THEY RECOGNIZED HIM IN THE BREAKING OF THE BREAD: Over the weekend I finished the first round of edits on my novel. The working title is New Wineskins. It is 64,618 words long (about 108 pp in 12-pt Times New Roman) and is the achingly sincerist story of a transgendered Yale student who becomes unintentionally pregnant. It is Catholic--mackerels snapping left and right--and desperately undergraduate. There's lots of discussion of feminism also. Despite these facts, I think it's pretty awesome.
I realize that the target audience for this novel may consist of: me. But I hope that's not true! I really, really, really need extra eyes for this, so please PLEASE email me at eve_tushnet@yahoo.com if you want to read the draft. I promise it sucks less than at least 80% of the bestseller list, no lie. Also I think people who have edited my stuff before will tell you that I take criticism well. I've been astonished at how gentle people think they have to be w/fiction criticism, when journalism is basically about your editor telling you precisely where and how you suck. (And sometimes being wrong, but not mostly.)
Also, if you a) think a friend might be interested in the draft (esp a transgendered friend or a friend who has been pregnant), PLEASE PLEASE TELL THEM--I would really love as many different perspectives on my handling of Other People's Experiences as possible and I am working hard to make sure that I have readers who will be able to tell me when I'm being an ass,
and b) relatedly, if you or your friend are not sure you can look at the novel until you know more about it, EMAIL ME and I will answer any questions. E.g. I totally know that people might need to know where the protagonist ends up in terms of gender and/or religious identity before they can settle in to reading the draft.
And finally, if you ask for the draft, I do NOT expect you to read it or comment. I mean, I really, really hope you do! That's why I'm asking. But if you get bored, or get distracted, or don't have anything to say except :/, or whatever, THAT IS OKAY. Asking me for the draft is NOT a commitment of any kind, to any action.
So yeah. No pressure, just a potentially-awesome novel which needs your help to be made less stupid.
If you feel like circulating this plea to more readers, I will think you are cool and also say a prayer for you. To... hm... let's say St. Francis de Sales, the patron of journalists.
Tuesday, April 20, 2010
MADAM CHAIRMAN, I AM CONFUSED. Why do people think official recognition and funding is a good thing for their organization? Surely we all know that having a bad reputation is the best way to attract the kinds of people a Christian would prefer!
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
HE WALKED DOWN PICCADILLY/WITH A POPPY AND A LILY: Lovely photo of Wilde's grave. (Scroll down.) Santo subito!
Via Rattus.
Via Rattus.
CHEAP TRAGEDIES: Noli Irritare Leones has a brief reply to my red/blue families post; here are three quickish points.
1. Right, all of us live in a "contracepting culture," I wasn't clear about that. I made it sound like I thought the basic divide was between people who don't believe in contraception and people who do, which would be a ridiculous claim about contemporary America. I was more referring to the reasons people might be less consistent/diligent about contraception, which includes stuff like mental health and general risk-aversion but also--and this is the real point I was trying to get at, sorry!--how much you feel like your future is in your own hands. People with less of a sense of control or agency are IMO likely to have a more Roman-hands-and-Russian-roulette attitude toward contraception. I may be overly influenced by pregnancy center counseling, but this doesn't seem unlikely, and seems very obviously class-linked rather than e.g. about whether you voted for Obama.
2. A related and perh more interesting point: The more I think about this red/blue families thing the more it seems like the r/b narrative and the "marriage gap" narrative are like those pictures which are a vase, but also two faces; or a duck but also a rabbit. The r/b narrative is the liberal one (not Left, but liberal) and the marriage-gap one is conservative. The r/b narrative promotes one set of solutions and the marriage-gap narrative promotes a very different set. The r/b narrative seems to emphasize politics and religion in its framing, while the marriage-gap narrative emphasizes poverty and race. Both often pay lip service to class (the intersection of economic status and culture, or the culture created by economic status) but really downplay it... which leads me to suspect that class is one of the biggest drivers of this divide. (Here's Jonathan Rauch on the marriage gap as a class gap.)
Anyway I'll probably end up writing a longer thing about these two competing narratives--with any luck, playing them off of each other will illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of both--ideally for money....
3. I am not sure how to flesh out what's essentially an aesthetic argument, but my problem with many of the red/blue commentaries recently is not that they're polemical but that they're pharisaical. "I thank God that my sins are not as the sins of this Republican" and all that. Thus class gets elided, for example, in favor of charging evangelicals with hypocrisy. (I don't think NIL is doing that! Just that it's the attitude which spurred my earlier post.)
...Also, though, a reader sent me this essay (PDF), which is a very early use of the r/b phrase and which I remember thinking was quite good. Still obviously from a liberal perspective but I seem to recall it as a fruitful and provocative one, rather than a self-comforting one. Will re-read shortly.
1. Right, all of us live in a "contracepting culture," I wasn't clear about that. I made it sound like I thought the basic divide was between people who don't believe in contraception and people who do, which would be a ridiculous claim about contemporary America. I was more referring to the reasons people might be less consistent/diligent about contraception, which includes stuff like mental health and general risk-aversion but also--and this is the real point I was trying to get at, sorry!--how much you feel like your future is in your own hands. People with less of a sense of control or agency are IMO likely to have a more Roman-hands-and-Russian-roulette attitude toward contraception. I may be overly influenced by pregnancy center counseling, but this doesn't seem unlikely, and seems very obviously class-linked rather than e.g. about whether you voted for Obama.
2. A related and perh more interesting point: The more I think about this red/blue families thing the more it seems like the r/b narrative and the "marriage gap" narrative are like those pictures which are a vase, but also two faces; or a duck but also a rabbit. The r/b narrative is the liberal one (not Left, but liberal) and the marriage-gap one is conservative. The r/b narrative promotes one set of solutions and the marriage-gap narrative promotes a very different set. The r/b narrative seems to emphasize politics and religion in its framing, while the marriage-gap narrative emphasizes poverty and race. Both often pay lip service to class (the intersection of economic status and culture, or the culture created by economic status) but really downplay it... which leads me to suspect that class is one of the biggest drivers of this divide. (Here's Jonathan Rauch on the marriage gap as a class gap.)
