PUBLIC LIVES IN PRIVATE PLACES: More thoughts on vowed friendship. My Inside Catholic piece was advocacy; this is the place where I complicate that advocacy.

This is where my head is at right now, when I think about renewing the Christian tradition of vowed same-sex friendship. I'm very open to criticism, especially critics who have alternative ideas for how to honor the loves I want to honor. But even if you're basically like, "Don't go that way!" rather than "Follow me!", I want and need to hear from you. My email's on the sidebar.

Maybe the first, necessary thing to say is that renewal is never rewind. There is simply no chance that vowed same-sex friendships in (say) 2055 will look the way they did in 1655. "With the inevitable forward march of progress/comes new ways of hiding things/and new things to hide." One thing I loved about Alan Bray's The Friend was its awareness of tensions, its ability to acknowledge conflicts without feeling the need to resolve them. This seems like a basic fact about any real, important tradition: It will serve both bad and good ends. You will not be able to harness it fully to any philosophy. It will always be messy and human and novelistic.

And so I am not suggesting that a renewal of vowed same-sex friendship would "solve our problems." Instead I'm suggesting that it might shift our problems, so that we moved from less-Catholic problems to more-Catholic problems.

Or to put it yet another way, even if I get everything I want from this idea, there will still be deep ethical problems with same-sex vowed friendships (just as there are deep ethical problems with Catholic marriage today, and there always have been). My goal is not to solve problems but to suggest that we might change them. If you think there are better ways to change our problems, email me!!! I promise to post all emails critical of this position.

PRENUPTIAL AGREEMENT: The one thing I most want to emphasize is that the Eucharist seals these vows. The Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity of Our Lord Jesus Christ. These vows might have some kind of fifteenth-generation-xerox possibility in the absence of the Catholic faith, but they gain their depth and meaning and hope from Christ's Body.

Having said that, I should note that my very last point is about generally Protestant communities and how they've maintained a sense of the family of baptism which most American Catholics have simply discarded. The Eucharist is at the heart of everything I care about with these friendships, but I'd be remiss if I didn't note that suffering and solidarity can create a kind of Protestant love-feast as well.

GIRLS DON'T WANT BOYS, GIRLS WANT CARS AND MONEY: The tradition Alan Bray describes grew up in a culture where women were unequal, and where we were separated from men by a vast gulf of social status and poetic/theological imagery. The tradition he describes was purely same-sex, and drew its power from metaphors both of marriage and of siblinghood, suggesting chosen kinship without sex. The tradition he describes defined the friend against the "sodomite," and had no place for what we now would call "gay identity"--a lady could contract a sexually-transmitted disease from her ladyfriend and perhaps never consider herself implicated in the usual Romans condemnation-passage.

We now live in a world where, as Bray himself describes, chosen kinship has been narrowed, filed down to marriage-and-nothing-else. Possibly this narrowing of kinship fuels the gay-marriage movement. (If you're a "conservative Catholic" and you've warred against my "Romoeroticism" piece, maybe consider this?) We now live in a world of "sexual orientation," of "homosexuality," of women working outside the home, and of women's theoretical equality.

(Have women ever been "equal" in any interesting sense? I suppose it depends on what you consider interesting. Women have never been equivalent to men in any poetic sense. Women have never--as far as I know--been equal to men in any societal-power sense. If I were a man, I would ask God why I was not a woman, for precisely these reasons.)

So: Can there be vowed same-sex friendship in a context so radically--at least in theory!--divorced from Bray's context?

I think there are reasons to believe we can still renew this practice.

First, traditions adapt to fill new needs. We clearly have new needs. There are actual, existing same-sex couples in which one or both partner chooses to become chaste. Some of these couples are raising children. We need some way of honoring their love; otherwise we say, "Split up," and that is wrong.

This is why I think vowed friendship, while I would recommend it to everyone!, will be most attractive to gay people. We are the ones who need it.

I realize that if gay people take this on as a way of understanding our loves, it will be culturally harder for straight people to do the same. This is one of the new tensions and new problems I noted above. I'm not sure how to address it. I want y'all ladies to be able to make sisterhood vows without your husbands getting wiggy; and yet I want, also, for a gay man to be able to introduce his "vowed friend" to his family, and for them to understand that this means more than a boyfriend, and different than a friend.

(Parenthetically, I'll say that I think there are strong reasons to follow tradition in restricting vowed friendships to same-sex pairs, even today when supposedly we're all equal. Men and women aren't similarly situated; tradition is a strong guide; regardless of sexual orientation, there's a point to distinguishing between relationships between two men, relationships between two women, and relationships between a man and a woman. I can expand on this if people want, since I know it's another point of tension! Mostly though, I'm a "trad," I believe in sex differences [that would be how I come to like ladies, yo], and so I like structures which preserve the sense of difference.)

Second, traditions exist to fill old needs, even when we've forgotten how to address those needs. Veterans still have comrades. Straight men who need other men have virtually no way to articulate that need in terms our culture can understand. Vowed friendship between comrades would a) not preclude marriage and b) even more importantly, let the community--not necessarily the law, I don't care about that right now--acknowledge that these are men who have an unchosen but inescapable tie to one another.

(For another point of tension: I know that now that we have ladies in the military, the relevant veteran-to-veteran links may cross the sex line. I genuinely don't know how to deal with that.)

Third, traditions reflect minority practice, not just majority. I've been struck, from the elementary-school playground to the pregnancy center, with how much more important godparenthood and godsiblinghood is to DC's black communities than to the white communities in which I was raised. We hear a lot about how black people are supposedly more "homophobic" than white, but we hear nothing about how much more open many black communities are to an expansive notion of kinship. I know this is a generosity born of necessity; but if all our communities worked the way black communities do, we'd already have a better framework for understanding Alan Bray's description of premodern English kinship. "Gossip" is short for "godsibling," yet the intimacy and responsibility of godsiblinghood is something I've only found in DC's black communities.

These ties are real and exist in America now. If you don't see them, it doesn't mean they've gone away. Maybe they can be harnessed to handle all our needs.

DOWN ON MY KNEES--I WANT TO TAKE YOU THERE: It was genuinely odd reading the reactions to my "Romoeroticism" piece. Maybe the weirdest thing, for me, was the recurrence of the idea of "struggle." People seemed to think I'd bared my heart, shown y'all my hardest fight. This is just not true, and I think maybe it's important to say that.

There are at least three reasons why maybe you shouldn't assume that a gay Catholic's gayness is her *~*struggle*~*.

First, please don't cover my face with your heart. Other people's impersonal sympathy can really become a sticky blanket you just want to throw off. I don't mean at all to denigrate the compassion and prayers people promised in the IC comments. It's just that you all might be over-reading me, you know?

If I don't say something is the big hard awful struggle of my life, maybe it isn't. Maybe I need your prayers more for something else. Maybe your compassion has some element of unintentional refusal to listen.

I think the thing many gay Catholics--even and especially those of us who do attempt fidelity to Church teaching--find most frustrating is simply that no one really listens. People project a lot of interpretations onto us and ignore the ways we challenge those projections. So I'm "self-hating," or I'm "struggling," and neither one of those descriptions really sounds like my actual life.

Second, there might be a better metaphor. I'd use the metaphor of surrender. I'm not struggling against a thing; I'm surrendering to a Person.

Now, I've noted before that I like femme metaphors better than butch ones! So there may well be gay Catholics for whom the "struggle" metaphor sounds more like how they feel day-to-day, and I'm not meaning to say my metaphor is better. I'm just saying my metaphor is mine, and it helps me understand how to live as a gay Catholic who is basically grateful and joyful. Other people will have other metaphors. All I want is for straight Catholics to let us pick our own metaphors, rather than assuming it's the one they've heard most often.

And third, let my heart rest here. Let me choose metaphors which suggest that it is in the Catholic Church, in the Mass, in the sacraments, where I truly find my place in the world. Let me say that this isn't where I struggle. It's where I "feel like... home."

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE POLS: Reviews of this and that.

Christopher Bram, Gossip. A New Yorker and a Washingtonian meet in a gay chatroom. (We call them "Washingtonians" when they're not from 'round here.) Their sex life flourishes even though one is a left-leaning ex-activist and one is a rising-star Young Republican type. But how long can you sleep with an enemy who doesn't even know he's the enemy?

This is nearly perfect summer reading: just intelligent enough to give savor to its lurid, trashy elements. (Bram's narrator bashes the New York Post, but this book reminded me more of that tabloid than of any other literary production.) I enjoyed it until the very end, when its suspense turned into melodrama via a too-neat (though well-foreshadowed) resolution.

Here I reviewed Bram's Exiles in America, a much better book. Gossip did hit on one of the major themes of that book: the stark, sociologically-inflected differences between how a couple looks from the inside and how it looks from the outside. Exiles takes as its epigraph Robert Frost's line (from memory, too lazy to look up, sorry) that marriage is "a type of friendship recognized by the police." Gossip shares that sensibility, though the nature of marriage itself isn't at issue in this book the way it is in Exiles.

I'll note that while the leftists in Gossip were recognizable human types, the right-wingers resembled exactly zero right-wingers I've ever met. But I'm willing to posit that I have not met a representative sample. It didn't keep me from enjoying the novel until it was over, at which point I did start to feel a bit curdled.

