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

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

Oh paleoconservatism. How you won't be missed.

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

"Hey, what's your name anyway?"

"Julien."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

well, read on why doncha!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then he sees this photograph.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

more

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

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

I'M IN NEW HAVEN. You will continue to be blessed by my absence until, say, Wednesdayish.

SERIOUSLY!

I'M IN DALLAS, and just visited the Meadows Museum, which you really should not miss if you're ever in this area. It's on the SMU campus, and features a terrific selection of Spanish art, from the end of the Middle Ages through the 20th c.--El Greco, Goya, Ribera, Zurbaran, Miro... you get the picture. (Sorry for no accent marks! I'm in the business center of a Best Western and don't have time to do them.) There's also one Giacometti.

I really wish the museum had a book of its collection. Oh well.

One extra-cool thing about the second-floor galleries is their arrangement: chronologically in a big circle. So the first room starts in, if memory serves, the last quarter of the 14th c., and then you go room-by-room until you hit the cubists and Miro and all that jazz... and then you're back with the medievals again.

This was great for me because I have a really hard time with both the medieval works and the modern ones, but seeing them right next to each other made me see how much they have in common with each other, especially in contrast to the Renaissance-through-1900 works I love, which are generally in that darkness-and-whiteness, brooding, exalted Spanish style.

The medieval and 20th-c. works were more iconographic, more alphabetic, less focused on personality. When they showed a cow it was The Cow, not this cow here. The medieval and modernist faces aren't selves in the same way, with the same internality; or else I can't see it, maybe. The textures and colors were very similar too: flat textures, no depth of field, and superhot, rich, highly contrasting colors--like those DC front yards where the hot pink azaleas are planted right next to the orange ones and the purple ones. Deep orange and deep blue lying against one another in huge flat blocks.

So, just some very scattered thoughts....

My other note on Dallas is that the very first mulberries are already out!--and yet the bumblebees came to DC before they came here, which seems utterly perverse.

"AND ANY MAGAZINE FEATURING THE SMITHS." I can't even tell you how much of this is one of the many master keys to the mystery that is me.

I did a book review of QUEER in high school. I helped put up posters saying, "YES I'M A DYKE AND I'M A BIG MEAN DYKE AND THAT'S MS. HOMOSEXUAL TO YOU."

This is life as I know it.

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.

DIES IRAE: This was supposed to be a blogwatch, but then I kept talking.

College Jay on the Day of Silence against bullying of students perceived to be lgbt.

I think silence is basically the exact opposite of what you should do to combat this stuff, but... that might be because I spent my high school days getting yelled at for being an idiot by the left-wing administration of my private HS (who thought gay kids were fine as long as we didn't make a big deal about it). I'M SORRY I WAS TEN YEARS AHEAD OF YOUR SORRY ASS. And... every memory of talking with the administration is a reminder of privilege. Maybe sometimes silence is the best anyone can do.

But I hope not. More soon.

And btw, I think Jay's response to the whole, "Why not just a day against bullying in general?", thing is right.

And also, more importantly, I don't really think a lot of straight Christians get how important this stuff is. You can be a straight Christian and be sweet and awesome, and love your neighbor, and grow up in an atmosphere where you very rarely see anti-gay bullying--especially if you're female--and so this horror, where your actual parents wake you up and tell you to get dressed and go get beaten and humiliated, never needs to be real to you. And so it's really hard to even imagine that this is as pervasive as it is.

It isn't everybody's experience, obviously. It wasn't mine. I got taunted a little bit but no more for being gay than for being generally kind of a hilarious weirdo. But it's really hard, I think, to be gay in America and like other gay people and not know stories which would make your hair curl.

DAY JOB: One! more! time!!... or, recent stuff on MarriageDebate.

From the bottom of the page to the top, we've got: thoughts for white parents of interracial children; a review of the looks-fascinating new book Marriage-Go-Round; the new kept woman; "Friday Night Lights" and the teenage virgin; and (from an interview with the author of Marriage-Go-Round):

Q: You were already well versed in the subject of marriage in America, as you have been studying families and public policy for much of your career. Did any of your discoveries surprise you as you wrote THE MARRIAGE-GO-ROUND?

A: I knew that our divorce rate was higher than in other countries, but I didn’t realize how much higher than even in supposedly vanguard countries such as Sweden. One statistic that stunned me: take two children, one growing up with married parents in the United States, and one growing up with unmarried parents in Sweden—which child has the higher likelihood of seeing his parents’ relationship break up? Answer: the American kid, because children living with married parents in the United States have a higher probability of experiencing a break-up than do children living with unmarried parents in Sweden. That’s how high our break-up rates are. ...

Q: Why is same-sex marriage so debated in the United States? How does this compare to other countries?

A: Same-sex marriage has been more of a battleground in the United States than in most other countries because marriage is more important to Americans than to people in other countries. Same-sex marriage is sometimes portrayed as a legal rights issue—the right to file taxes together, visit partners in the hospital, etc. Those rights are important, but that’s not the main issue. If the fight were only about legal rights, then civil unions would be sufficient. They are not sufficient to gay and lesbian activists in the United States because of the great prestige of marriage. The real issue is symbolic: who gets to wear the marriage badge. In some European countries, gay and lesbian activists are asking instead: why, at this late date, should we buy into the oppressive, archaic institution of marriage? But in the United States many advocates say that only a marriage ring guarantees first-class citizenship. And they are right, because marriage matters more here than elsewhere.

All that and so much more, for one low, low price!

Bow your head. Beg for your life. Death without burial.
And there--as if
Inside a moonlit sandstorm God allowed
The columns of Palmyra speech--
The Greeks encouraging their host:
"I am here. I will help.
Stand still and fight. At any moment they will break."
Though they do not.
--All Day Permanent Red

WEAR YOUR INSIDES OUT: Remember how I promised you a post about how God's like a killer mutant cat? This is that post!

I can't now find the post at Secular Right which triggered this response, but I recall it as an ingenue, even a gamine, in which the author asked why theists so often assumed that the atheist worldview was bleak or depressing: How can we feel bereft when there is Mozart and springtime?

And yeah, I'm really sympathetic to that view. I used to believe that people generally chose the worldview whose position on the afterlife was hardest for them to accept, because that was what I and my godfather and several other people I knew had done. Mozart and springtime can prompt astonished feelings that reconciliation has happened, somehow, when we weren't looking.