Anyway I'll probably end up writing a longer thing about these two competing narratives--with any luck, playing them off of each other will illuminate the strengths and weaknesses of both--ideally for money....
3. I am not sure how to flesh out what's essentially an aesthetic argument, but my problem with many of the red/blue commentaries recently is not that they're polemical but that they're pharisaical. "I thank God that my sins are not as the sins of this Republican" and all that. Thus class gets elided, for example, in favor of charging evangelicals with hypocrisy. (I don't think NIL is doing that! Just that it's the attitude which spurred my earlier post.)
...Also, though, a reader sent me this essay (PDF), which is a very early use of the r/b phrase and which I remember thinking was quite good. Still obviously from a liberal perspective but I seem to recall it as a fruitful and provocative one, rather than a self-comforting one. Will re-read shortly.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
FINAL GIRL FILM CLUB: SPIDER BABY. All the linkalicious Spider Baby love you can handle--and more, much more....
more! more! more!
Of course, you can't talk about this film without talking about the humor. Well, you can, but you'd be neglecting a large part of its charm. The opening credits, featuring a "Monster Mash"-style theme song sung by Chaney himself, clue us in that we're going to have fun with these kooky cannibals. And we do: they crack jokes and even bizarrely mug at the camera. It all works so well thanks to the performances. Everyone dives into his or her role with complete abandon and glee; the Merryes are hilariously over-the-top, while Chaney turns in a surprisingly heartfelt performance as their kindly, long-suffering caretaker. There's an Addams Family vibe to the entire affair, and in the end we're left to wonder who's more horrifying: the sadistic, murderous family on the hill, or their greedy, square, city-dwelling relatives.
more! more! more!
Monday, April 12, 2010
"THIS HOUR AND WHAT IS DEAD": An amazing poem.
more
Tonight my brother, in heavy boots, is walking
through bare rooms over my head,
opening and closing doors.
What could he be looking for in an empty house?
What could he possibly need there in heaven?
more
Sunday, April 11, 2010
"JOKING, OF COURSE": Three more quick thoughts about The Comedians and "Greeneland."
1. Honky-Talk Heroes: It's possible that you've heard the phrase, "What these people need is a honky!" It's usually used to describe a particular kind of movie--I haven't seen either of these, but Dances With Wolves and Avatar are pretty frequently cited as culprits--in which a nonwhite or coded-as-nonwhite culture can only stand up to its oppressors once it's been shown the way by the white-ass honky man. He is the best rebel of them all!
The Comedians both exploits and subverts this cliche, and I'd say it's about 30% exploitation and 70% subversion. So if you're interested in how white-dominated/mainstream movies presented race in the '60s, this is an Interesting Case. This is not the movie a black Catholic would make, and I think that's pretty obvious just from the casting and assumed audience. But it's still pretty intent on subverting this specific trope.
2. He Do the Priests in Different Voices: Graham Greene is really hard to take seriously. He gets overpraised by Catholics who envy the mid-20th-century moment when we seemed to be gaining the literary respect we really deserved in 1890. He then gets underestimated by people who think he's just a catechism with moving pictures.
What he really is, I think, is good enough. The basic elements of the Greene novels I've read are: This world is absurd and cruel, and you are helpless against its cruel absurdity; England is Haiti is Africa is everywhere, there's no geographical escape and white men are just scraped black men; justice is Hell; the Eucharist is mercy, but mercy must be accepted freely; the Catholic Church is the universal cynosure and everyone in the whole wide world thinks She's important.
Some of these points are obviously controversial! And I get that the specific way in which Greene lays the Church on with a trowel alienates many readers. It often doesn't work for me, because he tends to move too quickly from the character point--this actual character would say this actual prayer--to the symbolic. I'm hoping that I've learned from him, in my own Catholic novel (of which more in the next couple of days), how to integrate what characters do and what authors cry for.
But honestly--if nothing in Greene's Catholicism moves you, I think you are missing some basic point of philosophy, some basic moment in what it is to be human. He is not a zoetrope catechism. He's a Catholic man of the twentieth century, with all that implies. He's a weird man who wants to be a weird saint but can't figure out how; he's a person who wants to be real.
3. Does Anybody Remember Laughter? I think I would pay huge amounts of money I don't have to anyone who would compare and contrast the use of "comedy" and "comedians" in this movie, vs. the use of ditto in Watchmen. Because I'm honestly not joking (...of course) when I say I think they're doing the same thing. Both works are, I think, assertions--in Greene's case explicit, in Moore's case denied--of meaning against the obvious sick joke of this world.
The punchline, which comes like a gut-punch, is: There is a God.
ETA: Argh sorry, that was overstated and misleading. Of course Watchmen is an atheist comic book and an anguished one. But I do think that among the various philosophical stances its characters put forward, there's a strong assertion that justice is more than the exercise of will, and therefore meaning is given rather than created. And I don't really think that stance makes sense without God, as I've said a bunch of times, even though again, Watchmen doesn't go there. But anyway, just wanted to clarify what I meant. I'm more interested in the compare/contrast in the use of "comedian" imagery, & shouldn't've overstated the rest of it....
1. Honky-Talk Heroes: It's possible that you've heard the phrase, "What these people need is a honky!" It's usually used to describe a particular kind of movie--I haven't seen either of these, but Dances With Wolves and Avatar are pretty frequently cited as culprits--in which a nonwhite or coded-as-nonwhite culture can only stand up to its oppressors once it's been shown the way by the white-ass honky man. He is the best rebel of them all!
The Comedians both exploits and subverts this cliche, and I'd say it's about 30% exploitation and 70% subversion. So if you're interested in how white-dominated/mainstream movies presented race in the '60s, this is an Interesting Case. This is not the movie a black Catholic would make, and I think that's pretty obvious just from the casting and assumed audience. But it's still pretty intent on subverting this specific trope.