Kings, episodes 6 - 10: I reviewed previous episodes of this "It's about King David only alternate-universe only we're not going to tell you any of that because we don't want you to watch this show, apparently" NBC drama here. The first ten episodes are up at IMDB.com.

In the later episodes, some things are better: The David actor is growing on me. "Chapter One" is tense and intriguingly meta-narrative-y; the final twists of "Javelin" left me wanting to know what happens next. They've continued to pepper the show with lines and speeches which come from within a monarchist worldview, which fascinates me! This is one reason I like the Saul-figure's ruthless action at the end of "Brotherhood." It feels alien, old, simultaneously human and eldritch: personal.

The romance between the king's aide and the guardsman is both endearing comic relief and poignant character shading.

Other things, though... not so much. All the other younger actors still bother me, especially the Jonathan one. It would kill you to move your face? Express an unspoken emotion or an internal conflict, now and then?

During "Pilgrimage," in which various nonmarital sex scandals threaten, I found myself saying out loud, "Why is it so easy to make liberalism sound saccharine?" Whenever the series touches the intersection of sex and publicity it tends to sound contemporary-bien-pensant rather than alien-monarchist.

I still really, really hate what they're doing with the David/Jonathan relationship. They've chosen to prettify David (in "Chapter One," the Saul-figure does to show-David what the Biblical David did to Bathsheba's husband, so the show's David remains an overperfect farmboy with no need for penitence) and make Jonathan a conflictedly-gay conflictedly-villainous waffler with an obvious redemption arc in sight. I hate every one of these changes! ...There's also still little sense of God as a moral force rather than merely a source of power, although I admit we're getting subtle outlines of God's commandments as the series progresses. I wish David, rather than Silas (=Saul), had become the focus of God's moral attention earlier on--I get why they're doing it this way, but again, it makes David look cute rather than astonishing.

I should maybe note that I can't be rational about the "Sabbath Queen" episode because it depicts a family dealing with a critically-ill daughter. I have no idea if that episode is good or not, and I don't plan to watch it again.

Batman: The Animated Series, all seasons. I hate Batman comics; I loved this series!

Batman as a genre tends toward sickly child-abuse storylines and exploitive portrayals of mental illness. (I know why you'd mine mental illness for metaphors, and that can really work; I just want it to be completely cartoony, or much more realistic, or unruly genius... not the Uncanny Valley into which a lot of Batman stuff falls for me.) In comics which purport to be Serious Business, I really cannot handle that stuff. For the most part, this show didn't hit those buttons for me, although there were occasional moments when the bottom dropped out and I couldn't help but remember that Arkham Asylum is scary because we're supposed to fear "the weak and the wounded."

But the thing I loved about this series--the reason I Netflix'd it, and the thing on which it completely delivered--was its look. This is a hot, gorgeous show. It's all angular and expressionist and deco and... basically honey for the bears, where I'm concerned. It's dark and spooky-fun and stupidly beautiful.

I loved basically any show with Harley Quinn. I was expecting to like her and ended up adoring her. She's having so much fun! "Harley's Holiday" might be my favorite of those, although the one with the Joker Fish, which I think is her first or second appearance, is also adorable, as is "Harley and Ivy." I liked Poison Ivy's eps generally as well. I love that they paired the clown and the femme fatale, and kept both of them recognizably noir-girl types!

I think you'll know immediately whether this show is for you, since as I said, its look is its main appeal. (At least for me.) Most of the special features are commentary tracks, which I love!--the most fun for me were the ones for the first episode, where they laughed at how dark the coloring is (it's really startling), and for "Critters," which is apparently one of the most reviled episodes of the series. I liked it! And I liked it even more after the commentary track. I think they actually avoided the problems of making a dark deco Batman fight a giant chicken, you know? It's an incredibly creepy chicken! On the other hand, it's part of a weird run of episodes where Batman fights dumb stuff--there's a dinosaur in the previous episode, and later we get gorilla-villains. ...Speaking of villains who don't work for me, I hated all things Ras al-Ghul except for the one which is really a Jonah Hex episode.

The later discs are a "revamped" version. Og like: I think they use a lot more red in the revamp? Not sure. If I'm right, it made the show even hotter; if I'm wrong, something else made it look extra spectacular. Og no like: People's faces mostly became more masklike, whiter and more acutely-angled, and I missed the curves.

DANCE DANCE REVOLUTION: So due to one of the snafus with which freelance life is riddled, this review of Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll didn't get placed in a timely fashion. I've decided to post it even though the show closed a while ago, because I think it may interest some of you all. I vacillated on whether or not to include the bits specific to this production, but ended up keeping them in, since this was not only the best Stoppard I've seen by far but the best Studio Theatre production I've seen by far. I want you guys to know that they can really knock it out of the park.
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Now that Europe’s “short 20th century,” 1914 – 1989, is over, everyone’s fighting over who gets the credit for the collapse of the Soviet empire. How much to Gorbachev, how much to Reagan, how much to John Paul II?

Into this reverse-ostrakon of historical popularity, Tom Stoppard has thrown an unexpected name: the Great God Pan.

His play Rock ’n’ Roll, in an intimate production at Washington, D.C.’s Studio Theatre through June 21, dramatizes the clash between the “cultural Left” and the more strictly political Left in the last half of the Cold War. Yet all the play’s oppositions--culture vs. politics, eros vs. reason, soul vs. matter--are embodied in the complex relationships between finely-drawn, resonant characters. The sentimentality which sometimes mars Stoppard’s work is absent. It’s a comedy, and a love song, but its joys and reconciliations are hard-won.

Studio’s actors are completely engaging, and the small theater space makes everything immediate: You can smell the joss-sticks. It is weird sitting quietly, occasionally clapping, as the actors explore the ecstatic release of a great guitar riff. There’s no way around that, given the bourgeois nature of just about any American audience who would come to see a Stoppard play. But the play is good enough to overcome our habitual complacence.

The first scene presents Great Pan in the unlikely form of Syd Barrett, crouching on a stoned hippie teen girl’s garden wall. We then set up the tension which will define the play: It is 1968 and Soviet tanks are rolling into Prague. In Cambridge, half-feral British Communist Max is growling at half-dissident Czech Jan, as Jan decamps for home: “I said, ‘You. I’ll take you,’ because you were serious and you knew your Marx… and at the first flutter of a Czech flag you cut and run like an old woman still in love with Masaryk.” Max does offer the self-consciously ironic machismo of apologizing to Jan “about the tanks.”

Max is a bitter-ender: “Why do people go on as if there’s a danger we might forget Communism’s crimes, when the danger is we’ll forget its achievements?” He feels piercingly the humiliation of his position:

I meet some apparatchik working the system, and he’s fascinated by me. He’s never met a Communist before. I’m like the last white rhino.

(One of the many subtle touches in this play is the way Max’s rationalism lands him in cruelly absurd situations.) His materialism gives no quarter to fuzzy-headed talk of “inspiration” or “soul”: The meat is all there is. This belief gets one of the funniest smackdowns in a very funny play, when his wife’s student Lenka says he believes a human is a “pinball machine which thinks it’s in love.” But Max also gets one of the play’s most wrenching lines, after his wife accuses him and his materialism of collaboration with the cancer which is killing her.

Max is the sort of man who says, “A worker’s state fits the case. What else but work lifts us out of the slime? Work does all the work.” Max’s marriage lasts until his wife’s death. He’s the Communist bourgeois.

Jan, meanwhile, just wants to listen to his records. His return to Czechoslovakia is something of a road-not-taken for Stoppard: As the playwright explains, “He was born where I was born, in Zlin, and left Czechoslovakia for the same reason (Hitler) at much the same time. But Jan came directly to England as a baby, and returned to Czechoslovakia in 1948, two years after I arrived in England having spent the war years in the Far East.” Back behind the Iron Curtain, Jan spends his time playing rock music, maneuvering around the police, and arguing against politics. The cops force all his employers to fire him, then arrest him for being a “parasite”--in a pointed callback to an earlier scene in which Jan praised British freedoms, and Max snapped that in England “everyone’s free to have lunch at the Ritz and it’s absolutely legal to be unemployed.”

Here again materialism matters, though the play doesn’t hammer it home. A cop can hit you in the face. A cop can bash in your head. A cop can control the meat. If, as the anti-Nazi resistance song says, “Thoughts are free,” it is only because there is something irreducible, a soul which can’t be destroyed by hitting it.

This is part of the importance of the recurring pagan metaphors. As Eleanor, Max’s wife, translates Sappho for a student: “Eros is amachanon, he’s spirit as opposed to machinery, Sappho is making the distinction. He’s not naughty, he’s--what? Uncontrollable. Uncageable.”

At first Jan and Ferdinand are sharply opposed in their ways of existing under totalitarianism. Jan accuses Ferdinand of “moral exhibitionism” for his constant petitions and protests. Jan argues that his rock musicians--preeminently the Czech band, the Plastic People of the Universe--have found a deeper form of rebellion against tyranny:

FERDINAND: Who’s got the best chance of getting Husak’s attention--Havel or the Plastic People of the Universe?
JAN: The Plastics.

At first Ferdinand is exasperated. After he meets the Plastics’ impresario in prison, however, he comes to Jan with convert’s fervor:

FERDINAND: He explained about the hair. The tempter says, “Cut your hair just a little, and we’ll let you play.” Then the tempter says, “Just change the name of the band and you can play.” And after that, “Just leave out this one song”…. It is better not to start by cutting your hair, Jirous said--no, it is necessary. Then nothing you do can possibly give support to the idea that everything is in order in this country. Why couldn’t you have explained this?

