THE MADDEST STORY EVER TOLD! I watched Spider Baby (1968!) two nights ago and zomg, is this the best movie ever made?? Lon Chaney Jr. is the tenderhearted guardian of two We Have Always Lived in the Castle-style crazy chickadees and their manchild of a brother. Mayhem ensues when a conniving aunt arrives, lawyer in tow, to steal the family manse by having the kids committed. There is spider-, cat-, and person-eating. There is scream-queen lingerie. There is a theme song!!

Seriously, I adored every single minute of this. Like all the greatest camp, it knows when to add real poignancy--Chaney's final speech to the kids apparently wrung tears from the crew on set--and the performances, especially from the blonde daughter, are amazing. She has this tilt-a-whirl smile that's way too long for her face.

If Richard O'Brien has not seen this movie two hundred times I'll be knocked down with a feather boa.

It's available on Netflix Instant Viewing (though you can't order it from them on dvd), so you have your assignment, people!

RELIGIOUS EXEMPTION IN HEALTH CARE REFORM? More info in the comments.

KITCHEN ADVENTURES: I'M GONNA GIT YOU SOCCA. I decided to make these chickpea-flour pancakes because other than the flour, all their ingredients were things I always have on hand. Super simple, just flour, olive oil, water, s & p, and whatever other thing you want to use. The Atlantic food blogger says:

Socca (without the subtle, wood-smoked flavor) is easy to make in a skillet on top of the stove. The batter, which has no egg or leavening, will keep for days covered in the refrigerator, and can morph into a variety of useful preparations. I often make socca as an instant snack, standing by the stove and eating it as it comes out of the pan (it is a good way to eat beans).

Socca also makes a marvelous hors d'oeuvres. I put the large skillet with the finished socca right on the table and let guests help themselves, tearing pieces off with their fingers. It's also a great crêpe-like base in which to wrap warmed leftover shredded long-cooked meats and stews.

Though it's probably something of a heresy, socca batter makes great silver-dollar pancakes for a grownup breakfast; their slightly eggy flavor marries perfectly with maple syrup or jam.

Doesn't that sound good?

So I made five medium-sized socca (socci?) with various accouterments. They were all delicious, and incredibly easy to make, so I strongly suspect there will be more socca-experimentation in my future.

First I heated the oven to 375 (you'll probably want to set it higher--my oven gets very hot very fast) and cut a yellow onion into fat slices. I drizzled the slices with olive oil on a foiled baking tray and stuck them in the oven to get sweet and slightly browned. Then I sliced a knob-end of mozzarella I had hanging around.

Then I followed the recipe in the link. I wasn't fussed about whisking in exactly one tablespoon of water at a time or anything, and I didn't need to be. But keep in mind that you may need less water than the recipe calls for. I got the heavy-cream consistency with less than a cup of water, probably because my cup of flour was a bit scanty. I also spread the oil over the pan with my fingers, before the pan got really hot. I, uh, wouldn't do that if I were cooking for people who aren't me.

My socci took noticeably longer to cook than the recipe calls for, probably due to irregularities in both my stove burner and my pan. I needed maybe five or six minutes on the first side, and two or three after I flipped the pancakes. I took the onion out of the oven and dumped it onto a plate. After I flipped the pancakes, I laid the mozzarella slices on top of the larger socca to melt.

These first two came out moist and delicious! I topped the smaller one with some of the onion. The larger one became a sort of socca grilled-cheese sandwich, folded over the mozzarella filling.

Then I made three more: one with dried rosemary, one with cumin and dried oregano, and one with cumin, curry powder, cayenne, ground ginger, and a tiny bit of cinnamon. The smell from this one was amazing. It was also the tastiest of the second batch; the rosemary and oregano didn't do much for the pancakes. I let the second batch cook at least a minute longer than the first, which meant that they were drier and browner but no less tasty.

I finished the meal with a glass of whole milk--the perfect accompaniment!

Verdict: This was easy and delightful. I can't wait to try more with this batter--maybe making a thicker batter and turning it into fritters with fresh peas? Or... onion rings?? And I know I'll be making more socca.

THE FIRST TIME I HAVE USED THE TAGS "LENT" AND "LOL" FOR THE SAME POST. Via the Rattus of course....

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

DON'T LOOK NOW: Mini-reviews, mostly horror. I realized that there are a lot of books and movies I'm glad to have read or watched, even though I don't have enough to say about them to warrant a full-length post here. So this is a roundup of a bunch of things you might want to know about.

Hugh Kennedy, Everything Looks Impressive. Yale in the '80s; is the protagonist supposed to be unlikable and unwilling to learn? Class resentment, demi-dykery, survivor guilt. I've been reading a lot of college novels lately, and I'm surprised by the regularity with which survivor guilt surfaces as a theme. I note that Everything Looks Impressive is oddly reminiscent of The Sterile Cuckoo, a college novel written some 30 years earlier. The books' narrators are equally narcissistic, but Kennedy's guy isn't as sexist in his narcissism, so... that's something?

Bonus POR mention on page two or three, as a "neo-fascist organization." I love you too!

Recommended for Yale obsessives (boola boola!) and people with my intense interest in the college-novel genre.

Deadgirl: I watched this on Netflix Instant Viewing after reading this description at Kindertrauma. This is a horror flick with a truly rancid premise: Two high-school losers are exploring an abandoned asylum when they find a naked woman strapped to a bed, behind a door which hasn't been opened in so long that it rusted shut. What follows is gross and cruel and immensely sad.

This is a horror movie about misogyny, and abuse of power more generally, which isn't itself misogynist. It's extremely hard to watch. I found it totally effective. (I'm not convinced that it fully earns its ending, but I also don't think it could really end any other way, so I'm willing to go along.) The color scheme is appropriately raw, moldy, and corrupt.

Helen Oyeyemi, White Is for Witching: Experimental horror novel in which a house in Dover, England develops a malevolent power and personality, which it uses to destroy the local immigrants and the women of the house. There are some real shivers here, and the fragmented, multiple-narrator style makes the mystery more compelling and frightening rather than serving to distance the reader from the events.

Sudden Fear: Joan Crawford's husband is trying to kill her! She's so fantastic in this, with her giant eyes and man-face and her telenovela acting style. There are some nice noir shots as well, including a gorgeous shot from above as Crawford runs down a dark street. Very easy to watch despite the relative predictability of the story.

The Experiment: German suspense flick based on the Stanford Prison Experiment. Moritz Bleibtreu is terrific! Unfortunately, the film doesn't get over the most basic hurdle: It's really hard to make a fictionalized version of the actual events which is even as horrifying as what really happened. So despite some raw moments and tough-to-watch scenes (I was struck by the early glimpse of the prisoners' feet unprotected in sandals while the guards wore heavy boots) the movie still feels tarted-up and tinfoil compared to the visceral events on which it was based. The romance subplot is also distracting and kitschy.

My Little Eye: Fluffy C-level horror movie about a group of twentysomethings recruited for a reality-show webcast which requires them to live in a creepy old camera-riddled house together for six months. If anyone leaves, everyone forfeits the million-dollar prize money. I enjoyed the Breakfast Club echoes, both explicit and implied.

DAVID "BEYOND GAY" MORRISON AND SOME GUY, in "a conversation about the Church and same-sex marriage" at Blessed Sacrament in Chevy Chase (DC), tonight at 7.30 pm. I may be there! Because I can't get enough of that wonderful Duff, apparently. Anyway, I thought you all might be interested.

Uyeda says that his approach to cocktail-making is grounded in the Japanese tea ceremony. It is an "adoration of the beautiful among the sordid facts of everyday existence. It inculcates purity and harmony, the mystery of mutual charity, the romanticism of the social order."
--"Tokyo, Cocktail Capital of the World," Hugh Garvey, in Best Food Writing 2009

I CANNOT POSSIBLY TOP CAMASSIA'S POST TITLE but you should know that she continued our secular-morality discussion from last week, here, and I replied in comments.

ETA: Oh, possibly my old post about St. Anselm would be relevant??

PRIORITIES. Via the Rattus. Several of the other ones she links are also great, e.g. "Destiny."

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS is having a fairly epic book sale. I'm snapping up two books of medieval Jewish poetry. You should check it out!

"FANTASY AND THE JEWISH QUESTION." More, and well worth your time: "But it's America that plays the crucial role here, not Judaism." Robust comments thread as well!