Perhaps some of the reason I reject that view comes from a difference in temperament. But I'm more interested in exploring whether my difference with this atheist-amid-cherry-blossoms worldview is based on our divergent approaches to the relationship between beauty and meaning.

One could view beauty as its own meaning, in the same way that it's its own justification. I... don't actually know what that would feel like, or look like, because I don't do it, but conceptually it seems possible.

But to me beauty is always an arrow, always points beyond itself; it's always lack as well as presence. It's always both two faces, and the vase in the negative space between them. When I'm most present to beauty, it seems to me that I can hear the blood pulsing beneath the skin, the life and vulnerability and horror beneath the musculature. Samuel Delany--maybe in Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand--? but I think actually in Babel-17--anyway, he described a man's muscles as "like snakes in milk." And the glamour and danger of the snake deepens the beauty of the man.

Which brings me to The Uninvited! Badmovies.org summarizes its plot with, "A killer mutant cat that hides inside another cat." And a) that is one of the most awesome things I have ever read, but also b) that's pretty much what I think beauty is. A cat, with all the reality and life of a cat... but inside the cat's skin, there's something else, something more powerful, something more real. When I talk about "meaning," which I should do less often (it's an easy crutch for the theist), it's this killer mutant cat-within-the-cat which I mean.

THE PLAYMOBIL WINE BAR. You're welcome.

Think of a raked sky-wide Venetian blind.
Add the receding traction of its slats
Of its slats of its slats as a hand draws it up.
Hear the Greek army getting to its feet.

Then of a stadium when many boards are raised
And many faces change to one vast face.
So, where there were so many masks,
Now one Greek mask glittered from strip to ridge.
--All Day Permanent Red

POLITICS AND THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: I haven’t written anything about the recent gay-marriage decisions. I really didn’t think I had anything to say that I hadn’t said already. But apparently I do... because I have too many friends?

This post was prompted by an ad from the National Organization for Marriage, which a friend of mine described as “Orwellian”; in his view, the ad said that love is hate. So here are three thoughts about the ad [EDITED: It's that "Gathering Storm" one--I'm too lazy to find a link, but I'm sure YouTube can hook you up] and that adjective, in order from least interesting to me to most interesting to me, because a) the last shall be first, yo; and b) I acknowledge that your priorities may not be the same as mine. So this post is about the implicit concessions of the slippery slope; religious liberty; and how our language acknowledges the divergent forms of eros.

Full disclosure: I do weekly html monkeywork for NOM. I have exactly no input into their ads, but, you know, if I really disagreed with what they do on a fundamental level, I’d quit. My bosses don’t know I’m writing this post, since they don’t read my blog and I don’t plan to bring this to their attention.

That said, the ad. It’s really, really cheesy.

It’s fearmongering, and I feel really conflicted about that. I don’t want to become so missish on this issue, so much in thrall to political prudery, that I reject the gutter-punching, tabloid ethos I profess to love.

And yet at the same time, I wonder whether this ad goes against John Paul II’s Gospel admonition to “Be not afraid!” We’re told to “duc in altum,” to put out into the deep. Maggie Gallagher, a.k.a. my part-time boss, told me once that the slippery-slope argument is already a concession. The implicit premise is, “Well, gay marriage isn’t really that bad, but look at what it might cause!” I think the religious-liberty ad partakes in the same concession. It’s the kind of ad you’d expect from a lost cause. We’ve lost, but please, can’t we have our small enclave of resistance?

And yet, and yet. There’s probably a reason I don’t get to do these ads, you know? Am I just using effective ads as my redshirts? Am I using them as the demotic worldview from which I, as a Respectable Person, must distance myself? Am I giving in to the pressure to rule all arguments against gay marriage out of bounds as bigoted? (A move made quite strikingly here, for example, where “I don’t want my children to be taught things deeply contrary to my faith” becomes “Gay people molest children!” If the ad described in that comment is out of bounds, what argument could possibly be permissible?)

John Corvino describes a similar dilemma from the opposite side, here.

And it’s not like the ad is wrong. I guess I just can’t understand how people mock or disagree with the basic premise, or call it paranoid or hysterical. It’s obvious to me that the whole culture changes when gay marriage happens. That’s what gay marriage is for.

I don’t think you can say, “You are just like the bigots who oppose interracial marriage--but nothing will happen to you as a consequence!”

If you’re at all interested in the religious-liberty implications of gay marriage, I’d recommend Marc Stern’s and Chai Feldblum’s chapters from Same-Sex Marriage and Religious Liberty. For a shorter overview, you could try Maggie Gallagher’s “Banned in Boston” article, which in my obviously-not-neutral opinion is very fair.

The best counterargument is the same as the best counterargument on all gay-marriage topics: “This isn’t just about gay marriage but about a whole panoply of prior changes, most of which have obvious good qualities as well, so you’re not seeking status quo so much as rollback.” Dale Carpenter makes that argument ably and concisely here.

I see the force of that argument, and of course I acknowledge that there’s no way we would be having this conversation without the prior cultural changes which led to e.g. laws against discrimination based on sexual orientation. For that matter, every single day I take advantage of the cultural changes which have made it possible for me to be an out lesbian while facing very limited explicit hostility.

But I still disagree that gay marriage is only a trivial turn of the ratchet (do ratchets turn?? I’m really not the home-improvement kind of dykey!), a mere formality, or something you can only worry about if you also reject all of the prior cultural moves which brought us here. I think prudence can allow you to draw a line, and frankly, gay marriage is a really obvious place for that line. Gay marriage is a big deal for the same reasons given by its supporters!--it is a real change in the culture, a deeply significant change, and a change with far-reaching public implications. I don’t think you can write paeans to marriage as a public and cultural status, then turn around and say that gay marriage will have very limited public effects. Marriage isn’t designed to have limited public effects.

For a more mechanism-focused take on this stuff, check out Eugene Volokh here; or, I can’t stress this enough, Stern’s and Feldblum’s essays cited above.

Or take public schools. NOM and its allies were ridiculed for suggesting that where gay marriage is legal, public schools will have to teach about it. What I never understood was--why on earth wouldn’t public schools teach about it? Was it to be legal yet shameful? Of course not! Public schools already embrace “family diversity” for families reshaped by divorce, remarriage, and cohabitation—none of which bear the same “if you think this is troubling, you might as well put on a white hood and sheets!” baggage as gay marriage.

