the sway of all authority. In practice this meant the struggle of Reason, which at last felt it had come of age and won its independence, against the domination of the Roman Church. The second trend, on the other hand, was the covert but passionate search for a means to confer legitimacy on this freedom, for a new and sufficient authority arising out of Reason itself. We can probably generalize and say that Mind has by and large won this often strangely contradictory battle for two aims basically at odds with each other.
--The Glass Bead Game

HEARTS FULL OF YOUTH! HEARTS FULL OF TRUTH! SIX PARTS GIN TO ONE PART VERMOUTH! Megan McArdle on lowering the drinking age, and reducing DUIs.

THE VERY SHORT MIMES OF THE SNOW GODS DO NOT WISH AT ALL THAT THE VERY GREAT BURDEN OF DISTRIBUTING THE WINE OF THE WALLS WILL BE LIGHTENED IN THEIR LIFETIME.

Also, FKS is right that these recipes for happiness are worth reading (in order); and some of them would make nicely provocative debate resolutions....

Men like Abelard, Leibniz, and Hegel unquestionably were familiar with the dream of capturing the universe of the intellect in concentric systems, and pairing the living beauty of thought and art with the magical expressiveness of the exact sciences.
--Hermann Hesse, The Glass Bead Game, tr. Richard and Clara Winston

More from this later, but for now, I just liked the inversion of our--or my--expectations. I mostly hear "thought and art" praised for their "magical expressiveness," whereas when the sciences get praised on aesthetic grounds it's usually for their "living beauty".... I have no idea what this was in the German, and whether the connotations are carried over with any grace or fealty, but I like this sentence as translated.

CAESURA: Radio silence will end either Friday or Saturday; I'll also reply to your emails then. Thanks so much to everyone who's written, esp. about the "How to Make Your Child a Gay Activist" piece! I'm sorry it's taking me so long to reply, but I will get to everyone this weekend.

Blog posts on deck: why I connect aesthetics and leadership; three kinds of multivocality; maybe some thoughts on "Project Runway." Probably some other stuff.

In the meantime, enjoy your respite from all things me!

LEGALIZE IT!

"NFP IS... THE WORST POSSIBLE METHOD, EXCEPT FOR ALL THE OTHERS."

HEY, AUGUST 15--A.K.A. FRIDAY--is the Feast of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. It's a Holy Day of Obligation. Go to church!

If you're Christian but not Catholic... take some time on Friday to think about Our Lady as Ark of the Covenant; or her lifting-up after such great sorrow as a parallel to Christ's lifting on the Cross; or her Heaven, with her Son.

DON'T READ A PUNCHLINE AS A TREATISE, would be my immediate reply to BDFAR's dismissal of the mixed-sex-dorms question. It's really not the point I was making; in fact I purposely chose a ridiculously trivial situation to link because the situation in the previous link (torture) was so obviously untrivial.

My less-immediate reply would be, read the article. And then tell me that it wasn't a shopworn paste-up of reasons no one should care about sex difference. "I live in a house ruled by pure reason!"

I get why undergraduates would say that stuff; but what's the adults' excuse?

...fwiw, I can think of benefits to this situation, which should also suggest that I don't view it as a huge horrific problem. Guys should have some sense of girls' use of "feminine protection" (LOL, I want a pink Derringer) and that having a uterus is not some kind of bizarre sci-fi complication sprung upon them by gods unknown. On the other hand, come on, I challenge anyone above the age of 22 to deny that the Boston Globe article normalizes naivete. Not because it defends chicks rooming with guys, but because of the way in which it does so.

RESURRECTED WORDS BATTLE ZOMBIE WORDS: So of course someone put his finger squarely on the weakness of my Parmenides/Huckabee post: What now?

Well, I want to say a few things. I'm going to do my thing first, because this is my blog, and then if I think it will help to respond to my interlocutor I'll do so; otherwise I'll yield the floor.

First: Does BDFAR actually disagree with my premise? That is, does he actually think that "reason" or "nature" or "happiness" or "pleasure" are either a) a basically uncontested category in American politics, or b) a good-enough basis for politics? I'm going to say that the first three are radically contested, and the fourth is a frankly gross basis for politics. Does he disagree?

I honestly don't know how you can look out your window and not think that virtues have become brain-eating zombie words. But if somebody wants to say, "Oh yes! We have all kinds of virtue beliefs in common, and those are the most important ones!", well shoot, I'd love to listen.

Second: Of course we do actually share an enormous amount in common. When I talk about marriage I can say "Song of Songs" and most people know what I mean. This is important for the next point, but it isn't really the same as having a cultural consensus on marriage, as--again--I think almost anyone would agree.

On the one hand, I want to beat up the leftist postmodernists with copies of Donald Davidson's "On the Very Notion of a Conceptual Scheme"--you really can't get away from Shakespeare, sweeties! (which is not at all what DD meant to say, because he's naive about language, but it's still kind of obviously true)--but on the other hand, of course, the Left arises out of the same tradition and the same facts about the world that produced Shakespeare, and is thereby almost as universal as he is. (Not quite as, because he's multivocal, while the Left by definition tends to flatten all voices into one voice. I'm sorry your philosophy arose after the Enlightenment screwed up philosophical practice. Desperately not my fault, though, y'all.)