2. He Do the Priests in Different Voices: Graham Greene is really hard to take seriously. He gets overpraised by Catholics who envy the mid-20th-century moment when we seemed to be gaining the literary respect we really deserved in 1890. He then gets underestimated by people who think he's just a catechism with moving pictures.
What he really is, I think, is good enough. The basic elements of the Greene novels I've read are: This world is absurd and cruel, and you are helpless against its cruel absurdity; England is Haiti is Africa is everywhere, there's no geographical escape and white men are just scraped black men; justice is Hell; the Eucharist is mercy, but mercy must be accepted freely; the Catholic Church is the universal cynosure and everyone in the whole wide world thinks She's important.
Some of these points are obviously controversial! And I get that the specific way in which Greene lays the Church on with a trowel alienates many readers. It often doesn't work for me, because he tends to move too quickly from the character point--this actual character would say this actual prayer--to the symbolic. I'm hoping that I've learned from him, in my own Catholic novel (of which more in the next couple of days), how to integrate what characters do and what authors cry for.
But honestly--if nothing in Greene's Catholicism moves you, I think you are missing some basic point of philosophy, some basic moment in what it is to be human. He is not a zoetrope catechism. He's a Catholic man of the twentieth century, with all that implies. He's a weird man who wants to be a weird saint but can't figure out how; he's a person who wants to be real.
3. Does Anybody Remember Laughter? I think I would pay huge amounts of money I don't have to anyone who would compare and contrast the use of "comedy" and "comedians" in this movie, vs. the use of ditto in Watchmen. Because I'm honestly not joking (...of course) when I say I think they're doing the same thing. Both works are, I think, assertions--in Greene's case explicit, in Moore's case denied--of meaning against the obvious sick joke of this world.
The punchline, which comes like a gut-punch, is: There is a God.
ETA: Argh sorry, that was overstated and misleading. Of course Watchmen is an atheist comic book and an anguished one. But I do think that among the various philosophical stances its characters put forward, there's a strong assertion that justice is more than the exercise of will, and therefore meaning is given rather than created. And I don't really think that stance makes sense without God, as I've said a bunch of times, even though again, Watchmen doesn't go there. But anyway, just wanted to clarify what I meant. I'm more interested in the compare/contrast in the use of "comedian" imagery, & shouldn't've overstated the rest of it....
Saturday, April 10, 2010
Are you gonna go to the Sodom and Gomorrah Show?
It's got blogwatching you need for your complete entertainment...
Crazy Bus Stops. I want to catch the s4 from a peach or a watermelon! Or a swingset, wow. What a completely different understanding of public space is implied by that concept. I love it so much. And so I don't mean to chastise whoever thought of it. I think it's great. But honestly--if bus stops are your refuge, is this the framework you'd choose? ETA: What I mean is, if I slept in bus stops, I really wouldn't want them to switch to swingsets. Because you can't sleep on a swingset.
Plan a Roadtrip With Southern Foodways. OM NOM NOM NOM!!!!
Peculiar British Pubs.
It's got blogwatching you need for your complete entertainment...
Crazy Bus Stops. I want to catch the s4 from a peach or a watermelon! Or a swingset, wow. What a completely different understanding of public space is implied by that concept. I love it so much. And so I don't mean to chastise whoever thought of it. I think it's great. But honestly--if bus stops are your refuge, is this the framework you'd choose? ETA: What I mean is, if I slept in bus stops, I really wouldn't want them to switch to swingsets. Because you can't sleep on a swingset.
Plan a Roadtrip With Southern Foodways. OM NOM NOM NOM!!!!
Peculiar British Pubs.
Labels:
district of chaos
CINEMA PURGATORIO: Lots of quick film notes. I wish I had something more substantive to say about all of these, and welcome your thoughts.
The Comedians: An all-star cast does Graham Greene's Haiti novel. Masks are what we have instead of command; masks are what we have instead of peace. Haiti is shocking and it isn't much prettified. (I don't know where this was filmed.) The Catholicism starts to feel strenuous--even in Haiti, I'm pretty sure you can invoke the Virgin without showing us part of a Hail Mary scratched into a prison cell wall and then talking about it--but the underlying conviction that this life is a dead-baby joke, and yet somehow, somewhere, things must be put right... that basic Catholic sense of the horror of justice comes through. One of the points I wanted to make about Brown Girl in the Ring, but forgot, is that justice is horrifying to watch no matter how much you want it and know it needs to happen (to someone else, but also to you, when it happens to you).
Anyway, I think the cruelty and absurdity of this movie, and its bone-deep conviction that this world is not enough, mark it as Greeneland. Recommended.
Brighton Rock: One of the first (the first?) Greene adaptations for the silver screen. What's weird is that the novel is in some ways more cinematic than the movie. The novel's first and final thirds are both incredibly tense, suspenseful, freighted with obvious but still powerful theological weight.
The movie is way too quick at the beginning--I went with someone who hadn't read the book, and basically just missed the essential ten-second shot and dialogue which explained the entire setup--and the movie is badly hurt by the cardboard placidity of its Final Girl. If her love for the Catholic-diabolist gangster Pinky doesn't make sense, then the whole movie suffers, because she serves as the audience identification character, I think.
The good news (so to speak!) is that Richard Attenborough, I am not making that up, is an amazing Pinky. He is young and cruel and charismatic, and he's able to convey exactly as much depth as the story needs--you can see him dipping his rosary into the Styx.
I think the gay couple who exited the movie ahead of me and my friend pretty much summed up the weaknesses--and the weird, indefensible strengths--of this otherwise studio-standard working-class noir: "I really wasn't expecting all the Catholic stuff. That came out of nowhere--it was really bizarre. I mean is that normal?"
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I don't know if there are points to be made (scored?) from reviewing this movie. Richard Burton was amazing in The Comedians, and he surpasses himself here. Liz Taylor was acceptable in TC, and gouges a handhold in my heart with this performance. I like Albee anyway, but this is also good filmmaking: The long shots and the space this movie takes up should let you know that dir Mike Nichols is making choices for a reason.
