HURRY UP DAY JOB: MarriageDebate! This week, IVF mistakes and what we mean when we say a child is "ours"; adoption and parental investment; fathers, and whether family-resource centers tend to assume that they're irrelevant.

Last week, marriage in the movies, a CNN debate about monogamy, a chewy Newsweek piece on the future of abstinence-only sex ed, libertarianism and culture, "your brain without Dad," Stephen Colbert, and much much more.

I know I don't post there regularly enough. But believe me, even if you have signed up (as I hope you have!) for the IMAPP weekly newsletter, you're still missing interesting marriage- and family-related links, if you don't check in at the blog. (The weekly newsletter does give you the more scholarly stuff, so if your time is limited, consider signing up for that. The site itself is a bit more freewheeling, basically whatever I feel like throwing into the hopper plus whatever the IMAPP overlords consider interesting plus occasional flotsam. That can be a real advantage, though, since the blog addresses a wider range of issues and perspectives than the newsletter.)

I am not being paid to tell you this! I just think we've got stuff up there now which would interest many of the readers of this site.

PS: As always, send me links! As you can see from the cornucopia above, the site deals with marriage, family, parenting, and gender issues, and we're willing to publish pretty much anybody's perspective as long as it's well-written and/or intriguing. Our job is to advance the debate.

A GIRL ON A BEACH: On October 30, I watched Nosferatu at the AFI Silver, with a live score by the Silent Orchestra. There are a lot of things one could notice about that experience (SOMEDAY I will own the SO-scored version of Alla Nazimova's Salome!!!!) but I will just pick one.

This movie is very long, for a silent movie, and it does have bland stretches. But it also offers lots and lots of scary ship upon a scary ocean. And it also is only the second movie, after Barton Fink, where I've found an image from my personal horror iconography presented in all its beauty and terror.

The Mina Harker character--I can't remember her nom de ripoff, but you know which one I mean--sits out on the beach and waits for her husband's ship. The waves crest black; the grasses shake in the wind. Crosses are planted here and there around the bench where she sits, memorials to sailors lost.

This one scene twists in my gut. It takes the hope, the memory, the sense that once there was a place where we were at home--all the things I associate with this scene of a beautiful girl on a beach--and studs it with crosses, with death and heartbreak.

I have been here before
But when or how I cannot tell;
I know the grass beyond the door,
The sweet keen smell,
The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.

--Dante Rossetti, "Sudden Light" (more from me)

Somewhere I have heard this before...

--Nirvana, "Drain You"

Just a beach and a pretty girl,
If you just take this potion

--The Levellers, "Fifteen Years"

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;

--Edgar Poe, "Annabel Lee"

Oh life looked so rosy in the blogwatch,
But I'll be a friend and I'll tell you what's in store...

Belated Halloweenery edition.

Camassia on Synetic Theater's Dracula adaptation. I strongly second her belief that Synetic should've stayed wordless; the best moments of the production were all dance, from the snaky vampire women to the eerie invisible horse. (That horse really should NOT have worked--it should've evoked memories of Monty Python members banging coconuts--and yet the amazing lighting work and the actor's total commitment to the moment made his galloping seem terrifying, not silly.)

Dresden Codak: 42 Essential Third-Act Twists. FOOD STARTS EATING PEOPLE.

Pumpkin Gutter: This may be the most fabulous thing ever. Iron Pumpkin, embryo pumpkin, American Gothic pumpkin, braces pumpkin, scary eye pumpkin, tarantula pumpkin... there's something here for everyone (in the Addams Family). Sadly, I forget where I found this.

Sean Collins: Reviewing Al Columbia's Pim and Francie:

But moreover, these scary stories and disturbing images are all so gorgeously awful that they appear to have corrupted the book itself. They look like they've emerged from the ether, seared or stained themselves partly onto the pages, then burned out, or been extinguished when the nominal author shut his sketchbook and hurled it across the room or tore up the pages in terror.

MORE.

Plus, he reviews Paranormal Activity. While he ended up with a different overall stance on the movie than I did, I really liked a lot of his review, e.g.:

...For some reason, the lights being flipped on and off really got me. They weren't flickering--something was walking around turning lights on and off. Not only was something else present in the house, it was basically using the house the way we would--only it was nothing like us in nature or intent. I dunno, that creeped me out pretty bad.

But best/worst of all were the two scenes where somnambulist Katie got out of bed, turned to face it, and just...stood there, for hours and hours. That's pure automaton Freudian uncanny, of course, and a monumental horror-image par excellence. ...These are actions that really have no inherent emotional or psychological content whatsoever. They're purely neutral. But when you have no idea why someone's doing them, even totally neutral actions can become sinister, almost intolerable.

(whole thing--plus comments-boxing!)

Basically, the buzz around PA has made me really want to rewatch The Blair Witch Project--especially since I am in the minority who really liked the Heather character!--so that's probably good.

THE CHILDREN OF THE NIGHT: If you don't check out the Kindertrauma Jukebox... well, I reckon we don't like your kind 'round here.

The Specials provide my favorite tune by far.

The function of the advance guard in military terms is exactly that of the rear guard, to protect the main body, which translates as the status quo.
--Donald Barthelme, quoted in the American Conservative, of which more later

THREE LINKS. First, in honor of the 75th anniversary of the Yale Political Union, the only article you'll ever need about the ypu.

But also: Noli Irritare Leones turned me on to these two interesting posts: a friendship contract; and the "moral murkiness" of charity. The latter link has a terrific story of a fistfight, and reminds me of my post about pregnancy center counseling, leadership, and complicity.

OUT AND ABOUT, LIKE A RORSCHACH BAT*: Here's where I'll be in the next few days. If your own itinerary looks similar, why not say hello?

Thursday: All-day conference at Heritage on "Religious Practice and the Family: What the Research Says." This is totally free, they feed you, and I should be able to get an article out of it... and, uh, it's also a fascinating subject!

Then, at night, I shall venture into darkest Rosslyn (it's actually about four blocks from the metro, but I am scared of suburbs) to see Synetic Theater's wordless adaptation of Dracula. I saw their Midsummer Night's Dream earlier this month, and it was amazing--funny, sexy, eerie, poignant, all conveyed solely through music and movement. I'd been hearing about this troupe, mostly made up of Georgian immigrants, for years; I can tell you it lives up to the hype. More once I've seen Dracula.

Friday: "Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror," at the American Film Institute Silver theater in Silver Spring. Again, a short (though uphill) walk from the metro. Scary movie with live music. I'll be at the 9.30 screening.

Saturday: Halloween!

Sunday: "Night Editor," AFI, 12.45 pm--tickets only $5! Noir, and I'm hoping the title indicates that there will be at least a bit of newspaper-noir, a subgenre I can never resist.

(Also, this is All Saints' Day, of course, so I will be churchifying.)

*Possibly the second-most obscure blog heading I've ever used. That Hattifatteners quote might still be the most obscure.

"SHELF LIFE." My new AmCon column--which is only available to subscribers online, so check your local libraries and newsstands!--takes a look at Martin Luther King, Jr. Public Library. I think this is my favorite DC column so far.

THE PURPOSE PRIZE. Hey, that's my aunt! (Second item.)

"Conservatism is my sexual preference."
--the FC, around 5 a.m. Sunday morning

The last bus I missed to Maudlin Street,
so you drove me home in the van
saying, "Women only watch me
for my blogs..."

Sean Collins says more or less what I thought about Danica Novgorodoff's Slow Storm comic... except that he was easier on white-$#@!up Ursa than I was. But yeah, the art is amazing.

Maggie Gallagher on Ricky Gervais vs. Oscar Wilde (yeah, you have to fight through some partisanage, but it's worth it--scroll until you hit the Wildery if you have to).

Mark Shea on converts vs. cradle Catholics--yeah, I think this is a good assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of all us messed-up popish folk.

HOT LINKS FOR HORROR CHICKS. I revisit Night of the Living Dead. (Also contains comments on Paranormal Activity, so you might want to avoid this post if you're avoiding fairly general yea-or-nay commentary on that flick.)

Lotsa horror-bloggers list the tropes which always freak them out! Fascinating. I will say a) my thoughts about Zelda in the movie of Pet Sematary can be discerned from my thoughts about the mother in the Willard remake (which I otherwise loved--and, in fact, I definitely would not make this same criticism of the novel of Pet Sematary),

and b) I can only think of two tropes which get to me as horror in a way that they affect me in no other genre. #1: the sea. Discussed here and here and here. The black and churning ocean.

