LIKE THOSE OTHER STICKY VALENTINES: A lot of people seem to view the killing of Osama Bin Laden as a symbolic victory. I think that's right in many ways. But at the same time I think it's something else; how do we know the difference between a symbolic act and a sentimental act?

I know part of my distaste for the celebrations of his death (beyond the basic fact that celebrating even the death of Hitler is very different from celebrating victory in World War II) was because it seemed to make war into sentiment. Mothers die in Iraq but we feel very good! That's an attitude which can only exist in the absence of the draft.

Anyway, since I'm constantly defending symbolic politics I thought I should note how easily it can serve as the vehicle for saccharine fantasy; vengeance fantasy, in this case.

PASOLINI IS ME: What's the difference between a stereotype and an archetype?

KEEP THE ASPIDISTRA FLYING: (edited to add links, itals, and tags, but nothing else) OK, as promised, a reply to John Corvino. It's long so it will be broken into two posts. In this post, a tiny bit on biological relatedness, and a really long bit on iconography; in the next post, sexual regulation.

First, I feel very silly. I'd actually read the column on biological fatherhood which Corvino wrote earlier, and to which he links in his reply, and I wish I'd reread it before writing my post. I truly don't think he can separate the case for gay marriage from the case against honoring biological ties (or the case for donor conception) as cleanly as he'd like to, but that's a complex argument which I'm not entirely sure how to articulate right now. One philosophical claim is that I'm not sure why heterosexual couples get to be really important and interesting in—to use Catholic jargon—their procreative function, but remain banal and Just One Kind of Couple Among Others in their unitive function. One claim about rhetoric is that I've very frequently been told that gay marriage is great because how dare you say adoptive families, or stepfamilies, or single parents who make sure their kids have “male role models,” are missing anything at all? ...But I should say that the previous sentence could easily be turned back on me, since I hate so much of the rhetoric deployed against gay marriage.

And the more important point for this specific discussion is that I should have engaged with Corvino's actual position, and not what I projected on to him. That was ridiculously sloppy and gross, and I truly apologize for it. You should read his column and think about how we can honor both biological ties and families formed in other ways, since that's the question he's grappling with and it's obviously an important one.

Now, Corvino to me on sex difference as iconic rather than practical or contingent:

It’s hard to respond to that, except to note that it depends on a radically different worldview from mine: As I see it, of the many important purposes of marriage, iconography is pretty low on the list.

I value marriage because of the concrete ways in which it recognizes and fortifies families, helping them to sustain relationships that do them—and society—palpable good. It serves people’s deep needs for intimacy, care, support in childrearing, and
so on. Gay and lesbian people have those needs, too.

So if it’s a choice between marriage-as-iconography and marriage-as-meeting-concrete-needs, I’d pick the latter every time.

I think we're talking past each other here a bit. Let me first state what I think iconography does for society, then why I think the primary benefits of marriage are often due to its iconographic rather than practical nature, and then how this relates to marriage as the union of man and woman.

Iconography is how a culture inspires its members to meet common goals without using the police power. Iconography is how a culture gets its members to long to do the right thing, rather than coercing them into obeying the laws. (Thus the iconographic nature of marriage actually skyrockets in importance when forced marriage is outlawed and legal penalties for premarital or extramarital sex are rescinded.)

There is no government in which iconography does not play a major role. How articulate a culture is about its own iconography, and the content of that iconography, determines (this is just off the top of my head, and only counting stuff where government gets involved): what is taught in public schools, where conscientious objection is allowed and where it is not, what is a religion and what is a scam, what is charity and what is politics, how people describe their desire for public service or military service, and what's in the national anthem.

A quick interlude: I'm in the middle of Paul W. Kahn's Putting Liberalism in Its Place. Kahn, himself apparently a liberal, is nonetheless concerned with mapping the limits of liberal philosophy and the “here there be dragons” areas outside those limits. His basic thesis is that liberalism thinks in the categories of reason/discourse and desire (/choice/self-expression), but is baffled by the categories of honor, sacrifice, and love/personal loyalty.