This play is passionate about the transformative power of music--the moral force of joy. But it is not naïve. Stoppard hints that perhaps rock’s transformative power is not the same in the liberated West as in the repressed Eastern Bloc: Although Jan’s line, fairly early in the play that “the Grateful Dead must be so envious of the Plastics” gets a laugh, by the play’s end the primary representative of Western rock is the aging Syd Barrett, shambling through the eternal present of late-stage drug addiction. And one of the sharpest exchanges in the play is this one, toward the very end:

MAX: There was a place once, a huge country where square-jawed workers swung sledgehammers, and smiling buxom girls with kerchiefs on their heads lifted sheaves of wheat, and there was a lot of singing, and volumes of poetry in editions of a hundred thousand sold out in a day…. What happened to it?
JAN: If pornography was available, the poetry would have sold like poetry in the West.

The last time the gods are mentioned, Lenka is in Cambridge, as a student of her own reads from Plutarch: “…and Thamous in the stern shouted towards the shore--Great Pan is dead!” The play ends in the Czech Republic, because it has to, because the joy of liberation depends on who’s liberated from what. It’s possible to read the play’s gentle ending as a statement that the time of the gods has passed, and we are now in a time of humanity. But even this is a much too reductive reading of a play which is, like the ecstatic soul, irreducible.

Even requited, such love would be foolish, messy and brief. Unless it changed Bill's politics. That fantasy was back, larger than before, giving value to lust, turning sex with a Republican from a self-betrayal to a good deed, a moral rescue. Bill went against his best interests by seeing me. Maybe he wanted to be changed.

But what if love changed me? Could it rearrange and corrupt my identity? Oddly enough, that scenario wasn't frightening, but produced a nasty thrill. As if I were bored with who I was and enjoyed the impossible notion of becoming someone new.
--Christopher Bram, Gossip

CAMILLA'S HAIR, SOAKED WITH BLOOD. Winners and runners-up in a contest to design a new cover for The Secret History. I like the top three (i.e. all the winners except Lucy Pritchett) and, among the runners-up, Pat Tierney, Harriet Beesley, Frida Delin, Helen Ashcroft, and Sara Mulvanny in about that order. I'd also totally buy the Rachel Lewis one, just because it's what the book's paperback cover would've been in 1967. (I admit Ashcroft's isn't that good unless you've already read the book. Otherwise it looks like a generic drunk-memoir cover, when I assume she was actually referring to the scene with the glass in Camilla's foot, or else the... is it a mirror?... that one of the twins breaks late in the game.)

Via Helen Rittelmeyer.

DAY JOB FOLLIES: Now, at MarriageDebate: "Everyone's Marriage Is Queer," the recession vs. men, reasons people give for cohabiting, searching for one's sperm donor father, and Russians pretending to be happy.

And mooooooore! Remember that you, yes you, can send me links.

Outside, in a little courtyard on the roof, in the rain, a small group of musicians were playing on home-made guitars. Jenkins explained that if Treece was interested in the breakdown of class boundaries the guitarist in the group was actually the Earl of... (he named a prominent scion of the English nobility) and the group was called the Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense Skiffle Group. "It would be," said Treece.
--Eating People Is Wrong

"INSECURITY CAMERAS": My review of the Czech avant-garde photo exhibit at the National Gallery of Art....

PASHERNATE LOVE: Camassia has a pretty fascinating response to my "Romoeroticism" column.

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: BURGER TIME! I pretty much never cook meat, but this week the fever came upon me.

I used ground beef, jalapenos, salt, freshly-ground pepper, a couple different kinds of rolls (mealhada, and then today something where I don't know its name), butter, cinnamon, cayenne, cumin, ground ginger, dried thyme, and Port Salut cheese.

What I did: I'd never actually made my own patties before. First I sliced the rolls in half lengthwise and put them cut-side-down in the toaster oven, letting the yummy breadcrumbs fall onto the cutting board. Then I finely diced a jalapeno. Then, at last, I grabbed a big handful of ground beef and began working it.

I'd thought I could just make a big flat patty with a depression in the center (to help it cook). This turned out to be surprisingly difficult. So I ended up doing what all the recipes had told me to do, and making a much rounder patty with a depressed center (your "sort of like the American electorate!" joke there). I got the jalapeno all worked into the meat. Then it went into the pan, on high. I don't have a grill, or even a grill pan, so I just put it in a flat nonstick and hoped for the best. I spiced it with (in about this order) cumin and/or thyme, salt, ginger, and a bit of cinnamon. Once it was really sizzling I started toasting the roll halves.

I let this thing cook for a while--much longer than I had in the past. I was worried about the smoke alarm, and while I never saw or even really smelled smoke, I could feel it catching in my throat. Nonetheless, I turned the burgers without making the alarm sound. I let the burgers cook just as much on the other side while I sliced up some Port Salut. Then I turned them one last time, ground some pepper over them and added the sliced cheese and a bit of cayenne, and buttered the bottom halves of the rolls.

The result: stupidly delicious. Seriously, this was amazing. I'd never been really satisfied with home-cooked burgers before, because I hadn't let them cook quite long enough. When you can grill a burger it's fine to worry about whether the inside will still be a deep pink, because you're guaranteed a caramelized outside crust. But in a saute pan you've got to be much more patient.

The herbs, spices, and jalapeno didn't overwhelm the burger at all. The Port Salut was... melty and yummy, a rich but nonaggressive taste. I'd almost call it a hyper-cheddar.

I don't plan to do this often, but for Independence Day week it was pretty swift.

"I have never felt like this before," Louis pressed on. "Passion has happened to me before; I'm a man, after all. But generally I preferred to ignore it, to get on with my work." This was true enough; it had always seemed to Louis that a fundamental desire to take postal courses was being sublimated by other people into sexual activity; that he was at the root of things.
--Malcolm Bradbury, Eating People Is Wrong

SHE NEEDS YOU/MORE THAN SHE LOVES YOU: An email in response to my post about tradition and iconicity:

First, you suggest that tradition's primary purpose is to create a persona out of an impersonal thing (like a place or an institution) so that individual human beings might truly love it. But it seems to me that this position reduces love to an exclusively inter-personal phenomenon. I will accept that love cannot exist apart from the relationship between persons, but consider that (theologically) the act of God's creation is sometimes described as an overflowing of the Love within the Trinity. Thus, God loves rocks and trees though they are impersonal.

Might we not say that human love of institutions, places, etc. result from a similar overflowing. A Frenchman does not first love France, but rather his family, and then, later, his love overflows into the place that made his family possible, and the institutions that gave it shape. Under this scheme, tradition does not create a persona but rather forms a shifting network of channels into which love may overflow. Love allows us to see the beauty of the beloved even where it is concealed from plain sight. Just so, loving the beloved allows us to love what the beloved loves, and to love what brought the beloved into being, and to love a thousand other things as well. And as love overflows, so do we become privy to ever more beauty.

And tradition, by binding people together and to institutions, customs, foods, ways, stories, etc. etc. makes the flow of love from one thing to the next easier and more regular. But I think you miss something if you say a French person loves France more fully as personified rather than as experienced.

Secondly, I would like to make a distinction... you mention the Church as one of the "fictive women" alongside Marianne and Israel. The Church, however, must be distinguished because the Church is in some sense a real Being with an existence distinct (if not independent) from its constitutent parts. France is the people of France and their ways, land, and all the things to which the people of France are bound. The Church, however, is the Union between God and man, which is a Unity in the image of the Unity between the Persons of God. And just as the three Persons of God make up a single Being Who is not merely three Persons existing in a certain relationship to one another, so the Church is a single (eschatological) Being. Consider that Marianne (a fiction) is the symbol of France, but the symbol of the Church is Mary.

That being said, the Church is a Unity as well as being a truly human institution (that is the mystery of the Incarnation, right?) and thus is formed by tradition as any other human institution. I think this actually lends support to my "overflow" model of tradition, since the idea that tradition builds up the Church into a persona would set up two parallel and conflicting symbologies -- one of Marianne and one of Mary.

so yeah, that's awesome.

Some quick responses: I really do believe love is "an exclusively interpersonal phenomenon." I'm not sure how to defend this belief--I've tried a couple of paragraphs and deleted all of them--but actually I don't think my interlocutor is really disagreeing here, he's just pointing out that tradition might be explained without rejecting that basic belief.

I'm still not sure he's right, though. If I love France as an overflowing of my love for my family, can I ever serve France when that would damage my family? Can I have some ideal of France with which my family members would disagree?

The Unabomber was turned in by his brother. I've been convinced of a vision of America which is very different from the vision of ditto embraced by my family. Can we really negotiate these conflicting and shifting loyalties without personifying nationhood--and even, sometimes, putting those personified nations above other forms of personal loyalty?

I very much agree with the distinction between the Church and "Marianne." In fact, I generally think that Christianity (like Judaism) cuts the Gordian knot of philosophy by presenting an object of love Who is simultaneously a moral arbiter.

You don't have to be blogwatching, but it helps...

Holy Whapping provides awesome Philip Neri/celebrity-cardboard-cutout action! Via Sparrow Fallen.

