Moored at Sea

Valentine's Day

2012-02-13T22:25:00.001-06:00

I am not powerful in love, my love is flaccid and clammy. It pours out like yesterday's tea, a little thickened, very murky, mixed with the swirls of turned cream. I cannot love grandly, and heroically. Some people can love a thing fuller than the thing's capacity, they can surround something with their love. Their love can make the object bigger than it is.

I cannot love around, though. My love has not the structural integrity for that. My love is not so grand as that. But even so, even so, I have that little human urge, I want to love, to love, to love, to love with all the love I have. How lucky I am then, that I met someone whose heart is deep and richly chambered like a limestone cave. It is cool and humid with an infusion of its own rich love, and I can pour and pour myself into it, and never, ever, ever fill it up.

Happy Valentine's, Amanda.

Fairies in Shakespeare

2012-01-30T10:38:00.000-06:00

One doesn't have to know me terribly well, to know I have a soft spot for fairies. I could write about why another time, but sufficeth to say, I have one. If you've been reading a long time, and REALLY been paying attention, you may also remember that my book arch nemesis, the book that I've never been able to conquer is Edmund Spenser's 'The Faerie Queene'. Well, all this converged at the beginning of this month when I was thinking of what I could do in terms of reading this year. For the last few years, I've picked an author and read at least a broad swath of their most famous works, to really get to know them, as I did with James Joyce a few years ago. So this year I decided to try something a little different - instead of reading one author's many books, I'm going to work my way up to reading the Faerie Queene, later this year.

So, this coincided nicely with Ms Allie at A Literary Odyssey, who decided this month to have a Shakespeare Reading Month. Spenser and Shakespeare were near contemporaries, and both of them have some rather famous forays into fairyland. More importantly, the writers of Shakespeare and Spenser's time, in many ways, began to invent the idea of fairies that we have today. The Elizabethan fairy is both familiar and foreign to our modern idea of fairy-folk.

This is not to say, of course, that Shakespeare and his contemporaries just cut the idea of the Fairy from whole cloth. It seems, in fact, to be a feature of the human drive to mythologize something that is classifiable as a fairy, and we see incarnations of the 'Wee Folk' throughout the folk traditions of many world cultures. In Shakespeare's day, in fact, this line was far hazier than it is now, when we think of a fairy as a very specific type of being (with wings and sparkles and flower petal clothing - its alright, we can all confess together, its true, that's what we all think of, right?). In Shakespeare's most famous exploration of the fey world, "Midsummer's Night Dream", this is actually fairly apparent, fairly quickly - while we often forget this, now, the setting for MND is Athens, the lord of the city is the Greek mythological hero Theseus, and his lady is Hippolyta, the Queen of the Amazons. The setting and characters, then, hearken back fairly strongly to a classical tradition. Mab and Oberon, even, are character-wise really not a far leap from the Greek Gods, if one thinks about it, and the role of Puck as the messenger of the King is a fairly close parallel to Hermes/Mercury. At the same time, the action takes place in a wood, the sort of wild place that the Greeks would have populated with Nymphs and Dryads.

This sylvan divine aspect of the fairies is repeated again in the other of Shakespeare's plays that grapples, though very differently, with the faeries: The Merry Wives of Windsor. MWW is set in England, so the strong classical allusions of the MND fairies is lacking, here, but there is still a strong thread of connection to lost and ancient gods, as the wives trick Falstaff into dressing as a stag and going into the forest, to meet them - then proceed to dress some of the people of the town as fairies to come and torment him. The Horned Man, or the Horned God, is an old remnant of the pre-Christian past of Western Europe (one that lives on today in many varieties, for instance, of neo-pagan faiths). The connection with fairies, here points to their position as fallen Gods of a sort. There's further evidence of this in the name of Queen Mab, in the (in)famous 'Queen Mab' speech that Mercutio offers up in Romeo and Juliet. Mab is probably derived from the Celtic Medb, or as its often transliterated, Maeve, the name of one of the great queens of the Tuatha de Danaan, the 'Gods and Fighting Men' of the Irish/Celtic mythological cycle.

The fairies, then, in England were not terrifically different from Gods - albeit fallen ones, now subservient to the power of Christianity. Many of the fairy stories we have, with a bit tweaking, ore almost indistinguishable from the mythological tales of the Gods of the Celts, the Scandinavians, or the Greeks, with many of the same tropes: descent into the underworld, rewards for virtue and punishment for vice, seduction of mortals by the immortals, rites of appeasement and sacrifice, etc.

But the question, of course, comes up - we DON'T think of the fairies now as being like Gods, really, whatsoever, short of a somewhat shaky connection to immortality, and a certain degree of magical power. Fairies, in most of our modern ideas, do not live lives bigger than human lives, but rather paradoxically, smaller - literally as well as figuratively. The Elizabethan Age is when you begin to see this shift, from fairies as simply strange, unknowable semi-divines, to fairies as amusing, petty imitation of human life. One of Shakespeare's contemporaries, Michael Drayton, wrote a narrative poem on this subject, entitled 'Nimphidia' (another interesting parallel to Greek myth), the outlines of which could live quite comfortably in the pages of Peter Pan, The Water Babies, or a Tinkerbell cartoon. In Nimphidia, the fairies are so small that ride in spacious coaches made of snail shells, pulled by gnats or flies:

The seat the soft wool of the bee,
The cover, gallantly to see,
The wing of a pied butterflee ;
I trow 't was simple trimming.

The wheels composed of crickets' bones,
And daintily made for the nonce,
For fear of rattling on the stones
With thistle-down they shod it;

This image is not one of the strange old tales of fairies that can strike terror into the country man's heart - this is pure Disney. Much of the writing I've read on this subject seem to treat this decline of fairies from Gods to be worshipped to doll-like children's characters, feel uncomfortable with the shift - its often depicted as a debasement, where Christianity is the bad guy, and the fey are a noble old religion being shoehorned into irrelevance to make way for the One True God, or begin used as a tool to browbeat people into submission to new social mores.

The interesting thing to me, though, is that, clearly given the longevity of the itsy-bitsy fairy, the feeling of these new Elizabethan fairies is a powerful and resonant one to the popular imagination. MND is (rightly, I think) frequently listed as one of Shakespeare's greatest works, and carries inside of its playful whimsy a great deal of emotional maturity, something we perhaps don't necessarily associate with the 'kids stuff' of the adorable little fairy. What were these fairies DOING for the Elizabethan, that made them so attractive?

Well, aside from the need for cute (go ahead, TRY to tell me this isn't a big part of the human psyche - you know you have another browser tab open with adorable LOLCats in it), the Elizabethan Fairy was a remarkably flexible tool for storytelling and dialogue. Take, the fairy story inside of Midsummer's Night Dream for a moment, for example, and pretend it isn't about fairies: Its a story of a court in which the King and Queen are as human, jealous, persnickety and difficult as everyone else, where the Queen ends up making out with a Donkey, and where the King ends up looking perhaps a bit incompetent in his hiring processes. The revelation for me in understanding this was to realize that this story was written in the height of the English Renaissance, at the beginning of the century filled with the birth of the modern mind: Don Quixote, Paradise Lost, The Anatomy of Melancholy - these are books of the 17th century. It was an age in which people began to take a cynical eye to their oldest and most sacred institutions. But its also a century in which people were murdered by the state for being Catholic, Protestant, Puritan, Anglican, Huguenot, etc, in turn. Its a century that would produce the secret police of King Louis XIV or Oliver Cromwell. The production of MND occurred in a time when people began to try to say what they thought, and the powers that be were still structured to silence them. Fairies are, comparatively, safe ways to talk and think about the larger world. Its interesting in fact to think that this same Queen Mab of so much of Shakespeare's work is the Queen Mab that Shelley would use a few hundred years later to lay out his philosophical support for everything from pacifism to atheism to radical democracy (I'll be reading Shelley's Queen Mab later this year). I am led to wonder if its any coincidence that the forces of the fey in Shakespeare's plays are generally arrayed to help those who are generally in the position of less power in the larger world: The marriages in MND are subverting the patriarchy and the state, the person the fairies are initially trying to help is a woman, Puck uses Bottom to humiliate someone in the monarchy, the false fairies in MWW are being used by women to punish a member of the nobility who is trying to seduce them. The Queen Mab in the speech of Mercutio tweaks everyone from the Parson to the Soldier.

But, the really remarkable thing about the fairies to me is that at they humanize those in power, instead of demonizing them. MND, again, as an example, certainly has some subversive things to say about power, but its certainly not a polemic. Its a play by a man who saw the injustices and idiocies of his society, but also a man who its difficult to believe wanted to overthrow the monarchy. Polemics a-plenty were written before and after the fairies made their entrance, and had their strong effects on history - polemic helped produce the bloody civil wars of England, the revolution of France, etc. But Polemics encourage you to hate those in power. The stories of the fairies encourage you, perhaps, to roll your eyes at them, and to simply think. No one ever threatened a fairy revolution. The majority of people don't WANT a revolution most of the time - revolutions are violent, unpredictable, and frequently more destructive than they are productive. They simply want to be able to talk and think about the things they worry about in the world around them. The fairies gave the Elizabethans a way to do this (Nimphidia bears reading in this light, as well). The fairies as arbiters halfway between heaven and hell, allowed people to live in a world that contained greys.

This is the real message, to me, of the famous 'If we spirits have offended" speech: the play only wants to tell a story, and it wants to have characters that are human. It doesn't mean to teach or push, or change minds and hearts. It only wants to tell stories - that's why it has the power that it does. Offense could be taken - it quite possibly was taken, by everyone from nobility that didn't like being painted as buffoons, to the pious who didn't want to look at a world as suffused with the erotic as MND is - but its not intended. And if its taken? Let it go. Fairies aren't gods, they do not need acolytes and worship and dogma - they simply, like all the rest of us, have lives to live, stories to tell, and they'd like to go through life feeling, at the end, that someone was glad to have seen them.

Ponies in Technology

2012-01-20T20:55:00.001-06:00

When I was young, and on the outside of my profession, I thought of IT as a sort of embedded, marvelous utopia, a land of high ideals and ferocious belief. It was - it still is - a sort of firelight to the widest-eyed moths of humanity, drawing in a lot of very intelligent, high-minded people. When I thought of it, it was easy to imagine the way a student would feel in a hundred years, reading about these hungry souls ripping a new era from a mass of copper and silicon. Heroic, in a very real way.

I wanted to believe that a group that was trying to construct a dream as broad and new as the internet would be like devoted revolutionaries - subsumed in the revolution. I work in IT, now, it changes things, to be inside of a thing.

Where I work now, there is this old tradition, nominally intended to increase security, but really as essentially meaningless as all traditions are. If you leave your desk and forgot to lock the screen, others will come and play a trick on you. I had it done to me, once, and returned to find that an enormous, scantily clad photo of David Hasselhoff had been set as my wallpaper. Its more popular, now, to open the person's email, and send a message to the company wide mailing list in the victim's name, saying how much they love ponies.

The pony email is immediately followed by the sort of kindly ribbing that really is meant as a sort of kindness. And perhaps that is all it is. But humor is a strange thing. And it left me wondering, why it was so funny to us as a culture, why another technical worker saying 'I love ponies! Oh how I wish I had a big pretty pink one!' is such an easy, default laugh.

Well, the answer is fairly straightforward - because its non-role-appropriate behavior. As a technologist, in my company, there is an OVERWHELMING likelihood that you are male, and the role of maleness in the technologist's life is, in my experience, very important. Technology is a strange field in this way.

Historically, programming began as a largely female endeavor - the operators that wrote punchcards for the early computers were overwhelmingly female. It was viewed as, essentially, skilled clerical work. Only when software development became something we as a culture admired, found magical and creative, did it become a male profession. With this transition, and with the sudden meteoric growth of respect for technical careers, a culture grew up.

While the boundaries are loosening now, even today certain cultural elements are very much binding forces within the programming community - building cachet and understanding with other programmers is half technical acumen, but, in my experience, also has to do with trading the cachet of shared knowledge and experience. And this knowledge is largely not technical. The ability to tell and comprehend jokes on Star Wars, Douglas Adams, or Doctor Who, for example, are a quick way to find rapport in a technical community. These elements are, of themselves, seemingly harmless.

Culture, however, when it is at its strongest, must have not only methods to include new members, but also methods to draw its borders of exclusion - subconsciously or consciously. One shining example of this is a list of the 222 most famous names in software development (you can find information on it here). The list is, of course, like all subjective lists, eminently debatable, but its also, to be frank, fairly well done. It has most of the 'greats' I would have included. And this list contains 6.5 women (Roberta Williams, because the work she is famous for is a collaboration with her husband, gets a half entry, an interesting and somewhat discomfiting statistic that I won't pursue here). These proportions, today, aren't much different from the larger tech industry's gender proportions. And the more 'technical' the job role, the more you see this contrast become starker.

This is a well-known issue in the community, and of course is partly a problem with our education system, which discourages women from most math, science, and engineering fields at some level. But the problem, I think, is also inthe culture which has... well, I can only describe it as a sort of machismo.

An acquaintance of mine - a far better programmer than I, and a genuinely nice, open-minded person - made a joke the other day that illuminated this. He was talking about a time management technique called Pomodoro which is very popular in the tech community, and how they were doing it in groups, calling it 'Bromodoro', because 'its like Pomodoro with your bro's.' The joke was meant to be tongue in cheek. The word bro, has a sort of 'oh-god' hipster ring to it that marks any use of it as not entirely serious (at least this is my experience - though as with any slang term, these borders of legitimacy can be murky). I wrote back, half-jokingly, to ask what they would call it if they had a woman working with them. He wrote back and said that 'sisses could be bros, too'.