And my claim here is that social order, rule-utilitarian maximization of happiness, reason (which IMO in the liberal mind gets defined instrumentally, as “the thing which helps us get to rule-utilitarianism,” when they bother to define it at all rather than simply relying on how they were raised and saying that that's reasonable and everyone else is crazy), and choice are not the only goals toward which a government may orient itself. In fact, with Kahn, I'd argue that no government in the history of ever has actually oriented itself only around these goals, without incorporating notions of beauty, sublimity, nature, honor, and similarly illiberal things.

(I should note that I have at least one huge problem with Kahn so far, but I'll get to that when I've finished the book!)

I wonder if one way to put why Corvino and I haven't yet “achieved disagreement” on this issue is the following: I believe that there are no fully secular arguments. I believe that eventually we hit rock bottom and you have to start talking in terms of whom or Whom you love, and what you believe to be the facts about human nature which we shouldn't change even if we can, even if they hurt. And these claims about love and nature are, if not entirely or explicitly religious, still very, very close to religion. Yet a pluralist society rightly seeks to postpone hitting this rock bottom as long as possible, and often, rightly, recuses itself from judging between competing systems of love and nature.

But I think that because it is so universally attested, in the law and liturgy and art and popular culture of societies with such a vastly divergent array of religious beliefs, the iconic status of sex difference is not sectarian and lies several steps above the rock bottom. My impression, which could be entirely wrong, is that Corvino sees this iconographic claim as on the rock bottom, where a pluralist society ought not descend, or at best a half-step above it.

Okay, but why is marriage an important arena for iconography?

My beliefs here are strongly influenced by my work at the pregnancy center. The women there so often long for marriage with a poignancy I can barely describe. They do not expect practical benefits to outweigh practical drawbacks. The practical benefits provided by (occasionally) slightly greater social support are counterbalanced by the threat that they will lose their government aid, and that they will find it much harder to leave a man who becomes abusive, addicted, incarcerated, or otherwise unacceptable. The benefits of marriage are, for them, primarily about what it will do for their sense of self, which is a result of its iconographic power.

And also, my beliefs here are strongly influenced by, like, being gay. Gay couples long for marriage not solely—and often not primarily, as the rejection of civil unions suggests—for the practical benefits. I do not mean in any way to denigrate the importance of e.g. being able to make medical decisions for an incapacitated partner. The practical benefits are real. But the benefits I talked about in my “Home and Dry” post, of home and honor, are entirely a result of marriage's iconic status. And I think that these benefits lie close to the heart of the push for gay marriage rather than alternative kinship forms. (The other reason for “gay marriage, not alternative kinship forms” is that modern folk, to our great detriment, stripped away the social and legal recognition and honor which once accrued to forms of kinship such as friendship and godparenthood. This is bad. Because we can only understand kinship in terms of marriage and parenthood, we can only understand gay relationships as either marriages, or not really kin at all. This is the false dichotomy Corvino should be attacking!)

Okay, but so, marriage is really important, people long for it, I get that. What does that have to do with sex difference?

Let me throw out three thoughts here. 1. What's past is prologue. Even societies which found ways of honoring some forms of homosexual relationships have not considered those relationships interchangeable with marriage, or a form of marriage, until very recently. This means that 99 44/100ths of our marital iconography is geared toward the needs and desires and images of heterosexual couples. I think for anyone with even a smattering of Hayekian humility in the face of the past, this overwhelming persistence of heterosexual marital imagery should give pause.

2.I complained here about Julia Kristeva's attempt to separate “biological” from “biographical” life. But I think she's gesturing toward or elaborating on a real insight: The stories we tell about our biology can deeply affect how we use our bodies. Therefore if we misunderstand which aspects of our bodily differences are iconic and which are merely necessary, we will very likely misunderstand how we should respond to those differences, how we should act in our bodies. So, since I already believe that sex difference is iconic in a way which very few other differences could ever approach, for all the reasons I gave in the links in that last post... it's important to me that we get the iconography right.