In other weird saint news, yesterday was the feast of Saints Processus and Martinian, patrons of wardens, jailers, and prison police. (That's because St. Paul converted them when he was imprisoned, and they suffered martyrdom proclaiming the Gospel their prisoner taught them.) Today is the feast of St. Thomas, but I think you can find the Caravaggio painting by yourself.

Overlawyered turns ten! For all your corporate-collusion-with-government-regulation needs!

My column at Inside Catholic has provoked much comments-boxing. For the moment I feel no further desire to box, but I thought I'd point it out. And I really will talk about problems and tensions with renewing the Catholic tradition of vowed friendship... either later tonight, or on Sunday. They, uh, won't be the same problems these commenters seem to batten on.

And the current Commonweal has a really good, basic piece on religious abuse at Guantanamo. I don't think it's online yet.

I WAS WRONG. "Gypsy Presents: 'Waiting for Gorgo'" is my favorite MST3K riff.

So far.

The dead woman whom I adore keeps her distance. ...

Where is the cocoon of noise and need?
I am an uneaten meal, a full glass.
--Anna Harrison, "Need," in the current Commonweal. You really, really should read the whole poem.

As other lifestyles become more acceptable, you must choose whether to get married and whether to have children. You develop your own sense of self by continually examining your situation, reflecting on it, and deciding whether to alter your behavior as a result. People pay attention to their experiences and make changes in their lives if they are not satisfied. They want to continue to grow and change throughout adulthood.
--Andrew Cherlin, Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today

Notice how the last two sentences say exactly opposite things! Throughout this book (which is generally good), Cherlin uses "grow and change" to mean "place preexisting wants and personality traits above role and obligation." It's kind of obvious that sticking it out, placing role and obligation first, might change you more--challenge you more, certainly.

"ROMOEROTICISM": My take on the collision of Corpus Christi and Gay Pride, at Inside Catholic....

LOYALTY BINDS ME: Some notes on Alan Bray, The Friend. The first thing to say is that I love this book. It's a study of the culture, rituals, ethics, and tensions of same-sex friendship in England, from 1000 AD through, essentially, the death of John Cardinal Newman.

I could not love this book more if it were made out of chocolate and shaped like Sophia Loren, with a cameo by Iron Man.

But now that I've got that out of my system: This is such a heartfelt book, and such a humble one. Alisdair MacIntyre rabbits on about how some virtues are necessary products of certain practices (like, chess isn't chess if you cheat); this book demonstrates how history as a practice can inculcate, or reflect, or strengthen, a genuinely spiritual humility. Bray can be wry, he can be pointed, but he's always ready to submit his preferred conclusions to the uncertainty of the evidence. This is basically the opposite of a polemic; it's a complication.

Okay... there are some twitches. Bray frequently, but super-briefly, falls into a utilitarian-universalism, where the *~*real*~* purpose of Christianity is friendship/reconciliation/social order. (To put the three terms in order from most awesome to least.) This is a complete anomaly from someone who generally goes out of his way to acknowledge alternate readings. It's a misunderstanding of tradition-in-general and English-Christianity-in-particular, since few robust traditions are simple enough to have one "real" purpose, one "central" concept. A tradition builds persona (see below!) precisely by being much more complex than this.

And Bray does have occasional fits of rhetorical Protestantism. I don't have any idea whether that reflects his actual beliefs--for all I know he was as Catholic as Morrissey when he wrote this book. But at least twice, to take the most notable example, he writes that a vowed same-sex friendship might be considered "more Christian" because it did not require the gatekeeping approval of a priest. I totally agree with him that a Christian pledge of love does not become less Christian in the absence of a dogcollar, but that isn't what he says; if you turn what he does say inside-out, like a glove, it imples that sacraments which require a priest are less Christian than those which don't. I doubt Bray himself would really argue that the Eucharist is less Christian than marriage! So I read this as a verbal tic, signifying a genuine defensiveness about the ability of the laity to sanctify their lives and loyalties, but not meant to be read too literally.

Speaking of the Eucharist, I love how thoroughly Bray has placed this sacrament at the heart of his book. Anyone interested in Eucharist as love-feast and as quintessential Christian prayer cannot afford to miss this book, for real.

Similarly, you can't read this book and then attend an ordinary American Mass without wanting to cry at the loss of the Kiss of Peace. The "handshake of peace" is a horrifying sign of how far we have come from the world of Bray's book.

This is not "weaponized" history. I think it does provide hope and succour for those of us who wish to create a fruitful, joyous, and sublime way of life for contemporary gay Catholics; but I'll talk tomorrow about some of the tensions and cautions this book outlines for that project. Bray's own position I think will be clear to anyone who reads the afterword, but even there, he speaks with the bone-deep humility of a historian who has fallen deeply in love with his subjects and will, therefore, respect their memory by not getting in the way. He doesn't put his own heart over their faces.

This book overlaps, at the very end, with the very beginning of Roden's Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture. It made me want to re-read Roden, to play the two off against one another.

I'll close by saying that he's a terrific stylist. I especially love his trick of ending each chapter with a cliffhanger!

SHE LOOKS LIKE AN ANGEL... BUT I GOT WISE/SHE'S THE DEVIL IN DISGUISE!: Some exceptionally scattered thoughts on tradition and conservatism. These are propositions for discussion, not settled beliefs of mine. [I'll add links to older posts later, and remove this parenthesis.]

1. There's a difference in kind between a stereotype and a role. Actually, this one I'm fairly sure of; I'm just not sure how to cash out what that difference in kind really looks like. I've been using gender stereotypes vs. gender roles as a possible way into this question.

One possibility is that stereotypes are abstractions, character descriptions, whereas roles are characters. The Hysterical Woman is a cruel and insipid caricature; Eddie Monsoon is a wonderful monster. (Similarly for The Prude vs. Saffy Monsoon.)

I'm not sure that's quite accurate. I do think a preexisting personal representation of the role being somehow approached by our actions is part of the difference. That's what the saints are for. They break the conventions in keeping the Commandments, in Chesterton's very nice phrase, and thereby expand the possibilities for the rest of us. They show us new roles. Joan of Arc, Teresa of Avila, these aren't stereotypes.

This of course doesn't help you when you can't find precedent for what you perceive as your vocation. And since I believe very strongly that vocation isn't a choice, I am still searching for other, more illuminating ways to cash out the difference between stereotype and role.

2. One way to tell that something is a tradition is if it can't be defended by reason alone. I've already written that tradition's primary purpose is to create a persona--to simultaneously give a place or institution an ethos, and give it a personality, making it a possible object of love. (Specifically, at least in the contexts where I've encountered traditional institutions, the institution becomes a fictive woman. It would be shockingly cheap [and cheaply shocking] to wonder if Germany's problem wasn't the idea of the Fatherland--but is there anything to be salvaged from this idea that fictive womanhood is better for us than fictive manhood?)

Anyway, putting gender questions aside, this definition of tradition should immediately show you the many points on which it is vulnerable.

a) Fictive womanhood is fictive. (Long cat is loooooooong!) There is no actual, individual, percept-rich "America" or "Marianne" or "Israel" or "Church." Reason-alone will always sever the cords of language and longing which held together shadow and substance... making it impossible for us to argue that the imperceptible (the persona) should be considered the substance, not the shadow.

b) Fictive womanhood is a fantastic alibi! This is why Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France is simultaneously so central to my understanding of tradition's role, and so troubling. If we agree that tradition makes France an ethos and a beloved, must we agree that Marie Antoinette is the personification of that persona? Or to bring this down to the twentieth century: If tradition, then figurehead--whether monarch or dictator?

This is the darker side (the back!) of my post about how tradition gives grace to our necessary subordinations and submissions: Tradition, of course, can give graceful cover to our unnecessary subordinations as well.

c) Cultures lack an architecture. There is no science--and precious little art!--by which we can tell which elements of tradition are load-bearing. In any particular case, I can argue rationally that this element can be removed without destroying the iconic resonance, the persona, of our tradition. And in fact, I can always point to many, many cases in which prior rejections of traditional elements did not fatally damage what we now consider to be the nature of that tradition. This is both a strength of tradition--its ability to adapt, to recreate a cultural persona as adeptly as you and I recreate our own public faces when we undergo severe personal change, remaining recognizable to our friends despite the massive internal damage and recovery--and, in a rationalist age, a weakness. No individual fort can be defended, even though the attackers insist they're on our side.

d) Finally... how can you prove that your beloved should be loved? This is one of the very few questions where I can't think of a medieval Christian philosopher who has really provided a hard-and-fast, cash-value answer... which is a point in favor of medieval Christian philosophers. Never use an argument when a stained-glass window would suffice.

AMY WINEHOUSE SINGS "BEAT IT."

edited: de mortuis.

As in our own time the permafrost of modernity has at last begun to melt--and a more determinedly pluralistic world has bounded back into an often troubling life--the world we are seeing is not a strange new world, revealed as the glaciers draw back, but a strange old world: kinship, locality, embodiment, domesticity, affect. All of these things, but I would add that at times we are seeing them in something as actual--and as tangible--as the tomb of two friends buried in an English parish church. We did not see those tombs because they did not signify; but they are beginning to signify again.
--last lines of The Friend (not counting the afterword)

IT'S THE CIRCLE OF LIFE!: 1. Conservative, moralizing politician gets caught [EDITED to remove unnecessarily crass description; "gets caught" pretty much covers it...].