This isn't blatant sexism, of course, its not said because women aren't desired. I would say, from what I know of the coder in question, that I imagine he would be thrilled to encourage more diversity in technology. The comment, after all, was pretty innocuous - I've known people who work hard in charities specifically devoted to encouraging young girls in math, science and engineering make comments of a similar sort. Heck, I've made far worse comments in my life.

But at some level there is a piece of our culture that says 'we are open minded, liberal people, and would love to have more women (or minorities, or GLBT people, or whatever) join our culture. Just as long as they don't change it.' In other words, diversity is great, as long as we all act the same.

Again, this isn't to suggest that the fellow who made the 'bro' comment was trying to send some 'boys only' vibe out, at all. But, I do think that technologists, as a culture, are comfortable with the vibrancy of our community, with its strong identificatory marks, and we sometimes assume that others will be happy to simply enter the culture as 'bros', as it were. Its the old issue of letting women (or minorities, or whatever) come in and be 'one of the guys' - even if they AREN'T 'one of the guys'. Again, this isn't meant to put a freeze on speech, its simply to point out that when we live in a culture that is very monolithic, it is easy to present a from that is less than welcoming to a polylithic world.

The interesting thing is, however, that our culture HAS diversity that we are, I think sometimes, afraid of. One of the interesting things about the list of 222 developers about is that the list ALSO contains 4 additional women - male-to-female transsexuals. The implications of this are interesting, but they are not hard for me to imagine. Technology work allows one to abstract one's identity in a way that is both seductive and liberating. People who are uncomfortable with their 'real' identity in a LOT of ways can find it a rewarding way of working, in my experience. But this strengthens the psychological need to ensure that the codes of conduct within the community have clear borders, particularly when you combine this with the extremely social aspect of technology work - everything one does is at some level collaborative. And there is the difficulty of the fluid identities of the web - that people are frightened of that power, they need the security of a simple, easily parseable, and contiguous identity int he people they interact with. Its as if, in that shadow world, we see each others loose ends and the possibility of secret selves, and so when we meet face to face, we feel the need to reassure ourselves that - no, we're just normal people, that the irregularities, and frightening depths of individuality need not be grappled with. ITs taking a world that is plump with intimacy and trying to keep things businesslike.

Which returns us to the ponies. Humor often performs the function of allowing us to have a dialogue about the things that we cannot have serious conversations on. My industry's relationship (dare I say, our entire Western culture's relationship) with gender identity is, in my mind, one such area. We need to, in some sense, confirm that 'yes, there are still the comforting barriers we've erected to define us as a group,' and playfully pretending to expel each other from those boundaries is a way of doing it - a way that feels positive, and harmless - you're let back in, as it were, after the game is done, and noone says anything too hurtful in the process. The trouble is not to the person that is playfully expelled, it is to the person who is in the culture, but now knows that their feelings and beliefs warrant expulsion, or to the person outside who sees that the culture is not welcoming to their identity, that they will be allowed, but will always feel separate. Outside the culture. This is the sad secret of any anti-discrimination initiative - you can legislate that someone who applies for a job not be discriminated against (although even this has proven difficult), but you can't legislate that they be made to feel normal in the group. A woman programmer (or a man who likes pink ponies. Or an african-american. Or whatever) must always, in my experience, be continuously aware that they are an abnormality. An exception. Sometimes they are celebrated as an exception. But nonetheless, as they navigate an immensely social enterprise, they must always negotiate a very clumsy identity within the group. Its not that they would necessarily be looked down on or attacked (though I have seen this too). Simply that they will never be allowed to forget that they are not normal. When they offer opinions, they'll be the girl programmer's opinions. When they write code, it will be girl programmer code. Etc.They are tokens, instead of humans. And that is a lot of pressure, pressure that requires skills that are not the core skills one needs to be a great programmer.

Again, this isn't just women, its anyone who doesn't fit this narrow band of identity that the culture defines - I've felt it myself, being someone who loves purple, has odd taste in clothes, and likes fairies. Not that anyone looks down on me for it. Just that they always know it. Most of my work has been in niches, where I work, largely, independent of other technologists - filing the hole, as it were. I imagine these two facts are, at some subconscious level, connected. And in my day to day work, it means I DO put up a certain facade of 'but don't worry, you see, I'm really just like you', that is intensely artificial, but frankly invaluable in getting my work done without feeling powerfully emotionally vulnerable. If I was entirely genuine, I would confuse people, frighten them, perhaps, or at least, simply become 'other'. Its not because technologists are bad. Its simply the result of a confluence of factors. But its real nonetheless.

But then, again, if this is a revolution, this is how revolutions always are - they break the limits of the last regime, and then scramble in terror to build new ones, to make walls that let them understand the new world they've created, that protect them from the anarchy of a new social order. It doesn't mean that the revolution wasn't real, or the revolutionaries insincere. Its simply how humans work. Until the next revolution comes along and topples them.

White Page

2012-01-12T07:00:00.000-06:00

Write me on your lips, my love,
Write me on your hands,
Write me on your fingertips.
Write me on the hollow of your neck,
Write me, love, between your breasts,
Write me on the plain of your belly.
Write me down the bones of your thighs.

Now stop and write me on your wrists.
Turn them upright, hold the steel nib close,
And write me, write me deep, and clear,
So that the letters will not wash away.

Be thou the book of me.
I am nothing, my love, a story orphan,
Only words and lips to say them,
Only pantomimes and hands to act them,
Only love to season my milk,
Only a hunger beneath my navel,
A shiver within my thighs.

But words silence,
Pantomimes fall beneath their curtains,
Milk shrivels,
And hunger wastes away,
The shivers still,
The story is forgot.
Be thou the book of me.

Sol Invictus

2012-01-05T13:41:00.000-06:00

My cold, bare arms, my ragged throat
Have never summoned you before --
I know, much more, the light no longer
Holds the tinder that can burn in me.

But for the sake of midnight, sun,

Rise!

Sol Invictus, epithet of gall!
Unconquerable!
Fire-eyed Napoleon, unconquerable:

Rise!

Thy lips of vital fire, strike into me thy revelation:
"Virtue alone is sure!"

But dark is a virtue, oh my beloved,
For it wants to end.
Sorrow is virtue,
For it wants to end.
Jealousy and Anger, those two sallow sisters, too,
Beneath their shifts are naked virtue,
For they want to end.

Only Hatred,
Hatred and Pride,
Feed on themselves -- Ouroboros of vice!
Two circled snakes, a disc of lost eternity.

And now?

'Tis midnight, oh my love, and in the dark
All pride will waste and wither,
Hatred, even, needs the light.

Listen close, thou molten resurrection stone:

The morbid hollow of the night,
Alone
Stands
Pure
And cannot cry, but whimpers:

"Oh thou sun, thou long forgot eternity --

Rise!

Rise!

Rise!"

(Photo by schaaflicht)

An Open Letter to all the Amanda Gignacs of the World

2011-12-22T06:00:00.000-06:00

Dear Unfortunate Friends:

It has come under my consideration that somewhere in the great wide world, with its broad lands and long history, that perhaps, somewhere out there, there is more than one woman with the name Amanda Gignac.

To each of you I send my sincerest apologies.

I am but the messenger, but the news I bear is bad. See, the thing is, for the majority of you, you will, I'm afraid, go through life being only second best at being what you are - an Amanda Gignac, that is. And by majority, I mean, all but one of you. My reasoning on this is, sadly, ironclad, and I'm afraid that after listening to it, you'll be forced to agree.

Of course, at some level, this is TRUE of any name, right? There can only one best Farley Finklebinder, or Teresa d'Avila, or even Adolf Hitler, after all. Every name will have its champion. But with these other names, at LEAST, I believe, I could accept an argument of equality. Perhaps there have been several, equally great, say, Lucy Talbots, or Horace Waldens. Perhaps.

But Amandas... I'm sorry. You see, its a simple process of elimination. Imagine the best person possible, imagine this ideal. Who is it? Mother Theresa? Emily Dickinson? Paul McCartney? Whatever example you think of it, I'm afraid it so chances that there is an Amanda Gignac superior to the individual you are thinking of.

Wait... Paul McCartney is your ideal human being? Have you heard 'Band on the Run'?

My knowledge of the greatness of aforementioned Amanda Gignac is unparalleled - I somehow tricked her into marrying me, 12 years ago today (I find this incomprehensible as well - how could one so great be so inclined? I put it in the same category as 'how did God lose when Jacob wrestled with him?' and 'If Virginia Woolf and James Joyce had a cagefight, could either of them pay attention to the amtter at hand long enough to win?' It is an unanswerable question. Life has those). Its on account of that, in fact, that I acan say that I apologize to ALL the Amanda Gignacs of the world - one of them simply for a different reason for the others. At any rate, believe me, oh Amanda Gignacs of the world, you've been beaten. You may submit your letters of surrender to the address of aforementioned ubermanda.

Take heart, friends! There is a good chance that you do not share the Great Amanda's middle name (which will remain undisclosed). So you DO have a fair shot at being the world's best Amanda Anne Gignac. Or Amanda Imelda Gignac (though your mother was cruel with that combination). Or Amanda Garfield Gignac. Or whatever. But in the larger world of Amanda Gignacs... I'm afraid you're doomed. Don't tell all the Amandas of the world, but I'm pretty sure they're right out of the running for Best Amanda, as well. Sorry.

Best of luck to you in your second-place endeavours. Its not so bad being a middling specimen of your type - take my word for it.

Best Wishes,

Jason Gignac

Conference Call

2011-11-29T08:13:00.001-06:00

I give to you my voice --

My lips that press, unpress, impress upon my breath,
I keep these to myself -

But --

I give to you my voice --

My tongue that touches, traveling in susurrations, raising war against my gullet gates,
I keep this to myself -

But --

I give to you my voice --

My throat that hoards the hollows of my breath, that stitches hems along my voices edge,
I keep this to myself -

But --

I give to you my voice --

The words, yes, like a deck of slides,
Blooming stems of the inane,
Distilled to fit agendas:
A self composed of meeting minutes -

And yet, I am the long-walled, warm and humid cavern,
That you cannot see,
You cannot have, you cannot see.

My voice is a fat-threaded fustian,
And I tell you to retrieve from it the contours of the loom,
From the whispers, curled, and warbled hissings, half devoured by the copper wire.

Listen, listen close.
Listen, listen close.

(images by Double-M)

Williamina Fleming

2011-10-07T06:00:00.000-05:00

In 1878, in Boston Massachussets, twenty-one year old Williamina Fleming awoke on what was probably one of the hardest days of her life - her husband had left her the night before. In Scotland, where she was born, Fleming had been a teacher, but she had gone with her husband to America, and was only a few months off the boat by the time he left. Now, she was broke and alone, one of a vast sea of immigrants in Boston. On top of everything else, she was pregnant. Heavy in heart (and belly), she went out into the streets to look for work.

It was then that she happened upon the door of Edward Charles Pickering, a professor of astronomy at Harvard, who took her on as a housemaid. She worked hard, raised her child, and lived quietly. It was three years later that Pickering, frustrated at the poor quality work he got from his male research assistants, angrily declared that even his housemaid could do a better job. Little did he know how right he would end up being.

Pickering hired Fleming on to his academic work shortly thereafter, basically to do clerical labor. Soon, however, Fleming showed that she had a startling eye for detail, and an excellent head for complex scientific topics. Within a few years she was contributing significantly to astronomical research, including devising a system for classifying stars based on the amount of hydrogen they burned, using a prism to separate the light they emitted to a telescope. Her work continued for many years, and she is the discoverer of many stars and astronomical bodies, including, in 1888, the Horsehead Nebula.

By 1899, powerfully affected by Fleming's work, Pickering expanded upon his success, and ended up hiring dozens of women in the astronomy department of Harvard. Promoted now to the position of Curator of Astronomical Photographs, Fleming supervised their work.

Known as 'Pickering's Harem' or the 'Harvard Computers', the group eventually produced the first catalog of stars organized by brightness, a system still used (with some modifications, many of which where made by other members of the Harvard Computers) today. They were exceptionally poorly paid, earning little more than a factory worker, but nonetheless produced many of the greatest of the early female astronomers of the United States.

(This post was written in honor of Ada Byron Lovelace Day, 2012)

Young ≠ Lazy, Selfish, and Stupid

2011-10-01T18:54:00.000-05:00

If you haven't heard about the recent Occupy Wall Street movement in New York, I hope you look it up. Is it likely to fail? Sure, probably. But, just as a measure of people's spontaneous desire to try at things, its a wonderful, wonderful thing, all these young college students sitting on the sidewalks days after day, all these people finding ways to get space heaters and hot meals to them. (Note, by the way, I know there are people older than college age participating in this too - good on 'em. This isn't meant to marginalize what they're doing either).

Which made the reaction of New York Mayor Bloomberg particularly interesting to me:

We need the banks, if the banks don’t go out and make loans we will not come out of our economy problems, we will not have jobs. And so anything we can do to responsibly help the banks do that, encourage them to do that is waht we need. I think we spend much too much time worrying about how we got into problems as to how we go forward. [...] Also we always tend to blame the wrong people. We blame the banks. They were part of it, but so were Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae and Congress.

I see what Bloomberg is saying, I will not naively say that our entire current financial woes are the result of the Machiavellian schemings of a couple of rich men in pinstripes. The current economic crisis is a systemic problem.