(continues in next post)

“'When I make a word do a lot of work like that,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'I always pay it extra.'": And now I come to the thing I care about most: songs.

For it seems to me that there is one way in which the gay-marriage movement deserves the adjective “Orwellian.” It is designed to make any sense of the uniqueness of heterosexual eros unspeakable, and ultimately unthinkable.

There are boring practical reasons to have a separate and specific language for describing sex between men and women. I talked about that stuff here and here. The task of marriage is to make intercourse fruitful rather than devastating, since it has such great potential to be either.

But there are also ways in which heterosexuality is uniquely beautiful, and our language of marriage developed to recognize this, too. Here’s one way to get the quick thrill of encountering a foreign belief system: Check out the Mattachine Society’s 1953 brief against gay marriage. Mattachine was one of the first gay-rights organizations in this country; and yet here, the writers sound not even like John Paul II but more like Paul VI. I don’t think I would wax this rhapsodic about the sanctity of motherhood! [EDITED: Well, I should re-read things before I link them; this is fascinating in its way, but less unpredictable than I'd remembered. Thoroughly skippable. Ah well.]

There’s something uniquely lovely about bringing together the two halves of humanity; about bridging la difference; about moving He and She past mutual incomprehension and suspicion, into harmony. (This is of course related to procreation, but separate from and prior to it. That’s why JPII roots his “theology of the body” in Adam and Eve’s couplehood in Eden--before they had children.)

There’s something uniquely lovely about recognizing the sexual Other as one’s home.

(I’d suggest that there’s also something uniquely lovely about homosexual love, insofar as through love, one’s sexual… compatriot? likeness? whatever is not “self” nor “Other” but “similar”… becomes an Other. Eros is the complete union of two beings who nonetheless remain distinct, remain Other to one another; this is why heterosexual union is such a frequent Jewish and Christian symbol for the union of God and Israel or humankind. My experience of lesbian love is that it tends to draw out and heighten the ways in which the beloved is Other, or even transform her into Other, so that she can be the target of love. This is perhaps a rebuttal to the criticism that homosexuality is narcissism. Nonetheless, it is clearly a different form of eros than the heterosexual form, in which metaphysical Otherness is iconically represented by physical, sexual difference.)

And yet now, if you try to talk about “the halves of humanity,” or anything at all which might be unique to heterosexual eros, you’re a bigot. This is a new development. There have been cultures--I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again--which honored some forms of homosexual relationships, while still considering marriage to be something separate.

I don’t know if that’s a path our conflictedly-Christianized culture can take. Still, it would be more accurate and more poetic than the moralistic, bourgeois denial of heterosexual uniqueness which fires the rhetoric of the gay-marriage movement.

To the sigh of the string, see Pandar's shot float off;
To the slap of the string on the stave, float on
Over the strip for a beat, a beat, and then
Carry a tunnel the width of a lipstick through Quist's neck.
--Christopher Logue, All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten

AND A BELATED HOLY THURSDAY GREETING TO YOU, TOO.

Worth checking every day.

BREAK FAST: KITCHEN ADVENTURES. Some stuff I tried, to celebrate Easter.

Lemon-roasted Cornish hen: I used: a lemon, a small yellow onion, a small Cornish hen, some fresh rosemary, s & p, lots of butter.

Set oven to 425, 450, or thereabouts. Peel the onion. Cut a wedge of lemon and a wedge of onion--these two together get stuffed into the hen, so you want pieces which will fit. Then wash the hen and pat dry. Take out the giblets if they're in there. Stuff the cavity with the lemon, onion, and a few branches of rosemary. Squeeze the rest of the lemon over the hen and add salt and freshly-ground pepper.

Grab a handful of nice soft butter. Just rub that all over the hen. You want it slathered.

Then the hen in its baking dish goes in the oven. Roast it for... you know, however long it takes. I think with my oven it took about 20-30 mins, but yours might cook faster or slower. Check and baste the hen every ten minutes or so. It's done when the juices run clear.

The verdict: Yum! This was a completely predictable and tasty dish--you really taste every flavor. Totally enjoyable. My one thought was maybe more onion next time--roughly chop the other half of the onion and add it to the dish halfway through cooking?

When you're done feeding, throw the squozen lemon halves, the hen carcass, some whole peppercorns, a bit of salt, and some more rosemary branches into a pot. Just cover them with water. Bring to a boil, then cook uncovered for about an hour. Strain, and now you have a lemony hen stock, for your soups, pastas, etc.

Wild mushroom egg roll things: I used: assorted wild mushrooms; egg roll wrappers; olive oil; fresco asiago cheese; salt; various spices.

I covered a baking tray with parchment paper and set the oven to, I think, 450. I laid out some wrappers on the tray.

I scattered cut-up mushrooms on the wrappers, and cut the fresco asiago into kind of like Lincoln logs. Each wrapper got one Lincoln log, and a pinch of salt. I used different spice combinations: plain; cayenne; chopped fresh rosemary; cayenne-cumin-curry powder-powdered ginger-tiny hint of cinnamon; and cayenne-ginger.

Then I did my best to roll 'em up and seal them, keeping my fingers wet. I'm terrible at this! I managed to make various mushroom packages, but I don't think you could really call them "rolls."

Then those got rubbed with olive oil, and into the oven they went! They cooked for about 11-12 minutes; I checked on them at the nine-minute mark but they were only just starting to brown. You want them brown, but not burnt, with the skin starting to blister a bit.

Once they'd cooled, I tried the rolls and made some more. These were fairly satisfying, but I don't think I got the wrapper-to-stuffing ratio right--the rolls were either bulging or slightly empty, especially since the mushrooms reduce a bit in size as they cook.

The best flavor combination by far was pretty much anything with the ginger. I'd use fresh ginger if I did this again. Ginger and wild mushrooms... totally delicious.

If those wrappers are still workable tonight, I'll make wonton cigarettes with cinnamon and a pinch of cayenne, for dessert. I'll let you know if that works!

FLOWERS IN THE DUSTBIN:

Green and beautiful low-income housing? This sounds like an oxymoron. The usual standard for housing for the poor has been cheap and functional. But only this year came Intervale Green, a low-income apartment building in the South Bronx that might just be a model for developers. ...

