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

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

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

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

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

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

so yeah, that's awesome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So far.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

AMY WINEHOUSE SINGS "BEAT IT."

edited: de mortuis.

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

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

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

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

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

5. Lather, rinse, repent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

POSSIBLY MY FAVORITE MST3K JOKE EVER:

"Vatican II: The Final Reckoning!"

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

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

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

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

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

THE CIA AND THE NEW CRITICISM:

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

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

more

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nonetheless, highly recommended.

EATING PEOPLE IS WRONG. Proving too much?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tom Stoppard, The Invention of Love: Thin Victoriana.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My readers: so much fun!

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

SINCERITY IS WHAT COMES AFTER INNOCENCE BUT WELL BEFORE CHASTITY.

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

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

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

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

more

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

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

REVERSE-ENGINEERED "IRON CHEF" RECIPES!!!

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

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

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

BISY BACKSON.

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

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

and

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

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

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

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

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

Oh paleoconservatism. How you won't be missed.

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

"Hey, what's your name anyway?"

"Julien."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

well, read on why doncha!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then he sees this photograph.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

more

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

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

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