What's more interesting to me was that he said there is one solution to our current problems: the banks need to make big profits, so that they're willing to go out and make loans, and that will make reinvestment and growth opportunities, and get people jobs. This is, I will not argue, one way out of our current crisis (I WOULD argue that it's not necessarily the most sustainable one - banks have been growing in profitability for the last 30 years in a way that sure isn't directly making the average real wealth level of middle and lower class America any higher). What was interesting to me was the assumption inherent in his description, that these protesters were making a stupid, knee-jerk reaction, out of anger and ignorance: "Ah, if only you understood the banking sector as much as I do, kids, then you'd see that you're being childish."

Any time, I think, when you refute someone's opinion with the assumption that they're simply too stupid to know as much as you, there's a fair chance that you're either actively trying to marginalize them, or that you're passively assuming they are less competent than you in some ways.

I see this all the time with young people. I've recently become a manager at work, and have attended a few management training classes, a group in which I was on the lower half of the age spectrum in the group. Probably pretty close to the bottom. One of the points someone brought up in the class was that you just had to work harder to manage the current generation. To paraphrase what he said, kids today are so mollycoddled and spoiled, that they don't understand how to function in an eight hour job, aren't capable of stopping playing long enough to work, don't have the attention span to finish difficult tasks, and haven't been taught to take risks and try new things. Heads bobbed nearly universally. The MySpace generation (yes, their words, not mine) simply hasn't been taught how to be functioning members of society.

Today, Amanda and I went to a book festival, and besides being a wee bit overstimulated (thank you, notebook and a pen, how often you have saved me from loud, busy rooms), I was absolutely plucked in the heartstrings, seeing so many teenagers in one place, again. As you get older, the world repeatedly inundates you with the idea that teenagers are lazy, teenagers are brats, teenagers are selfish, teenagers are know-it-alls. A group of perhaps fifty 12-16 year olds came out at the beginning, in homemade costumes, strung through a crowd with no rehearsal in the hall they performed in, and did a remake of Michael Jackson's "Thriller", choreographed. The whole, painfully long song. I personally am not a Michael Jackson fan, but their choreography? Great, well-practiced, energetic and fun, and filled with sparkling, individual personality. This wasn't the dancing of a bunch of kids quietly obeying the instructions of a wise older teacher who shows them precisely how to move - it was kids who took a framework, and made it their own, every kid a little different, while all still keeping the synchronicity that makes choreography what it is. Lazy, imaginationless drones with no focus? Unwilling to take risks? How can people even say that?

I know, this is something every generation goes through, the process of deciding the next generation down is a lot of worthless heathens who will throw the world away, but dammit, this is my generation, and I don't want it badmouthing, say, my sister's generation, just because it can't quite put its finger on how it works.

And that's what I don't get about Bloomberg. See, his whole thesis is basically this: "Look, kids, when there's a crisis, the banks take a while to get comfortable, and then start returning everything to the status quo, and that's how crises end." He forgets that what he's REALLY saying is 'That's how crises HAVE ended BEFORE.' That's a valid direction to look. Heck the young generation itself, these days, is harking back to the 'Keep Calm and Carry On' posters of World War II Britain.

But you can't just assume that revolution has nothing to tell you, just because it will make your life a bit easier and tidier if we just do things how they've always been done. The social cohesion, the energy, the heterogeny, the beauty and spirit, and inexperienced fervor that is youth, there's a reason that we have these things. They have a value that isn't one that needs to be condescended to, its one that, sometimes, has to condescend to us, just to get to our tired, stuck little brains, and say, "Wake up! The world can, if you let it, be something else!" In a time when our problems are paralyzing us with fear - terrorism, disasters, environmental decay, poverty and economic change, employment shifts, you name it - isn't that kind of courageous optimism at least more useful than a drudging terror of doing things differently than they've always been done?

While Their Babes Sleep On

2011-09-29T06:00:00.000-05:00

Hand on throat and hand on hip,
Skin of gullet, skin of thigh,
Cinching fingers, Angry lips,
Stale submission, choked replies.

Fan blades over souls asunder
Rotate slow in salted air,
Humming blood through leaking laceworks,
Flesh left bruised and flesh left bare.

Sweaty teardrops, gasping mumbles,
Cinching fingers, angry lips,
Snap and tangle, Thump and tumble
Breathless throat and rigid hip.

The Progress of Other Gods' Pilgrims

2011-07-21T15:54:00.000-05:00

My children have for a few years now been slowly working through a best of list of literature for children, broken down by age group. My eldest is in a group of books now that has what I found to be a curious choice: John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. Not to say the book is inappropriate for children. Its not, it is, in fact, probably throughout history one of the books children read, depending on the time period and nation. Historical New England comes to mind. Its just that... well, its an allegory. We don't really read allegory anymore - or when we do, its been swallowed almost entirely by the self-help genre.

Which is, after all, not so strange a thing. Pilgrim's Progress is, more or less, a self-help book, the old Protestant equivalent of, say, The Alchemist, a book that is meant to tell a story mostly only in order to keep you from being bored long enough that it can tell you what to think. I say that, and it sounds like I hate Pilgrim's Progress - I don't. I thought it was more ridiculous when I was younger. I don't know.

The difference, I suppose, is very simple - Bunyan is so terribly, terribly earnest. I don't agree with him, no, but I think when a soul is that earnestly seeking something, its able to tell you something very interesting about the thing sought. The seeker, in some ways, knows the object of his search must better than the possessor, and honestly, I don't think Bunyan thought of himself as a possessor, yet (though he was a Calvinist, so predestination would come into play, I suppose, but I could write a whole other post on how fatalistic philosophies and individual freedom are strange but copiously affectionate bedfellows sometimes).

I am the opposite of Bunyan in so many ways. There's the obvious ways, of course: Bunyan is a devoted Protestant, I'm not entirely sure there is a god, or if there is, if he's a loving one that I want to identify with. Bunyan was a social conservative, I tend to connect morals with the individual and their inner life, rather than society and the outer life. Bunyan, for all his idiosyncrasies, was a literary genius (and no, I'm not the only one who thinks so). And, he wore a mustache.

But more than this, there is a fundamental difference: Bunyan was a preacher. I don't lean on the religious aspect of this, I think Lenin was a preacher in much the same way, or Malcolm X, as much as Martin Luther King. He is a declaimer. I'm not. I cannot imagine being sure of anything emotional/spiritual/political/social, so much that I could teach it. Discussing it is difficult enough, sometimes, and I'm frequently disgusted with myself enough after that enterprise. And, Christian, the Pilgrim that is Progressing in the book, is a preacher, too. So, following him is a maddening flip-flop, for my morally soft brain.

I learned the trick of reading it, though - to stop wondering if I agree. This is a double-edged trick, and hard to wield sometimes - you're obliged to ignore both those moments when you agree and when you disagree. But for me, at least, taking approval and disapproval out of the question (as much as possible), leaves bare something purer than dogma and direction - it leaves the simple story of a man pursuing an idea to exclusion. It hardly matters why he believes what he does, or even what he believes. The thing is simpler than that - it is a little testimony that says "Yes, a soul can follow its ideals, completely. A soul can be faithful to truth itself." With that testimony, there is, for me from hundreds of years later, a little question though: "Is that virtue?"

Again, I mean to separate this question from the particularities of Christian. It DOES NOT MATTER what ideal he is following. In fact, just the other night my wife and I were talking about Lord Byron, and how, contrary to the idea we front of a man who was dissipate and amoral, Lord Byron had an ideal, and whether or not you agree with it or not, he followed it, in earnest, with greater faith and steadiness, in many ways, than some of the best of Christians followed theirs. Call the book "The Radical Romantics Progress." Enjorlas, in Victor Hugo's 'Les Miserables' is another great example - a man capable of being precisely one thing, all the time. And, if you want to read a stirring, inspiring, horrifying statement of the muddled observation I'm making here, read Enjorlas and his journey from the back room of a cafe to the top of a barricade to a pool of his own blood - and then think of other men's blood he pooled into his own to get there. And realize that he meant it, every word.

And there's the problem with being in earnest (and perhaps the fault in Pilgrim's Progress) - can you live life entirely honestly, earnestly, directly, surely, and not hurt anyone else in the process? Christian, in the progress leaves his wife and children - and the scene in which he weeps over their not listening to him and following him on the path to heaven is, for me, one of the most heartbreaking in the book. The best of earnest men, I think, are destined to fall, because at some point, they realize that their desire for purity and direction will involve someone else. Truth is a harsh lover, and at some point, always makes you choose between her and the other ones you love.

People make such an effort, of course - that's the root of monasticism, I think, in many ways. What is a monastery but a group of people who have promised each other to be glad to all suffer for the same end? Or a hermit. When I hear about the desert fathers of early Christianity, wandering into the sands of Egypt to take up abode in some broken hulk of of stone, and there to live alone, calling God, that fear of impurity is I think, as much a fear of burning up the impurity, as having it extinguish the fire.

That's the thing about heroic journeys, though - they always end up alone. We tend to focus on the heroes, and so we feel the great stoic pain of solitude in that - Odysseus struggling against the sea alone, Harry Potter walking through the woods alone. And think of that, in Harry Potter, how hard she had to work to convince us, the audience, that yes, yes, Harry is virtuous to walk alone into the wood. Why must she spend so long in the book showing us that its the only alternative? Why must it be utterly clear that it is a choice between killing his friends or killing himself? Because we want it to be NOBLE that he's going to leave aching, bleeding holes in the supporting cast we've come to love: Ginny, Ron, Hermione, everyone. They are the ones who will suffer if he dies. It takes courage to die, but it is, at least a choice. Suffering you did not choose is, somehow, worse, at least to me. And the dying has an end. The aching doesn't.

At one point I thought, int his vein, how wonderful it would be to be a Buddhist. The perfect Buddhist is the one who relinquishes everything - the Buddha himself stayed on earth rather than immediately ascending to Nirvana because he felt he had to fulfill duty first, to teach what he had learned. So in some sense, his whole life is no more than a long noble search for the freedom to cease being. But, at some level, I have to ask - is that, really, noble? Buddhism itself, to my understanding has grappled with this idea. The tradition of the Boddhisatva in some strains, is that these are souls who have achieved Buddhahood, but had such compassion for the world, that they choose to be the last living souls to enter Nirvana, to continue returning and returning and returning to the world to hope the rest of us on. There is an angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin question there, though, that has an interesting ramification: if ten Boddhisatvas have all promised to be the last to enter Nirvana, which of them enters first when they are all that is left? In a sense, perhaps the implication here is that there will never be the opportunity for the question to be answered - that is, the answer hardly matters, because the question will never be asked. The world is composed of suffering, so there will always be more men suffering, awaiting help to free themselves from it.

This is the sadness and beauty of the Quixotic hero - the Pilgrim travels because there is a destination, the Boddhisatva travels because there is a road, and if the road is a circle, there is always another place to step forward into. Hopeless infinity is the only hope so grand that it can consume a noble life beyond the limits of human imagination. The only quests, in some sense, worth pursuing, are those in which you're sure to fail.

The Death of Emily Dickinson

2011-06-21T23:12:00.000-05:00

When Emily Dickinson fell into her final illness (Bright's Disease and its complicatons, most scholars think), she spent it in her tiny bed, in her tiny room, a few feet from the desk where she'd say and copied her poems, and pinned them into fascicles and stuffed the drawers with them. There isn't even, really, a day when you can see her illness began. Practical science, in its current form, has an aversion to the boundless or the gradual. It wishes disease to fit into lab reports. Disease is not always like that - it can bea slow melting towards where death is in its most natural form, more like falling slowly to sleep than being knocked unconscious. There is the period of settling, the period of pondering, going over the day's events, then that strange dreamy half-state where you are half tethered to consciousness, and the tide of it pulls gently, gently, outward into sleep.

Emily had been to a few doctors, over the years. Her eyesight had been failing for a long time, and in fact, she'd been at some risk of going blind earlier in her life, and had had to make an uncomfortable, unsettling trip to the city to stay at a relative's while being treated by an oculist. But, by now, medicine had had its day. She was nursed by her sister, Lavinia. She wrote letter to friends. She slept a great deal. She felt awful. She almost certainly cried, though the record of this sort of thing is understandably scanty, kidney diseases aren't pleasant. She messed her sheets, she sweat a lot, suffered through fevers. And then, one day, in the Spring, she died.

It was in May. Emily loved the springtime, and in Massachussets, May is the crown of spring (though, to be fair, Emily's poetry shows a playful, familiar affection for March). It was warm enough, by then, that the windows would have been opened off and on, probably even more than normal to air the sick room. She would have smelled the dusty florals of the hawthorn hedge at the edge of her property, she would have smelled the rich balsam-pine smells of the trees next door, where her life-long best friend and sister-in-law lived, no doubt anxious to hear the news of her. Its a wet month, there, she may have smelled the rain. She probably, by then, was not seeing a great deal at all. Perhaps the robins came for her, as she'd written about before.

She was dressed in her own bedroom, and a white coffin was brought in to lie her in, set likely on sawhorses downstairs, in the hall. The Dickinson's gardeners, Irish I believe, would likely have been the ones to come and nail it shut. They took it to the library, where they had a short funeral. Her long-time correspondent, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, read a poem by a different Emily: Emily Bronte. Of all those in the room, it is ironically possible that he knew her the least. Her sister-in-law wrote an obituary, that mentioned her legendary skills as a gardener.

She specifically asked that the servants, with whom she had a close, personal relationship, carry her out the back door. They crossed a meadow. The grass in it would have been high by then, flecked with wildflowers, particularly buttercups. She lay in the box, her eyes set shut, her hands gently cradling flowers she had carefully requested before her death: heliotrope, lady's slipper, wild wood violets. The scent of the heliotrope, thick and vanilla probably slipped out the interstices of the wood. The grass would have swished against the walls, the buttercups tumbled pollen onto the wood. When they arrive at her plot, the pallbearers would have had the late leftovers, perhaps, of damp about their boots and trousers.