[eta: Sorry!--that previous paragraph was not at all in direct response to BDFAR, and I wasn't assuming that he (?) is in any unusual or interesting way "on the left"; I don't know his political beliefs.]

Third, and most excitingly: All anyone can ever do is present descriptions of how persuasion happens. This meta-discussion is vastly less interesting (and likely less fruitful philosophically) than simply persuading; but every now and then maybe it has to happen.

So here's what Huckabee should do, a.k.a. what everyone should do.

Get on your hands and knees. Humbly feel around for shared premises. Listen, listen quickly!

Talk about why you believe what you believe, in terms which you think might be persuasive to people who don't already agree. This ridiculously basic step is the one Huckabee missed, of course. He was a Rortyan without a secular canon--Rorty writes as though of course we all draw the same lessons he drew from Western lit, and Huckabee shows the same naivete about the Bible. I'm not sure which of them comes across as more provincial: Rorty with his canon which can never get outside the boundaries set by some projected self-shadow he called Nabokov, or Huckabee with his Bible which can never get outside the boundaries set by the Washington Times. Neither one of them exemplifies self-overhearing, to be frank.

So yeah--feel around, on your hands and knees, for words. If you find a word that might work, pick it up and wave it around and see where it catches the light: sublimity, beauty, honor. Maybe people who are allergic to talk of good and bad, or wrong and right, can hear those words when the light glints off them just right.

Eventually I think you should look for the light source; but then, I would say that, and I don't think it's a desperately useful thing to say in this conversation. For the moment let's just go with feeling around on the floor, listening, feeling with your palms until some shard of something really hurts. Pick that thing up. Look at that thing. That's the thing your culture teaches you to avoid. That's something worth looking at.

Fourth: To resurrect a word, you need to be a leader. That's actually the definition of leadership: resurrecting a word for a community.

John Keegan's Mask of Command is the most profound study of leadership I've read; the only other option is Plato's Symposium. Philosophy cannot proceed--maybe ever, but certainly in our day--without leadership, and therefore it cannot proceed without authority.

Where do words take meaning? From our culture, from our wants? From our beloveds? Or perhaps from some other--some Other--who pushes somehow beyond self and culture and beloved?

Philosophy, as eros, is precisely the eros for this other option, this hidden god, this Other. Apollo yearns for Dionysos, always, always.

Thus every resurrected word will lead--if we follow her--back to her tomb and then to her Savior.

BUT YOU'VE GOTTA HEAR WHAT'S ON THE B-SIDE!: I missed my chance to link you to Bernini's St. Laurence when the linkin' was hot. But there he is.

He was a smartmouth. I'm honored to be named after the same thing he was. (I'm "Laura Eve" in my even-less-professional life.)

And because the Catholic Church is exactly as awesome as you always wanted Her to be... he really is the patron saint of rotisserie operators.

Triple-X blogwatch, the double-X eyes...

Sean Collins revisits Watchmen--which is what I'd be doing too, if I could find my copy! Whine. Anyway, interesting comments.

Cigarette Smoking Blog: Oh, blender, won't you help a first offender?--shattery noir photos, very fun.

And I owe Books Do Furnish a Room a reply, but that probably won't happen tonight. Soon!

IT'S JUST A GLAZE, DEAR: KITCHEN ADVENTURES. (I'm so sorry.) I made a ridiculously good roasted chicken thing a couple weeks ago. Here's what I did:

I turned the oven to 350, took a half a chicken, and loosened its skin. I rubbed cumin, ground ginger, and a bit of cinnamon into its flesh. Maybe cayenne too, I can't quite remember. Then I got a small bowl and put in (in about this order) honey, balsamic vinegar, minced garlic, and a bit of olive oil. I stirred that quickly with a fork--I'd say "whisked" but I'm not sure of the technical definition of whisking--until it all got incorporated into one glazy sauce. That went all over the chicken.

Then the chicken went into the oven on a foiled baking tray for about twenty minutes. After that, I kept checking the bird now and then, turning it, shlupping the glaze over it, etc., until it was done, which I think took no more than forty minutes total. I may also have added chopped mushrooms to the tray for the last fifteen minutes or so.

When it was all ready, I let it rest for about ten minutes, then began feasting. Soooooo good! All the flavors worked really well together and didn't feel at all overwhelming. The leftovers were great the next day, too.

ULTIMATE MARVEL TEAM-UP: PARMENIDES AND HUCKABEE BATTLE THE BLOB!: This very good post by Ryan Anderson is an opportunity for me to finally explain what I meant by saying that all culture rests on religion, “and by religion I mean an understanding of the nature of love”; and culture can't be separated from politics.

It’s pretty easy to jump from that statement to Huckabee’s, “I believe it’s a lot easier to change the Constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God. And that’s what we need to do--to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards so it lines up with some contemporary view of how we treat each other and how we treat the family.”