This is one of the movies I started playing, thinking, "Hey, it's basically dialogue. If it gets boring I can read something cheap while it plays." And I watched and gasped and whimpered all the way through.
Butterfield 8: Taylor as doomed girl with damage. Soapy and gross and fatalist and really no fun (except for the bitchy neighbor lady). Suds gone wrong.
The VIPS: Suds gone right! Absolute soap opera of various characters dealing with shifting power relations in their business and marital and extramarital relations, as they wait in the Heathrow VIP lounge in the sexy Sixties. Yet more Taylor/Burton, and I loved both of them. (She was also great in Butterfield 8. The fact that I hated that movie isn't about her performance, which was committed, and mannered in the good way.) This is unnecessary fluff, but utterly painless. And really, we all need soaping once in a while.
The Conformist: Fable of Italian fascism. Astonishingly beautiful to look at. (There's probably a paper still to be written about the differences between aesthetic fascism and aesthetic anti-fascism.) The understanding of sex is Freud plus slut-shaming all sprinkled with holy water, so if you cringe when you see the name "Maria Goretti," this movie will hurt. Similar issues w/r/t gay life. Still, it is stunning to watch.
Elevator to the Gallows: I'm pretty sure I Netflix'd this because of a horrifying article you can find among the awful links here, about a man who was actually trapped for an entire weekend in a corporate elevator. I honestly don't know why this article still shakes me so badly. But the man had what sounds like a serious nervous breakdown, so he needs your prayers.
ANYWAY, this is a cute French caper film in which a man does in fact get stuck in an elevator. I loved it! It's fast and fun and sexy. The gamine is ridiculously cute--like, I lost IQ points just looking at her pixie face--and Jeanne Moreau is amazing. She's alternately, shot to shot, the most beautiful woman you've ever seen in your entire life, and a potato-faced castoff. Apparently the movie was controversial for shooting her in this no-Vaseline style, but really she makes the film. She exemplifies my dictum that most men are average, but most women are beautiful. A lady who can look lumpy-faced and bag-eyed under one kind of lighting is the absolute avatar of Venus under another.
She, uh, also acts well. But she doesn't have to, is my point: The camera acts for her. I was five kinds of blown away.
The Lost Boys: This may be the first R-rated movie I ever saw (at a friend's sleepover). I'm deeply irrational on this subject. But I loved this.
I mean come on: Knockoff Madonna from Like a Prayer needs your help to keep from becoming a vampire! Your only allies are your adorable little brother (their relationship really rang true to me, with a special kick because they clearly are bonding after their mother's divorce) and the inherent awesomeness of your late '80s Venice Beach carnival setting. The logic works (what appear to be plot holes really aren't if you watch carefully, which admittedly I don't know why you would), the carousel horses are creepy, the Echo and the Bunnymen is awesome, and the taxidermy is hilarious. '80s horror-comedy at its second-best (after Gremlins).
Kiefer Sutherland is in this, and yet his scenes are all stolen by Bill from Bill and Ted. I... I have no idea if this movie works for people who were still teething when the Cold War ended. But if you're wondering whether The Lost Boys is really awesome, or if you were just eating maggots all along, I can tell you: IT'S BLOOD, MICHAEL.
What Have You Done to Solange? So the thing about gialli, and movies in that tradition (Italian gruesome horror), is that some of the movies are astonishing artistic achievements in which the grue and the sex are used to transfix the viewer while the real horror happens in the warping of our sense of reality. Suspiria, you know, or even Phenomena which I didn't much like. Or even Demons, which was hilarious and silly and gross.
And then there are the movies which are rape festivals interspersed with shower scenes.
And amazingly, you can't tell which from the descriptions at mainstream movie sites. So just an FYI: Despite the beautiful, transfixing credits sequence, with lovely camerawork and music by Ennio Morricone, Solange is the latter.
I know I defended Deadgirl for being about misogyny, and said it wasn't itself misogynistic. I think I should probably expand on that here. Deadgirl provides exactly no escape from a horrific conception of what it means to be a man. There are no alternatives. No women really have agency in the movie. And yet it still seemed to me to be a movie I could understand, enter into, relate to as a woman, because it never once (IMO) presented the dead girl's violation as anything other than a horrific encroachment by human monsters. When she was simply touched, the camerawork and color control and acting made it clearly a desecration--if you're Catholic, a desecration of the temple of the Holy Spirit, this creature's body. In the end I didn't think Deadgirl--despite its advertising--presented rape as titillating or deserved or natural.
Solange is... in some ways the opposite. Watch the first five minutes or so of this--and then write your own movie, better.
The Comedians: An all-star cast does Graham Greene's Haiti novel. Masks are what we have instead of command; masks are what we have instead of peace. Haiti is shocking and it isn't much prettified. (I don't know where this was filmed.) The Catholicism starts to feel strenuous--even in Haiti, I'm pretty sure you can invoke the Virgin without showing us part of a Hail Mary scratched into a prison cell wall and then talking about it--but the underlying conviction that this life is a dead-baby joke, and yet somehow, somewhere, things must be put right... that basic Catholic sense of the horror of justice comes through. One of the points I wanted to make about Brown Girl in the Ring, but forgot, is that justice is horrifying to watch no matter how much you want it and know it needs to happen (to someone else, but also to you, when it happens to you).
Anyway, I think the cruelty and absurdity of this movie, and its bone-deep conviction that this world is not enough, mark it as Greeneland. Recommended.
Brighton Rock: One of the first (the first?) Greene adaptations for the silver screen. What's weird is that the novel is in some ways more cinematic than the movie. The novel's first and final thirds are both incredibly tense, suspenseful, freighted with obvious but still powerful theological weight.
The movie is way too quick at the beginning--I went with someone who hadn't read the book, and basically just missed the essential ten-second shot and dialogue which explained the entire setup--and the movie is badly hurt by the cardboard placidity of its Final Girl. If her love for the Catholic-diabolist gangster Pinky doesn't make sense, then the whole movie suffers, because she serves as the audience identification character, I think.