2. Conservative Christian commentator wails about how could he? with much throwing of the fiftieth stone. I would never!

3. Liberal commentator (Christian or not--all look same!) inveighs against the obvious Schadenfreude and piling-on of aforementioned conservative Christian types. Drink if they cite "Judge not, lest ye be judged"; drain your drink if they bother looking up the chapter and verse. Drain somebody else's drink if they specify that they're atheist and they really, really think adultery is bad, and they'd totally shame the initial bad guy as much as you would, but they just can't help themselves in pointing out the hypocrisy!

4. Bitchy blogger notes that patting yourself on the back for your rejection of pride might actually be... prideful. Thus, she judges your judgeyness of others' judging of sexual sin! It would be so awesome if this action were virtuous!

5. Lather, rinse, repent.

I know so many good people, I mean, where do I start?

UPDATE: [edited: ehhh, changed my mind about this.]

FURTHER UPDATED: Doesn't change what I say in this post, but this does offer context and assorted whatnot.

TURN YOUR WATCH, TURN YOUR WATCH BACK/ABOUT A HUNDRED THOUSAND YEARS: I only remember two songs from my childhood, listening to "Q-107, Washington's Top 40!" I remember "Karma Chameleon," which for some reason I associate with the yellow schoolbus taking me to Jewish day camp.

And I remember "Billie Jean," on the playgrounds of Shepherd Elementary--a school named after a segregationist, where I doubt I knew fifteen other white kids, but the white kids I did know were almost all in the gifted-and-talented program, because that's the way racism works. That's why, as Ta-Nehisi Coates has said so often, you can't fix police brutality by painting the Policeman Barbies black. "Meritocracy" in a post-colonialist world is the worst caricature of Calvinism, where you're pre-damned and you're supposed to like it.

...Anyway. "ABC, easy as 1-2-3" was part of the old hand-clapping rhyme I learned, which sometimes ended, "We got the power!" with the Black Power fist. Nobody ever thought it was weird that a white girl did that ending. Nobody ever thought it was weird that black kids and white kids would pull their eyes up for the "Chinese, Japanese, Indian Chief!" rhyme.

(Sometimes we ended the ABC rhyme, "Now you got the chicken power!" I don't know what that signified!)

On Thursday, I was on my way to my volunteer stint with the Capitol Hill Pregnancy Center when an older black woman stopped me to ask if I'd heard: Had I heard that Michael Jackson died? I wasn't sure it was true until I got home, but I could pretty much hear in her voice that it was real.

Michael Jackson was part of the culture which formed me, and that's just inescapable, no matter your ultimate judgment of everything we heard about after the '80s.

Sean Collins does the caveats a lot better than I could.

INSIDE OF A CATHOLIC, IT'S TOO DARK TO READ. Summer books recommendations... hey, I'm in this!

What one then sees is a diverse set of practices that cannot be reduced to a single overarching motive but nonetheless employed the same rhetoric: practices of peacemaking, of countenance, of kinship. The same rhetoric that could ease the reconciliation of enemies could also enable the acceptance of a gift, or bind the affection of friends. It could enable adversaries to lay down a quarrel, without losing face. It could ease the passing of a gift, by its tactful indication that (as the language demonstrated in which a gift was offered) the giver also knew the limits beyond which the obligation it might create would not be pressed. And it could sustain by its binding force a true affection that might one day grow cold, through the infirmity of our natures. ...

The story I have set out to tell in this book is drawing near its end; but one final question remains, to which I now turn. What happened to the world I have described?
--The Friend

POSSIBLY MY FAVORITE MST3K JOKE EVER:

"Vatican II: The Final Reckoning!"

I think this might even beat the "Happy Saint Blaise Day!" throttling scene from Soultaker....

"I'M WITH CUPID": My review of Design for Living at the Shakespeare Theatre. With bonus Edward Albee!

(And yes, if you want to take this article as my partial rebuke to Jamie Kirchick, you may.)

Confusion was widespread in those years, but Empson countered it with a peculiarly British conception of ambiguity: “When I was crossing the fighting lines during the siege of Peking, to give my weekly lecture on Macbeth, a generous-minded peasant barred my way and said, pointing ahead: ‘That way lies death’”. Empson’s response was foggy, gnomic but swift: “Not for me, I have a British passport”.
--that same article about Angleton; whole piece is pretty fascinating

HOW IS ALAN BRAY SO AWESOME??? I'll write a real post on The Friend soon, but for now, just know that I'm in love with this book. As Mark Shea would say, "Check thou it out!"

THE CIA AND THE NEW CRITICISM:

...Norman Holmes Pearson, formerly an instructor in the English Department at Yale University before becoming a major element in the OSS, was wholly approving. As a student of literary criticism, he was naturally attracted to the subtleties of a text-based system that put a crucial emphasis on recognition of thematic and structural patterns. New Criticism, as the practice was called at Yale, concerned itself not with literary history and the personality of authors, but with the specific use poems made of language on the page. It fostered an interest in multiple levels of meaning, ambivalence, paradox, wit, puns and the peculiarities of Sprachgefühl: all devices on which cryptic codes or obscure messages might draw. In fact, when he described the whole Double Cross system, Pearson made it sound like a poem elucidated in class, its ironies nicely balanced, its contrasts wittily shaped. The power produced by this kind of close reading was intense, and as a result he was delighted to welcome as one of his new assistants in the OSS a graduate of Yale who had studied these mysteries: James Angleton. Based in Europe, educated at Malvern and clad in bespoke English tailoring, James Angleton fitted comfortably into an Anglophiliac Yale. The photo on the cover of Michael Holzman’s book makes him look remarkably like T. S. Eliot. Yet his full name, James Jesus Angleton, sets free its own vitalizing American ambiguity. He was the son of the US-born James Hugh Angleton and Carmen Mercedes Moreno from Nogales, Mexico. And though he never used his Mexican name in later life, that “Jesus” marks him, by our standards, as a Chicano: from a British perspective he seems exotically transatlantic.

Holzman’s brisk, uncluttered book offers valuable access to previously untapped material on Angleton, who became the first head of the Counter-intelligence Staff of the CIA. In particular, it makes incisive use of his years as a student of English at Yale and the influence on him of the New Critics and modernist poets of his day. Previous biographers such as Robin Winks have pointed out that at Yale he was co-editor of the literary journal Furioso. But Holzman takes a more spirited line, publishing two of Angleton’s grating undergraduate poems and a list of his correspondence with writers such as T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, I. A. Richards, William Empson, Ezra Pound and Louis MacNeice. These famous poets all “took this young man very seriously” and he, in return, was greatly impressed by their writings, particularly the book that became a crucial text of New Criticism, Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity. For Empson, ambiguity is the central aspect of language. Not a minor stylistic flourish, it is an unavoidable linguistic feature permanently in place and in effect seems to exploit the fundamental characteristics of language itself. This means that “opposite” meanings will always illuminate and invade the primary meanings of ordinary words, so that “in a sufficiently extended sense any prose statement could be called ambiguous”. Thus, Empson argues, a word may have several distinct meanings; several meanings connected with one another; several meanings which need one another to complete their meaning; or several meanings which unite together so that the word means one relation or one process . . . what often happens when a piece of writing is felt to offer hidden riches is that one phrase after another lights up and appears as the heart of it; one part after another catches fire.

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My philosophy? Metaphysics. What is metaphysics? There's a long, complicated explanation for that question. But to make it simple: A metaphysician doesn't believe you're dead when you die.
--The Dead Talk Back

Yes, I'm watching MST3K on YouTube. I'm reminded of the friend of mine who did interviewing for prospective Yale students. One eager little high-school senior said he wanted to study physics--at which point my friend got a devilish grin and asked, all atremble with temptation, "Have you ever heard of... metaphysics?"

FOLLOW SALAM PAX ON TWITTER. (Who? "I became the profane pervert Arab blogger....")

UPLIFTING: Over the weekend I watched Up in 3D. It was fantastic! (Very mild spoilers follow.)

Really, one of the best children's movies I've ever seen--maybe even second-best after the indescribable Last Unicorn. I'd say it's tied with The Great Muppet Caper. It's a beautiful story of love and grief, of fulfilling one's dreams and sacrificing them, of hope and wanderlust and discovery and homecoming. I think maybe the Kevin-the-bird arc is the subplot which defines the movie's heart: Obligations mean that sometimes a beautiful creature wanders into your world, and you fall in love with her, and then you let her go home.

It's poignant, hilarious, full of the "sense of wonder" and yet simultaneously very aware of life's limits. I loved Ratatouille, the only other Pixar flick I've seen, but this was just in a different ballpark.

I will say that I don't think of myself as someone with a fear of heights, but there are a lot of scenes in which a small child almost plummets to his death, and... I had a hard time. A lot of careful breathing and "it's just a movie!", there.

And, as I said to friends who'd watched the movie with me, "Maybe not today--maybe not tomorrow--but SOMEDAY, we'll get a children's movie or a superhero movie without Daddy Issues." I thought the choices around the divorce subplot were somewhat clumsy at the very end, even though they were pretty undeniably emotionally effective.

Nonetheless, highly recommended.

EATING PEOPLE IS WRONG. Proving too much?