I think it’s fairly boring to say, “I don’t want conversion by the sword.” It’s unjustifiable on Christian grounds (sorry, St. Augustine, for the most part I think you’re the squiggly neon shoelaces of the world and I love you to little sparkly bits, but that wasn’t your finest hour) and, really, after JPII and his insistence on the rights of conscience, do we still need to have this discussion? So I will bracket it, because this is my blog, and instead talk about the ways in which Huckabee is right, and Richard Rorty is right, and Alisdair MacIntyre is right--because these are three guys I would far prefer to use as scratching posts, so defending them will be an exercise in humility.

All natural-law talk is virtue-talk at heart. Certainly in the realm of politics this is true. There are some things Reason can’t explain; for everything else, there’s natural law. If you believe anything remotely close to that, you are a virtue-talker.

MacIntyre is right on two counts: First, that virtue-talk is necessary to translate religion (“an understanding of the nature of love”) into politics and culture. Second, that virtue-talk has broken down in our culture, and is merely a threadbare proxy for much more fundamental clashes of worldviews.

These two things are both true because virtues are names. I don’t mean that virtues have names. I mean that virtues, in both the cultural and the political arena, are names. If I say that a certain behavior is “dishonorable,” of course everyone nowadays asks, “By what standard of honor?” So too with “chaste,” so too with “cruel,” so too with “courageous,” so too with everything. Marriage, fidelity, kindness, justice--no noun can stand on the solid ground of universally-acknowledged meaning nowadays.

And therefore our Constitution cannot stand on that ground either. If you think I’m wrong… define “cruel and unusual punishment.” Every word in that phrase except “and” is not merely contested as a matter of political practice, but contested as a matter of basic, irreconcilable philosophical and theological worldview.

In other words: If the Eighth Amendment has meaning, rather than being a fight club of not merely competing but mutually exclusive meanings, then it must have meaning in reference to some underlying Truth which infuses meaning into our words “cruel” and “unusual” and “punishment.”

If the One is not, then nothing is.

Plato’s Parmenides is right that all of Socrates’ vaunted Forms rested on some underlying conception of reality: the One. Without some kind of consensus--however limited--on the One, no Form made sense.

Huckabee is right that without some underlying cultural consensus on basic definitions of justice, mercy, rights, marriage, compassion, cruelty, and even reason itself, whose definition is anything but obvious, we cannot possibly have a coherent national politics. Politics is a conversation punctuated with gunfire. If we don’t even understand the words the other side is speaking, the gunfire will of necessity get more frequent, and the conversation less so.

Rorty is right that there’s a way out, and that way is aesthetic in nature. When the Good and the True have collapsed into a hundred muttering and squabbling goblins; when the One is a longed-for rag of memory no more puissant than Prester John; still the Beautiful and--one hopes even more so--the Sublime call to us.

This is why the ultimate political evil of our age isn't cruelty, and isn’t even selfishness. The ultimate political evil of our age is sentimentality, which leaches the meaning from meaningful things; or, to use its secret name, banality.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR CHILD A GAY ACTIVIST: This is something I've had kicking around the hard drive for a while, and, well, better extraordinarily late than extraordinarily never. This is based on any number of true stories, with style somewhat ripped off from the Screwtape Letters....

I welcome email about this post, including challenging or hostile email.

If you end up here via Google, please, please check out my sidebar under "Sicut cervus: Resources on God and homosexuality." This is a fairly bitter piece, but there's an enormous amount of love and support out there for you, and if you can't find it, please email me and ask me for more.

---------------------------------------------------------

Let's say you, like many Christian parents, have a child with strong and lasting homosexual longings.

Someone--maybe not Jesus, but Someone--definitely enjoys it when people who are trying hard to love one another and act well toward one another end up deeply hurting themselves and each other instead. Someone loves it when Christians trying to bear witness instead cause confusion, disappointment, and pain to those they love; when Christians, trying to support family values, destroy their own families. Someone enjoys it when Christians, seeking to love and support their children, hurt those children deeply.

How do you help that "Someone"? How do you make it as hard as possible for your child to accept Christian chastity and humility, rather than seeking solace in gay pride?

Let's begin at the beginning....

1. Worry about whether your kid is too girly or too tomboy. Worry a lot. You can start when she's still in the womb! Is your little princess kicking just a bit too hard? It's never too early to start fretting about whether she'll be one of those... you know... rugby girls.

Make sure you tell your kid exactly how, and how often, he or she steps out of the most rigid gender lines. You don't need to try to shame your kid. At earlier ages, children usually want to conform, so just being told they're not normal can make them feel properly... abnormal.

2. Let your kid think your love is conditional. Again, you don't even have to say this out loud. Many kids just assume, unless they're told differently, that they'll only be loved if they do what you want.

Best of all, your child will guess that God's love is conditional too.

What about when your child tells you he's gay?

3. Find someone to blame. The best person to blame is yourself, of course. It's your fault. Blaming an ex-spouse is also good; blaming the child is even better.

Don't forget your child's friends. Don't trust them for a minute. They provide nothing of value--better your child should be entirely alone, dependent only on you for approval. (If your son introduces a boyfriend, remember that no matter how it might look, he doesn't love your child at all--so it's not as if you have anything in common.)

If you need help figuring out whom to blame, there are countless Christian sources that discuss "causes" of homosexuality. Spend a lot of time with these resources--ideally, more time than you spend with your child. These resources address the most important question: Where did this problem come from?