And that was that, they lowered her down, they dropped sod into the hole, and Emily's tiny limbs and white dress would, slowly, slowly begin to dissolve into the earth. I like to believe that someone sang over her. Perhaps it was just the birds.

Hymn

2011-05-30T16:07:00.000-05:00

O, pipe the hymn both clear and loud:
"Come soon, thou golden dream!"
The altar sends the incense up --
Though flesh-smoke feed the stream -
"Come quick, thou light, both clean and bright!"
Though born a crimson gleam.
O pipe it loud! Drown out the sounds
Of the sacrifice's scream.

Bleed out thy scream, O sacrifice,
Thou destined cinder-grey!
The crisp of thee in sinuous stream,
The gleam 'neath an empty vein,
The elegy of a Silver Dream,
Keened out in Bean-sidhe lay:
Bleed out, and silence thou become -
Now comes the break of day!

The Problem I Had With "Plain Kate"

2011-05-06T15:35:00.000-05:00

This morning, I finished reading 'Plain Kate' by Erin Bow, a book that Amanda assigned me for our Lovebirds Challenge, and it has been gnawing me since. I'm very glad I read it, because something about it is bothering me.

Understand, first, it was not a book. It was a pretty good one in fact. There was a few moments that lifted me out of the flow of the story in awkward ways, but not very many, and I'm oversensitive to that, and tend to demand that books be written especially for me, in some ways, especially modern ones. And aside from that, it was a well written book, tightly fairy-taled, in a way that is neither cloying or anachronistic (the two ways I usually find that fairy tales find their downfalls).

But, there was something about it that bothered me. (mild spoiler, I'll avoid the big ones). There is this cat, the main character's cat, who at one point gains the powers of speech, and becomes sort of mentally part human, because it's Kate's greatest wish - that she have a travelling companion. A friend, more succinctly.

Now, first of all, I found it a bit irritating that not 10 pages past this point, where she had been a lone and friendless the whole book, she suddenly falls in with some people with whom she starts to develop friendships. But that's neither here nor there, and only bothered me because it seems like it should have been dramatically ironic and wasn't.

What bothered me was this: her love and friendship with the cat is one of the emotional engines of the book. And yet, the cat isn't real. He is only the way he is, because she wished him to be so. He does not awaken and learn to like her, or grow from the feelings a cat would have to a master to the feelings a friend would develop for a friend, to the point of self-sacrifice. He is simply made, immediately, the Perfect Friend. This is realistic - it's what she wished for, after all, not just a talking cat, but a perfect friend, to stay with her when things become difficult.

The problem with making someone a perfect friend is the same problem, though, that love potions have: they aren't real. Or if they are real, then love and friendship are, after all, meaningless. I was talking to Amanda this morning, and made an analogy: I'm a computer programmer. So, what if I learned how to program emotions into a robot? And what if I programmed a robot, whose main directive was to love me, to be loyal to me, to care about me? I don't mean, to be a slave, just to be - a perfect friend. If I programmed this robot to be that way, would it REALLY be love? What would the feelign I felt back be? In a sense, Kate's cat isn't it's own being at all - it's just a piece of Kate. Her wish, embedded into another living thing through no will of that other thing's.

But then, what difference does that make, really? At some level, after all, all love is a complex of neurons and memories, right? An instinct. We love, because we have evolved into lovers, because love has proven to be the best way to survive. I'm not a snob about this idea, I don't think that's demeaning to the human spirit, or anyhting, that it makes us less. But, it does beg the question - if I put you to sleep, and then constructed love in your brain, when you awoke, would that love be less real than a love that developed on it's own? In a sense, it's almost like cloning - most of us have a gut level reaction of unnaturalness, when we consider the idea of producing a child without the natural process of human inter-fertilization, apart from any of the moral qualms surrounding how the technology might be used we don't like the idea of the technology, of itself. But why? If an identical child is produced one way versus another, is ther eREALLY a difference? Or isn't there? Mental Illness is another example - if someone is mentally ill, than some of their emotions are not the byproducts of the normal activity of their mind, but rather they are symptoms of an external disease. If someone is furious only because they need medicine, are they any less furious? Does their fury 'matter less'?

I can have this whole argument, but you'll notice, I'm not convinced by it, and I simply don't know why. The idea of that cat being a produced instead of a natural friend truly bothers me. To produce consciousness, that DOESN'T bother me - I do not, for instnace, have the same gut level fear of the idea of artificial intelligence. But emotion does, and I can't quite pinpoint why. It draws into something bigger, something that has to do with the purpose of life itself - in the end, after all, the material effects of life are irrelevant, right? Things don't matter, at the end, its only, as so many people have said, the experiences we've had, the memories we've shared, the love we've given and recieved. What if we only feel that this love was given? Does that make a difference? If there were no way of knowing, if it could be given equitably, if we could make it so every human on earth could receive the gift of memories and emotions, and if we could irrefutbaly show that this, in the end, would let every person mentally have lived the life they wish they could have lived, would that be wrong? And if it IS wrong, why? Is it simply because its unnatural? Is it because we would be foolish with it, and create lives that don't have any regret in them? Is it because it would be selfish, removing the reality of anything done for someone else? It's something else, something, because even if it were possible to remove all these things, it would be wrong. I do not want to be loved, I want to... have lived a love. And the idea of simple accepting the validity of the other option really bothered me.

Hannibal Bin Laden

2011-05-03T10:31:00.000-05:00

Sometime between the years 181 and 183 BC, in Libyssa (the city now known as Gebze on the entrance to the Black Sea), there was an old Greek palace. Libyssa was a city in the now long forgot kingdom of Bithynia (interesting, also, in the later life of Mithridates, another fascinating character), which at that time, was wrapping up a long war with the nearby kingdom of Pergamum, an ally of the Roman Empire. The war was a difficult one, and in those days, for most countries, there was no standing army of any substance, so for professional soldiers, the king, Prusias, had turned for help to mercenaries, including a man who, though in the winter of his life, was without a doubt then (and in many ways still today) the most famous military leader of all time - Hannibal Barca, the general of the Carthaginians in the Second Punic War.

Most people know Hannibal for his famous march through the Alps on the backs of his famous war elephants, or perhaps know the famous phrase "Hannibal at the Gates!", meaning that danger is imminent. During his life, Hannibal was, by most Romans, the most terrifying man alive. After marching through the Alps, Hannibal proceeded to spend 16 years marching up and down the length of Italy, turning most of Rome's allies in the region to their side, and systematically beating the Romans over and over - the historical records (which several of Rome's greatest historians kept) seem unanimous: Rome was, quite simply, incapable of winning a battle against Hannibal. And Hannibal's victories were not simply crushing feats of superior manpower. In the most scathing battle, Hannibal marched into the field of Cannae, near Rome, with 50000 soldiers, against a force of 86000 Romans. Hannibals group was a ragtag mixture of a wide swath of different Celtic tribes, and a core force of Carthaginians far away from their homeland. The Romans were close to their own city, defending their families and livelihoods from what was, truly, a mortal threat. At the end of the day, about 6000 Carthaginians were dead, as opposed to 50000 Romans. And additional 5000 were captured. To put that in perspective, literally 1/5th of the male population of Rome had died, in a single battle, on a single field, on a single day. The number is large enough, for me, to really have no meaning: think of it this way - the Roman's losses on that single day, were nearly equivalent to the death count of the US Army through the entire Vietnam War. And this in a nation whose native population was about half that of the Omaha metropolitan area.

Beyond this, Hannibal's tactics were, in and of themselves, completely foreign to the Romans. The Romans learned their tactics from the Greeks, in large part, who fought, essentially, like a football line: a long row of soldiers, perhaps 10 deep, lines up in straight rows, and marches forward to smash against the other army. Hannibal did not - Hannibal took part in what we now call 'unconventional warfare'. Caught in a narrow valley at night, for instance, with Romans surrounding him on most sides, Hannibal took a herd of cattle, and lit their tails on fair, then pointed them (as much as one can point a herd of burning cattle) toward one of the passes out of the valley. The Romans, watching from the outskirts, suddenly saw a mass of fires running toward one of the exits, and of course, assumed this was the torches of Hannibal's army, trying to escape the valley, so they naturally moved their forces to block the exit the cows were approaching. Hannibal left via the other exit, now left wide open.

The Romans hatred for the Carthaginians had many roots, of course. One was the materialistic one: Carthage was a rival, with interests in Sicily, which is awfully close to Rome. This is, without a doubt, the reason the wars were fought. Aside from this, though, one of the interesting threads of the real antipathy the Romans felt for the Carthaginians was cultural and religious. The religious of the Carthaginians, to the Roman mind, was primitive, barbaric and cruel. In many ways, we would probably think of it the same way today: the Carthaginians, most infamously, would sacrifice their own children on their altars, a fact that was considered a fable made up by the Romans to demonize their enemies for a long time, but now largely confirmed by considerable archaeological evidence. And beyond this, by the time of Hannibal, their was a considerable historical antipathy - the first Punic War had, particularly for the Barca family, created a situation where the Romans dominated the Carthaginians, making of them what was, if not in name then in reality, a colony, and a fairly cruelly taxed one at that. Hannibal, as a very young man, was taken to an altar (possibly where the child sacrifices were occurring, though opinons on this differ, I am led to understand), where he placed his hand on the altar, and his father had him swear an oath to hate and fight the Romans, for the rest of his life, on principle. In short, we tell the story of Hannibal now with sufficient historical distance that we can feel like both sides have their heroic moments. There is, I would say, even a tendency to like Hannibal more - he's the underdog, and the genius, people want to cheer for that. It's difficult for us, then, to reall completely internalize how quintessentially threatening Hannibal was at the time. Hannibal was the force of destruction and dissolution, a force that felt not simply like a war enemy, but a threat to the very culture of Rome at the time, the personification of the threatening other. And this perception was not, entirely unfair - given the choice, Hannibal's history seems to suggest, Hannibal would have been quite happy to see Rome ended, razed to the ground, the earth salted (in much the way, ironically, that Carthage was treated at the end of the Third Punic War).

I don't think it's a stretch, then, to draw parallels between Hannibal and the Carthaginians to Rome, and Osama Bin Laden and the extremist Islamic fringe in groups like Al-Qaeda to the United States. In both situations, you have a group whose cultures seem to be predisposed to clash. The variety of Islam that the extremist fringe espouses (not Islam in general, just the variety) feels, I think, to many like an attack on the best parts of modern culture (whether this is true or not, or the relationship between the perception of this difference and the actuality is irrelevant to this topic, though an interesting question on it's own). In both cases, there is a certain horror in our culture of the tactics themselves, a sort of consciously irrational feeling that the other side is 'cheating'. Of course, that's silly to some extent. Terrorism, at least from my ability to define it, is entirely a function of one's point of view. But the feeling is strong - the feelings we have about terrorism are fairly easy to match up to the feelings Rome had about Hannibals method of warfare. The feelings we have about 9/11 - a strange mixture of horror and denial and blood fury and patriotic pride at our ability to survive it - are very similar to those the Romans had after Cannae. And in many ways, the attacks on Carthage that eventually led to Hannibal's defeat and exile, are much like America's war in Afghanistan.

Particularly this is true when it comes to the results, with Hannibal himself - the object of the attack on Carthage was to defeat Hannibal, yes, certainly, much like the American object in Afghanistan was to overthrow the Taliban, but beyond this, it was for many Romans, to catch Hannibal, to drag him back to Rome, to try him, and to kill him. To see justice done, on the one hand, and to remove the man who had become the definition of secret fear for Romans, on the other. Hannibals escape, and his subsequent career of acting as a mercenary for Rome's many enemies was a crushing, terrifying thing for the Romans. Hannibals power was broken, at some practical level, of course - his home was gone, his army taken from him. But he was still there, and after all, just like we now live in a state of continual fear of devastating terrorist attack, despite the fact that there has been essentially no change in the intensity of the actual threat (its probably decreased in fact), the knowledge of the threat is sometimes worse than the threat. Terrorism, or Hannibal, or the adult equivalent of the Bogeyman - there is no situation in which the Bogeyman can be proven to not be a threat, no matter what color the threat alert light is.

So, it was, in Libyssa, that Hannibal sat, and waited, knowing the end was at hand for him. The Romans were a huge force in the world, by then, and had finally intimidated Prusias into letting them come in and take Hannibal. Hannibal was no fool, he had secret tunnels and exits throughout the home he had in Libyssa - but someone had betrayed him. Each of these exits was guarded that day. Hannibal knew what was coming, and he knew, now, finally, there was no escape. He took poison, and left a note behind, reading something that could just as well have been tauntingly offered up by Bin Laden, if he had made one final of his infamous videos, knowing that he had been surrounded:

"Let us relieve the Romans from the anxiety they have so long experienced, since they think it tries their patience too much to wait for an old man's death"

I do not know what happened when Hannibal died, immediately. I could guess. I'm sure that it was heralded through Rome, that there were celebrations, that it was the talk of the empire. I'm sure there was a feeling of relief, I'm sure there was some unpleasantness.

The interesting thing to me, though, is that we have such a history of him. The history the Romans left was first written by a man named Polybius, who in fact had the family of the general who defeated Hannibal as a patron. The history was detailed, and historians believe, remarkably accurate, and the interesting part to me: it presented Hannibal as an extraordinary leader, and told much of the story following Hannibal's armies, not Rome's. Hannibal was not made into the hero of the story - he was, without a doubt, a villain, someone who had done Rome great harm, and who would have destroyed it. But, he was who he was - a human being, and a, for lack of a better term, worthy foe. A Roman, reading Polybius, could sympathize and understand Hannibal, could learn from Hannibal, and at the same time, still feel glad that, in the end, he was defeated.