The good news (so to speak!) is that Richard Attenborough, I am not making that up, is an amazing Pinky. He is young and cruel and charismatic, and he's able to convey exactly as much depth as the story needs--you can see him dipping his rosary into the Styx.
I think the gay couple who exited the movie ahead of me and my friend pretty much summed up the weaknesses--and the weird, indefensible strengths--of this otherwise studio-standard working-class noir: "I really wasn't expecting all the Catholic stuff. That came out of nowhere--it was really bizarre. I mean is that normal?"
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? I don't know if there are points to be made (scored?) from reviewing this movie. Richard Burton was amazing in The Comedians, and he surpasses himself here. Liz Taylor was acceptable in TC, and gouges a handhold in my heart with this performance. I like Albee anyway, but this is also good filmmaking: The long shots and the space this movie takes up should let you know that dir Mike Nichols is making choices for a reason.
This is one of the movies I started playing, thinking, "Hey, it's basically dialogue. If it gets boring I can read something cheap while it plays." And I watched and gasped and whimpered all the way through.
Butterfield 8: Taylor as doomed girl with damage. Soapy and gross and fatalist and really no fun (except for the bitchy neighbor lady). Suds gone wrong.
The VIPS: Suds gone right! Absolute soap opera of various characters dealing with shifting power relations in their business and marital and extramarital relations, as they wait in the Heathrow VIP lounge in the sexy Sixties. Yet more Taylor/Burton, and I loved both of them. (She was also great in Butterfield 8. The fact that I hated that movie isn't about her performance, which was committed, and mannered in the good way.) This is unnecessary fluff, but utterly painless. And really, we all need soaping once in a while.
The Conformist: Fable of Italian fascism. Astonishingly beautiful to look at. (There's probably a paper still to be written about the differences between aesthetic fascism and aesthetic anti-fascism.) The understanding of sex is Freud plus slut-shaming all sprinkled with holy water, so if you cringe when you see the name "Maria Goretti," this movie will hurt. Similar issues w/r/t gay life. Still, it is stunning to watch.
Elevator to the Gallows: I'm pretty sure I Netflix'd this because of a horrifying article you can find among the awful links here, about a man who was actually trapped for an entire weekend in a corporate elevator. I honestly don't know why this article still shakes me so badly. But the man had what sounds like a serious nervous breakdown, so he needs your prayers.
ANYWAY, this is a cute French caper film in which a man does in fact get stuck in an elevator. I loved it! It's fast and fun and sexy. The gamine is ridiculously cute--like, I lost IQ points just looking at her pixie face--and Jeanne Moreau is amazing. She's alternately, shot to shot, the most beautiful woman you've ever seen in your entire life, and a potato-faced castoff. Apparently the movie was controversial for shooting her in this no-Vaseline style, but really she makes the film. She exemplifies my dictum that most men are average, but most women are beautiful. A lady who can look lumpy-faced and bag-eyed under one kind of lighting is the absolute avatar of Venus under another.
She, uh, also acts well. But she doesn't have to, is my point: The camera acts for her. I was five kinds of blown away.
The Lost Boys: This may be the first R-rated movie I ever saw (at a friend's sleepover). I'm deeply irrational on this subject. But I loved this.
I mean come on: Knockoff Madonna from Like a Prayer needs your help to keep from becoming a vampire! Your only allies are your adorable little brother (their relationship really rang true to me, with a special kick because they clearly are bonding after their mother's divorce) and the inherent awesomeness of your late '80s Venice Beach carnival setting. The logic works (what appear to be plot holes really aren't if you watch carefully, which admittedly I don't know why you would), the carousel horses are creepy, the Echo and the Bunnymen is awesome, and the taxidermy is hilarious. '80s horror-comedy at its second-best (after Gremlins).
Kiefer Sutherland is in this, and yet his scenes are all stolen by Bill from Bill and Ted. I... I have no idea if this movie works for people who were still teething when the Cold War ended. But if you're wondering whether The Lost Boys is really awesome, or if you were just eating maggots all along, I can tell you: IT'S BLOOD, MICHAEL.
What Have You Done to Solange? So the thing about gialli, and movies in that tradition (Italian gruesome horror), is that some of the movies are astonishing artistic achievements in which the grue and the sex are used to transfix the viewer while the real horror happens in the warping of our sense of reality. Suspiria, you know, or even Phenomena which I didn't much like. Or even Demons, which was hilarious and silly and gross.
And then there are the movies which are rape festivals interspersed with shower scenes.
And amazingly, you can't tell which from the descriptions at mainstream movie sites. So just an FYI: Despite the beautiful, transfixing credits sequence, with lovely camerawork and music by Ennio Morricone, Solange is the latter.
I know I defended Deadgirl for being about misogyny, and said it wasn't itself misogynistic. I think I should probably expand on that here. Deadgirl provides exactly no escape from a horrific conception of what it means to be a man. There are no alternatives. No women really have agency in the movie. And yet it still seemed to me to be a movie I could understand, enter into, relate to as a woman, because it never once (IMO) presented the dead girl's violation as anything other than a horrific encroachment by human monsters. When she was simply touched, the camerawork and color control and acting made it clearly a desecration--if you're Catholic, a desecration of the temple of the Holy Spirit, this creature's body. In the end I didn't think Deadgirl--despite its advertising--presented rape as titillating or deserved or natural.
Solange is... in some ways the opposite. Watch the first five minutes or so of this--and then write your own movie, better.
PLAYING SPIDER: ZOMG you guys you guys!!! The Final Girl Film Club is this Monday, and I get to be in it... because they're doing Spider Baby!!! You can play too; click here for details, but basically you just watch the movie, which you can do online, and then post something about it.
THANK GOD FOR MISSISSIPPI: There is a fun meme called "red families vs. blue families." This Seussian formula may not be especially based on the book of the same name, which I haven't read and which I therefore don't want to assimilate to the sins of its followers. But the meme itself is not really new.