4. Use the right phrases. "Risky lifestyle" is a good one; also "disease." "So disappointed" works, especially if you haven't been diligent enough about step #2.

The best, of course, is that oldie-but-goodie, "You're dead to me."

You might not think you'd say that. But oddly, many people do. Perhaps the Holy Spirit inspires them to find the overdone--might we even say, campy?--phrase most likely to devastate their children.

These phrases are like Jif--kid-tested, mother-approved! They'll help your child trust in other people and in God. After all, tough love is the best kind.

Under no circumstances consider any of the following: "I love you, sweetheart--I always have, and I always will"; "I don't know if you want to talk about this more, but if you do--now, or ever--I'm always here for you"; or, worst of all, "Okay, well. Okay. Huh. But you're still bringing the sweet potatoes for Thanksgiving, right? You know your mom always burns them."

5. Now is a good time to bring up the Church's teachings. Your kid has probably spent months to decades gearing up for this moment, expecting the worst, braced for rejection. He's in a tight-wound emotional state, pulse racing, trying to speak clearly and coherently.

This is the best time to tell him about intrinsically disordered impulses, Leviticus, and Romans. He's ready and willing to hear you. Besides, if you follow steps #4 and 8, you may never get another chance to talk to him.

6. The only good gay is an ex-gay! For minors, why not try ex-gay camp? Send your kid to a remote location, where he'll enjoy outdoorsy, macho, sweaty activities with other virile, same-sex attracted boys. That'll cure him! (The best camps don't let the kids listen to anything but Contemporary Christian music--none of this fairycake Mozart business.)

If you can't find a good camp, at least try counseling. Your daughter can still learn to be a Real Woman--with dresses and everything! (Jesus likes it when girls wear dresses.) Be sure your kid understands that if she doesn't become heterosexual, she has no chance of being chaste.

What about the long term?

7. "Help" is a four-letter word. Don't tell anyone what you're going through. Especially, don't seek out other people in your situation. They couldn't even raise their own children properly--surely they can't help you with yours! Besides, if you get support, you might forget to focus on the important stuff, like whose fault this is.

8. "Sorry" is for sissies. Whatever you and your child said in the heat of emotion reflected your deepest feelings--so there's no need to try to reconcile. Your kid doesn't care what you think, anyway--why would he want to hear from his mother after years of estrangement? Why would he want to know you still think about him every night?

9. Most importantly, don't pray. Don't pray for your kid. Don't pray for yourself. Don't pray that you can model Christ's love to your child. Don't pray that your child will be a source of grace and blessing for others (including his boyfriend or her girlfriend--definitely don't pray for God to bless those awful people!). If you absolutely must pray, just pray that your child will realize exactly how wrong he is and exactly how right you are.

That's what Someone would want.

TIME IS LIKE A DREAM/AND NOW, FOR A TIME, YOU ARE MINE: Yet more reader comments on NFP and liturgical time (not using names b/c I haven't asked permission, but if you see this and don't mind, email me and I'll add your name back in):

#1:

Hi Eve,

It may interest you that if you go to Ethiopia today, you'll find that few weddings take place during the fasting seasons (Lent, Advent, Apostles, Dormition,...) and during the rainy season (mid-June to early September). Even the non-Orthodox (Muslims, Protestants, and Catholics) will tend towards avoiding these dates so that their Orthodox friends (about 50% of the population) can attend the wedding.

Between Easter and the June rains, there's usually a bit of April and June, and the whole of May. Interstingly, May (or the Ethiopian somewhat equivalent - Ginbot) is associated with negative superstitions, which means that late April and early June is heavy wedding season. Some folks end up going to more than one a day!

A significant portion of the Orthodox observe the fasts to some extent or another. It's palpable to any visitor. Restaurant menus change, butchers and dairies scale down, and there's a relative serenity in the air.

Also not (quite) on board with the sharp separation at the end between pragmatic discipline and spiritual discipline...

#2:

I thought you might like this little mnemonic verse on the Forbidden Times of Marriage (Pre-VII):
Advent bids thee to refrain,
Hillary sets thee free again,
Septuagesima bids thee stay,
Six days from Easter says thou may,
Ascension pleads thy chastity,
But thou may'st wed at Trinity.

The feast of St Hilary falls on 13th January, the Octave of the Epiphany, marking the end of the Christmas season. Septuagesima Sunday fell 70 days before Easter (the third Sunday before Lent) and Trinity, of course, is the first Sunday after Pentecost)

and Cacciaguida (who already gave me permission):

...On the pragmatic/spiritual point: it's traditional ascetic teaching that a mortification undertaken as such, for God, has somewhat greater spiritual value than one encountered, either passively (a bumped head, a stubbed toe) or in the course of a legitimate secular pursuit (we write the article when we'd rather blog or watch a movie, etc.). But the latter can be offered up as well, so I can't see that the difference is as big a deal as your correspondent makes it.