Welcome to Intervale Green Apartments. Quietly but clearly it engages in a dialogue with the old psychology and social policies that say the poor don't need beauty--just basics. But Biberman understands that beautiful places change people's attitudes, reduce stress, improve productivity, and also give people hope.

more (I forget where I found this)

Too frail and puny to play with the other boys, Caldwell spends his solitary days sitting high up in his favorite tree. There, hidden behind a veil of Spanish moss, he takes from his pocket an old Bull Durham sack in which he keeps the mementos of rural Southern boyhood/sensitive division: a frog's skull, a cameo with half the face sliced off, and the pennies that closed his grandfather's eyes.

Caldwell would be content to spend the rest of the book thumbing through these talismans, and Gonad Manque, who has no sense of plot, would be equally content to go on writing about them. But it's That Summer, a season unique to the South, when Something Terrible Happens.

Suddenly Caldwell's woodsy retreat is invaded by inhabitants of the outside world. When "they" come, his sensitivity receives a jolt. Perched in his tree, he watches copulating couples, escaped prisoners committing sodomy, a seven-foot black named Raoul staring at a dead fish, an old crone burying a jewelry box containing the other half of the cameo, a weeping stranger castrating himself, and the town idiot masturbating over a crushed flamingo.
--Florence King, "The Gay Confederation," Southern Ladies and Gentlemen

RADIO SILENCE UNTIL EASTER MONDAY, but I'll leave you with Amy Welborn's post rounding up blogs and stuff by people entering the Catholic Church this Easter!

...Plus, more somberly, a post from Amy's comments, about some reasons people fall away from the Church after conversion.

CULTURES OF DEATH:

Senate Republicans are now privately threatening to derail the confirmation of key Obama administration nominees for top legal positions by linking the votes to suppressing critical torture memos from the Bush era.

more (via Mark Shea)

GO DOWN, MOSES: Okay, the symbolism here is pretty intense, regardless of my other opinions of the President:

This year's Passover is then infused with additional meaning, being marked by the first African-American president of the United States, who will be hosting a the first ever Seder at the White House.

more--and the rest of the post is definitely worth reading as well.

WHY CAN'T WE HAVE A FOOD SAFETY POSTMODERNIZATION ACT? No, but for real, Walter Olson breaks down how a proposed bill would push small/artisanal farmers out of the field:

...Patrick, and the other writers linked just above, warn that the law may drive out of business local farmers and artisanal, small-scale producers of berries, herbs, cheese, and countless other wares, even when there is in fact nothing unsafe in their methods of production. Many informal makers of ethnically or culturally distinctive food items will go off-books or simply fall by the wayside, overwhelmed by the reporting and batch-tracking paperwork. Many foreign producers who ship in less-than-mass quantities will give up on the U.S. market rather than try to comply with challenging standards that differ drastically from those imposed by European markets or their own countries of origin, which in turn will mean that many interesting and safe specialty foods will simply no longer be available for purchase, at least legally.

much, much more, with delicious and nutritious artisanal links. Comments thread is shortish but substantive so far as well.

RAGGED THOTS (aka Robert A. George) is in Colorado at the Conference on World Affairs, talking about the future of the Republican Party and also comic books. I was a total shank and failed to post this before his first panel, on Monday, but he's got a few panels left before the conference ends--he's a cool dude and he wants your thoughts (or thots?), so you should drop him a line....

"Will you speak falsely for God,
and speak deceitfully for him?
Will you show partiality toward him,
will you plead the case for God?
Will it be well with you when he searches you out?
Or can you deceive him, as one deceives a man?
He will surely rebuke you
if in secret you show partiality.
Will not his majesty terrify you,
and the dread of him fall upon you?
Your maxims are proverbs of ashes,
your defenses are defenses of clay."
--Job rebuking his "comforters," Job 13:7-12

I'M DREAMING OF A BLACK MARKET, JUST LIKE THE FREE ONES THAT WE NEED:

...O'Brien, the first and only homeless person to belong to the Harvard Square Business Association, said he is tired of fighting City Hall.

His story is a long, involved one that includes getting arrested twice, obtaining various permits, and being moved onto subway grates by the Cambridge superintendent of streets, only to have the MBTA say he couldn't set up on its property. When he tried to open a book business in a nearby church, he found he couldn't get liability insurance. When he tried to get a tax identification number, he said, "they wanted all sorts of paperwork" that he couldn't provide, especially since he had a half-dozen other homeless people working for him on commission. Now his peddler's permit has lapsed, and he said he has grown weary of filling out forms.

"It's the paperwork that killed me," O'Brien said. Decades of living on the streets have weathered his face beyond his 55 years. He says he ran a similar business in New York and was never hassled.

more (via Hit & Run)

The Institute for Justice, here.

THISTLE FARMS BLOG.

For those who are new to our community, Thistle Farms is a non-profit business for women who have survived prostitution, violence and addiction. By hand we make natural bath and body products that are good for us and for the environment. But we are connected not just by what we were or even what we are today, but by our remembrance of what it feels like to be broken. We all remember what it feels like to have been in the ditch, when everything in your life seemed to fall apart. The enduring gift for most of us is that this experience allows your heart to be so open. There is humility and compassion for others because you have learned how human you are. Whatever has brought you to our blog today, we hope you will feel the love and grace that binds this community together through the voices you'll read on these pages.

(that post) (the whole blog)

FEAST OF SAINT MARY OF EGYPT, patroness of penitents.

OrthoWiki on the saint; Wikipedia (with bonus Nalo Hopkinson--I did not know that!); more, plus an icon.

I arose to open to my beloved,
and my hands dripped with myrrh,
my fingers with liquid myrrh,
upon the handles of the bolt.
--Song of Solomon, 5:5

IF YOU STOP PAYING A SURROGATE MOTHER, WHAT HAPPENS TO THE FETUS? I should really make you guys go to MarriageDebate for this stuff, but I thought this would be of interest:

If you're angry about the AIG scandal or Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme, check out what's happening to the infertile couples and surrogate mothers involved in a California womb brokerage. It's a familiar tale of vanishing funds and defaulted obligations. But this time, the potential loss is bigger than property. It's pregnancy.

Whose pregnancies are at stake? That's a tricky question. Through in vitro fertilization, a fetus can have two mothers: a genetic one and a gestational one. Last week, for example, we looked at a Japanese case in which a doctor mistakenly put one woman's embryo in another woman's uterus. Weeks later, the second woman was told of the error and aborted the pregnancy. The first woman wasn't told about anything for two and a half months.

That's what can happen when you separate pregnancy into two stages. One woman can abort another's offspring.