And a bit more here: fantasy vs. critique of fantasy. I'm pretty sure I prefer the latter, although there are exceptions.

A FORMER MILITARY INTERROGATOR UNEARTHS THE ERRORS AND FEAR-MONGERING IN MARC THIESSEN'S "COURTING DISASTER."

While many of Thiessen's opinions are appalling from a moral perspective (he justifies torture and abuse through the religious writings of St. Thomas Aquinas), the book is comprised of errors, omissions, and a whopping dose of fear-mongering. I'll concentrate here on his worst misstatements and why his conclusions ultimately make us less safe.

read it here

probably via The Agitator

HE LOVED SOMEBODY BUT IT WASN'T ME: A bit more on whether there are secular reasons. This post is fairly tentative.

Camassia replies to me and Fish and Steven Smith here. I will concur in part and dissent in part!

First, Fish and Smith are both using a philosophically sketchy definition of "religion." They seem to be influenced by the (Rawlsian??? is he to blame for this??) notion that all "comprehensive doctrines" are suspect in the public sphere. They're also talking about a fairly specific kind of religion--I don't think this discussion would make much sense if you assumed that "religion" referred to vodoun, or the Greek pantheon, or (maybe?) Shintoism.

I do think they're right to say you can't get teleology from undirected nature--you need a Creator--and that most moral arguments do rely on teleology. Most moral arguments rely on an account of human nature which is about what humans should be, not what humans demonstrably are. In fact I'm not sure how you'd get a moral, "should" argument from a bare evidentiary "are" claim.

And so I'm not fully on board with Camassia's proposed knot-cutting:

This experience of looking at yourself as if you were someone else, and liking or disliking what you see — in other words, having a conscience — is essentially a brute fact for nearly all people. They have varying explanations of why it exists, or they may have no explanation, but still it’s there. And this experience compels at least a rudimentary morality; if you like people who are good to you, then you must be good to them, if you are going to like yourself. By the same token, if you respect people who don’t take crap from you, you’re going to be uncompromising towards others if you want to respect yourself. I didn’t say this was all warm and fuzzy. But it’s also why I don’t entirely agree with Fish’s claim that ideas like justice and equality are totally empty without God. The ability to see yourself as a person among persons, to put yourself in another’s place, implies a certain equality, or at least similarity. There’s a certain justice that comes when you dislike yourself in proportion to the cause you’ve given someone to dislike you. And — this is the less obvious point — this identification with others also means that you assume other people have that capacity, and can therefore make claims on them. I think this is why these words have meaning for people, even if they can’t agree on precisely what they mean or how to apply them to a given situation.

Because I agree that we are able to see ourselves in another's place... sometimes. We are able to extend empathy, and derive "should"s, morality, from that empathy.

But within this human-scale morality, can we ever say you should love someone you don't? Can we say to the Spartan citizen that he should see himself in the face of the helot?

So yeah: Justice and equality are not totally empty without (a specific conception of) God. But I do think they're importantly empty.

As I understand it, both Judaism and Christianity cut the knot by identifying the source and summit of morality with a Person, thus a possible object of our love. God is not an abstraction but a powerful dude working in history; God is not just a big goon, but the essence of goodness. God is simultaneously (among many other things!) a specific beloved, and that-which-is-to-be-loved. So to say, "Why should I love God?" is a question which--if you are actually talking about this God, and not denying that He exists or that He is what Jews and Christians say He is--simply unravels.

Obviously none of that is an argument for the existence of this God. Which may be why this kind of argument rarely plays a role in conversion! But I think possibly this line of thinking influences Fish and Smith when they say that morality doesn't really get off the ground without some smuggled incense in the balloon.

(...Hmm, I think that metaphor probably fails at physics. Heh.)

[edited: I think perhaps the next place to go is the Birthday Cake of Existence: What do we do when our moral claims appear to conflict with our metaphysical beliefs? There's more than one option!]

STILL PREFERRING THE TINSEL: I recently finished Melinda Selmys's Sexual Authenticity: An Intimate Reflection on Homosexuality and Catholicism. (Insert "sounds like a Heideggerian lingerie ad" joke here....) I wish I could recommend the book, because it does grapple with some concepts close to my heart--I was really excited to see that later chapter headings included "Beauty" and "Vocation." But this book did not work for me, at all. I'm not going to do a real review, but I do want to highlight five problems I had, because I think these problems are endemic to orthodox Catholic writing on Gay Whatnot.

So here are five things I wish Sexual Authenticity had done.

1. Remember the miniskirt rule! Discussions of sub-topics should be long enough to cover the subject, but short enough to be interesting. Selmys covers sodomy in Christian history in two pages, ex-gay therapies in maybe five and a half. Better to skip these topics entirely than to skimp.

Selmys, for example, describes some of the more shocking 20th-century "cures" for homosexuality, like electroshock and hormone replacement, and then tells us that contemporary ex-gay therapy shouldn't be similarly reviled. That's groovy and all, but Selmys doesn't actually describe even one contemporary ex-gay program. So is she saying we should give this a chance, or the programs described by Peterson Toscano and Lance Carroll in my NRO piece here, or this, or something else? I don't have to think Carroll is today's Alan Turing to think Love in Action is cruel, ugly, and silly. (I'd really recommend the posts here for in-depth, specific looks at various different approaches to ex-gay identity, practice, and culture.)

2. Avoid monocausal explanations. There are a lot of reasons people drink milk in the morning! Surely there are even more reasons someone might be promiscuous, or unhappy, or defensive. And yet Selmys frequently falls back on rhetorical forms like, "Promiscuous sexuality is, at its heart, an attempt to access something like the Communion of the Saints--to be able to enter into the intimate life of a much larger range of humanity than you would ordinarily be able to access."

This is intriguing and in a way quite charitable. It's in line with Augustine's stance that sins are virtues misapplied. But it's also, I would wager, unrecognizable to most people who have actually been promiscuous. (Not speaking from experience, MOM.) If you only offer one explanation or reason for an action, you lose the chance for your words to resonate with people who did the action for entirely different reasons. This isn't such a big deal if a) you're just talking about your own experience, or giving other specific examples of actual people, or b) you don't rely on monocausal explanation very often. Selmys went to that well way too often for me.

Oh, here's another example, and a worse one I think. While arguing that ex-gay therapies fail, when they fail, because they don't promote friendship and spiritual succour, she says: "The 'cure' consists not in the healing of father-wounds, nor even in the assumption of heterosexual relationships, but in humbling yourself enough to admit that a struggle is taking place and that you can't do it by yourself. This is why frequent confession and compassionate spiritual direction is effective, while testosterone-replacement therapies are not. ...This is also why there are some people who will never be 'cured.' Because for someone whose primary struggle is the struggle with same-sex attractions, being cured is tantamount to being saved. Regardless of what certain Protestant theologians would like us to believe, that is something not completed until, finally, you stand before the judgment throne of God...."

It's really just not true--and it's damaging--to say that people whose same-sex attractions persist throughout their lives are insufficiently humble or are assuming that they'd be saved if only they went straight. I mean, I know people who do frequent confession and have compassionate spiritual directors, and who seek to live entirely in accordance with God's will as expressed in the teaching of the Catholic Church... and they're still pretty gay.

3. Don't say you have special insight into experiences you almost had. This one is tricky. Almost having an experience can give you relevant insight into that experience, depending on the reasons you stopped short. But if you deploy your empathy too readily, you may come across as if you're attempting to colonize other people's experiences for your own worldview.

For example, Selmys writes, "I am going to stand up and confess, here, that I understand exactly what my homosexual brothers are feeling when they give up on the quest for chastity, leave the Church, and try to find hope and happiness in the gay lifestyle. I have felt it myself: there are times when I look up at my ceiling at night, and I don't see the face of God--I haven't seen Him, or felt Him, in months, and I can't understand the burdens that are piling up on me--and I want to say, 'To hell with it.' Literally. Let this entire project of the moral life collapse under its own weight; just let me get out of the building first."

Which... I'm pretty sure I don't understand "exactly what my homosexual brothers are feeling," but obviously a lot of people view leaving the Church as taking on a new moral project, a better and truer one, not giving up on the moral life. I think they're wrong (though they're quite sincere!), but it's just not true to diagnose their problem, universally, as despair or willful immoralism.