The idea is that families in "blue states" are relatively adept at transmitting some aspects of a marriage culture to their children. Massachusetts, e.g., is home to families where the children mate for life. Meanwhile "red states" produce children (they produce more children, usually, by the way) who marry in haste and repent in somewhat-delayed-haste, lots of divorces and out-of-wedlock births and similar signs of family-values hypocrisy. When I say "this isn't new," I mean, "I got 10 cents off my Caribou coffee by knowing that Mississippi has an extraordinarily high rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies more than a year ago."
These are facts, and there are a lot of ways of responding to these facts. You can explore ways in which the contemporary economy and culture, by (for example) prioritizing postsecondary education and stigmatizing living with one's parents, has made it extraordinarily difficult to sustain a culture of more-or-less postponing sex until marriage. You could criticize the notion of marriage as the capper on life's to-do list, to be sought only once all the other boxes are checked and you're "stable," rather than a foundation for a later stable life. You could, in other words, ask why a consumerist culture is so hostile to a communal and marriage-based way of life.
You could maybe talk about Protestantism! Catholic states tend to have very different problems from Protestant ones: They tend to be aging states--whether we're talking about Massachusetts or Italy--where divorce is rare but birthrates are low. What can the competing Christian cultures teach one another?
You could look for institutions and traditions within so-called "red state" cultures which promote lifelong marriage and serve to more-or-less-okay manage the problem of intercourse. You could find heroes and show how "red state" life works, when it works, and which conditions need to be in place for it to work.
These are all things you could do.
The other really fun thing you could do, though, is blame "red state" families for being Not Our Kind, Dear. It is just so sad that their pathetic religious delusions make them slutty hypocrites. (Yum, by the way; I think hypocrisy makes your breasts bigger.) You could argue that they're really promoting abortion, 'cause it's their fault they haven't adapted to the contracepting, college-educated ways of the elite. It's not about poverty, or the fatalism it breeds, or the terrifying knowledge of how close you really are to falling off the ladder. It's about Baptists suck.
You could wage class war, in other words, on the side of the privileged. You could focus on shaming people who are really different from you, and not on figuring out how marriage and family life can be strengthened across a variety of religious and moral beliefs and a variety of class and cultural backgrounds.
Of course, if the (for example) Catholic view of marriage is simply doomed and pathetic, then I guess it's just ripping off the Band-Aid quickly to say so. But I really think if you spend any time with actual humans actually trying to make decisions about their sexual lives, their unborn children, their religion, and their relationships, you will not sound the way a lot of the "red vs. blue families" commentators sound.
The idea is that families in "blue states" are relatively adept at transmitting some aspects of a marriage culture to their children. Massachusetts, e.g., is home to families where the children mate for life. Meanwhile "red states" produce children (they produce more children, usually, by the way) who marry in haste and repent in somewhat-delayed-haste, lots of divorces and out-of-wedlock births and similar signs of family-values hypocrisy. When I say "this isn't new," I mean, "I got 10 cents off my Caribou coffee by knowing that Mississippi has an extraordinarily high rate of out-of-wedlock pregnancies more than a year ago."
These are facts, and there are a lot of ways of responding to these facts. You can explore ways in which the contemporary economy and culture, by (for example) prioritizing postsecondary education and stigmatizing living with one's parents, has made it extraordinarily difficult to sustain a culture of more-or-less postponing sex until marriage. You could criticize the notion of marriage as the capper on life's to-do list, to be sought only once all the other boxes are checked and you're "stable," rather than a foundation for a later stable life. You could, in other words, ask why a consumerist culture is so hostile to a communal and marriage-based way of life.
You could maybe talk about Protestantism! Catholic states tend to have very different problems from Protestant ones: They tend to be aging states--whether we're talking about Massachusetts or Italy--where divorce is rare but birthrates are low. What can the competing Christian cultures teach one another?
You could look for institutions and traditions within so-called "red state" cultures which promote lifelong marriage and serve to more-or-less-okay manage the problem of intercourse. You could find heroes and show how "red state" life works, when it works, and which conditions need to be in place for it to work.
These are all things you could do.
The other really fun thing you could do, though, is blame "red state" families for being Not Our Kind, Dear. It is just so sad that their pathetic religious delusions make them slutty hypocrites. (Yum, by the way; I think hypocrisy makes your breasts bigger.) You could argue that they're really promoting abortion, 'cause it's their fault they haven't adapted to the contracepting, college-educated ways of the elite. It's not about poverty, or the fatalism it breeds, or the terrifying knowledge of how close you really are to falling off the ladder. It's about Baptists suck.
You could wage class war, in other words, on the side of the privileged. You could focus on shaming people who are really different from you, and not on figuring out how marriage and family life can be strengthened across a variety of religious and moral beliefs and a variety of class and cultural backgrounds.
Of course, if the (for example) Catholic view of marriage is simply doomed and pathetic, then I guess it's just ripping off the Band-Aid quickly to say so. But I really think if you spend any time with actual humans actually trying to make decisions about their sexual lives, their unborn children, their religion, and their relationships, you will not sound the way a lot of the "red vs. blue families" commentators sound.
Friday, April 09, 2010
GEORGIAN CONVICTS SWAP CELLS FOR MONASTERY:
more (via Ratty)
...The main difference, though, is that Tariel is not a fully-fledged monk, but a prisoner now serving out his sentence at the Father Ambrosi Khelaia monastery near Tbilisi.
Having spent four years behind bars and barbed wire, he is now allowed to roam the calm surroundings of a pine forest on the outskirts of the city, as one of the first candidates in a government-led rehabilitation programme.
A devout Orthodox Christian, he shows me around the monastery, explaining his daily ritual.
"I start every day in prayer. Then I feed the chickens and sheep. During the afternoon I usually sit together with the other monks and we discuss our faith. At 2130 we rest."
He says he also takes part in Bible study, bee-keeping, gardening and playing with the monks' pet bear.
more (via Ratty)
"TOP 12 THINGS I NOTICED FOR THE FIRST TIME UPON SEEING CITIZEN KANE IN A THEATER." My old post about CK noir-as-horror is here.