And that's not the only way it can happen. Thousands of women have hired themselves out as gestational surrogates. If you're the child's genetic mother, you can put a clause in the contract stipulating under what circumstances the surrogate can abort the pregnancy. But no court will enforce that clause, because you aren't the one who's pregnant. The surrogate is. She can choose abortion unilaterally. All you can do is stop paying her for carrying the child.

But what if it's the other way around? What if you stop paying her first? If you had hired her to sew booties for your kid, she could respond to your nonpayment by halting work on the booties. But her job wasn't to deliver booties. It was to deliver the kid. If she responds by halting work on the thing you've stopped paying for, that thing is your child.

Presumably, if you care enough about the baby to have hired a surrogate, you'll pay what you promised. But what if you don't control the payments? What if you delivered the money to a broker, and the broker lost, stole, or squandered it? You did your part, but the surrogate is no longer being paid. And she has every legal right to end the pregnancy.

That's the scenario unfolding in California.

more

NOT AN APRIL FOOL'S JOKE.... Hey guys, if you tried to go to Saran Malene M's show at Twins Jazz tonight, I really apologize--I had no idea the place was closed! It looked like they lost their liquor license or some similar problem. If I can find info about her next show I will let you know about that. Again, my apologies if you got rained on....

TELEBIBLICAL: So I just watched the first three episodes of Kings off IMDB. Some thoughts. (Keep in mind that if I don't mention something specifically, I probably didn't like it! I was a real hard sell on this one.)

This post is written on the assumption that you a) have seen the episodes or b) don't care about spoilers (including, you know, stuff that isn't in the Bible).

Executive summary: Wow, a show about a contemporary/alternate-universe King David is a terrific idea. I hate what they're doing with Jonathan; the acting is uneven at best (well... no--there's no good acting under age 40); but there's really unexpected subtlety in certain moments of this show. Also, 95% of this post was written after the first episode, which means that the subsequent two pretty much added nothing and subtracted nothing. If you watch Goliath you'll know what the show is like so far.

What I liked: The contrast between the front and the capital. A thing I think a lot about is how isolated it's possible to be from our military. If I hadn't joined a group of right-wing freaks in college, I doubt I would know a single veteran my own age today. That strange disconnect, where the war is happening but it's remote from many citizens--they're not even really on the "home front," they're just at home--is hit pretty intensely in Kings.

The anointing/motor-oil scene. I honestly don't know why this worked for me, but it did; maybe because it captured the sense of surprise from both men, that this really mundane moment had suddenly taken on supreme significance?

David's piano music in the first episode sounds nicely harpish.

The scene on the steps. Harsh and real, and the only time I've actually liked Sebastian Stan's otherwise eyelinerish, CW-style acting as Jack. I first thought the dialogue was annoyingly conflicted between a today's-America worldview ("how God made you") and a more Biblical one, but actually, I think it might be seen as part of Silas's shifting between trust in God and trust in power (as he says later to Rev. Samuels, "Then God can go to Hell").

"We are all your children, Silas." This was a really alien sentiment--a line spoken from within a monarchist worldview, not a lib-dem one. You don't see that often on TV from a sympathetic character.

"Show me you're more than tank. ...That you live for more than our deaths." Taken on its face this is an incredibly maudlin speech. Taken as a speech to God--cast as a speech to enemy soldiers!--it's honestly pretty incredible, and deeply in tune with the Christian faith. Wow. (Judah Halevi: "I love my enemies, for You are one of them.")

Prosperity: David's happiness at trading the port his father died for in order to have peace. I think that's the only thing I really liked about this episode, although the pigeons were fun.

Not so much: I'm not feelin' the butterflies at all. Really, show, butterflies?

I can think of at least fifteen different ways to play the Jonathan/David relationship in a way that would really speak to me. This show has found a sixteenth one which I can't stand. The actual Bible story is much, much more poignant than this cliche. (I might feel slightly different if Stan could sell Jack Benjamin as a military leader, whose care for his troops is basic to his character. He hasn't done that for me so far.)

I'm actually having a hard time articulating what I find wrong with this setup; there's the obvious (setting aside power for love is perhaps the core element of Jonathan's story, and if you start off showing me a whiny, resentful prince, I'll have a hard time buying any future development toward the uncompromising awesomeness of Biblical Jonathan), there's the gay (I'm really over media that gives me Tormented Pretty Gays to feel sorry for, and I feel gross about how popular that image has proven [especially among straight girls], for this show and in general), there's the indifference to faith shown by both Jack and David. Mostly I just think what I said above: The actual Bible does this story a million times better.

Can the show win me over by portraying change in these characters? Yeah, maybe. If they don't have Jack be all unrequited and piny about David (because we all know gay people have no non-eroticized same-sex friendships!), and they sell me on the characters' spiritual growth... maybe. But right now I'm not seeing Jonathan and I'm definitely not seeing David. Can you honestly picture this demi-cute everyboy singing the 51st Psalm?

BLACK AND WHITE AND RED ALL OVER: Comic Art Indigene. The National Museum of the American Indian has an exhibit on Native Americans and comics, up through May 31st. It's... it's scattershot.

There are about three examples of everything the exhibit wants to talk about. Three examples of traditional art forms done with comic-book motifs and themes (the pottery where the deer hunt uses imagery possibly taken from Krazy Kat was pretty awesome); three graffiti-influenced artworks with Indian characters; three contemporary satirical cartoons. You get the picture. It's all interesting, but it's a Tantalus exhibit, withdrawing just when you're starting to want more.

I'm also not sure who the target audience is. When I visited, a teacher was herding a group of little kids through the exhibit--hurrying them past the Indian lesbians to get them to the skateboard with Speedy Gonzales painted on it. The wall captions are really intro-level and kid-friendly, but the scratchy horror comic on the wall is not.

Not a lot of sequential art here; not a lot of comics-specific storytelling techniques, as versus obviously comics-influenced pictorial techniques.

And from the one other review I've read, I got the impression that there are a lot of developments in Indian comics which just got ignored or treated with extreme shallowness, like the growing influence of manga.

All of that said--this is a quick and occasionally provocative exhibit, which I liked a lot. I hope you get that my main complaint is that I wanted more! It's definitely worth the trek down the Mall if you're in the city already. Plus, you know, it's free....

THOSE WHO CAN'T DO, SCHOOL: My God--other than the obvious, is there anything Amy Winehouse can't do?

No, really, anything?