She concludes that section by writing that if she did not believe in God, "I would run away from my family, or commit suicide, or become a raging alcoholic and curse everyone who came my way. I would be worse--a hundred times worse--than any of the people hanging around the bars down in the Village." But really, if you'd be a hundred times worse than them, doesn't that mean you don't share their experience or know what makes them tick? Or to put it another way, if the problem of the guys at JR's is atheism, and Selmys understands their temptations and experiences as intimately as she claims, why aren't they acting as badly as she says she would?

4. Try to have something to say to people who are happy being gay. This is not so relevant if you're basically writing autobiography. But Selmys is attempting a more theoretical work, aimed at a broad audience. And I think one of the reasons it really didn't speak to me is that it assumes that lesbian experience will be kind of fakey-fantasy, inherently unsatisfying, and gay life is depressing. This... has not been my experience.

I like being gay! I love being Catholic. (Love is obviously a more fraught emotion than liking.) The intersection of the two can be humiliating, lonely, irritating (it's very tiresome being constantly told by strangers that you hate yourself), frightening, philosophically challenging, and generally difficult. But it's also immensely fruitful and, in its own way, fun. Certainly we've got a lot of historical precedent to play with! Pasolini is me... and all that....

5. Acknowledge the diversity of vocations. This point is obviously related to the previous one. Selmys, now married with children, often writes as if marriage is the summit of vocation, the only opportunity for real love. She writes that gay relationships are more like friendships than like marriages, which isn't true on its face (I think gay relationships are different from both, but similar to both--they're the middle circle in the Venn diagram, overlapping the two outer circles while retaining its own boundaries) and, in context, treats friendship as a cute accessory to the real business of life.

For example, elsewhere: "Friends may hope to stick together 'through thick and thin,' but in reality, friendships tend to dissolve quickly when bonds of mutual interest cease to hold them together--they may linger on in name, and occasion the odd greeting card at special holidays, but they cease to involve a genuine knowledge of and involvement with the other." (I don't know whether that sentence is more ahistoric, tragic, false, trivializing, or self-fulfilling.) And elsewhere again: "Love involves the whole person. Romantic or erotic love involves the whole person most of all--there are plenty of other kinds of love in which you make a sincere gift that comes out of yourself, but do not actually give yourself entirely."

You all know by now that I can't be havin' with that sort of thing. Friendship is real love. This I know, for the Bible tells me so.

I'm not sure how Selmys's latria toward married love can allow for priestly vocations, let alone devoted friendship.

THE FACE OF ANOTHER: Not quite a review of That Face, playing at the Studio Theater through March 14. (YOU CAN STILL SEE "IN THE RED AND BROWN WATER," PEOPLE. IT'S PLAYING THROUGH MARCH 7. GO SEE IT NOW.) This is just a slightly scrubbed version of what I sent Ratty after I saw the play....

Audience comments afterward included "intense" and "interesting," so... yeah! It really was not what I was expecting. It's the debut of a like 19-y.o. British playwright, and it opens with two prep-school girls hazing another one. Things spiral out of hand and the girls end up seriously injuring the haze-ee, landing her in the hospital. I'd actually thought, going in, that that incident was the focus of the play--I thought the "face" in the title referred at least in part to the girl's injuries. And honestly... I wish it had been that, since the two scenes with the haze-ee are incredibly brutal, and I was left wanting to know so much more about her--how she ended up in that position, how she could possibly manage to go on after being really thoroughly dehumanized in both of her scenes (both in the hazing and in the hospital).

But instead the play turns out to be about this wildly [messed]-up family--like, Southern gothic but set in ASBO-Tesco-yobbo Britain (and in fact, the crazy incestuous drunken mother's actress had played in both THE GLASS MENAGERIE and SUDDENLY, LAST SUMMER--I bet I can guess which roles!). The daughter of the family is one of the hazers, is how it connects to the opening scene, and because the school threatens to kick her out, her divorced-and-remarried father flies in from Hong Kong to deal with them, setting in motion all the other events. And... yeah, the complete awfulness of the family was intense to watch (and funny--this is a REALLY harsh black comedy), but I still... wanted to know more about the first girl.

The very disturbing thing is that some of the scenes/dialogue reminded me of one of the worst nightmares I've ever had, which made it especially hilarious when the father has the great line, "This scene has a nightmarish quality I don't like!"

Anyway, I was very shaken-up when it ended (abruptly), in large part because of that resemblance to my nightmare, but ultimately I don't know that it's more than a really grim family-gothic comedy. There's a kind of demi-theme of irrevocable acts, of repentance that comes too late to repair the damage, which of course I liked.

They sentenced me to twenty years of blogwatch
For trying to change the system from within...

Camassia: More on The Last Station.

MarriageDebate is just a cornucopia, people. "Are Sperm Donors Really Anonymous Anymore?"; "Would Your Boyfriend Be Pleased By Your Surprise Fetus?"; Can a court tell a parent what religion his child will be?; Catholic girls (and Canadian schoolteachers) gone wild; Yale administration promotes sincerist sex; and whether major economic shifts are leading women to redefine "marriage material." And much, much more. As always, send me links if you've got 'em....

The Rat is back to frequent, linkalicious blogging! Opera, lit, meta-cannoli and much more.

"Why There Is No Jewish Narnia." Really intriguing, though I'm way too far from being a Tolkein or Narnia fan to address its claims. I'd be interested in others' reactions. Two recent novels, Lev Grossman's The Magicians and Hagar Yanai's Ha-Mayim she-bein ha-olamot (The Water Between the Worlds), are reviewed as part of a longer and more speculative essay. Plus the piece is worth it just for the rabbinic description of the fate of Leviathan! Via Arts & Letters Daily.

"Weaponizing Mozart," and other present-tense dystopias from the place that was England.

To Save a Thousand Souls, a new book for men discerning a vocation to the priesthood, has excerpts posted here. The book aims to answer "frequently asked questions" with clear examples and stories. Via Mark Shea.

Stanley Fish asks, "Are there secular reasons?" He says no, but--kinda like what I did when I addressed the same question here and here--he equivocates on how a fully-secular philosophy might proceed. What are the possible objects for the philosopher's eros, the nuptial meaning of the mind, in a fully secular worldview? I dunno, because I've never done it, but I welcome your thoughts. Anyway, here is a bit of Fish, fishifying:

...Once the world is no longer assumed to be informed by some presiding meaning or spirit (associated either with a theology or an undoubted philosophical first principle) and is instead thought of as being “composed of atomic particles randomly colliding and . . . sometimes evolving into more and more complicated systems and entities including ourselves” there is no way, says Smith, to look at it and answer normative questions, questions like “what are we supposed to do?” and “at the behest of who or what are we to do it?” ...

Nevertheless, Smith observes, the self-impoverished discourse of secular reason does in fact produce judgments, formulate and defend agendas, and speak in a normative vocabulary. How is this managed? By “smuggling,” Smith answers.

. . . the secular vocabulary within which public discourse is constrained today is insufficient to convey our full set of normative convictions and commitments. We manage to debate normative matters anyway — but only by smuggling in notions that are formally inadmissible, and hence that cannot be openly acknowledged or adverted to.

The notions we must smuggle in, according to Smith, include “notions about a purposive cosmos, or a teleological nature stocked with Aristotelian ‘final causes’ or a providential design,” all banished from secular discourse because they stipulate truth and value in advance rather than waiting for them to be revealed by the outcomes of rational calculation. But if secular discourse needs notions like these to have a direction — to even get started — “we have little choice except to smuggle [them] into the conversations — to introduce them incognito under some sort of secular disguise.”

And how do we do that? Well, one way is to invoke secular concepts like freedom and equality — concepts sufficiently general to escape the taint of partisan or religious affiliation — and claim that your argument follows from them. But, Smith points out (following Peter Westen and others), freedom and equality — and we might add justice, fairness and impartiality — are empty abstractions. Nothing follows from them until we have answered questions like “fairness in relation to what standard?” or “equality with respect to what measures?” — for only then will they have content enough to guide deliberation.

more (and yet more of me here, a familiar link to longtime readers)

And this Peter Steinfels column from 2006 makes some good, basic points in crisp language:

But otherwise, Mr. Saletan's approach emphasizes making pregnancies intended and presumably wanted. The Democrats for Life approach emphasizes making pregnancies wanted, whether intended or not. Mr. Saletan emphasizes making any abortion choice unnecessary. Democrats for Life emphasizes making it what the group would consider a genuine choice. And at a very practical level, which is the level of political reality, the two approaches would finance very different and in many respects adversarial networks of organizations and ideology.