#2: traumatized blondes. From The Birds to Vertigo and way beyond... horror is literally the only genre in which blondes really do it for me. I mean, I wouldn't kick Veronica Lake out of my... uh, church pew... but for the most part it's only in horror that blondes make sense to me.

The More You Know!

...D'Addario was a rare breed of supervisor for a paramilitary organization. He had learned long ago to suppress the first impulse of command that calls for a supervisor to intimidate his men, charting their every movement and riding them through investigations. In the districts, that sort of behavior usually resulted from a new supervisor's primitive conclusion that the best way to avoid being perceived as weak was to behave like a petty tyrant.
--David Simon, Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets

This petty-tyranny is what leadership isn't. Leadership is getting men to love what you love. ("Talent hits a target no one else can hit. Genius hits a target no one else can see.") Leadership is about creating future leaders, who can see what you couldn't see. Command is always, at its best, a form of submission: submission to the target, to the unseen, to the mission, to the barely-apprehended beloved.

[edited to clarify what I meant by "this"!]

LESBIAN CHRISTIAN WHATNOT. Disputed Mutability is back!!! "Celibacy I could accept. Assimilation never!"

and Miss Ogilvy seeks novel recommendations.

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: A TERRIFIC DATE MOVIE! Unless you're heterosexual or something.

No, an actual review is here. Probably too long, probably chewing a bit too hard, but there you have it....

"MOTHERING GOD."

YET ANOTHER POST ABOUT THE END OF "EYES WIDE SHUT" (AND MY CONVERSION):

The fundamental anthropological truth of the Gospel is not that we are sinners, but that we are loved. Repentance is not grasping that I am a sinner, any fool with a modicum of self-knowledge and awareness knows that about himself. No, repentance is knowing in a deep and personal way that I am loved.

(the rest)

PURGATORY IS A ROMAN A CLEF, AT BEST: Elie Wiesel's play The Trial of God is amazing, and if you're reading this blog, you probably should read it. It's based on a real thing that happened: Wiesel, fifteen years old, was taken under the wing of some fellow Auschwitz prisoners who were rabbis and Talmud scholars. One night they put God on trial, as Job did. God did not deign to appear in the dock as He did with Job. They brought in a verdict of guilty. Then they made their nightly prayers.

The Trial of God changes both the setting and the outcome. We're in a 17th-c. village which has recently been scourged by a pogrom. This early-modern setting gives a sense of the ways that Jew-hate has existed across millennia. The pretext for the trial is that this night is Purim--the night celebrating the Hebrews' miraculous victory, recorded in the Book of Esther, against the genocidal villain Haman. A traditional formula states that on this night, Jews must get so drunk that they can't tell Haman from (the Jewish father and hero) Mordechai. This is carnival for Jews, carnival with a knifepoint as sharp as it should be (yet almost never is) for Christians.

The idea of recasting the Book of Job as a Purimspiel is astonishing. Everything in this play rang true to me. Initially I did wonder about some things said by the local Orthodox Christian priest, in which he explicitly praised Haman and said he was a true Christian--that seemed like making one's opponents unnecessarily stupid. But actually I think it illustrates how insane Jew-hate makes the haters. A Christian who hates Jews must be open to shockingly absurd reworkings of the Gospels, and Paul's letters.

I'd recommend that you avoid any edition of this play which includes interpretive essays by Christian theologians. My copy has two, a foreword and an afterword, and both seem rather disgustingly invested in taming the text. There is no way to make this text "safe" for Christians--or Jews. There is no way to make this text an apologia for God. It is not possible, and I'm somewhat shocked that anyone tried.

I do think Wiesel's play is haunted by the Christian understanding of God, not solely the Jewish understanding. There are several moments where it seems like there's a deep desire and need to see God Himself suffer. If only one could be certain that God Himself is crucified with the persecuted Jews, then perhaps God might be worthy of love... or perhaps not. Perhaps this would simply make Him yet another clown, another puppet yanked around by the strings of history and hate.

What Wiesel does display so helplessly is the terrible cry, "If there is no God, what do we matter?" If there is no God, why does human suffering matter; why does justice matter, beyond the dumb utilitarian desire to hurt less and enjoy more; why are there Jews? It is the raw fact of the Jews, and nothing else, which stands in the face of atheism in this play. It seems as though the choice is: Either the Jews are absurd, or God is.

THREE DEFENSES OF THE BUTCH MANTILLA: This is not a post about sincerism!

But in my previous vast post on the subject, I said this:

My strong impression is that sincerism is connected to a belief that ethical discourse is the only valid philosophical discourse. Talk of right/wrong always trumps talk of beautiful/banal. (I hope this formulation indicates that I do think sincerity--like ethics-talk!--is frequently appropriate.) If you say, "Women covering their heads in church is just another sign of Paul's misogyny!", and I drawlingly reply, "Well hmmm, I'd rather see a bulldyke in a mantilla than a nun in a pantsuit"... I've stepped out of the ethical discourse into the aesthetic, and therefore forfeited my right to be taken sincerely/seriously.

(And I mean it, too! I'd clip a daggone diaper to my head if it meant that most women would wear actual pretty lace to church instead of board shorts!)

which, understandably, led some readers to say that they were not willing to get on the "misogyny is okay if it's pretty!" train I seemed to be conducting.

So here are three defenses of my position, in order from least to most persuasive-to-me.

#1. Could beauty, my lord, have better commerce than with honesty? In any case where we're negotiating a tradeoff between beauty and equality, I'll defend the practice of asking, "How much beauty for how much equality?" In this case the beauty is obvious--those headscarves and church hats are lovely!, and the various kludges women used when they were caught short without their headcoverings (such as bobby-pinning the church bulletin to their hair) strike me as charmingly humiliating and wry. Meanwhile the equality is quite minor and fairly unsettling--neither men nor women would be expected to wear some symbol of their submission to God.

However, this argument does fail to meet a major objection, which I hinted at in the Hamlet (/Ophelia) quote. The mantilla can be understood to imply that women need more signs of submission to God than men do. This is a subspecies of the "outsourcing their spiritual lives to the womenfolk" that I decried here. If we understand the mantilla this way, we oppose its beauty not only to truth but also to men's submission to God. Both of these oppositions seem to me to be much harder cases than beauty v. equality, and I'd be hard-pressed to take beauty's side here.

So ultimately I think the "tradeoff" argument fails, though the fact that I consider it a strong argument should give some sense of how I approach these issues.

#2. Spending time, nowadays it's equal, nice, it's paradise.... I might be more amenable to ditching the mantilla if it really meant that women would be equal! But it never does, you know? Ridding ourselves of these ways in which tradition beautifies our subordination never ends the subordination (and often doesn't even mitigate it); it simply replaces beautiful subordination with banal.

I note that the solution is always to ditch the specifically feminine symbols of submission, rather than universalizing them--nobody ever says that men should wear the mantilla. Julia Serano might have some sharp words about why that happens.

#3. The Man-Mary, again. If we look for ways to express both the spiritual equality of men and women, and gender difference, we may find ourselves in dangerous territory! Since I doubt adopting the yarmulke will win many friends among Our Elder Brothers in the Faith, we must look around for specifically Catholic forms of submission which are restricted to men, as the mantilla is restricted to women. Guess what we find?

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: PEAR AND BRIE. Before we get to the adventures, a quick beer review: I'm sipping a Lagunitas "Little Sumpin' Extra" ale, and the overwhelming smell and flavor is of... walnut husks. Green walnut husks. I am unconvinced that this will become a regular beer for me.

Anyway, some sandwiches! Basically, I did a bunch of variations on one basic toasted cheese sandwich containing pear, Brie, balsamic vinegar, and some form of sweet onion. The basic procedure was to set the oven to 375, halve a small ciabatta roll, fill the role with sliced pear, onion, and cheese, wrap the roll in aluminum foil and bake for 15 mins.

The variations: #1--I sauteed the onion slices in butter to caramelize them, then drizzled the pear and onions with balsamic.

#2--I roasted the onion slices in balsamic before making the sandwich.

#3--I didn't pre-cook the onions in any way, but sliced them thinly, drizzled with balsamic, and topped the brie with a bit of cayenne.

I liked the third variation the best (and it's also the easiest and quickest), but in fact they were all good. I think the flavors didn't quite meld in the first variation, but I'm not sure why. I feel like one more ingredient would make this sandwich perfect--even the third variation had a tad bit too much roll proportional to filling. I wonder if sliced apples would work? Sorrel leaves?? Or just an extra layer of pear....

IRAQI MUSIC AND ETIQUETTE SCHOOL.

THE SHOOTING PARTY: I really didn't want to dislike this movie. It seemed like that would be the result of cynicism--the thing where people try to get on top of a movie, to prevent it from hurting them.