WHERE I WILL BE WEDNESDAY NIGHT. Saran Malene M. performs at Twins Jazz at 8 pm, 1344 U St. NW.

Saran is an amazing singer--I haven't heard her in several years, but seriously, she is mind-blowing, and I can't wait to hear what she is doing now. Back in high school her music was what I think a marketing department would call Huggy Bear soul, or "Nina Simone Presents: The Fabulous Stains!". I hope to have a less-reductive description for you all soon.

Click the Twins Jazz link above for price info, but please listen when I say there is no way you will regret this.

SISTERHOOD IS POWERFUL: So while we’re kicking around gay-marriage compromises, we get this one:

That brings us to our alternative proposal: The revisionists would agree to oppose the repeal of the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), thus ensuring that federal law retains the traditional definition of marriage as the union of husband and wife, and states retain the right to preserve that definition in their law. In return, traditionalists would agree to support federal civil unions offering most or all marital benefits. But, as Princeton’s Robert P. George once proposed for New Jersey civil unions, unions recognized by the federal government would be available to any two adults who commit to sharing domestic responsibilities, whether or not their relationship is sexual. Available only to people otherwise ineligible to marry each other (say, because of consanguinity), these unions would neither introduce a rival “marriage-lite” option nor treat same-sex unions as marriages. Their purpose would be to protect adult domestic partners who have pledged themselves to a mutually binding relationship of care. What (if anything) goes on in the bedroom would have nothing to do with these unions’ goals or, thus, eligibility requirements.

(more)
Which gets this response, in comments at the Independent Gay Forum (and the main blogger there picked this comment out as worthy of posting on its own):

Another half-baked idea that goes into the reject pile. It seriously debases same-sex relationships to the level of friendships and blood relations.

(more)

Which I’ve heard before in gay-marriage discussions, a lot, and which breaks my heart. So here’s a post I think you can agree with in toto even if you think gay marriage is the quintessential grape-scented marker of justice.

First, I’m not endorsing the Anderson/Girgis compromise. I see problems with it and I see good points. This post isn’t about that.

Nor am I going to repeat my cri de coeur on behalf of sacrificial friendship. We desperately need to revive our understanding of, respect for, and willingness to sacrifice within friendship. But in this post I’m going to focus on the idea of “debasing ... relationships to the level of ... blood relations.”

Because I don’t think it’s a great idea to denigrate our unchosen loves, our familial duties, in order to exalt our chosen ones. I think it’s honestly quite awful to denigrate the love between sisters, brothers, comrades in arms (no, click that link), any tie we don’t choose and which nonetheless requires intense sacrifice from us.

I get why people don’t want to think of siblings and beloveds in the same breath. We move around so much, you know? It’s really hard to know how we could be responsible for a sibling a hundred miles away, even if we wanted to be, whereas we expect a spouse to move with us. We view employment in the career of our choice as a much better reason to move than employment near our families-of-origin. And I am not trying to argue that this privileging of choice over unchosen origin is wrong in all cases.

(There’s a subtext here, of course, that LGBT people have often been rejected by their families of origin; their only family is their “chosen family.” Note here, though, that the “chosen family” includes friends as well. I thought AIDS taught us that friends too will stand by you and suffer heartbreak with you even when your own parents will not. ...But I said I wasn’t going to talk about friendship.)

What I’m trying to say is this: 1) We used to know that brotherhood and sisterhood were powerful, beautiful, unique and real relationships. That’s how adelphopoeisis happened. That’s how we came up with the idea.

And 2), maybe more importantly: Wedlock is about making chosen relationships more like unchosen ones. Of course we’ve gotten far away from this ideal, both legally and culturally. But we still have this sense that the wedding vow is a choice to forego future choices. We still try to talk as if we are choosing to become bound; we are choosing to be faithful, choosing not to leave, choosing not to stray.

If marriage is about making chosen relationships more like unchosen ones... why would we ever think that denigrating unchosen relationships, families-of-origin, would be a good way to defend marriage?

My own answer is that the “culture of commitment” is basically a culture of personal will. Think about the different connotations of “commitment” (personal choice) and “fidelity” (adherence to preexisting standards).

But seriously, this post is not about getting you to agree with me on that explanation. It’s just about ridding the world of arguments for gay marriage which require denigration of unchosen loyalties, unchosen loves, and unchosen responsibilities. Those arguments are bad for gay marriages, let alone for anyone else’s relationships.

And finally 3), most importantly of all: I want to think about how we can strengthen friendships and families (families made by vow and families made by flesh) in a mobile society. If you care about this stuff and have any ideas, comments, anything at all, please email me so we can talk. I hope to post soon with specific ideas along these lines.

Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow; but woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up. Again, if two lie together, they are warm; but how can one be warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him. A threefold cord is not quickly broken.

--Ecclesiastes 4:9-12

FACEBOOK MEME: BOOKIE. 1) What author do you own the most books by? Probably Shakespeare--? I have a lot of Nietzsche (possibly all Nietzsche?), Angela Carter, and Agatha Christie. If we’re counting comics, definitely Los Bros. Hernandez.

2) What book do you own the most copies of? Two each of The Secret History and Story of O.

3) Did it bother you that both those questions ended with prepositions? Nah, I’m easy.

4) What fictional character are you secretly in love with? The one who came to mind first is Grantaire--he loves the girls and he loves good wine, to the tune of “Vive Henri IV”!

5) What book have you read the most times in your life (excluding picture books read to children; i.e., Goodnight Moon does not count)? Hmm... candidates include The Last Unicorn, one of the Bruno and Boots books, or Dogsbody by Diana Wynne Jones. If things I read first as a child are excluded, probably *waves tentacles in embarrassment* The Closing of the American Mind (at least three times) or The Secret History, again, some more.

6) What was your favorite book when you were ten years old? The Borribles Go for Broke.

7) What is the worst book you've read in the past year? Since March ’08: Eh, I feel bad naming Catholic and Feminist: The Surprising History of the American Catholic Feminist Movement, because really I’m not sure that book could have been written in a way I would have found awesome. So I’ll say Generation Loss instead. 100 Selected Poems of E.E. CUMMINGS was also disappointing, since he’s able to do individual lines and even occasional whole poems that really hit me.

8) What is the best book you've read in the past year? Since January ’09: The Imitation of Christ (re-read) or Perfumes: The Guide. Welcome to the madness that is me.