THIS IS GOING TO STING A LITTLE. In which the Pope talks about the only story I will ever be able to tell. Every sentence of this excerpt is amazing:

In the modern era, the idea of the Last Judgement has faded into the background: Christian faith has been individualized and primarily oriented towards the salvation of the believer's own soul, while reflection on world history is largely dominated by the idea of progress. The fundamental content of awaiting a final Judgement, however, has not disappeared: it has simply taken on a totally different form. The atheism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is--in its origins and aims--a type of moralism: a protest against the injustices of the world and of world history. A world marked by so much injustice, innocent suffering, and cynicism of power cannot be the work of a good God. A God with responsibility for such a world would not be a just God, much less a good God. It is for the sake of morality that this God has to be contested. Since there is no God to create justice, it seems man himself is now called to establish justice. If in the face of this world's suffering, protest against God is understandable, the claim that humanity can and must do what no God actually does or is able to do is both presumptuous and intrinsically false. It is no accident that this idea has led to the greatest forms of cruelty and violations of justice; rather, it is grounded in the intrinsic falsity of the claim. A world which has to create its own justice is a world without hope. No one and nothing can answer for centuries of suffering. No one and nothing can guarantee that the cynicism of power--whatever beguiling ideological mask it adopts--will cease to dominate the world. This is why the great thinkers of the Frankfurt School, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, were equally critical of atheism and theism. Horkheimer radically excluded the possibility of ever finding a this-worldly substitute for God, while at the same time he rejected the image of a good and just God. In an extreme radicalization of the Old Testament prohibition of images, he speaks of a “longing for the totally Other” that remains inaccessible--a cry of yearning directed at world history. Adorno also firmly upheld this total rejection of images, which naturally meant the exclusion of any “image” of a loving God. On the other hand, he also constantly emphasized this “negative” dialectic and asserted that justice--true justice--would require a world “where not only present suffering would be wiped out, but also that which is irrevocably past would be undone”[30]. This, would mean, however--to express it with positive and hence, for him, inadequate symbols--that there can be no justice without a resurrection of the dead. Yet this would have to involve “the resurrection of the flesh, something that is totally foreign to idealism and the realm of Absolute spirit”[31].

via Mark Shea

Why haven't I read Spe Salvi yet?

GOD BLESS RADLEY BALKO.

OPERA--THE SUN LOVES IT! Via Ratty, a Guardian article on the Sun's promotion of the tabloid nature of opera; and a comments thread in which readers compete to summarize operas in Sun-style:

DAD LEFT DAUGHTER HOME ALONE IN FIREPLACE
(Die Walkure)

CANOE BLOKE DISAPPEARS AGAIN
(Peter Grimes)

HE SHAGGED MY BIRD!
(Ariodante)

HE SHAGGED MY BIRD!
(Tristan & Isolde)

POLISH IMMIGRANT IN ROYAL ID-THEFT
(Un Giorno di Regno)

BANGED-UP LEFTY TRAITOR'S CROSS-DRESSING LOVER
(Fidelio)

FLOODING - WORSE TO COME
(Goetterdamerung)

(Unfortunately, the summary for Jenufa is weak, even though--as one reader notes--the plot has more than a whiff of EastEnders.)

Best lines from the original Sun piece, showcasing its new opera-tickets deal ("Hear a tenor for less than a tenner!"):

Elitist broadsheet The Guardian wrote an article last week sneering at the fact that lowly Sun readers should dare to grace the Royal Opera House.

Blow them. They can have a night in with their mung bean sandwiches and discuss existentialist feminism. We’ll be down the opera having a knees-up.

more!

PEOPLE SHOULD GET BEAT UP FOR SKATIN' LIKE THE LEAFS. Never before have I had a dream involving:

* my mother asking me, in deeply troubled tones, why I had changed my beliefs, no longer believing in the maximization of utilitarian happiness for the average person (she had an example involving grocery shopping), at which point I explained that I now cared more about "various kinds of excellence" than about happiness;

* Canadians lion-racing (in fact, I suspect this is the first dream of mine in which the Canadian anthem has featured under any circumstance);

* a stand-up comic asking for definitions of tradition, which led to the Reactionary Epicurean using my tradition/addiction shtik... which in turn led to all of us getting heckled by a six-fingered man for "drinking from the keg of hatred every day."

WHEN I WAS CRUEL: My article on Alan Moore's A Small Killing is up at Inside Catholic.

KIND OF AWESOME "DARK KNIGHT" POSTERS from around the world. My favorites are this one, this one (prison), this one (credits-of-Seven-ish) and this one (sob!).

The last one is spoilerous if you know nothing about the larger DC Comics cast of characters. The others aren't.

SINCE PEOPLE ARE LOOKING FOR IT THESE DAYS... my old, long piece on Watchmen--talking about how its reworking of murder-mystery tropes is at least as radical as its reworking of superheroics; how the symmetries work; things it has in common with Shakespeare (really!--and not entirely for the best!); and forgiveness. And probably other stuff I'm forgetting. If you scroll up, there are lots of good responses as well.

More Watchmania.

And I should have another Alan Moore-related piece up sometime this week.

(If you have my copy of Watchmen... who on earth or Mars are you?? And can I have it back?)

TODAY IS THE FEAST OF STS. ANNE AND JOACHIM, parents of Our Lady.

St. Anne teaching the Virgin to read. I love these.

more! and more! and more!