It is at this point that the ambiguity remaining in Mr. Saletan's use of ''bad'' cannot be avoided. Is abortion bad like hurricanes or cancer, or is it bad like persecution or child abuse?

whole thing

"HEARTBREAK HILL": Subscribers to the American Conservative can get my new column here (PDF)--it's about Capitol Hill.

"TOLSTOY DIES, GOES TO AMERICA": I review The Last Station at Inside Catholic.

TRYING HARD TO BECOME WHATEVER THEY ARE: Over the weekend I watched "Transgeneration," a Sundance Channel/LOGO documentary series following four transgendered college students (well, one is a grad student) over the course of a year. I'd been putting this off a) because I have an aversion to this exact kind of self-voyeurizing, reality-TV documentary (it's related to my disapproval of biographies) and b) I thought it might be depressing. But in the event, the kids were so captivating that it was really easy to sit down and watch the whole thing all the way through. Here are a few scattered notes.

First, the cast of characters: a Filipina-American from a poorer background, a Smith College student from Oklahoma, an engineering-major geek from a well-off family, and an Armenian Cypriot graduate student. Plus lots of their friends and relations. I really liked both the diversity of backgrounds and the decision to include a lot of scenes with friends. You really get a sense that these students are creating communities of other transgendered people. There are a lot of contrasts and parallels here, watching which friendships break down and which gain strength over the course of the year. This isn't a documentary about just four people; it's also about the people on whom they rely, and who rely on them.

Second, holy cats these people are desperately undergraduate! (Well, the grad student is more grown-up, but he spends a lot of time with undergrads.) They're variously self-absorbed, melodramatic, hyperpolitical, and judgmental. They're alternately dizzy and diligent, they're fumbling through first romances (you definitely get a sense of the ways in which being transgendered meant they didn't have standard high-school experiences), they're convinced they can change the world.

All of these ridiculously undergraduate characteristics do play out through their gender identities and transitions, but aren't reducible to those identities--sort of like, I was 19 when I converted to Catholicism, and I think I lived out my conversion in a fairly self-absorbed and melodramatic way, but that doesn't mean Catholicism promotes self-absorption and melodrama. Just that if you're 19 at Yale, you may well live out your conversion in ways which reflect other aspects of the 19-year-old Yalien mindset.

Third, yeah, Americans are way too comfortable on camera. TJ, the Armenian Cypriot, seemed the least likely to film himself--am I misremembering that?--and in his segments back home there were moments when someone would bar the camera from pursuing, or wave the camera away so that real intimacy could be created. Raci, the Filipina-American, also had one relative who took her aside for an off-camera conversation. But the white, non-immigrant folks seemed ridiculously at ease being filmed and, again, frequently filmed themselves as well. I suppose as a Christian I can't be too hardcore about the idea that privacy, being unwatched, is something to preserve and honor--I mean, God is always watching even when you take a smoke break!--but I just can't imagine treating the camera with the nonchalance that these kids (and to a lesser extent their parents) do.

And finally, one thing I really wish the documentary had spent more--or really any--time on is the possibility of outside pressure toward transition. There were at least two people, a friend and a doctor, who seemed to me to be pushing students to resolve their ambiguities and hesitations into clear, final narratives of transsexuality. And I wonder if parents don't also apply some of this pressure. There are ways in which "I was always already a man, and I'm taking all the possible medical steps RIGHT NOW to express that manhood physically" is easier to understand than "I'm really not sure what's best for me right now, and I'm not totally sure where I'll be in a year, and maybe I need to spend some more time in-between even though it's astonishingly uncomfortable and I know I don't want to stay here forever." It's totally impossible to tell how much outside pressure really mattered, because the highly edited nature of the documentary means we're not seeing this year the way the students saw it. But I do wish the question had been addressed.

That said, I definitely recommend this series if you're at all interested in the subject. It's available on Netflix to order or to watch instantly on your computer. ...The deleted scenes on the DVD didn't add much, IMO.

"SET THE CONTROLS FOR THE HEART OF THE SUN": Sean Collins's picks for the 15 greatest science-fiction-based pop/rock songs. Awesome. I gave up pop music for Lent (I usually do this) so I will have to play the clips in Eastertide. [EDITED: Oh wait! Sunday is still a feast day! Excelsior.] But you can play them now!

These aren't the songs I would choose, necessarily, but the only really obvious absence (to me) is Janelle Monae. More on her soon.

I'M DANCING AS FANCY AS I CAN: I really loved the movie of The Business of Fancydancing. I mean, I loved it more than I loved The Toughest Indian in the World; I loved it more than any description could really justify, I think maybe.

One big part of my love was the star: Evan Adams. He's got a cocky, vulnerable, punchy grace. If you like Robert Downey Jr. but thought, "What if he were brown?" then I think this guy will push your buttons. The supporting actors are also really lovely but this movie is carried by its star.

But also. I know I missed a lot in this movie. I only listened to part of Sherman Alexie's commentary track, but even that short bit emphasized how many nuances I missed. What I saw was a movie about how we negotiate our unchosen identities, especially those identities which our surrounding culture lies about and tells us not to love. I saw a movie about the inevitable betrayals of the writer: Philip Roth territory (is "Agnes Roth" a callback? it must be), only with even more dead people in the wake of the writer. I saw a movie about loving someone with privilege you don't have, and how you can love him and reject him and evade him, and how he doesn't know what he's doing. (I've been on both sides of that maypole dance and I recognized both.)

By now you want to know what this movie's actually about, and I can't blame you. A gay American Indian writer who has transformed his, and other people's, reservation experiences into pricey lit (Quality Paperbacks with bright white pulp) returns to the rez for a friend's funeral. It's an experimental movie with some Marlon Riggs touches. I don't think the camera needed to swirl quite so voraciously during some of Seymour's (the author's) interview with a combative black inquisitrix.

But overall... this movie showcases the way the given order breaks your heart, only the movie has better pacing and more consistent acting. I don't know if I'd call it subtle. I'd definitely call it brilliant, and that matters a lot more.

I WANT TO LIVE IN A BATHYSQUID: OK so I have inchoate problems with "steampunk" as a thing--even though you could argue that the fantasy novella was influenced by that whole aesthetic, since it's kind of late-nineteenth-century England with magic and without colonies, which is four whole kinds of problematic--but this specific movie... this is something I predict that I will love with a stupid love.

Via DLB.

FEAST OF ST. JULIANA OF NICOMEDIA, a patroness of women in childbirth.

Odd to think that the piece of you I know best is already dead. The cells on the surface of your skin are thin and flat without blood vessels or nerve endings. Dead cells, thickest on the palms of your hands and the soles of your feet. Your sepulchral body, offered to me in the past tense, protects your soft centre from the intrusions of the outside world. I am one such intrusion, stroking you with necrophiliac obsession, loving the shell laid out before me.
--Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body

"SIX IMPERFECT METAPHORS FOR CONVERSION." My latest at Inside Catholic.

"OFFICER PURCHASES FOOD FOR MAN CAUGHT STEALING."

SUNRISE, SUNSET: I recently had reason to look at the archives of MarriageDebate, and it made me think that you all might be interested to see how our site has changed over the years. On the one hand, we're not a great example, because MD started as an attempt to host the best possible debates about gay marriage--when I was brought on board, my mandate was to make the site 50/50 pro- and con- on that, while keeping it fascinating and broadly-focused.

As years went by it became more of a clearinghouse for marriage- and sex- and gender-related stories and op-eds and blog posts and whatnot. That was great insofar as gay marriage is in no way the only (or, I would argue, the most important) marriage debate of our time. So we were able to broaden our focus. On the other hand, the debate became more static (I think in part because one's stance on gay marriage became an identity issue, like gun ownership [in the US], rather than a philosophical issue on which people from lots of different identity-categories could take divergent views without feeling too much like traitors) and I wish we could have continued drawing out the best respondents from both sides.

Any old how. Our archives are confuzzled right now, but here I go:

Our second week of operation. (The first week only has two posts.) A lot of stuff immediately prior to the gay-marriage court decision in MA; a lot of exchange between Maggie Gallagher and various people, esp inc Jonathan Rauch and Norah Vincent.

Week of 2/8/04: Goodridge (MA gay marriage), cloning, competing understandings of "liberation"; Federal Marriage Amendment still relevant at this time, thus all the familiar "process" arguments appear as fed-vs-state rather than judicial-vs-legis/vote.