9) If you could force everyone you tagged to read one book, what would it be? Well, I’m not tagging anyone, though you should feel invited to play if you want to. You guys know which books I’m obsessed with.

10) Who deserves to win the next Nobel Prize for Literature? Your mom. (I reject all Nobel things on principle.)

11) What book would you most like to see made into a movie? The Genealogy of Morals.

...OK, I’ll play for real: Hirokazu Kore-eda directs The Plague; Derek Jarman (requiescat in pace) directs Against Nature--not convinced this would be a good movie, but it would definitely be memorable!; Alfred Hitchcock (ditto) directs Wuthering Heights.

12) What book would you least like to see made into a movie? In general I’m leery of books-turned-movies.

13) Describe your weirdest dream involving a writer, book, or literary character. Good grief, I can’t think of any! Too busy drinking from the keg of hatred every day, I guess.

14) What is the most low-brow book you've read as an adult? Harry Potter and the Deathly Adverbs.

15) What is the most difficult book you've ever read? Plato’s Parmenides, maybe. (And I tried to read Capital in fifth grade.)

16) What is the most obscure Shakespeare play you've seen? I don’t think I’ve seen any obscure ones! Lame.

17) Do you prefer the French or the Russians? Russians.

18) Roth or Updike? Rooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooth. (I mean, I haven’t read Updike, ever. But still: Roth!)

19) David Sedaris or Dave Eggers? Sorry, haven't read either.

20) Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer? Shakespeare because duh, then Milton, one of the great “poets of women’s hair” (Harold Bloom, I think?). If there were a question about comics adaptations rather than movie adaptations, I’d definitely push for a comics Paradise Lost; the snaky, time-shifting, connotation-heavy lines are perfect for sequential art.

21) Austen or Eliot? Austen, though to be honest, she doesn’t really do it for me. I’m like the only chick in the marriage movement who finds it hard to care about Jane Austen.

22) What is the biggest or most embarrassing gap in your reading? I have never read anything at all by the following authors: Gogol, Proust, Goethe, de Tocqueville, Edith Stein. I’ve never read Portrait of a Lady, or anything even remotely longish by James; ditto Pushkin.

From Aristotle I've read exactly one chapter of the Nicomachean Ethics (on akrasia), and I've never read Plato's Republic, nor have I read The City of God.

I neither speak nor read any language but English. That’s really the biggest gap.

23) What is your favorite novel? The Brothers Karamazov; but also, The Last Unicorn.

24) Play? Lear, but not onstage; for staging, honestly I think Beckett--either Endgame or Godot--because they’re great to read but gain so much from good staging. I’m not good at plays, though, unless they’re Shakespeare.

25) Poem? Eliot’s “Preludes.” I also really love Kathy Shaidle’s “Lobotomy Magnificat.”

26) Essay? I've read far too few essays (except by Orwell and Chesterton) to legitimately call this one; the Orwell essay I always return to is his review of Malcolm Muggeridge’s autobiography. For Chesterton, “The Architect of Spears.”

27) Short story? This one seems to shift around on me a lot. At the moment it might be something by Octavia Butler--probably the one where no one can communicate, the title of which I consistently forget (irony!). The most recent great short story I read was Eudora Welty, “Keela, The Outcast Indian Maiden,” which made me forgive her for the overpraised “Why I Live at the P.O.” Rebecca Brown’s collection The Terrible Girls was a big influence.

28) Work of non-fiction? Does the Symposium count? Autobiography definitely doesn’t count, so Augustine’s Confessions are right out.

29) Who is your favorite writer? Shakespeare doesn't count, so Dostoevsky vs. Nietzsche.

30) Who is the most overrated writer alive today? No clue. I don’t read new stuff unless I’m getting paid, pretty much. (Or unless the author is Tim Powers.)

31) What is your desert island book? Arrrrggghhhh! Maybe complete Emily Dickinson?? No, that’s crazy. We’re assuming complete Shakespeare is cheating, as is the Bible. Karamazov again?? The Gay Science???? I hate this question!

32) And... what are you reading right now? Julia Serano, Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity. Highly recommended despite her consistent attacks on symbolism/iconicity.

And the Gospel of John.

And, since I began this meme I've finished the Serano (still highly recommended) and started Kenzaburo Oe, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!

When I travel out of the country for any length of time, including professional visits, I take one precaution against losing my presence of mind and emotional balance while I am a tumbleweed in an alien landscape: I make certain to take along the books I have been reading prior to my departure.
--Kenzaburo Oe, Rouse Up O Young Men of the New Age!, tr. John Nathan

YESTERDAY I LEARNED that there's a flower called a Lenten Rose. It looks like this. (It "thrives in low light"!)

"Do not marvel that I said to you, 'You must be born anew.' The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with every one who is born of the Spirit."
--John 3:7-8

FOOD SAFETY AND SMALL FARMS: John Schwenkler writes:

Over the weekend, Tim Carney and Rod Dreher both had very nice columns on the controversy over the push for the implementation of a National Animal Identification System and other food safety measures being pushed in Congress that would likely pose serious burdens for smaller farmers and other producers who are unable to take advantage of the benefits of economies of scale. ...

What Rod wants, then, is a system that puts stringent regulations in place on the larger producers while granting exemptions for smaller farmers who can’t reasonably be expected to meet them. But granting that this sort of route is clearly possible in principle, is it politically feasible? In my Doublethink piece on raw milk, the dynamic I detected in the battle over regulation in California was essentially the same one that Mark found in his work on the CPSIA controversy: in stark contrast to the naive image of anti-regulatory businessmen squared off against the would-be food nannies in government, the actual relationship between business and government was much more, well, symbiotic than that; it was the corporations that were pushing for the new regulations, and it was hard not to think that they were doing so at least partly because they were cognizant of the effects that such regulation would have on the competition. “Regulation”, as Tim Carney put it to me in a quotation from that article, “always helps the big guys by creating barriers to entry, but there’s a more important dynamic here: When you give the government power, you give the lobbyists power. It also works the other way: When only a handful of businesses dominate an industry, bureaucrats and politicians find it easier to control that industry.”

more

The sayings of the wise are like goads, and like nails firmly fixed are the collected sayings which are given by one Shepherd.
--Ecclesiastes 12:11

NAGASAKI CAFÉ: I review Watchmen-the-movie here. I really could've written five times as much and not even touched on everything I have to say about this movie; so I've added a lot of geeked-out commentary over here. The NRO piece is vaguely spoilerous, but the stuff here is intensely so.