YOUR FACE IS MARKED UPON THE CLOCKFACE: An anonyreader brings up a very pertinent criticism of my liturgy/nfp post. I'm not on board with the sharp separation at the end between pragmatic discipline and spiritual discipline (it seems clear that people can make the latter also the former, and in fact, lots of people who write about nfp take exactly that approach so as to avoid the "contraceptive mentality" my correspondent notes), but otherwise, this is a good riposte to an experimental and perhaps not-so-well-considered post:

Hi Eve,

I'm not sure I follow the parallel you're trying to make in your 7/19 post. An observant Orthodox Jewish couple will I suppose ceteris paribus have a fast/feast sort of rhythm as you suggest. But an observant RC couple will generally have that only if they are self-consciously and intentionally trying to avoid having a baby, right? Which is sort of permissible but definitely not mandatory? An RC husband and wife who have sex on a haphazard and arhythmic schedule, sublimely indifferent to the odds of conception on any particular occasion, are not, I take it, being Bad Catholics. If anything, isn't there supposed to be some risk that couples who use NFP can fall prey to the negativity of the "Contraceptive Mentality" (tm) even if they act out that worldview by licit Humanae-Vitae-compliant means?

I think there from time to time in Christian history have been those who advised married couples to abstain from sex on what were otherwise fasting days or periods, I don't know with what degree of practical success. I vaguely recall some historian claiming to have determined from a review of birth records in medieval France (?) that the timing of births (minus nine months) suggested a nontrivial percentage of couples were, in fact, abstaining during Lent, but I don't know how reliable the records were and how good the methodology was (e.g. whether it controlled for the fact that marriages were not typically celebrated during Lent, meaning one would expect an uptick in first children born to newlyweds at Eastertide plus nine months and change). Taking that sort of temporal-rhythmic approach w/o focusing on the practical impact on fertility could, I suppose, have some sort of liturgical / sanctification of time benefit. But periodically abstaining from sex just to avoid conception seems rather like periodically abstaining from meat to get your cholesterol down. Maybe it's fine as a pragmatic exercise, but treating it as a spiritual discipline seems to miss (IMHO) the whole point about how fasting and ascesis is supposed to be beneficial for Christians.

(I totally almost included the thing about no weddings in Lent! If I throw enough pasta at this wall, won't some of it stick??)

10 MOST AMAZING GHOST TOWNS. Oh, that first one is amazing. Reminds me of this....

ARISTOPHANES SAYS, "OH PLATO. WHY SO SERIOUS?": My sister did an interview about fanfiction. I haven't listened to it yet, but I'm guessing I mostly agree with her. It's so odd to me that fanfiction seems strange to others; to me, the weird thing is coming to the close of every single story you ever read and never once thinking, "But what happened next? Oh, wouldn't it be awesome if?"

My longer post about fanfiction is here.

RHYTHM METHOD: So I was reading about Humanae Vitae--the way you do--and I stumbled across a thing.

Both NFP and (unless I'm an internet-educated moron!) the Jewish laws of sexual behavior create a sort of rhythm of times of sexual fast and times of sexual feast. E.g. it's a mitzvah to have sex with your wife at certain times. Time is sacralized in the marital act.

And so I wondered--can anything this side of the grave be sacred without some rhythm, without some time-boundaries, some liturgical season? Is liturgy, and its inherent musical shifting between sound and silence, necessary in order for us to apprehend some hint of eternity? This seems like the sort of paradox God always goes in for, where marriage prepares us for the place where there is neither marrying nor giving in marriage....

WHY DOES STANLEY FISH HATE LEADERSHIP?

"STORY WITHOUT A NAME": I have a poem-type thing in the current issue of Dappled Things.

HELL IS AN ENDLESS ROMAN A CLEF.

TOOK YOU UP TO MIDNIGHT MASS, LEFT YOU IN THE LURCH: I realize that this whole conversation about shame might be better if I suggested an actual occasion on which I'd acted wrongly due to shame, as vs. guilt. The obvious one for me is that I don't go to Confession out of shame. I do not recommend this. I went on Saturday and it was amazingly awesome, as (almost) always. When I don't go, I get in this awful downward spiral of "it doesn't matter anyway, what's the worst thing I can do?" It's... kind of frightening, honestly, how far past your own limits you can go before the humiliation of Confession is better than the fetid crawlspace in which you're living.

Obviously, this is a failure of both guilt and shame! But the thing that stops me from coming back up to the surface is shame, and the thing that forces me to come back anyway is guilt.

I really, deeply don't believe that ethics are the sum and summit of the Christian life. If I had to pick something, I think I'd pick the Eucharist: the consummation of God's love affair with us.

And I think this rejection of ethics-uber-alles is relevant in two ways: 1) Shame is community property--the domain of ethics, the domain of humans negotiating life with humans rather than the domain of humans pouring themselves out in the humiliating, confusing, transcendent love of God; and yet 2) Deus Caritas Est is right that love of others is sturdiest when it's based on the Eucharist. I can't count the times I've finally surrendered and confessed because I had to counsel at the pregnancy center that night. Love beyond ethics strengthens ethics.