Watching the last few days, since the death of Osama Bin-Laden, I've been frustrated (though not surprised) to see none of this. Osama Bin-Laden is the butt of jokes, his death is hardly even a serious thing. The painting people make of him is a coward, a madman, a monster. I don't like Osama Bin-Laden. I'm not an apologist. I think his theology and his actions are wrong, and should be opposed. I am glad that he has been caught, and while I would on principle always rather someone be captured and imprisoned than killed, I can accept with peace the manner of his death, burial, etc, as far as I understand them. This was a dangerous man.

At the same time, I think that we, as a culture, both demean ourselves, and lose the value of this event, by simply pretending he was an inhuman monster. Osama Bin Laden was a man, a man who, I honestly believe, did not think he was being evil. HE was a man fighting for what he believed was right. He was resourceful, and intelligent, consistent in his devotion to his cause, and intellectually honest. He did what he did for a cause that I do not wish to see win out in the world, but one in which he believed, as strongly as we believe in our own causes. He was a terrible man, a man who did terrible things, but he was a man. He was, for lack of a better word, a worthy adversary, one who should inspire with his death, not an effort to denigrate him - his actions are wicked enough to denigrate themselves - but a serious searching inside of our hearts, to discover where such men come from, and why they succeed against us. This is a lesson that history has a way of repeating to us until we learn it - or fail to learn it. And its not, entirely or even mostly, a military or a political lesson. It's a human one.

Religious Tolerance

2011-04-30T21:00:00.001-05:00

On May 28 of 1453, the Church of Hagia Sophia in the City of Constantinople held its last mass. The city, in it's final days, was torn by internal religious divisions. Much of the mercantile and military population of the city were Italian, particularly Venetian and Genovese. Some of the native Byzantine population were supporters of a union with the Western church. Others, particularly the monks and priests of the city, were in support of a continued orthdoxy to creed of what we now call the Greek Orthodox church. These divisions were not minor theological squabbles, but had shaped the countours of Byzantine history, and in fact, were in part responsible for its downfall the next day. But that night, there was one final mass - it was a mass praying for a miracle. The walls of the city were broken beyond repair after being patched, repatched, and rebuilt innumerable times throughout the long siege of the Ottoman Sultan, Mehmed II, the people of the city were hopelessly outnumbered, and the fighting had ceased only because of the encroaching darkness. The mass, for that one night was spoken in Greek and in Latin, the intercessory prayers begged god's mercy and blessing on the Pope in Rome, the Emperor in Constantinople, and the Patriarch of Constantinople. And all the schismatic groups prayed together, that night.

The next day, this unity, in it's way, lasted on. The Ottoman Turks broke down the walls, and beat back the forces of the emperor quickly, killing the emperor himself in the process. The people of the city, and the soldiers, both the Byzantines and the Italians, retreated back to beneath the walls of the Hagia Sophia, believing in the sanctity of this great and ancient church, and they waited there, sure that God would not let the 'heathens' destroy the sanctity of that holy spot. They were mistaken - the people centered on this spot were rounded up, and sold mostly into slavery. Thus fell the richest city of Christendom.

The irony of this is that the Ottoman empire - the hegemony of middle and near eastern Islam in general, in fact - was, perhaps, in many ways a product of the Byzantine Empire itself. To reduce the rise of Arabian power after the life of Mohammed to any one cause, particularly an external one, is reductionist at best, of course, but it is worth looking at some of the future heartlands of Islamic empire: Egypt, for example, or Syria. During the time of the rise of Islam, a debate had been raging through the Eastern church for some time, regarding the precise nature of Christ (specifically, whether Christ had seperate human and godly natures, or these two natures were one and the same). To us, these differences may seem pedantic - but to the Byzantines, they were cause for rebellions, and for the putting down of rebellions. The monophysites (those who believe in one nature), who were particularly strong in Egypt and Syria, were oppressed with nearly the same vigor that the original Roman empire had oppressed the Christians: heresy was, for both the Eastern and Western churches, a horrifying prospect. So, when the Arabs began to invade Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, many of the people and the clergy there actually welcomed them - because under Moslem rule, they would be permitted to practice whatever brand of Christianity they wished. The Byzantine Army was, to the Egyptians, not a defender, but an enemy, sent to oppress them, and the Arab soldiers were liberators. So the Eastern Mediterranean, which had been the strongest imperial and Christian religious power in the known world, slowly began to dissolve.

Of course, taking any moral sense out of things, one could find many counterexamples to the arguments in favor of religious tolerance. One need only, for example, turn to the opposite end of the Mediterranean, in the Iberian peninsula (which let me warn you ahead of time, I know a bit less about). When the Moors invaded Iberia all the way up to the Pyrenees, they instituted the same reforms that they had registered in Egypt - religious tolerance of the Jewish and Christian faiths (of course, in neither case was this complete tolerance: non-moslems had to pay special taxes and had certain differences in their legal rights, and of course those who believe in non-Abrahamic faiths had no tolerance at all - but still, the fact that their religions were allowed to flourish is worth attention). Spain and Portugal, then, even under the Muslim empire, retained a strong, tightly bound Catholic community. In the end, this is part of the reason that the Reconquista, when the Moors were cast from Spain, succeeded: the Moors had allowed the Christian community to flourish, but the Christian church, internally, had no such tolerance in response, so it encouraged it's membership to remain internally integrated, but culturally separate from the Muslim empire at large. Because the Christians never integrated into the culture of their Imperial masters, their Christian identity became a banner to rebel against them, rather than the banner of a community within a larger community.

It is, in fact, worth remembering that religious intolerance and/or hegemony is frequently one of the driving forces of empire. The United States, for instance, for all its talk of religious tolerance, maintained (an in many ways still maintains) a strong suspicion of faiths outside of mainline Protestantism, to the point where when Kennedy was elected, his religion was one of the major issues against him - or when Mitt Romney ran for president a few years ago. Many of the seeds of Anglo-Saxon America were remarkably intolerant: the puritans, for instance, legislated obedience to many of their dogmatic laws, and the witch trials do not, after all, speak to an open mindedness about religious practices. The Ku Klux Klan was organized not only to fight against the growing power of African Americans, but also Catholics, and much of the anti-immigrant sentiment in America was largely religious fear - there was a plethora of briskly selling polemics in the late 19th and early 20th centuries regarding the 'Catholic Threat' from communities like the Irish and the Italians. In fact, the man who codified religious tolerance into the constitution through the bill of rights was opposed to organized religion on a general basis: Thomas Jefferson. The forces that drove our modern ideas of religious pluralism were similarly born in the 'godless' days of the Enlightenment - before that, tolerance was largely a matter of tolerance for those with a common religious enemy to one's self (Milton, for instance, believed every Christian faith in England should be allowed to practice - except Catholicism - he was Puritan. Queen Elizabeth and King James killed any Jesuits found in England on principle. Catholics repaid the favor, for instance, in the Spanish Inquisition, or the Huguenot massacres of France).

The history that we, as Americans, are taught in school, paints the victory of religious pluralism as the result of the brave souls who stood up to the Catholics in the Reformation (and of course, their followers who founded America, something also not entirely true). The image we have is of humble Martin Luther bravely tacking his principles up on the church door in opposition to the established authorities of his time. Luther and his peers were anything but tolerant - Luther frequently referred to not only the pope but even rival Protestant reformers such as Zwingli as devils, demons, and deceivers. Many of them returned the favor. In fact, both the reformation, and the counter-reformation of the Catholic church, is little more than a history of rival varieties of religious intolerance attempting to move larger and larger parts of the world into their own camp of followers.

All this, of course, makes it sound as if religious leaders are, in herently, cruel and hateful people. This isn't true at all, in my opinion. My reading of, for instance, Luther, was that he spoke so virulently against the Pope, and his many rivals, simply because he believed they were deceiving the people - Luther was strongly concerned with the peasantry over the faith of the few rich (not that he was without imperfection in this), and the thrust of many of his arguments against catholicism in particular were that it took advantage of the simple faith of common men. He believed, I would argue, that intolerance was his godly duty. Indeed, forgetting our preconceived biases for a moment, if we knew, for a fact, that a particular religious doctrine would lead people to go to heaven, and that any other doctrine will lead them to an eternity of suffering, one can imagine how all other faiths would be, in a cosmic scale, the very definition of evil. If one is entirely sincere in one's attachment to any of these faiths, it is not difficult to argue that torture is far less an act of cruelty than heresy - torture ends, hell does not.

Therein lies the rub: our natural instinct is to believe that any new religion would naturally have a tendency to believe in tolerance - after all, they are suffering the effects of intolerance, right? They should be able to sympathize. On the contrary, though - and even today you see this in new religions (we call them cults, now), which are quite frequently very separatist and intolerant - the fire of a new idea burns as much as it warms.

Counterexamples to this, then, become interesting to me. The Roman Empire, for instance, was (until later in it's life) remarkably religiously tolerant (we think of it as otherwise, largely, because it's intolerance was aimed at those who eventually wrote history). More than one child in school has boggled at how the Roman and Greek pantheons match up so nicely. In fact, the city of Rome had significant religious practices in the worship of Egyptian gods, as well - the Cult of Isis was remarkably popular, for example. The Romans, basically, would move into a new area, and take the Gods that were already there and either add them to their own pantheon, or absorb them as new manifestations of existing gods. The only early example of restriction of religious principles that I know of (and there could be more) would be against the cult of Bacchus - the cult of Bacchus, in its religious practices, is reported as trying to enlist very young men, and then having wild orgies, that would spill out into the streets of the city in the middle of the night. Compared to our current restrictions on practices like, say, Polygamy in the privacy of your own home, this isn't exactly extreme.

In fact, the problem that they had, first with the Jews and later with the Christians, was that theologically their faiths were incapable of 'tolerance' - the idea of monotheism was anathema to the early Romans, because it presumed that Yahweh, or the Trinity, were the ONLY gods, that all other gods were false, that worship of them was unacceptable. A polytheist was able to enter into the larger religious life of the empire. A monotheist kept themselves separate from it. The God of the Abrahamic faiths is, in the words of the Old Testament, a 'Jealous God', one who was unwilling to accept the idols of those who believed differently, even if he was worshipped alongside them.

Is polytheism, then, naturally more tolerant than monotheism? I don't know. I don't think so, necessarily. I think, rather, that the idea of universal truth, applicable to all, is difficult in terms of tolerance. And at some level, truth (particularly the kinds of truths otherwise unavailable to us) are what we look for from religion - the search fro unknown truth, for the revelation of mysteries was the root of the most ancient mythologies, and still presents the core of many of the most sacred acts of religious groups today.

Where does this leave us today, then? I don't know. People have dreamed of a harmonious future without conflict - in particular religious conflict - for a long time. But its notable that most of these dreams either have a society with a single, omnipresent faith (take, for example, the medieval idea of the Kingdom of Prester John, or Sir Francis Bacon, or the pre-Christian world in the Mists of Avalon, though it hardly admits this to itself), or a society in which religion has dissapeared, o r at least seems to have lost its currency in everyday life (the Federation in Star Trek, for example, or the dream future of the Marxist-Leninist thinkers, or Herland by Charlotte Gilman Perkins). Utopia is not, in our minds, a process of finding ways to live with our differences, but rather, finding a path to a glorious, harmonious homogeny. I think this is both an unrealistic and horrifying proposition when followed to its logical conclusions (after all, most Dystopias seem to have a religious or anti-religious hegemony as well). There is no harmony in a world of belief, unless it is forced down people's throats (As it has been in history, more than once), there is only controlled bubbling in the simmering pot of conflict. There is, unless you suppose some divine intervention, no future in which people work out these differences, unless they are worked out for them, or they cease to care about or lose faith in the absolute existence of the answer. I'm not sure the latter is the right answer, either (or a sustainable one. I think current American history speaks to this).

Darning Darning

2011-04-08T08:06:00.000-05:00

Darning Darning, yarn into
  The foot-sorry wear of a sock,
Little fingers push and pull
  As the chair below me rocks.
Somewhere, with trees with blossom-red leaves,
  And with wind like a soror's hands,
Somewhere, far off distant thought
  In a far-off distant land.

The warp and woof of the new-darned rough
  With the threadbare cloth interlocked,
The warp and woof pulls thick and thin
  As the chair below me rocks.
Somewhere, with clouds of dust-soft moths
  And with love seeped in with the sand,
Somewhere, far off distant thought
  In a far-off distant land.

(Image from Amazing_podgirl)

Familiarity and Contempt (What Was She Thinking? by Zoe Heller)

2011-03-20T06:26:00.000-05:00

Good god, I forgot what it's like to read a book where each page takes less than 15 minutes! It feels strange to be in the realm of books one can read as an activity instead of a journey. Not that I mean I regret Ulysses - just sometimes it's nice to simply take a day-trip to the park, rather than hiking the entire Appalachian Trail.

If you haven't read What Was She Thinking (also called Notes on a Scandal, after the title of the movie it inspired), or seen the movie, there will be spoilers in these thoughts, because I'm really not sure where to end before ruining any surprises. So, now then, only us spoiled or spoilable folks left? Alright, then...

The very first page of the book presents for us what appears to be an easily parsed framework for interpreting Sheba, the nominal heroine of the book: she is a woman who has had an illicit affair with a 15 year old boy. She has been caught. It's a nasty business. The news has introduced this particular character type, in the real world more than once (seemingly every time it happens), and in the beginning, there is a natural tendency, I think to assume that any further story will be simply the salacious details. The narrator, Barbara (in many senses, I think, the true protagonist of the novel), is much more of a mystery - she's older. She's loyal to this woman who has done something impardonable. She is a bit cold and bitter.