Week of 2/6/05: culture, 14th amdmt, bisexuality (at Yale!); right vs. norm, who is kin?, more Maggie, lots of religion.

Week of 2/5/06: Brokeback Mountain (inc Maggie's take), we have comments but I don't know why, penguin lust (and stranger things!).

Week of 2/11/07: A short and random selection of links on family diversity, de-facto parenting, cousin marriage in Islam (Stanley Kurtz), and a bit more. Slim pickings really, and if I had more patience I'd find a more-representative week.

Week of 2/10/08: Canada!; divorce; polygamy; schools w/r/t gay marriage; fathers; contemporary problems with... how to put this?... men.

Week of 2/8/09: sex differences, sex scandals, sex vs. food, sex when you're a chick, sex that makes lots of babies, sex on campus, Prop 8, the "Octomom." And sex.

I also think this NYT piece and this post, about competing compromises, look very strange at the moment. You can get lots more about these compromises if you go here and here and scroll about a bit. It's really worth it.

Current front page: The college gender gap (correlating with the "mancession," as much as I hate that term); divorce, abstinence, paternity leave. And I'll be posting more links soon.

If I might be permitted a philosophical conclusion, I'd say that you can't have a marriage debate without also having a sex debate and a sex-difference debate. You have to talk about sex, and about men and/versus/plus women.

I'd be interested in any other observations you all have about the changes at md.com and/or in the broader marriage debate over the years....

I'll be all alone on Valentine's Day. Spooning a bottle of wine... putting up pictures of Margaret Thatcher....
--an adorable homosexual, overheard near home 2/9

"I AM A MAN."

SNOW AND RUMORS OF SNOW.

DAUGHTERS OF IT'S-COMPLICATED:

In June of 1945, with memories of Nazi book-burning still vivid, a group called the Union of Orthodox Rabbis of the United States and Canada excommunicated Rabbi Mordecai M. Kaplan, after which they burned his newly published Sabbath Prayer Book. Although Kaplan is less known (and less read) today than his contemporaries Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel, he was in many ways the most radical Jewish philosopher or theologian of his era. So it is good to see that his first book, the influential "Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life," has just returned to print. Published by Rabbi Kaplan in 1934, it is a masterpiece of 20th-century Jewish thought.

Although Kaplan grew up in an Orthodox home (he was born in Lithuania and arrived with his family in New York when he was 8) and served as a rabbi at Orthodox congregations, his increasingly un-Orthodox thinking led him in 1922 to found his own congregation in New York, the Society for the Advancement of Judaism (SAJ). There, and at the Conservative movement's Jewish Theological Seminary, where he was a senior (and sometimes controversial) faculty member for more than 50 years, Kaplan continued to refine the ideas set out in his 1934 work.

As its title implies, "Judaism as a Civilization: Toward a Reconstruction of American-Jewish Life" reflects Kaplan's effort to redefine how modern American Jewry thinks of itself. Judaism is not only a religion, Kaplan stated; it is a people with its own history, identity, culture and civilization. Moreover, like any civilization, to remain vital it must continue to evolve to meet and adapt to the challenges and needs of each new generation. It must be reconstructed, so to speak--or else risk losing its purpose. ...

A believer in gender equality long before the term political correctness became a cliché, Kapan in 1922 "invented" the modern-day bat mitzvah--in which 12-year-old girls (like their male counterparts, 13-year-old boys, at their bar mitzvahs) symbolically accept the religious responsibilities of adulthood—when, at Sabbath services one Saturday morning, he called his oldest daughter to the pulpit and had her read from the Torah scroll. Since then, of course, this then-unheard-of custom has become an accepted, even expected rite-of-passage among Jews in all but the Orthodox branch of the faith.

...Most controversial of all, he rejected the supernatural concept of God in favor of a naturalistic view of a transcendent power behind nature and within us that helps us aspire to the highest level of moral action and ethical behavior. Kaplan was no atheist (as his critics asserted), but his definition of God as "the power that makes for salvation" allows for a broader interpretation of the potential for goodness that lies within each individual.

more

"IT IS THE LAST DREAM OF CHILDREN TO BE FOREVER UNTOUCHED." In other news, I finished the draft of the novel. This epigraph brought to you by the Zami: A New Spelling of My Name Foundation, and also the letter Q.

I THOUGHT THAT IF YOU HAD AN ACOUSTIC GUITAR THEN IT MEANT THAT YOU WERE A PROTEST SINGER: For some reason my American Conservative column is about gentrification, and why all my oldest friends don't talk to me anymore. It's also about U Street, sex as the new politics and vice versa, melodrama, extremism, love, communards, and regret. Oh I can smile about it now but at the time it was terrible--

Subscribers-only, because if you can't sell memories what can you sell?

LOOKING INTO THE PAST: Old photos superimposed on the present day. Includes a woman walking a bunny, about five minutes and maybe 90 years away from my apartment.... Possibly via Jesse Walker?

SHE APPEARS COMPOSED/WELL, SHE IS, I SUPPOSE/WHO CAN REALLY TELL? Oh hi there! I'm not super excited about debating transgendered identity issues on this blog, because it seems like it could easily become Well-Meaning Cisgendered Hour. And I'm gay enough to kind of desperately dislike the thing where cute married Catholics debate our actual personal lives. Basically no matter how humble and philosophically open the participants are, they also always come across as self-absorbed. So while I'm reading every email I get about the Jay Prosser posts, and will reply to them (bc email seems even more tentative and one-squid's-opinion than an already-tentative public post), I probably won't post them if they are taking issue with transgendered identity. It's just... not my place, I think, to do that kind of "dancing with myself" dialogue.

On another tentacle, though, a reader did bring up a point I think other people might also have wondered about. And since he's batting me around because of one of my personal hobbyhorses, rather than e.g. Prosser, I shall reply!

Thus, my anonyreader:

The one question I do feel competent to raise about your take is that I *think* that in stuff you've written elsewhere (e.g. against "sincerism") you've expressed considerable skepticism about the accuracy or presumptive validity of people's self-understanding, raised the possibility they may be unreliable narrators of their own lives etc. (And even if we "come to ourselves" in the Church and then authentically and reliably recognize who we always truly were, it won't necessarily be fully consistent with our best preconversion guesses of what that might be, right? So if we didn't really know what it would be like until we got there, maybe it's a good thing we just got dunked in water w/ no scalpels involved?) So I would wonder what's different or special about someone's sense of their "experienced sex" (when at apparent variance with the anatomy they seem to have) that would make it privileged and reliable and a basis for undergoing surgery or similar intervention, rather than simply a particular and admittedly peculiar instance of the sort of persistent self-deception we know humans are sometimes prone to. ...

And my reply:

Thanks!

No, I think a) my anti-sincerism shtik is a stance, a caution, a reaction against certain kinds of "you can only ever speak in one genre" therapeutic stuff. And transgendered people, perhaps because they're under so much pressure to conform their narratives to a really rigid psychoanalysis-influenced pattern, tend IME to be pretty aware of the possibilities of different genres and different levels of irony, sincerity, self-revelation and self-protection. I should probably be more clear, in general, that the anti-sincerism thing isn't anti-the possibility of self-knowledge--I was a philosophy major!--but more about expression.

and b) therefore, I'm actually not especially skeptical of people's ability to assess their own identities/experiences unless there's a fairly clear conflict with something else I believe more firmly. I think people should be humbly open to reinterpretation, but I don't, I think, approach most people's self-accounts with too much of a hermeneutic of suspicion...! Probably especially not when said people are neither coming from a privileged position [...] nor, like, teenagers.

This post about objections to my Commonweal piece on Gay Catholic Whatnot might also be relevant.

THE BOREDOMS (IT'S PLURAL!): Victor Morton on how boredom works, or doesn't work, in movies. I already said my piece about "Police, Adjective" here; but really, you should see that if you can!

"IN HIS IMPREGNABLE ARMOR WITH HIS INVULNERABLE SKIN BENEATH IT." What is courage, and why? Give three examples.

A LOT OF THINGS THAT AREN'T BARBARISM ALSO BEGIN AT HOME, MORRISSEY!: Ta-Nehisi Coates is hosting a really interesting discussion of spanking, discipline, class, fatherhood, love, race, assimilation... and stuff like that. With bonus gayosity!

YOUR NEW MOTHER HAS GLASS EYES AND A TAIL: Image results for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. I can't believe I never looked for this before.