But this thing is so heavyhanded! I mean, it is just WORLD WAR I IS COMING GENTLEMEN MAKE YOUR TIME! the entire way through, from the opening voiceover to the final title cards. There are some affecting moments (and some embarrassing ones, e.g. "God save the British Empire!") and some funny bits (I liked the costume party). But overall, the entire movie could've been replaced by a title card reading, "ENGLAND, 1913," and no insight would have been lost.

MY COLUMN in the current American Conservative is about Malcolm X Park/Meridian Hill Park. You may be able to get a PDF version by scrolling down here.

I note that this issue of AmCon quotes not only the Cramps (in my piece) but also the Dead Kennedys (in Jesse Walker's profile of Jerry Brown).

More seriously, if even half the allegations in the cover story are true, it's one of the more shocking things I've read in a while.

I tapped her on the blogwatch and said, "Do you have a beau?"
She looked at me and smiled and said she did not know...

Camassia: A correction, re: sincerism! And a post about revenge and divergent views of authority.

Sean Collins: "Is it too much to ask for horror art to inflict emotional damage?"

(I think I'd also add a category for horror art which provokes teshuvah/repentance. Some horror I've seen and loved does neither for me--Suspiria is amazing, just incredible art, but I don't think it "traumatized" me in the way Sean means, nor did it provoke any change in my behavior. But a lot of other movies--Vertigo, obviously, but also Ringu and Barton Fink--seem to me to have the potential to provoke a change in self-understanding which wreaks itself through the emotions, but beyond them, into actions.* Anyway, yeah, I get behind Sean's cri de coeur!)

(*If you think you hear a faint echo of my disagreement with Sean about the ending of Eyes Wide Shut, you're right. On the other hand, I think Sean could have easily rebutted my points in that disagreement by saying that the movie itself has the capacity to provoke teshuvah, whether or not Tom Cruise's character actually ends up there. I think that's true, and it's a very strong point against that aspect of my criticism of the movie.)

Also, this comic sounds like it might echo intriguingly against "Keela, The Outcast Indian Maiden," which is the only Eudora Welty story I really love.

VJ Morton has a huge raft of reviews from the Toronto International Film Festival. I've added at least three movies to my Netflix "save" queue on his recommendation, and will be keeping my eye out to see if any of them open in theaters down here.

He always had a great deal of sympathy for the American past; he said that Americans had tried to do what had never before even been tried--perhaps they had failed because it could not be done. Constance understood this not at all; to her America was ordinary reality, what everyone is born into, and the rest of the world romance. She had fallen in love with it at second hand.
--Randall Jarrell, Pictures from an Institution

CHINESE BABIES STOLEN FOR FOREIGN ADOPTION.

SEAN COLLINS IS ALL OVER THE SMALL PRESS EXPO! And so are other people! And so am I!

BETHESDA, Y'ALL. 9/26 - 9/27. I can't do stuff on the Saturday until maybe 1 pm or so, but after that, I will get Human Fly all over this thing.

If you love indie comics and other stuff that is awesome, why not drop me a line so maybe we can do like a big lunch or something? I hear Bethesda has the occasional eatery despite being located beyond the bounds of civilization.

HOLY CATS, THIS IS A CLASSIC HEADLINE: "GOP frets it's too surly with the fringe on top."

Via Mark Shea.

BOUGIE WOOGIE BABY: Additions and corrections to my most recent sincerism post.

Addition #1) I forgot to mention that the Misery essay Camassia links to sounds terrific (haven't had a chance to read it yet) and very much gets at what I'm trying to do when I say that genre fiction can be more realistic than realism if your perspective is not that of the majority.

Addition #2) She's also put up a really smart post exploring a) whether I'm just defending the cool pose, which I do think isn't true though I can see where she's getting that; and b) adding a bit of historical context.

Correction #1: As usual I was carried away by my rhetoric! I think it's wrong to say that "...Christian translation should work, I think, the other way. In other words, in the translation from Pepper LaBeija's language to Peter Sprigg's, a Christian should seek to translate Spriggish into LaBeijan rather than visa-va-va-versa." I'll defend some degree of Spriggishness because I will always defend the bourgeoisie! I don't want to join them, but I do realize that they are the people who make the world work, and the fact that I don't share that vocation shouldn't lead me to denigrate it. Besides which, my "LaBeijan" formulation suggests that Sophia herself may be found nestled comfortably within one subculture, which of course is not what I believe.

It would be more accurate to say that Christian translation should serve Truth at all times, and thus should introduce new and startling terms to both the Spriggish and LaBeijan dictionaries. And yet it's worth noting that in most cases the minority/subcultural denizen will have a sharper understanding of the majority perspective than vice versa (and will get less credit for it). But yeah, Christ must radically reshape all of our perspectives, and we must accept no existing culture as sufficient.

Correction #2: Because I am a product of all the same cultural forces I decry, I twice used "choose" when I should've said something else. In the parenthetical "(I chose my leadership persona, so doesn't that choice incorporate the persona into my 'self'?)" I think "chose" should be "accepted" or "developed" or some other verb implying both unchosen elements and the work I did to shape those elements. (There are certain styles of leadership I can't pull off, and I had to learn not to try them.)

And in the same paragraph, in the sentence, "It is leadership which guides you to the beauty or Beauty you could love enough to choose one set of syllogisms over another equally consistent," "choose" should be replaced with "embrace." I think that implies a greater degree of recognition rather than maximization of utils.

NOLI IRRITARE LEONES has been blogging about panels from the recent Depressive and Bipolar Support Association Conference. So far I've found the "Nature v Nurture Debate: Overcoming Guilt and Stigma" write-up most interesting, but if you want to read one post I expect you'll want to read others.

TEXAS: THE LONE STAR OF DR. MOREAU.

IN WHICH I STILL DON'T QUOTE OSCAR WILDE!: EDITED 9/28 to fix a ridiculously stupid mistake! ...I've gotten two terrific pushbacks on my big post about sincerism. You can find Camassia's here. And Miss Ogilvy emailed me thusly:

Just a quick question in reply to your recent "sincerism" posts: where and how does a gay self-identity (as opposed to a queer self-identity, which is a bit more flexible and maybe less self-serious) fit into your arguments against sincerism? I think one could use your definition of sincerism ("requiring a sincere, authentic, honest accounting of one's thoughts and emotions," which entails wrongheaded "assumptions about our ability to know ourselves") to diagnose a gay identity as a symptom of sincerism or subservience to the sincerist ideal. Would love to hear your thoughts on this question.

And where and how does a Christian identity fit into your arguments against sincerism? What would a Christian apology for irony look like? Might be interesting to try on the following proposition for size: Protestantism serves the sincerist ideal; Catholicism does not.

Am feeling very sincerist myself as I sort through Gay Christian Whatnot. But I agree with you that the sincerist ideal is a mess.

I think it makes the most sense to reply to both at once. What follows will be so scattershot, it'll make a blunderbuss look like a laser. But I never promised you a precision garden!

From stupid through cute and maybe eventually ending up in worthwhile, let's proceed with our education, one and all....

1) I would never have cited journalism as a sincerist profession! But then my genealogy of the profession looks like "Journalism in Tennessee" --> SOMETHING ELSE AWESOME TK --> the New York Post. I suspect that there are other valid genealogies!

2) Maybe helpful: My problem is not with sincerity. I've seen women at the pregnancy center do amazing work through transparent personal sincerity. (It may be relevant to Camassia's comments that the woman I'm especially thinking of here is black? But I've also seen white women make amazing impacts, forging incredible connections with women who clearly wanted a sincere and heartfelt woman to talk to. In my own counseling, I try to shift between more heartfelt and self-revealing talk as vs. more complicit and nudge-wink talk based on what the client seems to be open to. More on cultures and subcultures, and leadership, in a bit.) My beef is with the attitude that sincerity is always better than other modes of self-presentation. And this I think is a desperately American form of crudeness and anti-aesthetic, democratic/majoritarian well-meaning callowness. More on this in what follows.

3) Camassia's point about anti-sincere strategies serving minority communities in their internal communiques against outside understanding or this-bridge-called-my-back-building is fantastic. I never would've thought of that, actually, and I really take to heart her defense of translation even though I think I still partly disagree.

Some things need to be universally translatable, like the Gospel. But does everything need to translate? Can we preserve some turf where the translator is still a traitor, and if you want to learn the language you'd better be ready to go native?

And what does it mean to be a Christian if your answer to those questions--like mine is, right now--is "no" and "yes"?