And I think that's because the Mass, the Wedding Feast of the Lamb, is the model of how to make one's life an icon of love. "Charity" gets a bad rep for condescension. I think for the people for whom it is genuinely the Wedding Feast--the people who can live at all hours within the Mass--there's no condescension. I would rather think about how to live that way than think about how to properly shame one another....

PASSION WENT OUT OF FASHION--THAT'S ALL YOU'RE CONCERNED WITH: There's an interesting catfight about gender going on in Helen's comments here. It's intra-Yalien in the most desperate way, but I think her fashion metaphor is both interesting and profound. Obviously it doesn't work in a lot of ways, but she knows that, and it's worth taking the time to walk around inside the metaphor for a while, see how it's shaped and what it changes about your views, rather than dismissing it because of the obvious ways in which it's false. Or to put it more bluntly, I think you'd have to get up early to do a critique of this metaphor which it wouldn't've already anticipated.

Also: If I had two wishes which could not be applied to anything other than debates about gender on the Interwebs, my wishes would be these: 1) You do not get to pretend that men caring for their children is obvious and unshakable, and 2) You do not get to pretend that we have made intercourse manageable. Those aren't even disagreements about what is beautiful or sublime; they just require us to acknowledge dumb basic facts about sex, pregnancy, parenthood, and children in the USA right this minute.

I'm not on her side re: shame, but you knew that.

(Well shoot, as long as I'm here, I'll also recommend Truffaut on "the Ursula Andress of militancy.")

WHAT IT MEANS TO BE DADDY: Read this--and the comments, too.

TO TERRORIZE Y'ALL'S NEIGHBORHOOD: I messed around with the blogroll, there, mostly because what I read these days is fairly random. If it's on my blogroll, rest assured I recommend it for some reason; on the other hand, I think I disagree about fundamental matters of justice, faith, or mercy with at least half of the blogs I 'roll. So please don't assume that because I link to a blog, I agree with its proprietor on all or even most issues.

SNORT THE SNOW OF YESTERYEAR: Helen glosses my tradition-addiction post.

I like these one-liners because they let you "think [one's] own thoughts in the spaces around the print," as Diana Wynne Jones said about poetry, so I won't belabor the point. I'll just say that I'd conceived my post as being about eros and its distortions; which might clarify and/or intrigue.

There are a lot of ways in which the punchline is true, and Helen's sharp final paragraph gets at one of those ways. There are probably ways in which the punchline is false, although I'm not yet convinced by her approach there.

OUR ANCIENT ENEMY, THE SUN: A list of "13 memorable movies set during heat waves." I hadn't remembered that Rear Window counts; I'm not sure if that should disqualify it. Do the Right Thing (my first thought) clocks in at #6.

I FIGHT TO THE FINISH: Some adventures with a large bag of baby spinach.

1. Too tart! First, I made a toasted cheese sandwich. I split a mealhada roll in half crosswise and then lengthwise, filled the halves with sweet onion, spinach, and cranberry goat cheese, wrapped them in aluminum foil and baked at 375 for fifteen minutes.

verdict: not quite. This was way too acidic--I'd hoped that the different sharpnesses would blend, but instead they just clashed. At least one of these elements needed to be gentler. If I had it to do over, I might try caramelizing the onion on the stovetop first; or, obviously, using plain goat cheese rather than cranberry; or using mozzarella with maybe a thin coating of cranberry sauce.

2. Too bland! Another toasted sandwich, this time with onion, lots and lots of spinach, and munster. This was fine, I suppose, but kind of boring. Mushrooms would have helped, I'm thinking especially shiitake; also cayenne; but even so, I think it needed something more, maybe artichoke hearts or something. Or soy sauce?? I don't know about soy sauce and cheese, though.

3. Juuuuuuust right. The great thing about soup is that you can really throw just about anything together and it'll be good. I set salted water to boil, sliced the kernels off a corncob into a saute pan with some salted butter (I know you're supposed to use unsalted for greater control of seasoning--I never do, which is why I rarely mention adding salt to soups and things), chopped a tomato I think, threw in some minced garlic and a lot of dried herbs and spices (in about this order, to the best of my recollection: basil, black pepper, cayenne, rosemary, thyme, sage, cinnamon), added a big shloop of whole milk, and cooked all of that for a bit.

When the water boiled, I added fusilli and cooked halfway, then drained the pasta and put it in the saute pan. I added quite a bit of crab stock and stirred and cooked until the pasta was al dente, then threw the rest of the spinach in and cooked until it wilted. There may also have been cheese? Probably habanero jack cheese, if so.

Anyway, this was totally delicious--sort of like a cross between minestrone and chowder. The crab flavor definitely came through, but it worked with the other ingredients. Mmmmmm, soup.

SURVEY, SCHMURVEY: A neat survey of how widespread Yiddish and Hebrew terms are in everyday speech. They're especially looking for non-Jewish participants. I'm skeptical of online surveys as a rule, of course, but this is a fun one, so regardless of its scholarly value it might be interesting to you all.

TERRIFIC photos of the Fourth of July as seen from a rooftop on the Lower East Side.

"What, when drunk, one sees in other women, one sees in Garbo sober."
--Kenneth Tynan; via Ratty

WHITE LIES/BLOW AWAY: Traditionalism without religion is addiction.