By the end of the book, Barbara has done her very best to show us that Sheba is a faulty, essentially non-evil woman who committed a horrible mistake. One can (if one wishes) pity her, sympathize with her. On the other hand, unwittingly, Barbara reveals herself to be, as most people I know describe her, very creepy. Sheba let her hormones overtake her. Barbara seems to have something very distrubing wrong with her.

The interesting thing to me is this: Barbara, I think, one knows fairly well by the end of the book, and one despises her. Sheba, who one is given the opportunity to pity, one knows in many ways LESS than they did on the first page of the book. The narrator is clearly not terrifically reliable, and obviously sees Sheba in a way that suits the fantasies she needs to uphold for herself - how are we to trust that anything she says really accurately reflects on Sheba's character? Take, for a moment, the mere facts apart from the very artfully applied layers of interpretation, and one has learned very little by the end of the book, really - some details of Sheba's family life. A rough timeline of how the affair went. A highly coloured personal account of some of the day to days of the end of the affair. A frankly unreliable account of second hand knowledge that we don't know if it's even accurate. The image of Barbara, is, inadvertently, more or less an honest one. The image of Sheba is a more or less dishonest, or at least dubious, one. And it's much easier to like Sheba than Barbara.

This particularly caught my eye because the way Barbara details her life reminded me in some ways of Ulysses (sorry, I know). Barbara, perhaps because she lives alone and has no particular center or direction to her life outside of Sheba, is left, in between the periods in which she is merely reinterpreting Sheba's life, describing her life in very exacting detail. By the end, one knows how Barbara gets dressed, how she feeds the cat, the manner of cook she is, the way she keeps her bedroom and living room, her personal grooming habits, the way she sleeps even. Bloom's journey through Dublin is told in the same exacting detail (we were not, perhaps, left with a description of how Ms Barbara goes to the bathroom - but she did comment on the menstrual habits of her coworkers, so I think this was more an issue of space and first person narration than any sort of actual fastidiousness). And I've heard more than one person who read Ulysses mention how surprised they were at how much they disliked Bloom, and in much the same way that one dislikes Barbara - he's a little off, a little bit disturbing. Revolting.

In many novels one gains a certain intimacy with the characters, and understand please that the comments Im about to offer are not belittling that. But most of that intimacy is only with their inner selves - in some sense I think this is what we turn to literature for, to look at someone and be able to see something more 'real' than the everyday. Joyce turned this around and presented the everyday as the framework of the epic, and so I think that it's easy to look at his characters and think 'how disgusting', because one must see all the detritus of their daily thought patterns. I daresay that many of our hero's thought patterns would be equally ugly if we took them in unexpurgated. In part, I think this is the problem with living in Barbara's everyday world - familiarity, as they say, breeds contempt (or horror, or disgust).

I am not everyone I know, I'm only me, but I will say that a tepid toe dipped deep in the stream of my consciousness would be equally loathsome. I say this as impassively as I can. I think any number of ugly, unpleasant things, I'm plagued by a discordant, disturbing mishmash of non-cohesive patterns of internal life, most of them worn deep enoguh that the groove has gone smooth with time. This isn't, I don't think, because I'm deeply secretive - I try to fairly honest and forthcoming (not that I always have in my life). It's simply that writing about one's self naturally condenses identity into something cohesive. Maybe this is a sort of innate dishonesty, for my own benefit - I need to believe there is a self to build an identity around, instead of a raucous blend of things, most of which should be ignored or suppressed in order to function in the world. I don't know, I wonder sometimes if the feeling is more universal, if perhaps many or most of us have internal selves that stoke at a fire of contradictions.

There are two points to this. In some ways, it is a simple one: simply that knowing a person might tell us things about them we might not be glad we learned, and that we should, thus, take our knowing with a grain of salt - not becaus what we know is necessarily untrue, but because it is confusing to know a person intimately that way. The everyday has a way of bringing up the tics and highlighting them, leaving us blind, ironically, to the virtues of a person - which ironically intensifies the tics in our subject themselves, and declines the influence of virtue. Theory of PErsonality Relativity, I guess.

The other point, though, is I think it's interesting that the repulsive Barbara is, in fact, a writer herself - her manner of writingis not simply narrative, it's 'writerly' - complex, beautiful, very funny at times, poignant at others. She is not a diarist, but a novelist. And what's interesting about that to me is that she is making a novel of Sheba. The difference between the book and a real novel is simply that the ACTUAL author works so hard to see the machinations of the false author in producing the false account of the protagonist - we see, in essence, the making up of a hero from scratch, from the eyes of the novelist, without her explicit awareness of the revelation. Which makes one turn back for a moment to all the heroes in all the other novels they've seen created. Jane Eyre, for instance - it's difficult in a moment of clarity not to see how much Bronte needed her to be a hero. Or Stephen Dedalus. Or any of a thousand others. Authors write heroes, as often as not, because they need the validation of seeing someone else worship their illusions.

I don't mean this as a dig against literature - clearly I'm not opposed to Jane Eyre or Ulysses. I think that in truth of truths, though, there is no 'true portrait' of anyone. To make others feel for a character, one must describe the character artfully, art implies passion, and passion, by definition, precludes dispassionate honesty. I'm not sure it's even really a 'warning' per se. In some sense, I will admit, I believe that this lack of clarity is wonderful, because when you really look at a person, you're not looking for a catalog of their attributes - a catalog of attributes, after all, is the whole problem with knowing someone to intimately. You're looking for a story, for someone to connect little cohesive webs that let you wrap your mind around a person. Those webs can't be complete images of a person, of course - a person is made of the paints the web stretches between, not of the threads that you actually see. But something like the way an artist will use a color that is absent in nature to produce an illusion that's realistic, this sort of skewed portrayal can be far more 'honest', in some senses, than a clinical description

Ulysses (10:30, St. Patrick's Day)

2011-03-17T23:07:00.000-05:00

It's late in the evening of St. Patrick's. What a strange holiday it is, here in the states! I was at work today, and heard a tongue in cheek conversation in which someone stated that they don't celebrate St. Patrick's Day, because they don't drink, and someone else who followed up by saying they didn't understand why we celebrated St. Patrick's anyway - why not just have a 'British People Day'? (a slight shudder chased my spine for the Irish of the world on that one) I don't know why we do - or I do know why we STARTED to, but let's start there.

The celebration of St. Patrick's Day in America is actually very old, in some ways - all the way to George Washington, in fact. In 1780, on St. Patrick's, Washington gave all his troops a holiday, in solidarity with the Irish, who struggled for freedom in much the same way, even against the same imperial power (it probably helped, as well, that a good sized contingent of his troops were of Irish extraction). The holiday pops up here and there in American history afterwards. It doesn't become the great spectacle we know today until the age of immigration - the St Patrick's Parade in New York, for instnace, began before the First World War, and even then was traceable back to the celebrations of the regiments of Irish cannon fodder that fought in the Union army during the Civil War (for a chilling image of that particular aspect of Irish history, I recommend some of the scenes from 'Gangs of New York', a film full of strange and disturbing visuals). It's interesting, because the holiday didn't become a national holiday in Ireland itself until 1905. In part, of course, this was simply because Ireland was still a colony of Great Britain (colony, protectorate, whatever, call it what you will), and displays of Irish patriotism were frankly frowned upon.

In part I think there is more to it than that - the Irish in New York were an interesting sort of immigrant, in many ways like, say, a Palestinian today. The Irish were refugees, nominal citizens of a nation that treated them as either amusing comics or terrifying beasts - Catholics in Ireland were, until the 19th century, not even allowed to learn to read and write. So where, say, a German immigrant had chosen to leave his nation behind, the Irish immigrants to America were still looking for their country - not for America, but for Ireland. Sinn Fein and other Irish revolutionary bodies had considerable financial backing from American Irish, and much of their leadership ended up New York for extended periods of time. So the Irish, in many ways, found Ireland wherever they went - and there thick cultural cohesivity showed this.

In good and bad ways. The reputation for St. Patrick's now as a drunken revel with no religious or cultural significance whatsoever is, in most of the states, not entirely undeserved. The only Irish products most Americans come into contact with, now, or Bushmills, Baileys, Jamesons, and Guinness. The only Irish stories they know are vague, highly distorted versions of the Leprachaun - a story which, in Ireland, was never even terribly significant really. This is completely acceptable in most of our minds, and jokes about Irish culture as being essentially concerned with alcohol are common and well-accepted - amongst those of Irish extraction even. Guinness puts up signs every year saying 'On March 17th, everyone is Irish', and that's not because they're encouraging people to read Lady Gregory.

I finished James Joyce's Ulysses today. Joyce himself was not shy about pointing about the more irritating edges of Irish culture. Drinking, in fact, is not a small part of Ulysses, and in Finnegan's Wake, Whisky is elevated to it's celtic etymological roots: usquebaugh, literally the 'water of life. Joyce, in fact, exiled himself from Ireland in large part because of his frustration with it's culture, and said many rather unpleasant things about Ireland over the years. At the same time, I mentioned in my review of Finnegan's Wake last year, I had a friend at Pearson who was born in Dublin, and she read Ulysses because it felt so much like home. In a sense, this is the forgotten context of St. Patrick's, and perhaps, in some little ways, it's redeeming message (I wonder, sometimes, if this is how Mardi Gras feels for New Orleansers) - that yes, there is a lot of faults in a culture, any culture, but that's because it's human - to make a holiday that only celebrates an idealized, sanitized vision of identity is just as pointless. You can do either on St. Patricks, you can elegize Ireland, or treat it as an excuse to get drunk and tell dirty limericks. Either will get you a host of sympathizers. And Ireland - or what we call Ireland, which is much more, and much less, than a country, is both of these things.

I am somewhat infamous for being dubious of holidays. But, I suppose, more than anything, this is what I learned from Joyce this time around - that Ulysses, like the real, three dimensional mundanity of every-day life that it seeks to enshrine, is messy. It is neither one thing or the other, it doesn't come to any conclusions. Real life doesn't have tidy stories and pretty characters - it has people. Which is so wonderful, and so terrible all at the same time. Real history does not have heroes and villains, good guys and bad guys. The sublime is ridiculous, but it's still sacred. The ribald is fun in the most wonderful, needful way, but it's also self-indulgetnt and ugly. Holidays are the same way - we mean them to celebrate these beautiful, grand ideas, btu they don't - in spite of us, they celebrate us exactly as we are. In some ways, that's very sad, and ugly. But in some ways - why celebrate angels that don't exist? Human beings are messy, but they're so, so beautiful.

Happy Birthday, Amanda!

2011-03-01T06:22:00.002-06:00

Today is my favorite person's birthday! We actually alll really wanted pizza yesterday, so we did a party and presents a WEE bit early, but still - HAPPY BIRTHDAY AMANDA! Go visit her over at the Zen Leaf and wish her a happy birthday.

Otherwise, sorry to have been missing the last two weeks. Will start catching up tomorrow if possible.

Happy Birthday, jewel of my heart! :)

Human Dignity in Joyce's Ulysses

2011-02-15T21:21:00.000-06:00

More than one description of Joyce - and particularly the one I'm reading by Declan Kiberd - focus on Ulysses as a glorification of the human spirit, a sort of paean to real people in parallel to the paeans to idealized men that were to be found in books like, well, The Odyssey. (One could have some strong words of difference about whether Odysseus is an idealized man, of course. Perhaps that's the point). Stephen is a normal man attempting to be an idealized man, and in many way, Bloom is simply a normal man trying to be what he is.

This sort of story is a difficult one to grapple on to, of course. IT is, in many ways, the biggest sacrilege in the book - our culture, through a thousand ways, builds itself around the idea that all of us should be struggling to move up from our current position. This is the definition of the American dream, and while slightly different historically, was certainly at least the stuff of fairy tales. Great souls rise above their circumstances, the words say, and become great through sheer force of will. I don't necessarily disagree with this, I do sometimes wonder at the teaching that is inextricably attached as a verso - that those who do not struggle towards our, frankly narrow, definition greatness have failed, wasted their lives. Normalcy is mediocrity - or in an odd, twist of fate, even sub-normalcy. People who are not 'smart' are 'stupid'. People who are not 'driven' are 'lazy'.

I don't think this is the disease, per se, I think, rather, that it is a symptom. I don't know that Bloom (or necessarily even Joyce?) would agree, but reading sections four through six, where Bloom is introduced, the power he has in my eyes is that he is never struggling for primacy. The person who need not struggle for greatness is a pretty common trope, but usually this is on, say, the Mr. Miyagi vein of heroism : one has attained such mastery that struggle is no longer necessary (I will interject here as a side note that I remain dubious that this state exists in real life). Bloom, on the other hand, simply seems apart from greatness - he sees people struggling for it, just as he sees, say religion, but in both cases, he simply watches from afar. I find this, in my own brain, inconceivable, but I so WISH I didn't.