My old post about Watchmen-the-comic, which I still think is pretty hot.

So, posts at my spoilery site: My emotional arc after seeing the movie; what could I cut? (includes my pushback against the defenders of the softcore-VH1 sex scene, so if you're invested in that sub-argument, that's where I take it on); what the killer's dogs do for the story (includes my pushback against Barbara Nicolosi, whose response I respectfully disagree with); and random notes, including errata for the NRO piece.

Note that if you want to link to any posts at the spoilery site (or here, for that matter!) you need to erase the extra "tail" Blogger adds to the URLs for some reason. So that first post should be
http://evestoryblog.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html#246512807608831004
not
http://evestoryblog.blogspot.com/2009_03_01_archive.html#246512807608831004#246512807608831004

Sorry about that! I wish I knew how to fix it.

WHY do people who say that respect has to be earned never withhold respect from themselves?

AT THE END OF THIS TUNNEL OF GUILT AND SHAME THERE MUST BE A LIGHT OF SOME KIND: Helen's most recent post on shame rounds up all of her arguments to date, and is therefore invaluable. I still stand by the argument I made in her comments box--humiliation often brings spiritual fruit to the shamed, but humiliating others is a form of cruelty which will condemn those who practice it--but I wanted to talk here about one way in which I do believe in "shame culture."

(Ah, before we move on: I also agree with the class-based critique of shame culture, and it's part of the motivation for this post. I don't think there's ever been a shame culture in which poverty wasn't considered shameful--no, read that post first--so that's obviously anti-Christian. And yet there have definitely been vocational subcultures in which underclass background and even female sex weren't treated like crimes.)

Vocational training rests on shame culture. (Helen offers evidence here.) If you discern any kind of creative vocation, you are seeking to enter into a strict community of practice. This community uses harsh methods to teach you how to fulfill your vocation (think Kitchen Confidential) and promotes storylines, narratives of saints and villains, which show you how to live your vocation (newspapermen: All the President's Men) and how not to (Shattered Glass).

This vocation-based shame culture is far less cruel than a universal shame culture, in my opinion, because it is obvious that everyone judging you has submitted to roughly the same standards, and because you are being judged on performance you explicitly chose to make public. Anthony Bourdain can tell you your broccolini is so burnt it looks like something dredged up from Bob Marley's closet because you know he got yelled at and berated by chefs for years. Plus, you chose to present your broccolini to the outside world, your customer base, and not solely your friends, so you've submitted yourself to justice (for strangers!) rather than mercy.

(This btw is part of the intrinsic humility of entrepreneurship. If America can add anything to Catholic practice perhaps she can add this understanding of business as submission.)

The above claims are only partly true. Of course, if you have societal privilege then that privilege will affect how you're judged and which standards--spoken or unspoken--you must meet. To use the chef example again, Anthony Bourdain has written pretty harshly about the difference between the huge numbers of Latinos in the kitchen vs. the tiny numbers of Latino chefs who earn high honors. It's not because brown guys can't cook or run a kitchen, you know? Nonetheless, vocation-as-subculture is a real thing, and vocations build real solidarity, within which harsh chastisement and shaming can be done without self-aggrandizement on the part of the chastiser.

The intense emotion this vocational submission evokes was brought home to me in the Top Chef finale, when the amazing, lovely, super-cute and gentle (and hometown honey!) Carla Hall broke down in tears because she had failed to present good food to the judges. She was ashamed in front of her profession. And I understood: You should be. When you do inadequate work, you should be ashamed. If you aren't, you never understood your profession to begin with.

Vocation is performance--even a hermit's vocation, which is why everyone always bothers hermits!--and so vocation necessarily partakes in shame culture, not just guilt culture.

On the other hand... two caveats. First, I wonder whether Christianity can really support a strong shame/guilt distinction at all--at least if that distinction is cast in Helen's terms, rather than e.g. Ron Belgau's.

God has already "found you out." You are always watched. The only thing I remember from Lewis's Perelandra is the moment when the narrator wishes he could go outside--away from God's eyes!--and just have a quick smoke to re-establish his privacy. This small, human reticence of the cigarette is not available to Christians. For us, guilt is shame. Wrongdoing is always a violation of relationship, even if the only One we betrayed is our Lord.

And the second caveat: How do we understand a profession with a strong vocational ethos, which has nonetheless a deeply conflicted relationship with truth or virtue?

The obvious example for me is tabloid journalism. I far prefer the "black and white and red all over" style to the missish, Brahmin assumptions of the New York Times; but Five-Star Final is a terrific portrait of the cruelties of that profession, the shame involved in shaming others.

So, some questions: If Helen embraces Edward G. Robinson's character's shame in 5SF--he's the tabloid editor who obsessively washes his hands, and by the way, he's amazing in this role--is she necessarily embracing his actions in humiliating others? Can there be different standards of gossip, avoidance of scandal, and charity for different professions? Can a shame culture be a humility culture--rather than, what seems much more likely, a "good-people" culture of Pharisaical (sp??) self-satisfaction?

Fight in my inbox!

MATCHMAKER MATCHMAKER: I got to thinking about my blogroll, and realized I would love to make connections between my readers and other bloggers. So this is an "If you like X, you might like Y" post, along the lines of my shilling for Love and Rockets. I'll try to match reader categories with blogs outside those categories. So be aware that "like" probably means, "be fruitfully challenged by," as vs. "often agree with."

If you read me for arts/comics/movie stuff, you might like the Cigarette Smoking Blog and Racialicious.

If you read me for Catholic stuff, you might like Thunderstruck.

If you read me for gay stuff, you might like CSB again if you're not reading her already; or Noli Irritare Leones; or the Disputed Mutability archives, seriously, try three posts and I will bet you'll get hooked even if you think this is the last blog you'd want to read.

If you read me for conservatism, you might like The Agitator and Hit & Run. The former is run by Radley Balko, who should be Man of the Year if you ask me--you know how Catholics use the phrase "social justice"? That's his job. (Mark Shea and Shea fans, seriously, check him out.)

The latter is the Reason magazine blog, so you might think that you know what to expect, but I'll just say that I've gone back to reading it daily because it has so much to offer for all of us who would critique the modern state--from the left, the right, or the Vatican.

If you're a libertarian for some reason, you might like Colby Cosh or Ta-Nehisi Coates.

If you're on the left, you might like Megan McArdle.