WERE MIXED JEWISH-CHRISTIAN MARRIAGES POSSIBLE IN LATE MEDIEVAL POLAND? Fascinating stuff.

LAST WEEK I dreamt that I was doing a word puzzle where I had to find the anagram for a six-letter word. The word was YAHWEH... but since I couldn't read my own handwriting, the anagram I came up with was...

wait for it...

MAYHEM.

The inside of my brain: sometimes surprisingly awesome!

UNDERNEATH all those posts about Jay Prosser's book, there's a review of "Police, Adjective," which is a terrific movie. Skip to here if you are not interested in the Prosser stuff. (Or if you're only interested in that, the Jay Prosser tag is your friend!)

PEOPLE ARE STILL HAVING SEX (NOT JUST GENDER!): A chapter-by-chapter look at Jay Prosser's Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality, as promised.

The first thing to say is that although Prosser's style is hyperacademic--this was his dissertation--he's much clearer than most people who write like this. I mean yeah, “somatic” is really the only word for somatic, but I'm still not convinced that he also needs “anaclitic” and “imbricated” and “cathexis.” But even so, Prosser's very dry humor is actually funny and not strenuous, and he has a few word choices which are genuinely elegant: One-off uses of “redress” and “duplicity” come to mind.

And I apologize in advance for any portion of Prosser's arguments which I misconstrue. In general he is exceptionally good at layering quotations and examples to make his points, and so this post is necessarily a lot less persuasive than his book; I'm hoping to interest you guys enough that you read it (it's out of print, but I got a used copy on Amazon Marketplace fairly cheaply) but I certainly can't replicate the experience of reading it.

TIE ME UP! TIE ME DOWN!: Now, the introduction. For me the most interesting part here is the critique of the binaries assumed by queer theory: subversive/hegemonic, good=antiessentialist (there is no human nature)/bad=essentialist, transgressive/reinscriptive. Prosser points out that for people who talk very dismissively of binaries in general, queer theorists end up creating a whole lot of their own. And so they have a really hard time considering the body as a sublime fact rather than a banal fiction (that's my phrasing, not Prosser's). They have an equally hard time, though Prosser only hints at this related difficulty, addressing the fact that not all transgressions are good. It may be true that all hegemonies are bad, but it's really, deeply false to glorify “subversion” as such. (Again, if Prosser could talk in metaphors of manners or tradition, he might be able to do more than allude to the implied defense of authority here.)

THE BUTLER DID IT: chapter one: Prosser vs. Judith Butler! This was the hardest chapter for me to fight through, largely because a) Butler's prose is notoriously dense and b) the body-as-projection shtik she was arguing for struck me as so patently false and silly that I really might just have been misunderstanding her. I mean... I hear so much about how Freud is worth reading as literature, but every time people quote him admiringly, I just stare blankly and say, “But people aren't like that! Isn't that kind of grossly oversimplified to the point of being both false and boring?”

So anyway, Prosser is arguing a few things here. There's some queer-theory infighting about whether the attempt to weaponize transgendered identity into the central proof that all sex is gender--there's no nature to sex, just culture (and malleable culture at that?) all the way down--is based on an appropriation and misunderstanding of how transgendered people actually think about their own personal bodies and lives. Thus Prosser is also defending the body as a real thing; matter matters. While I agree with his points to the extent that I understand them, I don't know that they'll be especially controversial to readers of this blog.

LOOKING FOR MERCY STREET/WHERE YOU'RE INSIDE-OUT: Ch 2: “A Skin of One's Own: Toward a Theory of Transsexual Embodiment.” This is my favorite chapter. So rich and chewy! There's so much to talk about here, so I'll just pluck out the thing I love most.

Prosser connects narratives of people with bodily agnosia--a brain disorder in which their body parts, for example legs or a hand, feel completely alien--with narratives of people who have sensations in “phantom limbs.” For both of these sets of people, their sense of their own body is visceral, physical, provoking real loss of sensation or presence of sensation... and yet this sensed body doesn't match up with the visible flesh. Prosser quotes a lot of transsexual autobiographies describing alienation from the parts of one's body associated with the sex one was assigned at birth, and a sense of homecoming and integration after (or even in preparation for) surgery. He draws an analogy: It can be said that a transsexual woman suffers from bodily agnosia toward her penis (and presumably also Adam's apple and other physical markers of maleness?) and a “phantom limb” sensation in the breasts and vagina (and again, presumably, womb?) she doesn't yet have. And vice versa for a transsexual man. Their post-reassignment surgery bodies are the homes they were never able to dwell in before. A post-surgery transsexual woman is not a mutilated man, or a man made into a woman from parts you can find at home, but a woman who has had major reconstructive surgery. The basic argument is summarized by Prosser's subsection heading, “From Mutilation to Integration: The Poetics of Sex Reassignment Surgery.”

You can see why this resonates with me, since it sounds so much like my usual Eden-via-Plato “all knowledge is memory” shtik. The idea of a home we've never so much as visited, but which we remember and which is real, is one which makes a great deal of sense to me. In fact, the world-in-general doesn't make sense if there isn't such a home, or if we're utterly unable to recognize it when we encounter it.

On a side matter, I'll note that if Prosser were willing to assert forcefully that sex difference is a core difference, rooted in human nature, ontologically prior to many other differences, he'd get out of some of the minor traps in this chapter, like his quick and I think too-blithe acceptance of cosmetic surgery.

IT TOOK THE CHURCH THREE CENTURIES TO CELEBRATE THE EPIPHANY: Ch 3: “Mirror Images: Transsexuality and Autobiography.” Again we get careful, sympathetic attention to the metaphors and tropes of transsexual autobiography, especially the way in which the doubling effect of a mirror--the eye looking back at itself--can shift from emotionally devastating to enthralling. Prosser boldly opens the chapter with quotations which seem to reinforce the idea that transsexuals are uniquely narcissistic (sort of like us homos!) and proceeds to perform what I can only call deconstructive surgery on that judgment. The shifting use of “mirror” imagery provides a subtle and sublime rebuke to anti-trans arguments.

My favorite point from this chapter was Prosser's defense of transsexuals against a cisgendered woman who argued that transsexual autobiographies equivocate between “I was always already the other sex” and “I needed a sex change”: If you're already a man even though you've got ladyparts, why do you need hormones and surgery?

Against this charge Prosser not only implicitly incorporates the previous chapter's understanding of sex-reassignment surgery as reconstructive surgery. He also notes that this doubling, this equivocation between past self-understanding and present self's construal of that self-understanding, is an inevitable feature of autobiography: “[T]he genre of autobiography operates precisely on a set of reconcilable and constitutive oppositions.” He argues that transsexual autobiographies play out the way they do in part because conforming to these conventional ways of speaking (“sex change”; “I was always already”) are necessary for someone to gain access to treatment. But he also argues that autobiography itself, because it shapes the story of a life with a telos in mind, always has this tension between past and present. Think of conversion narratives: Their whole drama and drive is the tension between “I recognized the truth about myself and the world, the God Who had always been there” and “I converted, I changed.” I had always been the person the Church says I am; I had to change once I recognized that. Or as Prosser puts it: “In that its work is to organize the life into a narrative form, autobiography is fundamentally conformist. …All life events in the autobiographies seem to lead toward the telos of the sex-changed self. This gendered coherence is inextricable from the narrative coherence of the genre.” The moments and epiphanies we cite to draw out our sense of how we ended up where we ended up did not necessarily seem to convey that meaning to us at the time... and yet that doesn't mean we're wrong when we cite the moment we glimpsed a girl at a window, for example, as one of the key moments in our conversion.

(Note that Prosser is not using “conformist” as a slur, but as a neutral descriptor of one feature of a genre with its own formal properties and characteristic beauties. Conservatism rears its lovely head!)

This chapter is also notable for its crisp argument that because transsexuals must construct an autobiographical narrative in order to even identify themselves as transsexual, and because they must further shape those narratives to fit the rigid conventions of the clinical diagnosis in order to gain access to hormones, surgery etc., “every transsexual, as transsexual, is originally an autobiographer,” and--I'm adding this, but I don't think it's far from what Prosser says--an autobiographer who's likely to have an especially acute sense of the difference between what she says and how she's read. The chapter is equally notable for Prosser's clear, cold focus on how thoroughly transsexual people's own narratives of their lives are treated as suspect. The interrogation metaphor on page 111--used positively by a psychoanalyst/psychotherapist, because interrogator/prisoner is totally a great model for the “healing professions”!--man, I'd make everyone read that page if I could. “And charge them for it,” again, some more.