In a sense, though, this is also the troubling aspect of Joyce - Bloom is, decidedly, not great. He is not an ideal (I think Kiberd sometimes wishes to make him one, but I think Joyce is fairly realistic about his heroes limitations). This is both the horrifying and fascinating side of Joyce. Modern stories I have read frequently have these nasty, grey-moraled heroes, but one is supposed to either bitterly accept that this is the best we can get, or roll our eyes at the awful people that sit behind the masks we worship, or simply to laugh at the vanity of human pursuit of greatness. With Joyce, there is no irony, really, in his Bloom. Bloom is, simply, who he is. And so when Joyce makes him the hero of the novel, and plots his life as a parallel of the Odyssey, it's not to mock the Odyssey, and it's not to mock Bloom. Bloom is the bona fide hero. Which puts me, as a reader in an uncomfortable position. I want to, at some level, force Bloom to start 'acting heroic', I want to have a reason to admire him. And then, I'm reminded, this is the HARD work, this is the work of actually looking to discover what basic human dignity is. It's very easy to find dignity in the classic hero (though sometimes easy to find flaws as well). I would argue that it is often even fairly easy to find dignity in the extremes that are held up as the laboratories of dignity: poverty has a rich, powerful dignity much like heroism, even crime can have dignity. Homeless people in dire suffering or starving masses in third world countries, we have learned as a society, by and large, to look for dignity here (though not necessarily to do anyhting about it, sadly, or to go looking for it). But normal, bourgeois humanity, the lifeblood of most of our day to day interactions, we have been taught is low, callous, cultureless, personalityless. A middle class advertising man in early 19th century Dublin had the same totemic soullessness in some ways that a suburban soccer mom has in a hip, trendy book today. And we ARE in love with talking about the soullessness of 'normal' people - American Beauty, the middle section of The Hours, Pleasantville, even kid's movies like Over the Hedge make no bones about making this broad generalization, for instance.

But, that's just it - this is the sort of person Bloom is, on the outside (and in some ways, inside) level - a completely unromantic hero, undistinguished, unspecial, unimportant. If he were alive today, he'd work a vaguely roled job in HR or Marketing, maybe lower middle management in some soulless corporation (see how easy it is to say that?) and live in a little McHouse in the burbs of a mid-sized city, sometimes going in to see a show, but mostly just (somewhat awkwardly) talking to his fellows about the latest action flick, ogling girls at the office, and driving his SUV home at the end of the day. But, none of this makes him less human (even though I do love movies like the middle section of the Hours, and think there's a lesson there, too). None of this makes him less deserving of human dignity - and he does not have to break that mold to merit dignity. The protagonist in 'Fight Club' is a human being, and deserves our respect as such -- but so did his boss, or the spineless coworkers he left behind (Fight Club, in some ways (and I think in some ways purposefully) actually has a great deal to say about this demonization of the mundane).

And this is what's troubling. This is what, at some level, is the deeper part of the complaints about having to read a scene where he's sitting down for his morning poop, or worrying about the soap that he left in his hip pocket that's jabbing into him, while simultaneously not wanting to be seen moving it. Yes, these things are ridiculous. They're also part of what being human is. But it's harder than one would expect to keep that in mind while reading. At least for me - hey, I was raised on Victor Hugo, remember?

Happy Valentine's Day

2011-02-13T21:16:00.000-06:00

So, I love my wife, and it's Valentine's Day. And I thought, man, what should I post? It's very hard to know. I mean I could have serenaded her, but all the songs I know are musicals, and Amanda doesn't like them. I could write a poem? Sometimes that can turn out bad. And my poems can have a mixed message in them, I'm afraid...

Maybe I could enlist the help of the Lord of the Underworld?

No... no, that's a really bad idea.

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Proteus Chapter of Ulysses

2011-02-05T21:35:00.000-06:00

Before I get into this post, oh my friends, I must apologize ahead of time. I'm currently reading three different books: Ulysses, Ulysses Annotated (a book of annotations on the text of Ulysses), and Ulysses and Us (a book discussing why and how Ulysses is intended for the common man, instead of intellectual highbrows) I blame this on my friends who have organized Jousting With Joyce this month. But I'm having a LOT of fun. I read the book a few years ago, and I will not link to the review - it was so awful that it's the only review I've ever actually gone back and deleted content from. But I'm understanding it much better the second time. So, the short of it is: for the next month and a half, much of this channel will be devoted to Ulysses. Which I know makes some of us cringe in terror or hatred. So, I'm sorry.

But that's just the way it is.

So, before we began the book, Jill over at Fizzy Thoughts mentioned something interesting about chapter 3 of Ulysses, a chapter which Joyce titled, after the fact, Proteus - namely that this is the chapter that most people turn away at and never finish the book. And I will confess now, the first time I read Ulysses, this chapter took me, I kid you not, a month and a half. For fifteen pages. And I didn't understand a thing in it.

Well, that's not really true. I did understand something: I understood that the chapter was in stream of consciousness, and that the consciousness being streamed was confusing and... eh... just a little obnoxious. Pretentious, snotty, and a little full of itself. Declan Kiberd in Ulysses and Us admits this up front:

Many readers drop Ulysses at this point, finding themselves unable to keep up with Stephen's remorseless and obscure pedantry...

Yeah, that pretty much gives my initial feeling of the chapter. It's what he says afterwards that really captures how I felt reading it the second time:

...but the truth is that Joyce is laughing at the pitiful pretentiousness of the youth he once was. Nobody could understand all that Stephen says or thinks. Nobody could take all of his ideas with utter seriousness.

No, seriously. The closing words of the chapter, dramatic and stirring:

Behind. Perhaps there is someone. He turned his face over a shoulder, rere regardant. Moving through the air high spars of a threemaster, her sails brailed up on the crosstrees, homing, upstream, silently moving, a silent ship.

The 'behind, perhaps there is someone'? It's because Stephen just picked his nose and wiped it on a rock because he doesn't have a handkerchief, and he's afraid someone may have caught him at it. So, he looks over his shoulder, to see the great silent ship, deep and powerful symbol of the child Telemachus waiting for a father to come home who he has never met, silent and forboding, is all because he didn't want someone to catch him picking his nose.

This may seem facetious, or pretentious in and of itself, to write some grand sweeping complex chapter that is essentially about a stupid college kid wandering along the beach and killing time for an hour. Maybe it is, but I don't think so. It would have been much easier to just write a snarky satire of a chapter, talking about how stupid college kids are. The power of James Joyce is that he doesn't do this - instead he simply records what it feels like to be that person. There are parts of the mind that just find this bewildering, or course, let me address that first. In some sense, like Kiberd said, it is meant to be confusing. Part of Stephen's problem is his education. If you took this chapter apart, probably half of it would be a quote, an allusion, a lampoon, or a paraphrase of the words of someone else, and Joyce argues (in a different way in the previous chapter) that education, sometimes, aims for htis goal: to make people who are good at spouting at the correct bit of information at the correct time. It's a problem that is different now from Joyce's time, where rote learning was a huge measure of academic prowess, but it is a bigger problem now, perhaps, in our time when education's purpose has been narrowed to the point where it's largely presented as nothing more than a way to ensure you get a good job someday. Even so, though, part of the problem is, I would argue, intrinsic to this sort of free association thought. Some of the things in Stephen's mind are not academic esoterica: there's lyrics to pub ditties and popular songs, there's references to Hamlet in plenty, which isn't exactly obscure, there's references to the CAtholic Mass, which most of the people around Stephen would have been intimately familiar with. The problem is, anytime you enter someone else's mind, you will find that there are places foreign to you. This is perhaps amplified by the difference in time and space between Stephen and us, and by the differences in our respective educations. But at the same time I think it's partly simply the uncrossable chasm between two souls, the fact that we can peek inside someone else's head, but never truly climb in.

Apart from the bewildering nature of Stephen's head, though, there is the pretentiousness of it. And make no mistake, it is a chapter, stuffed to the gills, with pretentious. It is very easy to dislike Stephen, here. But at the same time, I don't think that is Joyce's point - in fact, I think it says a lot about us as readers, willing to seek out clues about whether to like or dislike a person so easily. Every person is a person at some level. Stephen is young, he makes mistakes, he can be annoying, but he's a person, and in the midst of all his wandering, there are some real, powerful, and beautiful emotions. The problem is that he does not how to pick them out of the mire. He doesn't realize that as much of the beauty comes in the 'low' as the 'high' parts of his thought, that his work scribbling a poem is far less powerful and human than his yearning for someone to love him as he thinks about the shopgirl he saw the day before, or the brooding loneliness he feels as he watches the dog running along the beach. Stephen is, simply, who he is. One may dislike him, but to hate him, that takes a special force. It is easy for me to hate some characters, because there are characters. I would present that authors construct them so that they can be hated or loved, as often as not. But Stephen is not a character in the same sense - to hate him is to hate a human - a ficitonal one, yes, but we do not have the luxury in Ulysses of having simlpy a hateable side of a person before us. If we are to love or hate anyone in Ulysses, we must hate them the way we would hate another person - which reflects and teaches the reader something about how it is that they really DO love and hate, teaches them where the line lies for them.

America and Democray: 1850 and 2010

2011-02-03T21:31:00.000-06:00

The last week of listening to the popular uprisings in Egypt has been deeply stirring for me. As a very uneducated but passionate historian of sorts, revolution has always drawn me to it: the Russian, the French, the American, the Haitian, even the English Civil War, in a different sort of way. There is something to a people being stirred up into something that rash that makes me feel a sort of clumsy kinship.

I've also been listening to a very intriguing book: Clotel, or The President's Daughter. Published before the Civil War in London, Clotel is usually considered the first novel by an African American, and as one would expect for it's time, it's an abolitionist polemic, following the life of a woman and her two daughters (and eventual granddaughter), whom were sired by Thomas Jefferson (just the daughters. This isn't THAT kind of book). And reading this book has made me very troubled, because it tells a great deal about America.

Thomas Jefferson, in particular is a man of deep and powerful contradictions. On the one hand he was a slave owner who did, in fact, sire children with his chattel mistress. On the other hand he not only codified the idealistic "all men are created equal", he also gave a number of very stirring speeches denouncing slavery as a crime against liberty.

It is perhaps Jefferson's most famous quote on slavery, however, that really shows where these contradictions come from. In discussing slavery, he said:

"But as it is, we have the wolf by the ear, and we can neither hold him, nor safely let him go. Justice is in one scale, and self-preservation in the other."

In essence, said Jefferson, we cannot let the slaves go, because we need them to be slaves, even if that's wrong. The tragedy of this statement, of course, is that it is so easy to say when you live in a home where your luxury is made possible by the hands that you keep enslaved beneath you. Perhaps, Jefferson would argue, he was a good master and treated his slaves as best he could, but then if one had told him that George had meant to be a virtuous king this would have made nary a different in whether he was a tyrant. Keeping slavery extant for another 80 years after the Revolution - and turning a blind eye to what amounted often to de facto slavery for African American through much of the rest of American history - is not morally justifiable, it's simply politically and economically expedient.

Take a look, now, at our situation today. The biggest recipients of American foreign aid (at least the last time I heard the statistics) are: Israel, and Egypt. Egypt, in large part, because it maintains an alliance with Israel. This is a debatable policy, in and of itself, but even more troubling when one considers that through most of the time in which we gave this aid, we gave it to the government of a despotic dictator. A few years ago, when we went to war in Iraq, there were three basic purposes floated for the war: to prevent Saddam Hussein from getting weapons of mass destruction, to destroy a base for Al Qaida and other militant terrorist groups, and to spread democracy in the Middle East. The first two of these reasons have been more or less debunked - Hussein didn't have any real weapons development anymore, and being a secularist, Al-Qaida was none too fond of Hussein. The third... is a trickier wicket. If we WERE, then, fighting an entire war to spread democracy, assert that human beings have an inalienable right to self-determination, then why is our response to Egypt so muted as a government? Shouldn't this be a moment for celebration, and for assisting our like-minded brothers and sisters? For using the ENORMOUS levers we have in Egypt - our foreign aid, for instance - to help those who are fighting for the cause of liberty?

Instead, our government is troubled, because when democracy DOES emerge, it's almost guaranteed that a considerable mass of the Egyptian people will vote for an Islamist party, changing the chemistry of our relationships in the region. Islamist parties are, generally, not terrifically fond of the United States, or of our ally, Israel. And after all, we have every right to look after our own interests. We cannot continue to work for good in the world if we lose the position we have in the world, now, can we?

Take a step back, for a moment, to the abolitionists. There was considerable breadth and variety in the abolitionist movement, but a significant portion of the movement was directly inspired by a fiery, fundamentalist Christian doctrine, one which, quite frankly, made government uncomfortable. Abolitionists, in fact, were not only frequently seen as terrorists, but did, in fact, commit acts that we would now consider terrorism: John Brown's raid, for instance, or the fighting funded in Bloody Kansas. Do I think this was right? I don't know. I cannot say. I can't damn them for it. Violence is awful, bloody, horrible stuff. But then, so was the violence being enacted on 6 million black men women and children. Was the plight of those people less cause for revolt than the plight of the Americans in 1776, who suffered from being overtaxed? I don't mean to trivialize the Revolutionary war, but not being able to send a representative to the parliament isn't quite the same as being a slave.

Which brings one back to today. Are the people of Egypt influenced by Islam? Certainly. Is the Muslim Brotherhood and it's Islamist agenda one of the inspirations for these protests. More than likely. But to argue that the people of Egypt should keep their dictator, or change on his timetable, is to argue that government is best when it is 'of the people, by the people, for the people, unless the people do not want what we think we should', which isn't a terribly moral high ground to take. If the Muslim Brotherhood were to take over, could very bad things happen? Perhaps - although I think that this is partly just xenophobia. One is reminded of the French Revolution, when an angry and miserable French people let themselves be let into the monstrosities of the Reign of Terror. At the same time, it's worth mentioning that the French were isolated by all of the rest of the nations of Europe, an action that probably had a good deal to do with why the people were willing to turn to such savage shepherds.