3.I don't want to instrumentalize beauty or sublimity. I believe that the practical, biological differences between men and women are, in themselves, largely responsible for the nature and importance of marriage. But the existence of this institution, which acknowledges and responds to la difference, is valuable in itself. As an analogy: The honor gay couples are seeking for their love, when they work for gay marriage, will produce practical benefits in terms of social support. But it's also valuable in itself.

I think our basic job right now, as a society, is to find ways of honoring nonmarital kinship without conflating it with marriage. This is basically an iconographic task, and gay marriage works against it.

In the nineteenth century, an era steeped in the language of religious and Platonic eros, two men or--even less suspiciously--two women could sustain such a sexually ambiguous relationship with impunity. They might even regard the relationship as more intense because more pure, so to speak. Thus we find Edmond Lepelletier pointing to Letinois as evidence of Verlaine's elevated affection for other men, rather than of his homosexuality. He even tries to desexualize Verlaine's love for Rimbaud, but with no great persuasiveness. Modern biographers, however, are loath to believe that such a homosexual desire can exist happily, and this disbelief strikes me as homophobic. Even today, the figure of the homosexual is so saturated with sexuality in the popular imagination that the very possibility of religious faith or chaste devotion in gay men is held to be highly improbable. Like everyone else, homosexuals eroticize religion, eroticize fatherhood, eroticize friendship, and eroticize aesthetics, but only through the utmost discretion are they allowed to get away with it. Gay men as a rule are not permitted to sublimate.
--Ellis Hanson, Decadence and Catholicism, yes I'm finally reading it

THEY ALL WANT LITTLE PIECES OF THIS YEAR'S GIRL: Over at the blog where I post stuff which is too long or spoilery for here, I've posted a ridiculously long thing about lesbianisms and why I was way too quick to talk as if every girl's experience was like mine. Toward the end there's some language which is a bit more explicit than what I want to have on the blog, as well. But overall the main point here is that I really, really needed to be more open to the fact that my experience is not The One Universal Lesbian Experience (In HD!) and I hope people whose experiences and interpretations of those experiences are radically different from mine will still write in to me.

"I went home and listened to classical music for an hour, trying desperately to recreate that feeling I had when I saw your breasts in the window...."
--via Ratty

RESPONSES TO "ROMOEROTICISM": Post #1, anonyreader. (this is a repost--accidentally posted it in a messed-up form earlier, which I hope nobody noticed! And it's actually about my Commonweal piece, but I thought it was apropos.)

I have just read your essay or reflections on Homosexuality & the Church in Commonweal. I liked your voice - but I ended up feeling confused...

I remembered once, many years ago, I had my little niece visiting me - she was only three, four or five years old - don't remember exactly and I was out of the church at that time, and we were talking about God and I think I said Where is God? - and she pointed her finger towards the heaven - and I smiled and said No, she is down there pointing towards the ground. She looked at me bewildered first and then giggling....

I think I did it because I had just discovered how different it would have felt for me If our creed had been talking about the Mother, the Daughter and the Holy Spirit - very estranging....

I know what Fatherly love is and I know the thrust in the Father - but the metaphor of relationship is not gendered? Being a son is not different from being a daughter? I hope not! To love God with all my heart - is loving a You/ a Thou -

Relating to the Word, the Son, The Christ, Jesus - and loving Jesus - How is that for a man and a woman? Is it a gendered face or is it Compassion, Lovingkindness in eyes - in a bodylanguage which still is not a masculine body? Just Human? Or is it not? Like when we don't differentiate between he and she in our prose and let he be both? - because for me there is a difference reading he and/or she....

I am a man who is longing for another man - a thou embodied in a male body - still my love is for a thou. Some men and women fall in love with another man or woman with the same personality profile - some fall in love with someone who has another personality profile then their own - no matter if they are hetero- or homosexual...