She said to herself, "Is not the gown the natural raiment of extremity? What nation, what religion, what ghost, what dream, has not worn it--infants, angels, priests, the dead; why should not the doctor, in the grave dilemma of his alchemy, wear his dress?"
--Nightwood

IT'S THE FEAST OF ST. ONUPHRIUS, which should be my chance to show you guys the stark Ribera portrait. Google image search turns up only a bunch of art-print-on-demand sites, but you can at least get the basic idea.

Also, David Bowie sketchbook time!!! My immediate thought with the Seth sketch was, "Whoa--William F. Bowie!"

No one could intrude upon her because there was no place for intrusion. This inadequacy made her insubordinate--she could not participate in a great love, she could only report it.
--Nightwood

THE SEASONS COME, THE SEASONS GO: Notes about various things which have spanned my personal, furry-book boundary between spring and summer. In roughly chronological order.

Edmund White, The Married Man. At least one reviewer believed this to be White's best book. I can't imagine how that could be true.

It's a fairly standard account of gay love and death, enhanced by a few terrific turns of phrase and obviously by the subject matter, and nearly destroyed by a midsection devoted to hating America.

No, for real, give me a moment: I don't like Providence, RI either. And I even can see that perhaps the overdone buzzsaw-whine of this section was meant to be unattractive--we're shown, for example, that the narrator is busy destroying the tacky home he's subletting, and his dog menaces the local children while reeking horrid smells from some kind of gland in his ass... and yet, despite that, the dog is a Mary Sue (everyone loves him in the end! Except me!) and no matter how valid your critique of America is, fifty pages of humorless whining is really, really tiresome.

Once the book leaves New England, everything gets better, but really the best parts of this book are a fairly good novel, whereas Nocturnes for the King of Naples is a masterpiece. Read that instead.

Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring: This is a movie set at a Buddhist hermit's retreat. It is one of those gems thrown onto the shore by my Netflix account, so old and random that I have no idea why I ever requested it.

It's predictably beautiful, predictably recurrent, and perhaps predictably tragic. But there's a portrayal of penance (in the Fall section) which I hope will stick with me as long as I live. I don't know if it can even be called penance, really: It's punishment transformed into sublime beauty, and yet there's no explicit notice of forgiveness. Can there really be penance in a world where no God nor afterlife will offer complete reconciliation, complete and therefore unimaginable healing of our irrevocable acts? (The first section really hammers this home, as well, and does a great job of preparing us for the Fall section.)

I'd show this to a catechism class, if anyone would let me teach one. I think it's an amazing jumping-off point for a discussion of guilt, penance, forgiveness, loyalty, and sublimity.

I'd also very strongly recommend this to fans of The Mission, for the obvious compare/contrast.

E.F. Bentley, Trent's Last Case: Both Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers wrote gushing blurbs for this fairly standard, well-written mystery. It is okay. The very last revelation is quite fun. I guessed 1 1/2 of the twists before that one, which, given my record with Christie (only one accurate guess ever), suggests that this is perhaps not so unexpected as all that.

The writing is very easy and pleasant. The paleoconservatism is not my imagination--finance, and abstracted capitalism generally, are thoroughly demonized; but perhaps more interestingly than that, this book made me realize that if you beat up on deracinated cosmopolites you will necessarily also target anyone who would be unwelcome in the heartland. Some people are deracinated for a reason.

I really did like seeing the beginnings of new technologies, e.g. the page-and-a-half (?) description of fingerprint powder. I'd also recommend the fingerprint passage to anyone who wants to learn how to do exposition in a fun way.

Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love: Thin Victoriana.

I was honestly the worst audience for this, but really, just reading the biographies of the men involved would give you a more complex picture of this era. This is AE Housman filed down to almost nothing, which is poignant I guess, but deeply self-comforting for our own era. Is there a fight here? I mean, is there any kind of tension whatsoever, with at least two competing sides? I don't see it.

Wilde, a simplistic movie, did better with Wilde; the most interesting thing in the Stoppard, for me, was the use of the ancient gods. He does that in Rock 'n' Roll, too. Is this just a sentimental sediment of Christianity, or are the gods doing something else and irreducible?

The House that Screamed/La Residencia: So you can see this on IMDB tv, as I did, because it was featured on "Movie Macabre"--a series I think all red-blooded Americans will remember as "Elvira, Mistress of the Dark." Revisiting the series has been something of a disappointment for me.

But this installment is... memorable. I suspect the Spanish title really translates as "The Residential School," in which case... yeah. It's Catholic abuse exploitation a-go-go. Smokin' hot chicks in corsets getting whipped and so forth. It's impossible for me to recommend this, but star Lilli Palmer is amazingly beautiful; I was genuinely, if miserably, fascinated to see how the Spanish production team worked out any cultural anxieties about the power of the Church (yes, there is a scene where nice reform-school girls saying their prayers are intercut with a bad reform-school girl getting beaten); and I think the whole cultural positioning of this movie is sickly fascinating given What We Now Know about how horrific the residential schools really were. This seems like the kind of movie you only make in that slipping-off-the-tightrope cultural moment when you know the Church has become complicit in horrible crimes and yet you haven't acknowledged those crimes, so it's still kind of B-movie, popcorn.

AVOID FOOD PRODUCTS that make health claims. For a food product to make health claims on its package it must first have a package, so right off the bat it's more likely to be a processed than a whole food. Generally speaking, it is only the big food companies that have the wherewithal to secure FDA-approved health claims for their products and then trumpet them to the world.
--Michael Pollan, "In Defense of Food," which I found in Best Food Writing 2008

"Food rules" are really better understood as velvet ropes, which you duck under even though you respect them--I'd eat a Swiss Cake Roll right this minute, I love Coca-Cola with an unholy passion, and I only stopped eating Chicken McNuggets because the outlet closest to me stopped giving me free processed honey--but as far as food rules go, this seems like a sound one. Cooking is an art, and defending it in utilitarian terms shocks my conscience as much as defending Mozart because it makes your baby have a higher IQ.

BUT SHE'S TOO ROUGH AND I'M TOO DELICATE: A reader writes, after my Catholic and Feminist review:

I share your disappointment that the book didn't tackle the real fascination of "Catholic and/or/but feminist," which is the dynamic of submission in feminism: what kinds are privileged (sorry, English major), who says so, why, etc.

Take Morrissey. One of the weirdnesses of his persona is that he is avowedly feminist, and yet he totally possesses, in Laura Mulvey's eternal phrase, "to-be-looked-at-ness." Just as much as any woman in von Sternberg or Hitchcock, he is completely constructed as an image to be consumed by the audience. He chooses to position himself as powerless and for-your-pleasure (or, according to St. Morrissey, as a Northern Woman). And while I've read about why he might like Factory girls or Northern Women as a viewer, has anyone really accounted for why he would choose aesthetic submission for himself?

Of course, I'm not trying to suggest a real equivalence. Aesthetic submission can be worn lightly because it's a pose, and authenticity is the enemy (or irritant) of art. Religious submission is another matter entirely. But in the sense that the aesthetically submissive must choose that for themselves, maybe there is something of a model there for a submission that does not become dominating and coercive and violent, as feminists fear. Or maybe it does, and Moz and Grace Kelly really are just so much siren song luring us into degradation. (Morrissey might like that.)

My readers: so much fun!

The woman who presents herself to the spectator as a "picture" forever arranged is, for the contemplative mind, the chiefest danger. Sometimes one meets a woman who is beast turning human. Such a person's every movement will reduce to an image of a forgotten racial memory; as insupportable a joy as would be the vision of an eland coming down an aisle of trees, chapleted with orange blossoms and bridal veil, a hoof raised in the economy of fear, stepping in the trepidation of flesh that will become myth; as the unicorn is neither man nor beast deprived, but human hunger pressing its breast to its prey.
--Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

SINCERITY IS WHAT COMES AFTER INNOCENCE BUT WELL BEFORE CHASTITY.

"WE'LL BURN THAT BRA WHEN WE COME TO IT." My Inside Catholic book column, on Florence King's When Sisterhood Was in Flower.

"TOWARD A BIOETHICS OF LOVE." Helen Rittelmeyer's provocative piece on "what conservatism can offer disability activism":

My sister’s genetic disorder is too unusual to have a name. If it seems like the person I’m talking to won’t understand a medical description—grand mal seizures, nonverbal, severe-to-profound mental retardation—the layman’s version is that she’s a 10-month-old mind trapped in a 20-year-old body.

I am not often asked whether there is a cure. When I heard the question for the first time, only a year ago, my answer, which appalled the questioner, was that my family probably wouldn’t be interested in one.

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There's a discussion here if you want comments-boxing. I'm not sure I have anything useful to say yet. I will note that when Christ appeared to the apostles in His glory, the glorified body still bore the wounds of crucifixion.... Anyway, I'd really, really like to hear other people's thoughts on this, so if you have links to send, send 'em--I'll do a link round-up soonish.

THE TORTURE DEBATE (AS A BATMAN COMIC): Cussin', bad taste, bad spelling, and gallows humor. You're welcome.

REVERSE-ENGINEERED "IRON CHEF" RECIPES!!!

I SHOULDA BEEN A PAIR OF RAGGED CLAWS: A friend sent me this link with the note, "Here is a giant centipede that reminds me of you." (Scroll halfway down the page.)

Post title via Tom Eliot and Alison Bechdel....

Art cannot be subordinate to its subject, otherwise it is not art but biography, and biography is the mesh through which our real life escapes.
--character of Oscar Wilde, in Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love

BISY BACKSON.