BABY'S ON A MISSION: GetReligion looks at a fascinating article about whether short-term mission trips really do more for their participants' spiritual lives than e.g. short-term LSD trips. The comments are also really, really interesting, which is why I'm linking you to GR rather than to the initial article.

ps: Apparently the cd I wanted to link y'all to, in the title of this post, has never existed. Uh, if you ever get a chance to pick up the Huggy Bear/Bikini Kill (very much in that order, for me) split record, you grab it and tell 'em I sent you.

[eta: Sorry! The Post article is actually primarily about the effect of short-term mission trips on the material well-being of the people on whom the missionaries are sprung. But the GR comments get into the spiritual issues on both sides....]

MARVELS. Mexican immigrants as superheroes. You do have to push through a bit of left-wingery--not to mention the fact that the actual immigrants do not get to talk (unless I'm missing something on the website), because that's progressive?--but this art project still really hit my heart. Check it out.

M to the A to the S to the K,
Put the mask 'pon mi face just to make the next day....

HE EATS THE BRAINS OF TREES!

I began, even as a child, to learn water's order,
and, as I grew intact, the feel of its warmth
in a new sponge, of its weight in a virgin towel.
I have earned my wine in another's misery,
when rum bathed a sealed throat
and cast its seal on the ground.
--Jay Wright, "Journey to the Place of Ghosts"

A man should be the mister,
And be the master of his sisters;
A man should be the drake,
For his blogwatch sake...

Uh, hello again. Things have been strange here, and I've had little to say, but I think that your respite from all things Eve will soon be over. For now, here are some other people saying stuff.

Sheepcat: David "Way, Way Beyond Gay" Morrison's Sed Contra archives are now available. There's quite a bit of good stuff in there.... David's approach is often different from mine, but he's also written a lot of stuff I've found really illuminating--I didn't even realize I'd latched on to the story of the rich young man (mentioned in my Commonweal piece) because he wrote about it.

And via Mark Shea, the jurisprudential theory of Cthulhu:

Supreme Court judges: Great Cthulhu is well accustomed to the adoration of priests wearing black robes and he is willing to accept the due homage of the Nine and raise them to his priesthood. Since there will no doubt be many vacancies on the court as their minds break one after another in the mad ecstacy of his fearful presence, Great Cthulhu pledges to appoint only strict Constitutional constructionists to the bench under the assumption that the basic sanity of their approach should allow them to serve at least a term year or two before they are reduced to gloriously gibbering cannibals. Because Great Cthulhu spent many years himself neither living nor breathing, he sees no reason that the Constitution must either.

here

I also have a quick comment at MarriageDebate on that Newsweek "kids don't make you happy" piece--really more about the difference between happiness and meaning, cf. the end of this post.

Also, if any of you all have read Alan Moore & Oscar Zarate's A Small Killing, and have thoughts about it, I'd love to hear them--I'm writing a piece on it today, and good chewy comics criticism is hard to find.

TODAY IS THE FEAST OF ST. THOMAS. Celebrate by pouring out your doubts in prayer before the Eucharist!

COMMUNICATIONS BREAKDOWN: Hi there. If you tried to email me last Friday, and you haven't received a reply yet, I did not receive your email. Had a bit of an eddy in the space-time continuum of my inbox. I'd be really grateful if you re-sent. Sorry for the inconvenience....

VISITATION SCHOOL: The Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center is doing volunteer training soon! I love CHPC--I wrote about it here--and it can always use more people to counsel women, answer phones and play with kids, fold clothes and do data entry. There's an endless round of tasks at the center. If you're looking for a Christian ministry; if you need reminding of your total dependence on God; if you want to meet the amazing, inspiring women we serve... consider CHPC. Tara's totally awesome, by the way.

Also, I'm trying to put together referrals we can give our clients, to premarital counseling (what U.S. Catholics often call "pre-Cana") and to mental health services, especially for depression. If you have any suggestions for people I should call in the DC area, please email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com. Thanks!

Counselor Training

Six Tuesdays 6:00 - 9:00pm

July 1 - August 5th @ CHPC (713 Maryland Ave., NE)

$45.00 Fee
~ Contact Tara Woods, http://us.f904.mail.yahoo.com/ym/Compose?To=chpcvol@yahoo.com

St. Elizabeth, friend of the Virgin, pray for us. Dorothy Day, pray for us.

SAINT FELONY: This is a good post about the economics of hiring ex-cons; the universality of mismanaged lives, and why the poor pay more for their crimes; and ways to change the incentives.

TYPICAL GIRLS... ARE SO CONFUSING: I recently re-read pretty much the entire archive of Disputed Mutability. This is the blog of a terrifically smart, forthright, wry ex-gay lady. You guys know me, right?--so you know that I am not a fan of the "ex-gay movement" as a whole. But DM is fantastic and touches on all kinds of issues: If you're interested in Christian discipleship, being specific in describing the interactions of religion and personal life, accepting and interpreting humiliation, presenting an identity, or anything about gay/ex-gay Christian life... she's probably got a post you need to read.

I strongly recommend starting with her earliest archive and working up. Seriously, if you took even a brief moment to wonder, "Hm, should I bother?"--you should bother.

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!