“THE TWENTIETH CENTURY? I COULD PICK A BETTER CENTURY OUT OF A HAT!”: Ch 4: Prosser on the transition from “invert” to transsexual, via analysis of The Well of Loneliness and the parallel shift from sexology to psychoanalysis. I admit I didn't get much from this chapter despite my general interest in how our understandings of sexuality and gender shifted between (say) 1840 and 1940, but people more interested in either Radclyffe Hall or critiques of psychoanalysis might get a lot from this section.

CAMERA SEPARATE: Epilogue: transsexuality in photography. I did not get a lot from the theory-of-photography here--it seemed somewhat intro-level--but then again, photography and comics are the only visual media where I feel like I really grasp even the intro-level theory, so maybe either I'm missing something or the epilogue is aimed at an audience who haven't done Paradoxes of the Leica 101. I did find Prosser especially personal and appealing in this chapter, for example in his description of his fierce protectiveness toward a transsexual woman featured in a pin-up book which mixed exploitation and reclamation.

UTOPIA VS. EDEN: Ch 5: “No Place Like Home: Transgender and Trans-Genre in Leslie Feinberg's Stone Butch Blues.” This is one of the only books Prosser discusses which I've read. Interestingly, I turned out to have completely forgotten the ending and its rejection of resolution of Jess Goldberg's gender identity. This chapter mirrors (by which I mean, both reflects and reverses) chapter two, as Prosser explores a transgender identity based on the rejection of belonging, the preference for remaining in-between, outside, exposed and endangered--and yet possessed of a sense of personal integrity, precisely because in this chapter “home” is treated as an illusion or projection.

The things in this chapter which are most interesting to me are both places where I have theological problems with Goldberg's/Feinberg's/Prosser's (maybe in that order?) stance. First and most obviously, I don't really think a Catholic can accept an identity which rejects the iconic binary of man/woman. That's probably not wildly interesting to anyone who isn't Catholic, though. Perhaps more interestingly, I think this idea of home as illusory projection rather than memory of Adam's happiness runs into the “how do you know what it looks like, then?” problem I talk about here and (if you read the “ethics can't just be a projection of self or culture” bits as pertaining to ontology as well) here.

RADICAL RECONSTRUCTION: And now just Eve's opinion, in case y'all are wondering: The more I think and read about transgender experiences and issues, the more I'm convinced that the Catholic Church can and (I pray) will accommodate some, though as I said above not all, forms of transgendered identity. Specifically, I think Catholic theology affirms many transsexuals' accounts (and even, as I've tried to suggest in this review, offers added strength to their position).

The Church has not, as far as I know, spoken with any authority on this subject yet. A search at the Vatican website for “transsexual” and “transgender” (and variants thereof) produced one result, right here, which as you'll see does not address “what should I as a transgendered person do?” at all. “Intersexed” and “intersex” produced zero results. Possibly I am not running this search right, but as I said, so far I haven't run across anyone, on any side of these issues, citing saints' theological writing or Church teaching which specifically addresses transgendered issues rather than simply sex difference in general. I'll be looking for more books and articles from or addressing specifically Catholic, ex-Catholic, or dissenting (by which I mean, heretical!) Catholic positions. (Recommendations are always welcome!)

As for my own stance, you can build this argument yourself if I give you the premises, I think:

1. Surgery to give intersexed people bodies as much as possible aligned with their experienced sex is reconstructive, not mutilating (see above), thus a-okay by the Church.

2. Our physical bodies are composed not solely of big obvious parts like arms and penises, but also brain structures and hormones. Those, too, are our flesh. Those, too, we can't gnostically reject.

3. We now know that there are differences in those areas for many transsexuals. I expect that we'll learn much more about these differences with The Inevitable Forward March of Progress.

4.There's nothing wrong with being a woman, or being a man--those are good things according to God. Thus transforming one's body to be more obviously a woman or a man is radically unlike e.g. anorexia or apotemnophilia, two disorders to which anti-trans writers often compare transsexuality.

There, now you can run the argument yourself.

As I said, I don't think the Church can accept all possible transgendered identities. The “always already a woman”/“always already a man” autobiographies Prosser discusses in chapter two are much more in line with Catholic thought, I think, than Feinberg's stance. Also, it's pretty obvious that we're just at the very beginning of trying to work through the theology here, and so even the rudimentary argument-premises above only scratch the surface. (I'm not sure I need such a scientistic understanding of “the flesh” to get to an acceptance of transsexuality, for example, but putting the case this way was the easiest way for me to understand and express it.) But I do want to note that the theological issues here only barely overlap with the issues in Gay Catholic Whatnot; “LGBT” is an uneasy cultural alliance, not a Catholic theological category!

So yeah... that's where I'm at.

WORDS HAVE MEANING: Victor Morton's review of "Police, Adjective" gets the philosophical and theological heft of the movie. But I honestly wasn't perturbed by the "Long Attention-Span Theater" nature of the first 90% of scenes--partly because Morton's review had made me expect a climax, partly bc the tension between everyday tedium and extraordinary suspense is part of the point of the movie, and partly bc the main actor is just so great. Morton says there's too much film where he just slurps soup; I remember thinking that I could watch this specific hangdog working-class antihero slurp soup for hours without getting tired.

For me, the basic experience of the movie was: DEADENINGLY RAW HUMAN EXPERIENCE which is somehow still compelling to watch... do that for a really long time, and often it's funny but every time it's funny it's also cruel. The punctuation of laughter is used really well. ...and then suddenly HOLY CRAP DISTILLED SCENE OF POWER AND HUMILIATION AND (a)THEOLOGY.

So put up with any boredom in the first part--you really need it--because this Jack-in-the-Box coil really is winding up to something shocking and cruel and theologically grisly.

It's playing at the E Street Cinema.

IF HOLLYWOOD DECIDED TO GIVE EVERYTHING A GRITTY REBOOT: One of the funniest reader-contest results I've seen. Charlotte's Web, the California Raisins, and much, much more.

YOU ARE THE MOST BEAUTIFUL, JENUFA! Last week I saw In the Red and Brown Water at the Studio Theater (through February 14). I may be reviewing it for money, so you might see that soon; if not I'll post the review here. But I wanted to post right now to tell you to get a ticket if you can! Although there are some flaws--some of the stylizations didn't work for me, though others really made the play more stark and resonant--overall this is a fantastic show.

It's the tragedy of Oya, a beautiful track star in roughly-contemporary Louisiana. It's very funny, and also incredibly wrenching: I'm not sure when I last heard an audience sniffling quietly around me. Rashaunah Simmons, as Oya, radiates youthfulness and hope at the beginning of her story, and transforms over two hours into a haunted house of a woman, staring out from the ruin of herself. And like I said, the formal experimentation is often deployed brilliantly: I especially loved the effect of having the characters read many of their own stage directions. (No, it really works.)

Anyway, actual review later, but for now: Go! see this!!! And look for other plays by Tarell Alvin McCraney, as well.

"LIVE THROUGH THIS": My column at Inside Catholic. The Catholic Church is not a box of answers.

(Also, "goon" is not a typo!)

I couldn't, of course, be the athletic or heterosexual man he wanted. He knew I was homosexual, although we never discussed it. I'd told him in a letter in order to get the money I needed to see the shrink, Dr. O'Reilly.
--The Beautiful Room Is Empty

The guy who created the sublime Daily Mail-o-Matic also made a widget to generate policy proposals from Labour politician David Blunkett. I have no comment on the accuracy of this or any other furrin satire of a furrin pol; but the thing I always remember about the widget is the tag, at the end of each cartoonish abuse of power, "...and charge them for it." Like so: "Pre-emptively convict children, and then lock them up. And charge them for it." "Put Muslims under a curfew order, and then put their children into care. And charge them for it."

And what's so striking to me is how easy it is to convince us to do it: to pay for our own shaming and dismissal, to pay someone else to be the Good Person to our Uniquely Bad. (For example.)

MANY, MANY MORE PLACES TO DONATE FOR HAITI--focusing on Haitian-run organizations. This is a post at the personal journal of someone with family in Haiti, not all of whom are accounted for, so your prayers for her specifically would also be welcome.