I'm not sure, and I think Camassia and Miss Ogilvy are both on to something supremely important. All I can really say in response is that I suspect that sincerism, like boboism ("bourgeois bohemianism"), attempts to assimilate the minority into the majority and translate in that direction--whereas Christian translation should work, I think, the other way. In other words, in the translation from Pepper LaBeija's language to Peter Sprigg's, a Christian should seek to translate Spriggish into LaBeijan rather than visa-va-va-versa.

I am open to accusations that this contrapposto stance simply reflects my own need to shore up my bohemian self-image. (She said, with a hipshot grin.)

4) I'm tempted to second Miss Ogilvy by saying that the Protestant denigration of "repetitive prayer" is a sincerist stance. I'm not sure if that's true really, because believe me, Protestantism is something I understand about as much as I understand the higher math. But here's something I wrote about repetitive prayer. Confession seems to work (for me, anyway?) somewhat similarly, in that the practice is so humiliating that it makes it unnecessary to dig the awl of self-scrutiny too far in: If I weren't really sorry I WOULDN'T BE HERE, ZOMG.

I think Miss O's suggestion that coming out is an inherently sincerist act is totally fascinating, since of course the gay subculture has traditionally (!) been one of the least sincerist, and yet I totally take her point about how coming out to oneself feels. Anyone have comments? I am at a loss!

5) I can think of two main categories of experience which prompted me to articulate why I think sincerism so often provokes bien-pensant stupidity on one hand, and cruelty-with-the-tweezers on the other. I have a hard time talking about sincerism because I find it much easier to point at than to define, and therefore it's easy to pat myself on the back for identifying examples. There's a way in which rationalism, for all its obvious falsehoods, is humbler than prudence, which requires so much trust in one's own perceptions. (Even if the examples are taken from my own life, there's still a showiness in the decision to display them in the light of my current better judgment.)

But here are the experiences. First, when I've been in a leadership position I've dealt with women (always women... I'm going to say this is cultural, and the guys would've framed their objections to my leadership this way if they'd thought it would win them masculinity points) who thought that the mask of command, as such, was inauthentic. Presenting a different persona when in leadership meant lying.

I think this is wrong on both rationalist grounds (I chose my leadership persona, so doesn't that choice incorporate the persona into my "self"?) and, obviously, aesthetic grounds. Leadership is an aesthetic act. It isn't rationalist, because there's always another syllogism, or an alternative premise, you can pose against the syllogism which would require of you something you don't want to do in the service of someone or Someone you don't love. It is leadership which guides you to the beauty or Beauty you could love enough to choose one set of syllogisms over another equally consistent.

So um yeah. I will, if necessary, pay for your trust by sharing some deep dark painful secret--but I'll respect you a lot less in the morning. I should be able to lead you without groveling for your pitying endorsement of my perspective.

b) I've several times tried to "relate" on a deep dark authentic level with someone going through a kind of suffering I can't share. I've tried to ask How You're Doing. I've tried to Be Real.

In no case has this ever been the right thing to do.

I get that people with much more sophisticated senses of how to be in the world (like Camassia) understand that what you do, when you're dealing with another person's desperation, is listen and be there and try to roll with what they give you, and not push. I don't think any of that is sincerism, even though it's sincere. But I do think sincerism is what I believed when I thought it was right to press my fingers against other people's bruises. I didn't think I was really acting as their friend unless I poked. I could not have been more wrong.

So that's where I'm coming from, on this question.

6) I'm not sure I want to overphilosophize here, since really I'm not sure what exactly sincerism is--like I said, it's easier to point at than to anatomize. But I am tempted to argue that sincerism is a part or a result of two philosophical tendencies I abhor anyway. ("You want a second opinion? Okay, you're ugly!")

a) My strong impression is that sincerism is connected to a belief that ethical discourse is the only valid philosophical discourse. Talk of right/wrong always trumps talk of beautiful/banal. (I hope this formulation indicates that I do think sincerity--like ethics-talk!--is frequently appropriate.) If you say, "Women covering their heads in church is just another sign of Paul's misogyny!", and I drawlingly reply, "Well hmmm, I'd rather see a bulldyke in a mantilla than a nun in a pantsuit"... I've stepped out of the ethical discourse into the aesthetic, and therefore forfeited my right to be taken sincerely/seriously.

(And I mean it, too! I'd clip a daggone diaper to my head if it meant that most women would wear actual pretty lace to church instead of board shorts!)

b) And on a deeper level, I really think sincerism is a subset of the Heideggerian fetish for authenticity and commitment. In this worldview, on the top level, Truth is found within--it's self-expression. I know that there is no philosophy without some level of self-trust. A radical skeptic can purchase bread, even though he knows it might be a hallucination, but he can never practice philosophy, because Sophia is nothing if she isn't real. (Even Derrida ETA 9/28 DESCARTES!!! "knew that he existed, and that he spoke French"!) But it is possible to distinguish between a philosophy of expressing the God within and a philosophy in which the self strives to recognize and love the God without--a philosophy in which recognition takes the place of expression, and submission is another word for love.

On the lower level, of course, "my real true deep self" becomes simply whatever my culture/subculture/biology/some complex interaction of all three tells me to value. That's one reason Heidegger's Rector's Address (which I used to be able to quote, as a party trick) is actually a valid conclusion from his premises. The naivete of sincerism is that it assumes that the self expressed will come pre-tamed.

Miss Manners knows better.

THIS BILL IS NOT A TOY: The invaluable Walter Olson on the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, aka the Unintended Consequences Are a Conservative Rhetorical Device Act--this is horrible stuff, and, as Olson points out, more may be coming down the pike:

Last Thursday, the House Energy and Commerce Committee finally held a hearing on the highly controversial Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act, the children's-product-safety law that took effect on Feb. 10. Chairman Henry Waxman (D., Calif.) allowed a single witness: Inez Tenenbaum, the newly installed chair of the Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC), who, like himself, is a strong advocate of the law. Not one of the thousands of craftspeople, retailers and small manufacturers the law has sent reeling was permitted to testify.

This law has saddled businesses with billions of dollars in losses on T-shirts, bath toys and other items that were lawful to sell one day and unlawful the next. It has induced thrift and secondhand stores to trash mountains of outgrown blue jeans, bicycles and board games for fear there might be trivial, harmless--but suddenly illegal--quantities of lead in their zippers and valves or phthalates in their plastic spinners. (Phthalates are substances that add flexibility to plastic.) Even classic children's books are at risk: Because lead was not definitively removed from printing inks until 1985, the CPSC has advised that only kids' books printed after that date should be considered safe to resell. ...

The CPSC touched off another furor this summer when it confirmed that Mattel, the giant toy maker whose many recalls helped set off the lead-in-toys panic, had qualified for an exemption from onerous third-party (outside laboratory) testing of its products under the law, and would instead be allowed to test in its own in-house labs. (Mattel had successfully lobbied for such a provision.) Of course, most companies do not operate on a scale that will make such an exemption feasible.

read the whole thing--there are no scary staples on the Internet!

The denial of the Fall--the hopeful insisted--was supposed to make life more cheerful; Bushnell was sure it succeeded only in making it duller. It was a denial of that human potential for evil which had made life adventurous precisely by making genuine moral crisis possible. It was a failure to understand tragedy. The sustained American aversion for tragedy, then as now, was based upon an obscure connection between tragedy and low spirits. Bushnell, pointing to the most enduring tragic dramas and tragic heroes, suggested that tragedy, by posing a real opposition and a real choice in human experience, was an affirmation of human dignity, and fundamentally optimistic. Adamism, Bushnell argued, by dissolving the opposition or absorbing it into a purely natural scheme, rendered life flat, colorless, undramatic, and boring.
--RWB Lewis, American Adam, via Rattus

DISTURBING SEARCH REQUESTS: maleness and humanity

UH, HERE'S THE ACTUAL LINK TO "GOLEM: A JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND MONSTERS."

Sorry about that!

SETTLING: I have a review of Andrew Cherlin's Marriage-Go-Round: The State of Marriage and the Family in America Today in the current Weekly Standard. Link is subscribers-only right now; I'll let you know if that changes....

TRADITIONAL MUSIC IN ENGLAND: "Circa 20,717 field recordings of traditional music, including popular ballads, children's skipping songs, customs, music hall, soldiers' songs folk tales and interviews."

via WKO.

PESTIVAL 2009: INSECT ARTS FESTIVAL. The termite pavilion looks pretty epic.

Via The Rat, who deserves a Pestival of her very own....

GOLEM: JOURNAL OF RELIGION AND MONSTERS.

Eventually via LOTT-D.

EDITED to unfuzzle the link. You can click through now!