But then there is the question of energy - that prototypes of Man and Woman even though they conceal all differences in those categories - they help molding the feeling of wholeness - for most gendered people - and this is based on the man longing for a woman and a woman longing for a man... maybe... and that's why children have to protect those bounded categories. We have all kinds of labels for lesbians and gays - and people identify with those roles, even though they might know that they are more than that identity. Some of those roles seems to me to be somewhat not autentic to the self...

I think there is a problem with the dicotomy of Man and Woman - if we don't ask what kind of man and what kind of woman - and I don't mean a real man and not a real man/ a real woman and not a real woman - or a good woman or a bad woman. I think polytheistic religions may have more opportunities for personal fullfillment through prototypes than we have through Jesus and Mary....

These are just some impulsive reflections... I would like very much to read what you think about these things.

Eve says: I do think our longings are often, though not always, very strongly gendered. That's where I was going with the "Beatrice" passage in the IC piece. This doesn't require rigid gender roles, but a more subtle sense that Woman and Man have some iconic reality. There's a very lovely thing in Thomas a Kempis's Reflections on the Passion of Christ where he reworks the Song of Songs as a hymn to the Christ crucified, which is deeply attentive to the body, very much attuned to the sublime aspect of the flesh; you might appreciate that. I've found praying the Anima Christi is also very striking.

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.

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

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.

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

"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.

LADY POVERTY: My review of Catholic and Feminist is available to everyone now, not just First Things subscribers.

All of these questions are just side effects of two main questions: If there really is a conflict between one’s Catholicism and one’s feminism, should Catholicism ever win? And, perhaps most central of all, can there be a feminist theology of submission--or does the feminist focus on equality and power relations necessarily crowd out any hope of understanding why a woman might find joy in kneeling, grace in bowing her head?

For the record, that wasn't my title; esprit d'escalier suggests "The Missionaries of Parity," though I don't think that's quite right.

My friend, Steve, told me this once: "All the girls I've ever loved should have their faces on the backs of milk cartons."
--Sherman Alexie, "Distances" (in The Business of Fancydancing)

LIE BECOMES THE TRUTH: I recently amused myself by listing things that are true of me when I'm writing fiction, and at no other time. (Or, let's say, at few other times!) Here are a few, posted in hopes that they will amuse you all as well.

I'm a reactionary. You know, I'm really much more of a liberal than my fiction expresses. "How They Made the Manticore" is both a parable that really resonates with me, and a temptation I need to recognize and sometimes work against in my fiction. I don't want to write "All change is bad! Progress is perverse!", not only because I don't believe that but also because Jesus wouldn't agree.

I'm 50/50 bisexual. In "real life" (que significa eso?) I'm... you can either say, "I'm 85/15 lesbian," or, "I'm maybe 60/40 attracted to women vs. men on a physical level, but in terms of emotional orientation and romance, I'm much more likely to be romantically and even iconically drawn to a woman than to a man."

[eta: This isn't quite right, you know. I'm dykier than this suggests. Not sure what would adequately convey the issue, other than a) iconicity is far more important to me than the Kinsey scale could ever recognize, and b) less excitingly (and by "exciting" I always mean "metaphysical"), I'm always gayer than you think I am, though usually less gay than you expect. Think of it that way--isn't that illuminating? ;) ]

But I can always tell when I find a character's image in my head physically attractive; and, intriguingly, I split really close to 50/50 lady/guy there.

I obsess more about death than about suffering. In my extrafictional life, the reverse of this is usually true. (Have I mentioned that I'm more liberal than you think I am?)

And the next novel will really focus on suffering--as the recent novel did, in many ways--whereas death, in both novels, is merely one cause or form of suffering among others. But in my short fiction, "the candles blew and then he appeared"... partly, I'm sure, because it's death that makes repentance necessary. "When there's no future, how can there be sin?"--because sin as a concept is always embedded in a narrative of possible repentance and also missed opportunities for that repentance. Sin is an irrevocable act, and that act can only exist, be reckoned with, and be reconciled in a world where sinners die.

That isn't the entire reason--it only explains let's say three or four of the skeleton-haunted stories I've written--but it's interesting in its own right, so I'll say it, and let time and change sort out the rest.