Labels:
Orson Welles,
VJ Morton
Friday, April 02, 2010
Don't, my son, look back,
or bother with right and left;
and don't say, "Tomorrow I'll die
so why should I walk around bereft?"
Remember the day to come
when your flesh will be eaten and gone,
when over your head the plows will plow
as farmers make their furrows long.
You sinned well enough in your youth.
Don't drag its legacy on.
--Solomon Ibn Gabirol, tr Cole
or bother with right and left;
and don't say, "Tomorrow I'll die
so why should I walk around bereft?"
Remember the day to come
when your flesh will be eaten and gone,
when over your head the plows will plow
as farmers make their furrows long.
You sinned well enough in your youth.
Don't drag its legacy on.
--Solomon Ibn Gabirol, tr Cole
Thursday, April 01, 2010
TELL MY HORSE: Nalo Hopkinson's first novel, Brown Girl in the Ring, comes with cover blurbs from Octavia Butler and Tim Powers; and if you like either of those authors, you should definitely check it out. It's set in a future-Toronto urban wasteland, with goats cropping grass in the parks and feral children living in the subways. A Caribbean-Canadian mother and daughter fight to save the daughter's lover from the clutches of the local gang kingpin, with the equivocal help of the orishas, the spirits of syncretic Afro-Western religion.
This book is so refreshing. I could listen to these characters talk all day long. They behave like actual people I've known from roughly-similar backgrounds: The flaws are as recognizable as the strengths. The love and resentment feel completely real. I will be bitter enough to add that the genre is also neither urban fantasy (aka pasty-faced pseudo-Celtic) nor magical realism (aka sentimental spilt-religion), but instead pretty much what I have been missing in both genres. There's also a recurring theme of conflicted or unknown paternity, which of course I found really compelling.
This is fantasy of salvage, where the losses have real impact on both the characters and the reader. People make really horrible decisions, and then don't conveniently die; they have to be lived with, and they have to learn to live with themselves.
There are some flaws. The ending includes a bit of policy-wonkery which I think is intended to be egalitarian (and needs to be egalitarian to function symbolically in the novel) but which is... not, really. There's a related Afterschool Special bit in which the line, "Excuse my bluntness, [Previously Amoral Character], but when did you develop a social conscience?" is used without irony, which is just teeth-grittingly painful.
There's an overreliance on "she just knew, and acted on instinct," which seems to be a deliberate philosophical choice on Hopkinson's part but which made it hard for me as a reader to relate, since it denies the pleasure of coming up with what you hope the characters will do and then being surprised when your own expectations are surpassed, or watching their thought processes and then being devastated when a plan you understood turns out to be useless. I can't think with a character who is deliberately rejecting thinking, you know? And I can't even really feel with her either, not in the moment in which she's ascertaining where her instinct leads her. It makes the character's actions feel deus ex machina and/or random.
Those points aside, though, this was a suspenseful read, brimming with ideas and unexpected twists on traditional imagery. I'll definitely be looking out for more by Hopkinson.
This book is so refreshing. I could listen to these characters talk all day long. They behave like actual people I've known from roughly-similar backgrounds: The flaws are as recognizable as the strengths. The love and resentment feel completely real. I will be bitter enough to add that the genre is also neither urban fantasy (aka pasty-faced pseudo-Celtic) nor magical realism (aka sentimental spilt-religion), but instead pretty much what I have been missing in both genres. There's also a recurring theme of conflicted or unknown paternity, which of course I found really compelling.
This is fantasy of salvage, where the losses have real impact on both the characters and the reader. People make really horrible decisions, and then don't conveniently die; they have to be lived with, and they have to learn to live with themselves.
There are some flaws. The ending includes a bit of policy-wonkery which I think is intended to be egalitarian (and needs to be egalitarian to function symbolically in the novel) but which is... not, really. There's a related Afterschool Special bit in which the line, "Excuse my bluntness, [Previously Amoral Character], but when did you develop a social conscience?" is used without irony, which is just teeth-grittingly painful.
There's an overreliance on "she just knew, and acted on instinct," which seems to be a deliberate philosophical choice on Hopkinson's part but which made it hard for me as a reader to relate, since it denies the pleasure of coming up with what you hope the characters will do and then being surprised when your own expectations are surpassed, or watching their thought processes and then being devastated when a plan you understood turns out to be useless. I can't think with a character who is deliberately rejecting thinking, you know? And I can't even really feel with her either, not in the moment in which she's ascertaining where her instinct leads her. It makes the character's actions feel deus ex machina and/or random.
Those points aside, though, this was a suspenseful read, brimming with ideas and unexpected twists on traditional imagery. I'll definitely be looking out for more by Hopkinson.
They asked me as though they were mystified:
Is it true your friend's hands are like clouds?
And I told them: They were tied for being too open,
and for goodness of heart of hunger he died.
--Solomon Ibn Gabirol, tr Peter Cole
Is it true your friend's hands are like clouds?
And I told them: They were tied for being too open,
and for goodness of heart of hunger he died.
--Solomon Ibn Gabirol, tr Peter Cole
Labels:
Solomon Ibn Gabirol
Wednesday, March 31, 2010
SOME LINKS which strike me as important reading for those following the discussions of Pope Benedict XVI's role in the sex-abuse crisis. (This old post of mine may give some sense of where I'm coming from on any theological questions here.) John Allen at the National Catholic Reporter has a historical analysis, "Will Ratzinger's Past Trump Benedict's Present?":
more
A second piece by Allen, "Keeping the Record Straight on Benedict and the Crisis," which corrects a few misconceptions promoted by e.g. the New York Times, but also includes this sentence, which is a truth much harder to accept and understand than the role played by one man:
more
If you want a short version of both pieces you can read Allen's NYTimes op-ed, "Pope Benedict's Conversion on Sexual Abuse."
Ross Douthat's op-ed in the same paper, "A Time for Contrition," also struck me as really good.