PLAYGROUND TWIST. Oh. I hadn't realized that "Rockin' Robin" was covered by the Jackson 5. I guess that explains why we all knew it as a handclap rhyme, more than ten years after they sang it on "Top of the Pops."

It was an incendiary expression of pure joy.

AGAINST SAFEWORDS, PART II in a no-doubt-continuing series.

Part one.

REFUSIONISM: So at a wedding over the weekend, I ended up in the perennial right-wing debate: Is fusionism a tactic, a political philosophy, or a scam?

What I say in this post is my interpretation of my experience; other people may have had other experiences, or interpreted them differently, and I'd really like to hear about that. But from my perspective, "trads" aka conservatives seem to interact with libertarians and their arguments in a very different way from the way libertarians interact with trads and trad arguments.

From my perspective, I see trads accepting libertarians as allies on criminal-justice/Fourth Amendment/"Leave Us Alone Coalition"/big govt vs. the "little platoons" issues, whereas libertarians tend to view trads as dinosaurs who don't believe in dinosaurs. (Keep in mind that I'm only talking about people in both camps who think a lot about their positions and have some degree of philosophical depth. Because I persist in my evidence-free belief that these people's conversations matter.) Trads seem to me more open to libertarian arguments on police power as state expansion than libertarians are to trad arguments on family and charity as the foundations of a free society. Trads seem to me able to grok libertarian arguments which invoke justice much more than libertarians can grok trad arguments which invoke beauty.

From these perhaps-wrong observations I move to a more general observation, behind which I'll stand all the way: American political and cultural discourse is devastated by our inability to speak politically about beauty. We let anything trump beauty--even choice. Even equality, for pity's sake! Thus we're desperately stupid about sex, about urban policy, about technology, about hierarchy and tradition. (Yes, I promise to cash out some of that list soon, but don't let that stop you from emailing me!)

And now back to a much more tentative question: We hear a lot about psych studies which purport to show that self-identified conservatives have a much stronger sense of "disgust" than soi-disant liberals. I wonder to what extent that is really true (who is more disgusted by images of physical pain, the devastation of war, torture, or--for one example in which I side with the right-wingers--skinning a rabbit?), but certainly a huge amount of liberal rhetoric is directed toward exalting reason at the expense of disgust. I dislike both of these terms! "Reason" too often becomes a nickname for naivete (rational = what my culture and disposition allow me to understand), when it isn't a nickname for power-worship (let the clever rule the weak). And "disgust" has all the class-based problems of shame, in which we recoil from the weak because of their weakness, as well as all the problems of good-person talk.

But I still wonder... if liberalism diminishes disgust (which I'm not convinced it does--I suspect liberals simply call their disgust another name, like "compassion"), is that why it also diminishes our ability to stand up for beauty? And does that mean we can't speak politically about beauty without reviving disgust?

I hope not. But beauty has so often been deployed against weakness (see: Paglia, Camille) that people on my side of the argument need to reckon with the moral passions we seek to unleash.

AFTER NEWSPAPERS:

...The New York Times reports on the ACLU's successful campaign to use the Freedom of Information Act to get the government to disclose documents about the government's detention and interrogation policies. The ACLU has received hundreds of pages of documents, which it has then released to the public on the Internet, becoming the basis of dozens of stories by journalists.

The torture story is one of the most important examples of American journalism in the last decade. But it was not revealed through traditional investigative reporting alone. Instead, a non-profit organization-- the ACLU--worked in coordination with journalistic efforts to mount a long-term litigation campaign to gain access to important government information. The ACLU then provided the information to the general public on the Internet, and journalists wrote stories based on the revelations, which led to further ACLU requests and more litigation, producing further revelations, and so on.

more

DANTEBLOGGING! The Cranky Professor is blogging his way through the Divine Comedy. He's on Canto X of the Inferno now (and his other posts have been making reference to his Danteblogging as well, so you might want to check out the whole site if you like snarkery).

LAST WEEK'S NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE focused on "Saving the World's Women." You can get the introduction here--alternately heartbreaking and inspiring--and some cautions here. From the latter article, which is less personal but still necessary:

...Yet these strategies — though invaluable — underestimate the complexity of the situation in certain countries. To be sure, China and India are poor. But in both nations, girls are actually more likely to be missing in richer areas than in poorer ones, and in cities than in rural areas. Having more money, a better education and (in India) belonging to a higher caste all raise the probability that a family will discriminate against its daughters. The bias against girls applies in some of the wealthiest and best-educated nations in the world, including, in recent years, South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore. It also holds among Indian immigrants in Britain and among Chinese, Indian and South Korean immigrants in the United States. In the last few years, the percentage of missing girls has been among the highest in the middle-income, high-education nations of the Caucasus: Armenia, Azerbaijan and Georgia.

Nor does a rise in a woman’s autonomy or power in the family necessarily counteract prejudice against girls. Researchers at the International Food Policy Research Institute have found that while increasing women’s decision-making power would reduce discrimination against girls in some parts of South Asia, it would make things worse in the north and west of India. “When women’s power is increased,” wrote Lisa C. Smith and Elizabeth M. Byron, “they use it to favor boys.” ...

What Das Gupta discovered is that wealthier and more educated women face this same imperative to have boys as uneducated poor women — but they have smaller families, thus increasing the felt urgency of each birth. In a family that expects to have seven children, the birth of a girl is a disappointment; in a family that anticipates only two or three children, it is a tragedy.

Thus development can worsen, not improve, traditional discrimination.

more

You'd know all this already if you read MarriageDebate--or signed up for IMAPP's weekly newsletter.

LOL DAYEST OF JOBS: My posting at MarriageDebate is somewhat less random than my posting here! And I really do try to find stuff which will interest anyone who wants to know where we are these days on attitudes toward sex, gender, parenting, and marriage--the most frequent tag I use is "culture." Other posters include Elizabeth Marquardt, IMAPP as an entity (that's me in terms of who hits "publish," but I don't choose those posts), and sometimes others. Here's my guide to recent offerings which might fascinate readers of this here blog:

this week: lying children, guilty children, gay marriage and heteronormativity on "Top Chef," Utah going soft on polygamy, and mandatory testing for genetic diseases in children up for adoption. And more!

last week: Why doesn't cohabitation work as a "test drive" for marriage?; why do tightwads fall in love with wastrels like me?; how stark is the generation gap when it comes to gay marriage?; do single women poach taken men?; plus gallows humor, Cat'lick humor, a really startling moment from the Obama administration's DOMA "defense" brief, multiple legal parents in Delaware, and yet more.

the week before that: the low rate of gay marriage in Vermont; the decreasing rate of marriage among black women with higher education; a startling statistic about wives; and a deeply moving column by Jonathan Rauch. And, as always, more.

Seriously, if nothing in those descriptions interests you, are you from Mars?!

As always, please do send me interesting links you find! This is a labor of love for me--I did it even when I wasn't being paid.

LILAC SEASONS IN THE LAND OF DREAMS: I have a column in the new American Conservative. This one is about Shepherd Park, the DC neighborhood where I grew up: the language of masks and the silence of skin.

I don't think it's online yet, so check your newsstands!

MADONNA BOOED IN BUCHAREST FOR DEFENDING GYPSIES. Good on her.

Was it relevant to her music? Well,

Until the 19th century, Romanian Gypsies were slaves, and they've gotten a mixed response ever since: While discrimination is widespread, many East Europeans are enthusiastic about Gypsy music and dance, which they embrace as part of the region's cultural heritage.

That explains why the Roma musicians and a dancer who had briefly joined Madonna onstage got enthusiastic applause. And it also may explain why some in the crowd turned on Madonna when she paused during the two-hour show — a stop on her worldwide "Sticky and Sweet" tour — to touch on their plight.

sound familiar?

EIGHT MILLION STORIES IN THE NAKED CITY: EveryBlock offers a newsfeed for your city block!

Via Noli Irritare Leones.

THE HEIRESS: William Wyler directs Olivia de Havilland and Montgomery Clift in a tale based on Henry James's Washington Square. Vaguely spoilerous but nothing specific, below.

I'm not sure I'd ever seen de Havilland in anything before. [eta: Oh hilarious--apparently I've forgotten Gone With the Wind and--perhaps even less forgivable--Hush, Hush Sweet Charlotte!] She was fantastic. A performing kitten with a cobra inside.

The tragedy was easily discerned from the beginning, but I was still left guessing as to exactly how it would break forth. The father/daughter parallels and What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? notes (sans rat--this is the genteel version!) were much appreciated. Clift was perfectly serviceable, but everyone was outshone by de Havilland, who played at least three different personae and made them all believable faces of the same person.