I glanced at my watch and realized I had to hurry back to school for the ringing of the next bell--I was on waiter duty at supper time. "How wonderful it must be to have long hours of freedom," I said.

Behind the glinting, anarchist's glasses Paul's eyes looked exhausted: "Someday you'll have more freedom than you'll want."
--The Beautiful Room Is Empty

TWO ORGANIZATIONS FOR THOSE SEEKING TO DONATE TO AID EFFORTS IN HAITI: Mercy Corps; and the American Refugee Committee (Ratty notes that they are non-sectarian).

"GAY TEEN WORRIED HE MIGHT BE CHRISTIAN." From The Onion; you knew I had to.

IT'S THE FEAST DAY OF ST. HILARY OF POITIERS, protector of exiles.

His silences were enough like my father's to fill me with grave anticipation. But he himself was completely different--as thin as my father was fat, as deferential as my father was overbearing, as open to new ideas as my father was closed to them.
--Edmund White, The Beautiful Room Is Empty. Not the best prose in the book so far--which I'm very much enjoying--but I like that he draws out this familiar connection between deference and intellectual openness. We seem to understand that an overbearing person is likely to be unwilling to consider new ideas, but for some reason we don't work the equation the other way and acknowledge that deferential and/or reverential casts of mind are often so willing to engage with and be reshaped by intellectual challengers.

"ON AVERAGE TERMS WITH JESUS, ON BETTER TERMS WITH MYSELF...": Ouch.

IT'S THE FEAST OF ST. BERNARD OF CORLEONE!

GUANTANAMO GUARD REUNITED WITH EX-INMATES. Via Ratty.

"THE AMERICANIZATION OF MENTAL ILLNESS." Terrific piece. If you want more on some of these subjects, check out Andrew Solomon's Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression.

What makes possible the psychic translation of the surgical incursions into the body into a poetics of healing is a kind of transsexual somatic memory. Surgery is made sense of as a literal and figurative re-membering, a restorative drive that is indeed common to accounts of reconstructive surgeries among nontranssexual subjects and perhaps inherent in the very notion of reconstructive surgery.
--Second Skins. This longing for and nostalgic memory of a home (a home in one's own flesh) which has never been experienced reminds me very strongly of Augustine's discussion of our memories of Adam's happiness. (Which... I only vaguely remember, at this point, your joke here. Am I making this up? It's certainly related to the Augustine-stuff I discuss here; the basic idea, as I understand it, is that we share not only in the legacy of Adam's sin but also the memory of his happiness, and it's this remembered happiness which allows us to long for goodness and to recognize it [when we do recognize it!] in this life.)

THE ORIGINS OF EL GRECO: Posting so I remember that I want to see this!!!

MARRIAGE DEBATE is back from our holiday hiatus. Right now we're offering a look at the second generation of Rev. Sung Myung Moon's mass weddings; Britain's first mixed-sex convent; online marriages; "divorce without vows"; marriage in the health-care bill; and a lot more.

Operative in Sacks's and Anzieu's practice as clinicians is that same narrative drive held as most precious in transsexual autobiography: from fragmentation to integration; from alienation to reconciliation; from loss to restoration.
--Second Skins

COMMAND PERFORMANCE: Once I've actually finished Second Skins I'll do a chapter-by-chapter. Like many academic works (e.g. Etienne Gilson's deeply-felt Heloise and Abelard) this book opens with its toughest and most jargon-riddled chapter. I hesitate even to comment on the Judith Butler critique since I am a) unschooled and b) desperately anti-sympathetic to Butler's project. I basically felt like Prosser was defending... you know... common sense--which isn't really accurate, and certainly isn't an especially useful interpretive lens, even though I agree with and appreciate Prosser's writing.

But I was struck by how Prosser's work sidled up to what I know or believe without ever engaging directly! I genuinely think Second Skins would be better if John Paul II's "theology of the body" were engaged: He offers a theology of sexual difference, rather than solely a cultural history of sexual difference, and he does so while clearly separating sexual identity from gender expression. JPII lets Augustine cry. And so he challenges us to view sex as a real symbol, an enfleshed reality whose expression is deeply culturally-contingent. He takes the body seriously, and still proclaims iconic womanhood. In these two respects he is basically the opposite of (Prosser's representation of) Butler, and I wish Prosser had gone mano-a-mano with him.

Moreover, I think the excision of conservatism from academic thought--or the conservative recoil from academia, I'm thinking it's both--badly limited the metaphors available for Prosser. His basic project in the early chapters (it sort of changes later on, so hold on for my chapter-by-chapter review) is to reclaim the body against the Gnostic, moralizing, dissolvingly analytic tendency of queer theory. That's totally right-on and well taken! But Prosser kind of can't analyze gender in itself, because he lacks metaphors which allow for cultural constructions to be better or worse.

Wow, that was an obscure and abstracted paragraph! But the conclusion is really simple: Gender is like a lot of things. If Prosser were able to say that gender is like manners, or gender is like art, or gender is like tradition... he'd be able to, I think, maintain and even strengthen his anthropology while accepting that some gender is better than others. Manners are culturally-contingent, yet not optional! They imply a moral stance. Art is notoriously difficult to delimit, yet I can actually name some forms of self-expression as beautiful and others as ugly, or distinguish between sublime and banal. Tradition is precisely the kind of repetition Prosser loves (and I love it too!), repetition as redescription... repetition in a new context as a simultaneous acknowledgment of, response to, and reshaping of that context. This is pretty much the second-most awesome thing about tradition. An aesthetic conservative vocabulary would, therefore, seriously help Prosser both explain his gender theory and give examples. ...I think.

And on a related note (I almost typed, "an elated note"!), I think Prosser is mounting an oblique and perhaps-unintentional challenge to the basic queer-theory stance where every constraint is abhorrent. Prosser actually echoes Maggie Gallagher's Enemies of Eros in his hints that the flesh truly does constrain us. Maggie goes on to say that we fear the fleshly constraints of sex because we fear the ultimate fleshly constraint of death. Whether or not she's right about that, she's at least able to articulate an anthropology--and, crucially, an understanding of womanhood--in which the flesh constrains our choices and that's good.

Every now and then I toy with the phrase, "I am a conservative because...." My favorite Mad Libs endings right now are, "...I believe suffering is a complex good, not a necessary evil," and "...submission is the best form of leadership."

"UNDERGRADUATES ARE THE MOST SINCERE SHOPPERS THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN." Apparently my AmCon piece about Georgetown is now available to subscribers as a PDF here. I... uh... am not a subscriber, so I have exactly no idea what's in this piece. Does it even contain the sentence in the title of this post? I don't know. Anyway, there's probably something about The Exorcist, and my high school drama, and the arduous process of constructing an identity.

And in one oral transsexual account an anonymous male-to-female expresses her alienation from her male body in terms of being encased, surrounded by a false skin: "I used to look at my body and think it was a bit like a diver's suit, it didn't feel like me inside."
--Jay Prosser, Second Skins. Prosser doesn't draw out what to me might be the most striking aspect of this metaphor: the diver swims in an implacably hostile environment, the coldest depths of the ocean. This metaphor expresses the basic move of Catholic theology in which, when Eve and Adam fell, the whole world changed with us, became suddenly hostile and predatory and wrong.

...As Butler exemplifies, queer theory has written of transitions as discursive but it has not explored the bodiliness of gendered crossings. The concomitant of this elision of embodiment is that the transgendered subject has typically had center stage over the transsexual: whether s/he is transvestite, drag queen, or butch woman, queer theory's approbation has been directed toward the subject who crosses the lines of gender, not those of sex. Epitomizing the bodiliness of gender transition--the matter of sex the cross-dresser has been applauded for putatively defying--the transsexual reveals queer theory's own limits: what lies beyond or beneath its favored terrain of gender performativity.

Second Skins reviews and begins the task of redressing queer theory's elision of the experience of "trans" embodiment by focusing on transsexual narratives. It is imperative to read transsexual accounts now in order to flesh out the transgendered figure that queer theory has made prominent. If, for queer theory, transition is to be explored in terms of its deconstructive effects on the body and identity (transition as a symptom of the constructedness of the sex/gender system and a figure for the impossibility of this system's achievement of identity), I read transsexual narratives to consider how transition may be the very route to identity and bodily integrity. In transsexual accounts transition does not shift the subject away from the embodiment of sexual difference but more fully into it.
--Jay Prosser, Second Skins: The Body Narratives of Transsexuality