...In retrospect, the Burresi and Maciel cases crystallized a remarkable metamorphosis in Joseph Ratzinger vis-à-vis the sexual abuse crisis. As late as November 2002, well into the eruption in the United States, he seemed just another Roman cardinal in denial. Yet as pope, Benedict XVI became a Catholic Elliot Ness -- disciplining Roman favorites long regarded as untouchable, meeting sex abuse victims in both the United States and Australia, embracing "zero tolerance" policies once viewed with disdain in Rome, and openly apologizing for the carnage caused by the crisis.
In a papacy sometimes marred by scandal and internal confusion, Benedict's handling of the sexual abuse crisis has often been touted as a bright spot -- one case, at least, in which the expectations of the cardinals who elected him for a firmer hand on the rudder seem to have been fulfilled.
That background makes the scandals now engulfing the church in Europe especially explosive, because by putting the pope's all but forgotten tenure as the Archbishop of Munich from May 1977 to February 1982 under a microscope, they threaten to once again make Benedict seem more like part of the problem than the solution.
more
A second piece by Allen, "Keeping the Record Straight on Benedict and the Crisis," which corrects a few misconceptions promoted by e.g. the New York Times, but also includes this sentence, which is a truth much harder to accept and understand than the role played by one man:
Anyone involved in church leadership at the most senior levels for as long as Benedict XVI inevitably bears some responsibility for the present mess.
more
If you want a short version of both pieces you can read Allen's NYTimes op-ed, "Pope Benedict's Conversion on Sexual Abuse."
Ross Douthat's op-ed in the same paper, "A Time for Contrition," also struck me as really good.
Labels:
Lent
"ZOUNDS! FIVE REFLECTIONS ON THE WOUNDS OF CHRIST." My latest for Inside Catholic. The last two are my favorites.
CAMASSIA REVIEWS (PART OF) DEFIANCE:
more (and my grandfather on the Jewish Councils, here)
This, probably more than anything, is what keeps the story from being a Tarantino fantasy. The Bielskis want to die like men, but they also recognize their own impotence. As much as Tec highlights the importance of their resistance, in contrast to the more typical images of Jews as passive victims, the Bielskis are ultimately also waiting for a much bigger war machine to rescue them. And so they have neither the moral purity of the ghetto victims, nor the masculine heroism of American mythology. Instead, like most people, they live somewhere in between.
more (and my grandfather on the Jewish Councils, here)
"SUICIDED: THE ADVERSATIVE PASSIVE AS A FORM OF ACTIVE RESISTANCE."
more (via Ratty)
Language is changing at a torrid pace in China, and it's not just a massive infusion of English words that is to blame. Nor can we simply ascribe the dramatic changes in language usage to rampant, wild punning for the purpose of confusing the ubiquitous censors.
Creative manipulation of lexical and grammatical constructions is another way to express ideas that are not permitted under the harsh social controls imposed by the government. ...
Lately, it has become fashionable to use the passive voice with verbs that don't normally allow it and in situations that seem ludicrous. One of the most celebrated examples is bèi zìshā 被自殺 ("be suicided"), with the implication that someone was beaten to death, but the authorities made it look as though he had committed suicide. Once coined, bèi zìshā spread like wildfire, so that it wasn't long before it merited its own entry in online dictionaries and encyclopedias.
more (via Ratty)
Labels:
words words words
Friday, March 26, 2010
SAUL ALINSKY'S LITTLE PLATOONS: A fascinating piece from Jesse Walker. Summary: "Critics of the expiring activist group [ACORN] say it was driven by the vision of Saul Alinsky. If only that were true." But there's lots more inside.
Thursday, March 25, 2010
"BUT EVEN IF HE WILL NOT...":
--from the readings for yesterday
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered King Nebuchadnezzar,
“There is no need for us to defend ourselves before you
in this matter.
If our God, whom we serve,
can save us from the white-hot furnace
and from your hands, O king, may he save us!
But even if he will not, know, O king,
that we will not serve your god
or worship the golden statue that you set up.”
--from the readings for yesterday
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
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!
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!
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:
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.
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.
Labels:
kitchen adventures
THE FIRST TIME I HAVE USED THE TAGS "LENT" AND "LOL" FOR THE SAME POST. Via the Rattus of course....
Friday, March 19, 2010
"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
--via Ratty
Tuesday, March 16, 2010
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.
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.
Monday, March 15, 2010
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
--"Tokyo, Cocktail Capital of the World," Hugh Garvey, in Best Food Writing 2009
Tuesday, March 09, 2010
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??
ETA: Oh, possibly my old post about St. Anselm would be relevant??
Saturday, March 06, 2010
PRIORITIES. Via the Rattus. Several of the other ones she links are also great, e.g. "Destiny."
Labels:
Rattus
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!
Friday, March 05, 2010
"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.
And a bit more here: fantasy vs. critique of fantasy. I'm pretty sure I prefer the latter, although there are exceptions.
Labels:
a shandeh for the goyim,
America
A FORMER MILITARY INTERROGATOR UNEARTHS THE ERRORS AND FEAR-MONGERING IN MARC THIESSEN'S "COURTING DISASTER."
read it here
probably via The Agitator
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
Labels:
torture
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:
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!]
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.
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.
Tuesday, March 02, 2010
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.
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:
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:
whole thing
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.
Friday, February 26, 2010
Tuesday, February 23, 2010
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.
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.
Thursday, February 18, 2010
"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.
These aren't the songs I would choose, necessarily, but the only really obvious absence (to me) is Janelle Monae. More on her soon.
Labels:
awesome,
Janelle Monae
Tuesday, February 16, 2010
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.
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.
Via DLB.
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
--Jeanette Winterson, Written on the Body
Wednesday, February 10, 2010
Tuesday, February 09, 2010
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....
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....
Labels:
marriage
Thursday, February 04, 2010
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
DAUGHTERS OF IT'S-COMPLICATED:
more
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
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?
Subscribers-only, because if you can't sell memories what can you sell?
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