It's odd to call a movie "suspenseful" when you accurately call all its plot points; and yet that's how this felt. I liked this b&w, old-school confection much more than I would've expected based on the first half-hour.

In terms of worldview, it complicated what I initially considered a really silly premise in which the men know more than the women (is that ever true of power imbalances, that the privileged know more than the less-so?), and its assessment of the interaction of money and love is nuanced rather than calculating. (Money is only one of the several factors in the diagnosis.)

THE NEXT THREE POSTS are more on vowed friendship. If you dun' care, feel free to skip to here for Orson Welles's adaptation of The Trial; Iron Man being the failbot we all know and/or love; a review of a fantasy magazine which had the poor judgment to publish one of my stories; and a few poems by Paul Celan.

HOW NOW, SWORN VOW?: (sorry....) Round four of the grand discussion of reviving vowed friendship! For round one you can check out my Inside Catholic column, "Romoeroticism" (and my review of Alan Bray's groundbreaking, beautiful book, The Friend); for round two, my comments here and here (the latter post is not specifically about friendship, but about other aspects of reactions to my IC piece); for round three, a series of posts and reader emails starting here; and now you get three more reader emails, posted without comment but all very much worth your time.

Thanks so much to everyone who has written, and I very much still welcome your comments on all of this! I have a couple of critical links I need to truffle up, and a bit more to post about godparents and godsisters, but not tonight.

These are posted in reverse chronological order, earliest last.

reader #1:

I do not know what to think of your idea, but it is quite intriguing. I do agree that our modern idea of kinship is overly narrow - - if we can create legal fictions to account for adoption of children by parents, then surely we can create all sorts of legal fictions to accomodate realities that do not exactly correspond to the biological or natural family. Could [same-sex marriage] or domestic partnerhip laws be characterized as legal fictions? Perhaps that is one way to look at them, though I am sure that both Andrew Sullivan and the Family Research Council would scream bloody murder at the idea for very different reasons.

As for your commenter, Mr 8 or 9, I was struck by how his view that [same-sex attraction] is so radically disordered that it taints everything that it touches is very similar to Martin Luther's view of human nature being incurvatus in se - - even if one does good things, such acts not only corrupt and not only of no value, but such acts only increase one's blameworthiness the more good acts one does! Compound that with an Augustinian slant on eternal salvation, one can see how a person with SSA - - especially a young man with SSA with an overactive libido and an overwhelming emotional desire to be love and to love - - could be driven to despair if confronted by a Mr. 8 or 9 in a position of moral authority. Surely, then, such a person would conclude that he was damned, given the way that sexual orientation colors a significant amount of human interaction with the world. If he's effective in for penny as much as for a pound, he might as well go for the whole pound while he is at it. . . . Southern Decadence here he comes! This is an example of the damage that zealous "defenders of the magisterium" and "defenders of the family" can wreak on people who find themselves with SSA and little or no OSA of no fault of their own. Thinking of C.S. Lewis's famous comparison of the prig and the prostitute, surely that irritiating mediocrity Bishop Gene Robinson is a better role model for SSAs than a counselor who thinks like Mr. 8 or 9.

reader #2:

My initial response to the suggestion that we revive vowed friendship is, "Yes, obviously." It's madness that marriage is the only meaningful public mode of intimacy that our society allows. It just leaves so much of the psychological landscape... nameless.

As the very last person to be actually interested in undertaking a vowed friendship (I'm a married white male who considers his wife his best friend and who has no significant male friendships to speak of), I nonetheless had much the same reaction to the idea of vowed friendship that you did. The world of vowed friendships is the one that really resonates with me. And this for many reasons, including, but not limited to...

1. The world of vowed friendship almost automatically has a saner view of marriage. After all, in practice, there's a lot of overlap between eros and philia. The marital relationship has a lot to do with being friends and co-workers, but with those aspects of the relationship consumed in public discourse on the one hand by silence and on the other by the equation of worthwhile work with money-making, marriage is left only with its distinctives -- sex and childbearing. Oh... except not those either since the Birth Control Revolution. A robust theology of friendship accompanied by a meaningful liturgical corollary would go a long way towards giving us a way to think sanely about marriage.

2. The Catholic Church says that homosexuality is wrong only insofar as sodomy is wrong. That means that the Church ought to decry the condemnation of homosexuality as a culture/genre/predisposition (and especially the condemnation of chaste same-sex love) as error. The Church has not done this in an open way (though, I would argue, it has done so in an implicit way), and I would really like to see that happen. It would appeal to my sense of justice, and it would seem to me that the Church was striking a really startling blow against modern heresies -- both pro- and anti-homosexual.

and

3. I'm down with pretty much anything folks did in the Middle Ages so long as it doesn't involve gruesome death.

However... but... and also... I still see merit in some of the arguments you speak against.

You are correct to say that the potential for misuse is no reason to avoid doing something that is inherently good to do. However, the potential for misuse may mean that we have to do that inherently good thing in an extremely cautious manner. Thus, the Tridentine mass is good, and Benedict XVI has always spoken out in favor of it, but he nonetheless has been cautious in his efforts to bring it back into common usage because of its mistreatment by the St. Pius X Society and others (as well as the unfavorable reputation it has with a certain generation of bishops).

Just so, I think that much groundwork must be laid both theologically and politically before the vowed-friendship rite may be meaningfully restored. Were it simply released to the many winds within the Church, it would be tossed about and treated ill. It would be taken by the press and the public at large as a concession by the Church to the gay marriage movement rather than as a ressourcement coming out of Catholic tradition. And many Catholic faithful (though men and women of great faith) would be unsophisticated and uninformed enough to suffer great scandal. More to the point, though, I think the vowed-friendship in its true form (and not as a surrogate for gay marriage) would be short-lived and little used.

I would suggest that what the Church needs is a point man in the form of a (conservative) bishop who truly and deeply understands the need for a theological understanding of friendship to let his own flock be a liturgical laboratory. After a few years of sermons and letters (maybe a nationally-distributed book) on the subject, perhaps he could hand-pick a few well-respected pairs of friends to help resurrect the rite on a very small scale. And so on and so on... little by little.

Basically, as with all rites, the community comes first. The soil must be ready for the seed.

But again, I agree with your basic point. The vowed friendship and a theology of friendship underlying it is something the Church (and the society in general) need... I would go so far as to say "desperately need." My only concern is cultural and political logistics.

Thanks for getting people talking about this issue. Here's hoping the conversation is... preparing the soil (?)

reader #3:

I'm one of those who has a problem with the formalized vow. I remember some time ago a discussion about this on the Courage email list, prompted by David Morrison. At that time and still today, I had no worries about the temptation and scandal issues. It was the idea of exclusivity that bothered me. For me, the Christian ideal is that one loves (agape) everyone equally. Not equally badly, of course, but perfectly, which would mean equally. Now, we do have special loves -- parent/child, spousal, friendships. These, in my view, are concessions to an imperfect nature -- 'we can't love everyone the same'. Of these, only spousal love is formalized in Christianity, and I would say it's the eros that is formalized. And I think that's a good thing -- I don't think we need to formalize any more of these concessions.

David's point, if I recall, was that the special loves are not concessions, but opportunities (for us lowly humans to practically -- my addition) practice God's love. We then learn from these opportunities to be more loving to others. The way I see it, yes, the fact that, say, I have aging parents to care for helps me to empathize more with others and love other aged parents better. But should it be that way? Isn't that so evolutionary biology. Shouldn't I love these other people anyway. After all, even the Gentiles do the same...

So I don't like the exclusivity.

Then there's the cultural issue. How much of the need for formalized avowed friendship arises from the lack of such relationships in the West? Would this be using a religious institution to address a cultural deficit?

Now, promoting unformalized (they may be avowed or not) friendships I of course applaud wholeheartedly. If people want to live together, or apart, in groups of any number, or anything it between, I think that's fine. Have a deeper and wider set of friends, like (simplistically) we have in another cultures. Strain not to send your parents to a nursing home. Enjoy living with an extended family. Etc.

But, I tell you, it's a tough go here in North America because the entire lifestyle is not attuned to it. I see everyday fellow immigrants astonishingly quickly absorbed by Western ways. In fact, I see it even when I go back home to Ethiopia among the (slowly) 'rising middle classes'. They work more, spend more, save more, and with much less time, retreat into their nuclear families in Western style.

THE TRIAL: Orson Welles-directed Kafka adaptation. This is amazing. Wildly-angled noir atheology--one of the most consistent, and consistently persuasive, atheist movies I've ever seen. (In case you're thinking of a film festival, off the top of my head I'd put Cube and maybe Nobody Knows on that list, for very different reasons.) Anthony Perkins is a shivery, wrong-jointed Joseph K, as uncomfortable as a snake trying to shed its skin. I honestly don't know what to tell you except that it's Welles without self-indulgence, and Kafka noir. If that doesn't make you want to see it, I don't know what will!