VERY EXPENSIVE STONE. Sorry--as you can probably tell, the post below was unfinished. My computer crashed. I want to do a longer post looking at a bunch of Mangan's columns, because she's a vivid writer and a good opponent even where I disagree, but I don't have time right now. For some children's-book recommendations from me, you can go here, here, and (with caveat) here. Also, I don't think I mentioned the Bagthorpe books for some reason; read those too!

Meanwhile, 1) it's the feast of St. Justin Martyr, patron of philosophers!

and

2) I have very vague, and possibly false, memories of an article making the case that the Slits scene in Derek Jarman's Jubilee "elected Thatcher" (by being emblematic of the '70s glorification of public disorder, which isn't the only reading of Jubilee, but whatev). Did I dream this, or does someone else remember the article? I need it for a thing.

DON'T GET CAUGHT: Lucy Mangan's list of indispensable children's fiction is... worth fighting.

I love The Borribles more than life, and I think Mangan makes the case for them in her arm's-length review. The third volume is skippable, but The Borribles and The Borribles Go for Broke are somewhere beyond children's classics.

She's made me really want to read Rumer Godden's A Doll's House,

PUTTING THE "PALE" BACK IN PALEOCONS: Of course within 15 pages Trent's Last Case gives us a "raving crowd of Jews." I couldn't tell you why. (Oh, no, right--I remember! It's because the early twentieth century heralded a beautiful new era when Jews would reign over their Gentile oppressors! ...You know, because that's what happened!)

Oh paleoconservatism. How you won't be missed.

Between what matters and what seems to matter, how should the world we know judge wisely?
--E.C. Bentley, first line, Trent's Last Case

"Hey, what's your name anyway?"

"Julien."

"Really?" Austin said. "That's the name of the guy who just dropped me."

Julien smiled, Austin guessed, not at his misfortune but at the explicitness of his remark. Sometimes it's okay to be American, Austin thought; we have a reputation for being brazen we must live up to.
--Edmund White, The Married Man

FIFTY HORROR MOVIES WHICH SHOULD EXIST: The amazing list of a Final Girl. I'm definitely not giving you all the terrific ones.

2. The Eyes Have Eyes
7. Wicked Harvest: You Are Food
18. Death is My Co-Pilot
34. And A Child Shall Kill Them
36. Black Thesis
37. Black Thesis 2: Ibid

more! (unsurprisingly, the comments also offer up some cursed gems)

(In every cycle there is a candidate reporters and liberals fall in love with whom they do not call liberal but call instead fresh or new or independent or a laughter-loving Aphrodite.)
--Richard Brookhiser, Right Time, Right Place: Coming of Age with William F. Buckley Jr. and the Conservative Movement. I like Rick a lot personally--too much to feel like I can review this memoir--and I'm enjoying his latest book immensely, as I've also loved his books on Washington and Hamilton.

SOME SUNNY DAY: If you live in or near DC, I can tell you one thing you need to do right now: Go and fetch yourself a ticket to the Studio Theater's production of Tom Stoppard's Rock'n'Roll. I haven't been blown away by other Stoppard I've seen, but this thing is just fantastic on every level. I'll be reviewing it, so I'll say more then, but... it's about the Velvet Revolution, and ethics vs. Dionysos, and the materialism of dialectical materialism, and... it's really funny, and it earns its ending. Dooooooo eeeeeeeet.

FOUR LINKS: "Troops take cues from classic plays: Theater of War spotlights symptoms of depression." Via Thunderstruck.

Jack Balkin: "The Rotation of the Justices: A Thought Experiment." So fascinating!

Do you want to know how Robert Bork became Chief Justice? Why the Court never heard Bush v. Gore? Read on.

well, read on why doncha!

My friend Brian Hughes has a piece in the Wall Street Journal, "Gays Have Served Honorably in the War on Terror."

...Straight and gay soldiers have been fighting side by side in Afghanistan, Iraq and beyond without incident. More than 20 of our closest allies have integrated gays into their ranks, including all of NATO except Turkey. American troops work and live with these forces without incident.

Here at home, every government service is integrated, including the paramilitary sections of the CIA that work hand in glove with the armed services. The presence of gays in these organizations is a nonissue. The idea that our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines would have any greater difficulty adjusting is an insult to their professionalism.

more--I think I agree with every word of this piece

And finally, right now at MarriageDebate you can read about the decline of muses, American fertility exceptionalism, equal protection, donor conception across national borders, and unwed motherhood on the rise in the US and worldwide. And more.

IF IT BLEEDS, IT LEADS: I missed it, but yesterday was the feast of St. Bernardino of Siena, patron of preachers, publishers, and boxers.

We should therefore be wary of any modern appeals to medieval traditions that oppose male to female or equate flesh with sexuality. We should also understand that there is little basis in late medieval art or devotion for treating body as entrapment rather than opportunity, suffering as evil to be eschewed rather than promise to be redeemed. My argument then is not titillating antiquarianism. It is rather a challenge to us to think more deeply about what our basic symbols mean. There may be warrant in the Christian tradition for equating the penis with maleness and maleness with humanity, but I would argue that medieval theology at least as explicitly equates the breast with femaleness and femaleness both with the humanity of Christ and with the humanity of us all. There may be warrant in the Christian tradition for seeing the resurrection as triumph over body, but I would suggest that medieval piety (at least in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries) speaks far more urgently of life coming from death, of significance located in body, of pain and suffering as the opportunity--even the cause--of salvation. A better understanding of the medieval past might thus enable modern people to give to age-old symbols new meanings that would be in fact medieval. If we want to express the significance of Jesus in both male and female images, if we want to turn from seeing body as sexual to seeing body as generative, if we want to find symbols that give dignity and meaning to the suffering we cannot eliminate and yet fear so acutely, we can find support for doing so in the art and theology of the later Middle Ages.
--Caroline Walker Bynum, "The Body of Christ in the Later Middle Ages: A Reply to Leo Steinberg," in Fragmentation and Redemption (citations omitted)

I'M TOO LAZY TO LOOK UP PICTURES ON FACEBOOK so here are two quizzy things I liked.

Five things you can reach from where you're sitting: Saints: A Year in Faith and Art; a corkscrew (and a Bible Literacy Project mug filled with white wine); sea salt; amoxicillin (last day!); a 1982 Pizza Hut collectible glass, etched with a picture of E.T. and the slogan, "Be Good."

Five things you loved when you were little: pictures of unicorns; Eugene Debs (for certain values of "little"!); wolves; "The Mysterious Cities of Gold"; pillbugs.

ALIEN SHE: I'm loving Fragmentation and Redemption, but the first essay does have one premise I'd like to challenge a bit. Bynum writes, "If one looks with women rather than at women, women's lives are not liminal to women--but neither, except in a very partial way, are male roles or male experiences."

That might be entirely true of the medieval women's narratives she's discussing. I certainly don't know enough to challenge her there! But she does seem to be implying that it's true per se--women aren't liminal to women because we are women--and that I think is false.

One of the facts of women's lives in what you can call patriarchy (although I think that term's focus on fatherhood is misleading, both because women-as-mothers do an immense amount to shape and transmit culture and because you can have male domination of culture despite a severe diminution of fathers' status and presence--anyway, let's move on) is that women are alien to ourselves and "other" to ourselves.

There are obvious disadvantages to this fact of emotions. There are perhaps less-obvious spiritual advantages. Self-alienation can be a strong source of insight, self-questioning, and Christian submission. (This possibility is really important w/r/t Bynum's essay, because she's arguing that medieval women's religious narratives generally rested on continuity of identity rather than radical conversion of identity: Because they already identified with Christ-the-suffering or Christ-the-lowly, they could imitate Him without a radical transformation or "reversal" of identity.)

My own perspective on this stuff is really weird because of being lesbian--I talked about gay alienation as a precursor to Catholic conversion here and here, and alluded to it here. I don't know to what extent my personal focus on the benefits rather than the (real, obvious, and painful) drawbacks of self-alienation and viewing women as Other are related to my sexual orientation, and I'd be interested in any comments you all have there. But on the more basic point about women's self-alienation (and therefore, although I know these aren't synonymous terms, self-liminality), I've heard lots of straight women support my position.

Where this goes, I don't know. It does, at least, complicate Bynum's final call to "stand with" women when doing history; how do you "stand with" someone who doesn't entirely stand with herself? (Should we seek to "stand with" ourselves?)

OH, HOW THE GHOST OF YOU CLINGS!: So, five favorite smells? This is hard.

Tentative list: tulip trees, blue ditto ink, lilacs, honeysuckle, cigarettes.

(I don't smoke. There should probably be a sub-entry for "cigarettes mixed with Pert Plus," for reasons largely explained by the heading of this entry.)

If I could add five more: salt water + suntan lotion, the vents of laundries (you know, where the fluff collects), old blankets, fresh basil, hamburgers on the grill.

The eucharist, albeit a recapitulation of Christ's execution, was not therefore a symbol of death but of life, birth and nursing. As I have argued elsewhere, it stood for Christ's humanness and therefore for ours. By eating it and, in that eating, fusing with Christ's hideous physical suffering, the Christian not so much escaped as became the human.
--Caroline Walker Bynum, "Women's Stories, Women's Symbols: A Critique of Victor Turner's Theory of Liminality," in Fragmentation and Redemption

eta: Oops! "Hideious" was a typo, not a pun....