POWER CORRUPTS, AND AWESOME POWER CORRUPTS AWESOMELY.

LADY CHURCHILL'S ROSEBUD WRISTLET #24 aka The One I'm In. Here's a review of the whole zine, in case the fact that I'm In This One! isn't enough for you. You can download each issue as an e-book for just $4 each.

First of all, there is kind of a LCRW "house style," ably demonstrated by this issue. It's hard to describe fully, but some elements include lush prose, a mysterious and troubling atmosphere, and direct references to and subversions of various well-known fantasy genres. A strong premise with unusual, surrealist imagery. Since my story has all these elements (I mean, I hope the premise is strong!), rest assured I have nothing against this stuff; but devouring the whole magazine at once may not be the best way to bring out the stories' unique characteristics.

Alexander Lamb, "Eleven Orchid Street": Very creepy parable of (it seemed to me) class and origin, the trap of fatalism and the trap of an embittered imagination. Expanding one's experiences can lead to the feeling that the old experiences have been drained of substance and meaning, rather than giving them renewed meaning. The kill-your-television stuff at first felt cliched, but was done so spookily that I ended up on board. The futuristic atmosphere worked too--a very lightly sketched Clockwork-Orangey place. Definitely my favorite story.

Liz Williams, "Dusking": Seems like it will be bog-standard Victorian revisionism (modesty and the Bible are evil! Fairies bite!) but has a really fun ending. The ending made me very fond of this one, and it's short enough that you get there before you really get irritated at the protagonist.

Jasmine Hammer, "Tornado Juice": Super-intriguing double premise (every strand of a girl's hair contains a world + people living inside a tornado), but ultimately this felt like a slight story which was trying to be dark but (for me) didn't quite pull it off. Still, the images are fun and very fresh.

Alissa Nutting, "Leave the Dead to the Living": A mortician who smokes his clients' hair to imbibe their memories. Very Tim Powers in Expiration Date. Once again, though, the story felt slighter than the premise.

"A Story Like Mine": Hey, I'm In This One! Various origin stories of a scar.

Dennis Danvers, "The Broken Dream Factory": You know, I'm not sure what to make of this one. For a while it was quite smug (and even if that's intentional, I don't find it any more illuminating or pleasant!) about its protagonist's commitment to producing broken dreams in an America which prefers banal happiness. Then it twisted into a really odd reworking of the Orpheus myth. I still think colliding two over-easy stories doesn't make one complex story... but I could be wrong about that. If any of you all read this issue, let me know what you thought! (And of course about the other stories, too.)

Anya Groner, "The Magician's Keeper": Stockholm Syndrome parable. I didn't get much out of this, I have to admit.

Overall, I'd say three stories I didn't write were good, one really good; and even the ones I didn't care for had intriguing premises and imagery. Given how easy it is for fantasy to feel played-out, a twelfth-generation xerox, that seems like an accomplishment to me. I didn't grok the poetry or comic well enough to comment on them, but I will note that part of the fun of a zine like this is the ads: Did you know there's a Joan Aiken collection coming out?! Plus lots more neat fantasy collections, weird novels, and magazines.

Get it here! Get more here! Remember, just $4/issue for an ebook version!

You are throwing gold after me
I am drowning:
perhaps a fish can be
bribed
--Celan

Evening after evening, embassies
drift over, distilled
from thoughts,
hard as kings, hard as night,
into the hands of the grief-
constables:
--Celan (excerpt)

AGAINST SINCERITY. Jendi Reiter has my back! With bonus poetry, "How to Fail a Personality Test."

me vs. sincerity here (and sexily here)

IVY-COVERED PROFESSORS, WITH IVY-COVERED...: Tell me your favorite novels set on college campuses?

Cleared for this
departure too.

Song of the front wheel with
corona.

The rudder of dusk engages you,
your slit-
awake vein
untangles,

what's left of you, sets itself aslant,
you gain
altitude.
--Celan

OH HEY! Victor Morton, the Right-Wing Film Geek, was on a blog hiatus for quite a while. He's back now!--or at least, he was in July, and I hope he'll post more (instead of just Twittering!). But there are reviews of Up and a wide range of documentaries.

UNLEASH THE POWER OF THE BLOG!: Hi y'all. I'm working on an article about how young adults are increasingly likely to call themselves pro-life, and increasingly likely to support gay marriage. There are a lot of narratives you could tell about how someone comes to hold either or both of these beliefs; I want to get some sense of which narratives people tell themselves. [ETA: Whoa, that phrasing is awful! "Which narratives people tell themselves" = how people explain, in their own words, how they came to hold their beliefs.]

So! If you are pro-life, pro-gay-marriage, and under 25, please email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com . If you know other people who fit the bill, please give them my information! And if you're on any mailing lists which might truffle up some responses, I would be thrilled if you'd repost this request.

THANK YOU.

Unappeased,
unattached, artless,
what alters the universe came up slowly
rasping
behind me.
--Paul Celan, "Heap of Seashells," tr. Katharine Washburn and Margret Guillemin

FAT LACES ON MY FEET WHEN CRACK FIRST HIT THE STREETS: Things I learned while surfing YouTube for the tv shows of my childhood, per this post about avant-garde cinema.

Thing the first: The opening credits of Mysterious Cities of Gold actually made me want to Netflix the whole thing rather than run in fear. Second, through the wonders of YouTube, I next found Count Freaking Duckula!!!! ...and thence to this selection of '80s cartoon themesongs. I remember exactly one of these shows (Jem of course, not a show I ever really liked--although apparently it's become something of a lesbian icon because there are multiple female human characters, LOL LOWEST OF STANDARDS) but overall, I grinned through this montage of the decadence of the space-age. So beautiful... so dumb!

You know how Jaime Hernandez is now revisiting his old superhero Bubble Yum commercial Chicana storylines? I love it. I always adored the ridiculous Penny Century storylines, and even the Maggie the Mechanic early stuff where she, I dunno, fought dinosaurs or something?... but I guess I relate even more now to the way Jaime has stayed '80s in the best way, cheesy and outdated and completely dedicated to being awesome. After the '80s it really felt like we all got so sincerist--nobody could say crazy crap like "No Guts, No Glory!" anymore on children's television!--whereas I grew up with the belief that any vastly stupid $#@! you wanted to pull was okay as long as it turned out hardcore. Bringing back the superheroine shtik is almost a refusal to move on; Jaime's sitting on the porch of his comics, drinking mint juleps and polishing his gun.

My favorite description of my cultural childhood is from Cracked:

If you don't remember the 80s, just imagine listening to Duran Duran's "Hungry Like the Wolf" playing on a boom box that at any moment could explode, killing you and everyone you know.

everyone's a Captain Kirk!

WHO'LL STOP THE RAIN?: The second disc of "Avant-Garde: Experimental Cinema of the 1920s and '30s" was bizarrely water-themed. It was also vastly less awesome than the first disc! Was this just me and my obsessions, or did the jesses really slacken on this disc?

Anyway, there was one short movie so amazing that it was absolutely, three hundred percent, worth sitting through everything else on the disc. Skip to H2O if you want to know about the only awesome flick herein reviewed.

Review of the first disc, part one; two.

Second disc:
Uberfall: Police report of an assault; plotty, doesn’t strike me as wildly experimental--? There’s a funny parallelism bit where a man paints a face on an egg and then breaks it in an egg-cup. …OK, it gets experimental (distorted faces, dice and other bits from earlier in the film looming up eerily) after he actually gets assaulted, to show the effects of the blow to his head.

La Glace a Trois Faces: French-accented English voiceover, lol. Three men in love with the same woman; their stories presented one by one. Bright Young French Things running around being champagne-y. Experimentalism limited to montage fade in/fade out techniques so far. …Oh ok, now there’s some neat stream-of-consciousness stuff with lampposts. …Wow, people in the 1920s really did not like lips! There are some aggressively-framed shots with geometric backgrounds—kinda obvious, but I like that stuff. In the same scene, there are some lovely bits of choreography e.g. a woman being pulled into the camera shot by her hand, or two men almost waltzing into frame as they light one another’s cigarettes. A great, creepy, low-slung shot of an elevator rising, making it look as if it’s traversing some kind of post-apocalyptic blasted warehouse landscape. Second segment: a monkey! There’s some great (original?) music, like a reverberating jew’s-harp; then, in the third segment, a more traditional skirling, longing sound, which apparently is a Vivaldi piccolo concerto. Great horror-movie music while the “intruder” (?) speeds past a danger marker… and then the Vivaldi again. And then possibly at the end all three men were really one man??? Do not understand that part.