"THANKS FOR YOUR HEART, BART." I loved Barton Fink from the very first shot, where the yellow(ed) wallpaper becomes the site of horror. Here are some thoughts on why this movie completely works for me in every moment (whereas The Big Lebowski, for example, is smarter and perhaps more essential, yet sloppier--they're both totally awesome).

First of all, Sean Collins is right as usual in saying that this is a horror movie. In fact, it's very close to an exercise in writing "If the movie of The Shining were funny." It's also a horror-comedy beating up on the idea that art is ethics, which is intensely awesome and right. Sean's review is fantastic and touches on several aspects I don't talk about here. I don't think I disagree with anything he says.

The hotel wallpaper is such a great starting image, basically because it's not what Sean calls the "monumental" horror image, something there which shouldn't be there--think of the twin girls in The Shining, or the wicker man in eponymous. (Argh, it's been years since I read Sean's fantastic essay, so if he incorporates this concept I apologize.) Instead, the horror of the wallpaper is the horror of something which really should be there in a cultural or ordinary-experience sense, something expected... and yet, in some other, emotional or metaphysical sense, still shouldn't--something which still isn't right. The normal course of the world is disruption.

And there are tons of other horror motifs throughout the movie--the use of music and sound effects, for example, is totally horror, and so is the hideous sticky dew of the peeling wallpaper. And in some sense you can say that the whole point of the movie is that even if you think you might be in a satire--and how awful is that, as a realization?--it's still even worse, because you're really in a horror flick. That I think is a fairly profound statement; and true.

More stuff about this movie.... I realize that I'm basically not rational about it, because it happened to employ one very specific symbol which shook my heart. Barton is a NYC playwright who gets hijacked by Hollywood. He checks into an adorably stereotypical hotel, with outlandish jungle palms and a knowing desk clerk and a duelling-scarred elevator man. (I really liked how this movie employed stereotypes without ever considering itself superior to them. Cliches are fun... and not random; they hook into some real anxieties here, even while being desperately overdone.) He goes up to his room. He sits down at his typewriter. He looks up.

And then he sees this photograph.

It's a picture of a pretty young lady sitting on a beach, looking out at the sea.

I can't even tell you what this thing means to me. It is so close to my own personal map of longing, of what George Orwell in 1984 calls "the Golden Country"... of the shores of Sans-Souci. It's what King Haggard means in The Last Unicorn when he says, about unicorns, "The first time I saw them, I thought I was going to die."

The moment I saw that photo I pretty much knew I was in thrall to this movie. And in fact, that photo turns out to be really important, used in really smart and complex thematic ways. (Check it out in the final scenes with Charlie Meadows, for example--his head is right up against the picture frame. And of course the finale uses this photo in a way I loved, even though I don't really understand it.)

There are probably other things I could say. I loved the exploration of a specifically left-wing Jewish horror, in which art-as-ethics suffered three distinct defeats:

1) The ethical artist really doesn't listen; his art is self-absorption. (This is really explicit in the text--"I could tell you stories," Charlie says at least three times, but Barton never asks about them; "You don't listen!" Charlie yells, at last. If the movie weren't funny this would come off as really heavy-handed, but I think the charming presentation and silly physicality--pus dripping from cotton-swabbed ears--makes it totally work. Plus the fact that the alternative presented, art-as-escapism, is equally awful!)

2) There are times when we experience moral vertigo, when "the right thing to do" is unclear, estranged, and horrifically far away. (This, and the point below, are I think big parts of why the "Bill Mayhew"/Faulkner cliche-fest is important.)

3) And after that, even when we regain some sense of morals, we still must confront radical evil--a kind of evil which makes all the talk of ethics ring hollow, where the question isn't, "What do I do now in order to be human?" but, "Why should I keep trying to be human, or to be anything at all?"

Also, it's funny. So nu, not as funny as The Big Lebowski ("Say what you like about National Socialism--at least it's an ethos!")... but still a good time at the popcorn house. And your laughter grants the movie its authority.

"'KISS'? WHAT IS 'KISS'?": So today, for the second time in a couple weeks, I came across that definition of postmodernism (Lyotard's?) where it's defined as the rejection of metanarratives. Here's why I think that's unhelpful. These thoughts are even more fragmentary than usual, which I suppose is appropriate....

I'm no more interested in a "definition" of postmodernism than I am in a definition of conservatism; both terms seem to imply more a tradition of discourse than an orthodoxy.

And within that tradition of discourse there are authors whose work relies heavily on certain highly-charged terms--words "surcharg'd with wine," as they say--and if you single out these words as especially important, that implies a metanarrative. This is still true even if the author doesn't attempt to discern or dictate much about the content of that metanarrative. The example I think of is Derrida's use of "the other" and "the avenir," both of which imply, I think, a sort of skeletal Jewish-or-maybe-Christian narrative. (And not, for example, a Platonist one, because of the emphasis on the avenir. Some narratives are excluded, which I'm pretty sure you can't do unless you do have a metanarrative, however parsimonious or covert.)

There are likely other elements of Derrida's thought which would conflict with the narrative implied by the other-avenir stuff; but it seems to me that you then end up either discerning conflict between narratives, or reconciling them somehow (either of which implies a metanarrative about what constitutes conflict and what constitutes reconciliation). Or, you know, just saying one thing and then saying something else, but at that point you're just giving up on the self, like when you put your nose right up to a pointillist painting and all the people turn out to be cacophonies of dots; that is certainly one way to do postmodernism, but not the only one within this tradition of discourse. And in fact, to my mind it's the least interesting response to conflicting implied narratives, because it's the only one where you don't ever have to change anything at all about yourself. You can just keep "holding Yes and No together in one hand," in Anne Carson's terrific phrase, which is the same thing as standing still. No choices are required and therefore no sacrifices and no personal transformation. What is the point of a life like that? I mean, I suppose you could be happy. If that's what you really want.

Back to Derrida and implied narratives, which in turn imply metanarratives. Now, I admit that I'm an extremist here: I think words like "vulture" and "sparrow" imply a metanarrative. But I don't think you have to go that far (although I wish you would! Didn't Wilde teach us that we must "go as far as possible"?) to accept the point that some words which were crucial to actual existing postmodernists do imply metanarratives.

In fact, I'd argue that the term "postmodernity" itself, while obviously insufficient and kind of hilariously woozy with indeterminacy, implies a fairly obvious narrative, in which modernity is a thing which it's important that we're post-. So by the time you're pretending to define it, you're already accepting and/or creating a metanarrative. (I'm guessing Lyotard, or whoever, knew this and addressed it somehow or decided not to care, so I'm really not addressing him but more his popularizers.)

And this brings me to John Paul II, whom I consider the greatest postmodernist of the past century, and whose wine-charged word was so often "nuptial" or "gift" or some similar insufficiently-hardcore way of saying "kiss." Not only in his writings on the "theology of the body" but also in his writings on faith and reason, and on philosophical practice, he tapped into and further explicated a narrative in which the primary metaphor for our lives is the kiss: both otherness and reconciliation, with neither term conquering the other. So much of his writing is pretty obviously a translation of basic Biblical rhetoric into the new language/slang/pidgin of postmodernity.

My bitter-little-lady thought for the day is to wonder whether existentialist postmodernism is simply Christianity reconceived as intellectual promiscuity: kissing everything in sight in an attempt at self-expression.

So... yeah, this was obviously much more of a blog post than a treatise! But then, I reject treatises utterly--if you must write philosophy, write dialogues. My main problem with JPII, on a philosophical level, is that he shoulda just kept writing plays.

SAINT JOB: I think Sunday trumps, but if it doesn't, this is his feast day.

RESOLVED: THE CONSERVATIVE CANNOT BE A PHILOSOPHER. So how many of the posts at Secular Right really boil down to rejections of philosophy as such?

Surely it is possible to be conservative, in love with Sophia, and--at least for a while!--atheist. I mean, lots of my friends are in that position, and I'm going to tentatively say that if something exists then that thing must be possible. So where are their allies?

Any incident is comic that calls our attention to the physical in a person, when it is the moral side that is concerned.
--Henri Bergson, "Laughter," quoted in (a footnote to) Caroline Walker Bynum, "In Praise of Fragments: History in the Comic Mode"--introduction to Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on Gender and the Human Body in Medieval Religion

I already have two epigraphs for the novel-in-progress (working title: New Wineskins), and three seems pretentious... but if I need a spare, this one's pretty awesome. I'm so excited about this book.

THANK YOU FOR BEING A FRIEND: What kind of Cat'lick dyke would I be if I didn't ask for your prayers for our beloved Bea Arthur? Deadpool and I are mourning this sweet lady; Sean Collins provides the best summary of her unique charm.

Her ability to acknowledge her flaws but power past them made her the perfect foil for Rose's naivete, Blanche's narcissism, and Sofia's provincialism, all of which she parried with her own trademark characteristic: bullshit-deflating sarcasm. As The Missus put it last night while we were discussing Dorothy, "They took the 'straight-man' character and made her funny.'"

more

IF YOU'RE STILL LOOKING FOR MOTHER'S DAY GIFTS, you could look here.

She was gazing slantwise towards the floor in some kind of coldly patient irony, he felt sick to death of himself.
--James Agee, A Death in the Family. I wouldn't do that with the comma, and this sentence probably doesn't work out of context, but given that I had this exact experience recently (from the man's position), well... here's the quotation.