Le Tempestaire: Seasick shakycam credits. Painterly shot-by-shot, like a Viewfinder, of a seaside village and its inhabitants. Low-key, slow-moving “she fears for her man at sea, so she goes to persuade the old witch doctor to work his weather magic once again” tale; some really cool shots of the sea reversing and calming. Several missing subtitles (including the last line!).

Romance sentimentale: Sergei Eisenstein. Intense, dramatic shots of the sea and falling trees, with the crash of branches paralleled to the crash of waves. Really great use of reflections and water-distortions. The music is original and mostly traditional with interruptions. Then we cut unexpectedly between a drawing-room with sculptures and a woman and a clock, and the leafless autumn forest. Then cheesy fireworks and more intense intercutting! …And then it’s spring for some reason. This is why I wish they’d translated the Russian song the lady sings. (Despite the Yalien colleague who always laughed, "Just learn the f***ing language!")

Autumn Fire: Ehhhh, (nearly-) wordless love poem.

Manhatta: Sentimental-modernist ode to NYC. Tall buildings and little anonymous ant-people. Some nicely-industrial piano music, but otherwise, no.

La coquille et le clergyman: Slow movie is sloooooooooooooooow. Koyaanisqatsi is the freaking Micro Machines Man compared to this. It does seem to have a plot, but I truly can’t be arsed to figure out what that plot is—and bear in mind that I’m already the kind of person who will watch six and a half hours of “experimental cinema of the 1920s and ‘30s.” This is what you feared silent movies would be like.

There’s a bit where the clergyman is crawling around all scrunched up like something out of Freaks or Uzumaki. I really liked that part.

Regen: Rain in a small city, with pretty (new) music. At its best, the music sounds like if the Raincoats circa “Honey Mad Woman” seriously mellowed out and had no instruments but a guitar and bass, but there are noodly bits which don’t really go much of anywhere. Deeply nonessential, but painless.

H2O: Again with the rain! And then other forms of water, actually photographed in a striking, dynamic way, where each shot looks very different from the previous even though it’s all just… you know… water. People as obsessed as I am with sea metaphors might really get a kick out of this. Also people who want a lovely alphabet of textures and shapes, different forms of motion. …Wow, I love the series of cuts showing different kinds of rippling. It’s a primer on “how to film,” sure, but it’s a beautiful and compelling one. Ooohh solarization now! …Oh my gosh, I literally caught my breath just now. The solarized-Japanimation-silken-Rorschach-realist-staticky-molecular intertwining sequence of shots is just too much.

The (new) music is country-fried and demi-menacing.

This is by far my favorite from this disc. Again, if you’re less obsessed with this particular kind of image than I am, it may be your equivalent of “Manhatta,” but man, this was sublime. It’s the only film on both discs where I knew I had to watch it again because I’d missed things. (Update: I totally had. I was mesmerized the second time through; it was even better than the first.) And y’all: THERE IS NOTHING IN THIS MOVIE EXCEPT WATER. That’s talent.

It’s by Ralph Steiner, a name I do not know.

Even—As You and I: Holy cats, is that the Harry Hay? YES YES IT IS. The “Boy Meets Girl” stuff at the beginning becomes more satirical when you know this, though I have no idea whether that is the filmmaker’s satire or God’s.

Unfortunately this struck me as an otherwise-unremarkable “Surrealism comes to America” piece. He’s reading the paper upside-down! And when he turns the page there’s a bra! And he has a swastika and a hammer-and-sickle over his eyes! Yeah, no. I did like the bit where the high-heeled shoe gets stuck on the cactus.

Rob me, strip me,
Virgin ruthless,
Cleanse me of every love,
Spare none.

--"Little Seal-Skin," Eliza Keary

I dreamt about this poem last night (/this morning, as I'm mostly nocturnal). I would like to say that this was a classier dream than the one in which Blair and Serena switched bodies... but I fear it really wasn't!

AGAINST SAFEWORDS: I note that "safe, sane, and consensual" is an extraordinarily sincerist credo; its assumptions about our ability to know ourselves, and its assumption that self-knowledge and self-ownership form the core of morality, are basically my exact problems with the sincerist ideal.

Not to mention that s/s/c = three things vocation isn't.

ANTI-IRONY CHARMS: Some rambling thoughts on "sincerism" and why it's no fun. So a couple times here I've growled at sincerism, without ever telling you what it is! Which... is certainly not the sincerist way, so props for consistency, but I do think at some point I might explain myself. Here are some partial notes.

Sincerism means--probably among other things--requiring a sincere, authentic, honest accounting of one's thoughts and emotions. It opposes irony, misdirection, self-protection (which, to be fair, I also oppose in most cases!), exaggeration, agent-provocateur behavior, unspoken understandings, WASPish complicity in one another's secrets, and your mouth writing checks your ass can't cash.

Think of it as American newspapers' claim to "objectivity," by which we mean mainstream conformity, vs. European newspapers' tabloid partisanship. Think of it as realism vs. "genre."

Sincerity, as a mode, has its good points. If anything, I think I tend to be much more sincere than I should be! The world does not care about the sparklyhearts authenticity of my feelings; nor does it really need every idea chewed into obviousness and pablum. But there are times when withholding sincerity from another person is prideful and/or cruel. If they need you to say, blatantly and without regard for your own self-image, "I love you," or, "I think you're amazing," you should do that. You don't always have to disclaim it or quote it ("I've known you longer than anybody, Eddie, and anything you do is all right by me--can I borrow the car?") or make them work for it.

But here are just a few of the many problems with sincerism.

* It's a genre which thinks it's the whole of art; it's a perspective which won't acknowledge its contingency. If I speak in aphorisms or jokes or provocations, I am actually conveying something about both myself and my view of the truth, just as much as if I *~*bared my heart*~*.

* It's the privilege of those whose beliefs are basically mainstream to think that "realism" and sincerity are good ways of conveying the truth. Only those whose experiences and interpretations line up with mainstream culture can be guaranteed that their sincere heart-baring tales will be believed; and they're the ones for whom this language of sincerity was made. To take the boringly obvious example, if I want to talk about Gay Catholic Whatnot, I need to somehow entice or bully straight people (and non-Catholics, for that matter) into learning my language; I can't convey what I need to say in theirs. And I strongly suspect this is also true of other kinds of privilege, which is why Invisible Man is one of the greatest American artworks ever created.

It's never joking all the way down.

* Sincerism is the opposite of camp. Camp, as far as I can tell, only works if the thing parodied has some real emotional and personal resonance. Camp is never loveless or rationalist. Sincerism divides the world into "serious" and "oh but you don't really mean that"... when our actual hearts and lives are much more conflicted, complex, and complicit than that.

If I can think of more to say, I'll say it; and I do apologize for the deeply sincerist nature of this post! It's a Mobius strip of ridiculous.

INTERNATIONAL BLOG AGAINST RACISM WEEK: At LiveJournal, and very much a mixed bag, but I really like the variety of posts here--everything from fan pix of nerd icons to personal stories of racism to a quickie exploration of how certain feminist tropes reinforce privilege.

HARRY POTTER AND THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE (MOVIE) IN 15 MINUTES: (uh, warnings for Samuel L. Jackson-esque language and suchlike)

The Unbreakable Vow

[Narcissa has come to beg an unusually feathered Snape for her son's life, and indeed, she is so distraught that her hair has gone two-toned. Her sister Bellatrix, however, is somewhat doubtful of Snape's stick-to-it-iveness.]

SNAPE: Begone, Wormtail! Fetch us a meat pie or something.

BELLATRIX: You realize that, in promising to cover Draco's ass, this is a vow that you cannot break, coward?

SNAPE: Yes.

BELLATRIX: Hence the unbreakability, scum?

SNAPE: Obviously.

BELLATRIX: And the vowness, Fluffy?

SNAPE: BRING IT.

Weasley & Weasley's Plot Point Emporium

FRED (OR GEORGE): Wouldn't it be awful if someone used our Instant Darkness Powder to infiltrate Hogwarts, thus leading to the death of Professor Dumbledore instead of just a harmless prank?

GEORGE (OR FRED): Well, that's why I put an anti-irony charm on it!

FRED (OR GEORGE): Excellent.

My mother is a fish

We asemble at the door where a beautiful AIRGURL is standing she is absolutely fizzing more lovely even than prudence entwhistle the under matron.
--Molesworth Back in the Jug Agane