A Sense of Place in Lagerlof and Cather

2011-01-31T20:00:00.000-06:00

Alright, slight raving side note: The Story of Gosta Berling, by Selma Lagerlof is one of the most beautiful novels I've read in a very long time. I could do a month of posts on this book. I may do one or two more, and make you all so sick of this book I'll ruin your opportunity to discover the beauty of Selma Lagerlof's beautiful vision. So, I'm trying to restrain myself here.

One of the things I loved about this novel (and there are several others) was the powerful feeling of place - I commented to a few people while reading it that it reminded me of Willa Cather's sweeping powerful Nebraska and New Mexico, and the farther I got into the book, the more I felt this - both Cather and Lagerlof leave me with a deep nostalgia for a place I've never been. Thomas Hardy has this feeling for me in his books somewhat, as well, but I don't feel his love for the place he's talking about as much as his horror at the absence of the place. Victor Hugo makes me feel this way about Paris - but in Paris, he is in love with the city, and a city is in many ways just an expression of human beings (another book that feels this way to me is Moby Dick, but with a ship instead of a city). Lagerlof and Cather make you feel in love with something much bigger than you, with the earth itself, I suppose. In Cather, they are these wild places that humans are trying to find an uncomfortable toehold in - in Lagerlof it is a country that has been settled for thousands of years, but where nature and the man-less world lives just outside the edges of day-to-day life. And in both, you see the country exhibit itself in the souls of the people who live there - but not as a sort of clumsy allegory, but rather in the way that we really that people really DO entwine themselves with their native land.

This is particularly powerful to me, because I don't HAVE a 'native soil.' I love my upbringing in this sense, I love that I could see so many places as a child, I think it was good for me. But, at the same time, I would love to truly know and love a place, to be married to the soil in the consummated way that some people are (less so in America, these days, which I think is interesting). That feeling of deep intimacy with a place makes one feel, in some ways, like a perpetual outsider.

It's strange, because the closest I can come to this feeling of deep and powerful intimacy with a place is with the internet itself (ah, yes, insert laughs here, it's okay). I've lived in the soil of the internet now for almost two decades, at some level, and for most of the time, the internet has been a deep and intimate part of my life. Like Cather knew the sweep of the blank prairie, and the way the earth grows beneath it, the way it bites back angrily at the plow, I know the ether of the web, I know the way an empty palette gnaws at a new piece of code, the way that a refugee can stare at it and hunger for their native land, but also dream deep and strong of what they can make of their new home. The way that Lagerlof knows the wolves, the winter wind, the water that comes in the spring floods, I know the angry rises and falls of this pseudo-landscape, the way worlds will form and dissolve with the impartial fury of a decimating blizzard. I know the way that this land can take a person and gnaw them until it leaps one day to devour them whole, and the way that it can cradle up someone lost and yield a little hole for them to make into a home. I've seen it in people I love, in stories that already feel so strange and elemental to be like folklore, I've seen it in myself - like a land, the internet proves it's veracity by being a place where one can be all the selves one is, at the same time.

The strangeness of this realization was that it feels, to me, more like Cather than Hugo - the internet feels like a land, not like a city. IT's inhabitants feel like they are connected to the earth, not cooped into metropolitan finality. It's the sort of place where I can imagine stories living of their own power, instead of simply as currents in a river of human existence (This is not to say that a city isn't just as beautiful, in it's own way). Sadly, I can't WRITE like Lagerlof or like Cather, but I've wondered how long it is until the Cather of the internet is born, telling the story not of the heroes of the land, but of the land itself, the writer who will see this ether plucked from ourselves almost unwilling as a character instead of a setting.

The power of Lagerlof is that she loves her land so much that she loves it's sins and horrors. Her Gods and Heroes are of the ancient cast, the kind that are equal measures of good and evil - how do you tell that story in a world where opinion is, in some sense, the root of identity?

Hippocrates, and How Science is Born

2011-01-30T22:27:00.000-06:00

(Short Summary for those who do not know: Hippocrates is widely considered a forefather of medicine. His collected writings include the Hippocratic Oath, variations of which are still administered by pretty much every medical institution on earth, but also include a broad array of observations and advice on a wide variety of topics of health. Hippocrates was usually thought of as a sort of wise, practical country doctor, who did not get cauhgt in esoterics, but who nonetheless laid the groundwork for medicine and medical theory)

I entered reading Hippocrates fully expecting a laugh. This medicine is OLD. This is before there was germ theory, before there was an understanding of the circulation of blood, before the advent of sanitization, and still in the depths of the four humors theory of physical health, sort of one step above magic.

And in many ways the book did not let me down. A few choice exerts:

"A woman does not become ambidextrous" (but men do!)
"If you wish to ascertain if a woman be with child, give her hydromel (mead) to drink when she is going to sleep, and has not taken supper, and if she be seized with tormina (acute pain) in the belly, she is with child, but otherwise, she is not pregnant"
"A woman with child, if it be a male, has a good color, but if a female, she has a bad color."
"[Delirium and tumors] more frequently occur on odd than on even days"

I'm guessing here, but I'm not sure these statements were rigorously tested before being accepted as fact. Other things were just horrifying - though possibly effective treatments given the constraints of the times. And the long descriptions of the various colors, textures, smells, consistencies, etc of urine, bile, feces, sweat, and mucus were, if certainly indicative of a highly observant mind, not the most exciting way to spend one's evening.

But, I DID learn things from Hippocrates, this is what really surprised me. In the first case, he says a number of extremely keen-minded things, things we forgot often today:

Many physicians seem to me to be in the same plights as bad pilots, who, if they commit mistakes while conducting the ship in a calm do not expose themselves, but when a storm and violent hurrican overtake them, they then, from their ignorance and mistakes, are discovered to be what they are, by all men, namely, in losing their ship.
The vulgar, indeed, do not recognize the difference between [charlatans] and their common attendants, and are rather disposted commend extraordinary remedies
The [medical] art consists in three things: the disease, the patient, and the physician. The physician is the servant of nature, and the patient must combat the disease along with the physician.
I look upon it as being a great part of the art to be able to judge properly of that which has been written (good advice, in fact, for those reading Hippocrates...)

My favorite quote, though, and the one that sums up how I felt about the book is this:

I say we ought not to reject the ancient medicine as if it were not and had not been properly foudned because it did attain accuracy in all things, but rather... to receive it and admire its discoveries, made from a state of great ignorance, and as having been well and properly made.

What was really awe-inspiring about Hippocrates was to realize how like a scientist he really DID try to be with so very little. Hippocrates throughout the book is basically making up the scientific method out of his head (making mistakes, of course along the way), when it was quite easy to make a living in his field by simply making stuff up, lying, and making excuses for your failures (he even acknowledges this last to be the case, and offers a very compelling argument for both education and for the institution of laws against malpractice - what doctor is doing THAT today?). Some of his observations, from the vantage point of a society that has many, many giants upon whose shoulders we stand, are really very clever: He notices, for instance, that eunuchs do not tend to go bald, or that sneezing can cure hiccups (I had never noticed it, but it really is true!), or that obesity tends to reduce life-span. He goes into great detail not only about how one ought to relocate almost any dislocated joint in the body, but also why his method will work better than others of the time. And all of this he points out with only Aristotles vague, ethereal theory of humors and elements, and a history of glorified magicians to back his practice up.

One thing this DID point out to me that I thoguht interesting is that we (quite rightly) do not use Hippocrates as a medical reference anymore. He's simply out of date. He wouldn't be upset about this (and the mistake of much of the middle ages in fact was to assume that these proto writers were writing inspired things that must be followed to the letter, that wisdom is immutable). However, we still think of, for instance, the philosophy of Plato and Aristotle as being immutably, eternally valuable, and not simply as a building block. Reading Hippocrates, one is naturally led to see his mistakes. But when we are taught ancient philosophers or literary writers, we are taught to gloss over or contextualize their out-of-date parts and respect the underlying wisdom of what they were saying - the same, but more extreme, could be applied to scripture and it's study in modern religion. I'm still mulling over what this difference means - is 'progress' shaped differently in fields that are not science? OR is it simply that we want to believe people then knew something we don't know now? I don't know.

'Magical Disadvantaged'

2011-01-27T17:13:00.000-06:00

So, I finished reading Dune recently, and I want to emphasize that this is not a review of Dune. I love Dune, it's a fascinating, complex book, full of strange considerations of the nature of human history, the relationship between state and faith, and the mixture of banality and magic that goes into making someone a hero-messiah. So there.

But, reading it now, as I'm older, some of the issues in it arise (this happened when I reread Lord of the Rings now that I'm older, too), and one of these issues is something that I've heard talk of elsewhere, when someone referred in a movie review (maybe it was was Roger Ebert?) to the 'Magic Negro'. The Magic Negro or the Wise Old Negro is the stereotypical old black man that appears in many movies, films, etc, and whose main purpose is to say wise and itnelligent things, despite being poor, undeducated, usually a janitor or something. Well Dune doesn't have any African Americans in it (there's no America anymore, either, mind you, though some of the characters I suppose may very well be black). But there are magical women, and magical (future approximates of) arabs, and magical arab women, and etc, etc, etc. Dune has a taste for the isn't-it-awesomeness of the exotic, and when the exotic are rather close parallels to actual human groups, this can get tiresome and feel a bit stereotypical. Like the 'Magical Negro' thing.

But, if I were only venting about this, I wouldn't write a post - I still love this book, remember, and I do think he lays out an interesting case (though one I don't agree with) for the magicalness of these groups. But more than this, beause it bothered me, I wanted to think about why these characters get written.

The reason this interests me, in fact, is because there is a part of me that feels bad for hating the magical minority writers - because, in some part of me, I know the feeling. It's a natural reaction, and in some ways even a positive one. When you have a disadvantaged group, members of the privileged group are taught largely to take the inferiority and disadvanatage of these groups for granted. So, when one does the work of stepping out of one's shell to examine the relationship with the disadvantaged group more honesttly, there is a natural tendency to become fascinated. I've done this, for instance, with the Romany - growing up, the tacit message is that Romany aren't, like, REAL people, they're just gypsies, characters in films that do spooky things and make for good villains. So, at one point, a part of me said 'you know, this seems to convenient, that there would be a group that acts like this' (of course this oversimplifies the process of facing one's inbron biases, but I hope you won't think my parents just taught me to be a raging bigot), and so the easiest way to love a group is to study it. So I did some reading, and of course, the Roma are FASCINATING as a people, historically, culturally, all of that.

At this point, one is tempted to lionize and make up stories about the group - not because one is trying to put them in a 'wise old negro' box, but simply because one has just learned how fascinating a group is - one has learned as it were the wisdom that one MIGHT have from living the life of a poor african american, or a Roma, or a woman, or whatever the disadvantaged group. And so one assumes this sort of sageness on everyone.

A good example of this would be Oroonoko, by Aphra Behn. It's HORRIBLY racist, with it's crude word-drawings of a 'noble savage' African prince, with a fancy sounding exotic name, and with all the amazing and inhumanly extrmee characteristics of his nobility. But. It's also one of the least racist books of it's time, or at any rate, the most anti-racist. To an extent, in the attempt to learn about a new culture, mistakes were made. A perfect knowledge (in Behn's case, even a functional knowledge) of a group that is traditionally separate from you involves forming a narrative of that people, and forming a single narrative of an entire people by definition gives a fairly skewed idea of what individuals in that race might look like. This is why, for instance, people discussing the Old TEstament can say things like 'You know, the Jews in Sinai under Moses could just be so stupid and selfish'. Consciously, of course, one knows that these Jews were individuals, and that there was variety in these individuals. But it's the story of a race, and so the individual humans just become drops in a sea - and looking at individuals as drops in a sea makes one predisposed to forget their humanity in one way or the other.

So, yes, it's very frustrating to look at these magic negro, or magic woman, or magic arab, or magic gypsy narratives - but it is a sign that people VERY IMPERFECTLY are TRYING to grapple with the idea that there is something beautiful in the group their culture is ignoring or opressing, something is there worth preserving. PErhaps, sometimes the effort towards telling this blinds the teller. It's difficult to tell stories about a group to which one does not belong. But does that mean we should fault people for trying?

Sexual Heterogeneity

2011-01-25T17:36:00.000-06:00

I've mentioned before on this blog, I come from Mormon stock - from the perspective of my family history, then, the polygamy in 'So Long a Letter' did not have an exotic factor to it for me. My birth name is Roper, and the first of the Ropers in America was a woman who crossed the Atlantic from Great Britain in order to pull a handcart across the American prairies to Utah, where she was the plural wife of a Mormon man there. In fact, the only thing I know about this plural marriage was that she didn't like the way the man treated her with the other wives, much like the characters in Ba's book.

Polygamy, when growing up was (albeit only historically) a given to me. It was something people used to do - and not in the sense of ancient Israel (in fact, the whole Abraham and Hagar thing has always struck me as probably a somewhat skewed account, and not a great indication of Abraham's good virtues). There are echoes of this polygamy even now: no, to be perfectly clear, Mormon men are no longer allowed to marry multiple wives, but, for instance, a man can, if he is widowed (and even if he's divorced in some cases) be sealed to a second wife for time and eternity, whereas a woman cannot - because men can have multiple wives in heaven, while women can have 1 (or, in some sense, part of 1) husband. This struck me as unfair, but then, marriage in general struck me as unfair to one party or the other, usually.

Because the pioneers who practiced polygamy are the mythic great fathers of the Mormon stock, though, it was remarkably difficult to get a real approximation of what it must have actually FELT like to be a person in a polygamous household. I always wanted to know, both the practical details (so, do the women all have seperate bedrooms? Did all the wives and the one husband - in my very chaste childhood image - just sleep in one really wide bed?), and the more profound ones (if you're a multiple wife, do you feel married to the other wife, too? Do you feel like sisters? Rivals?). In that sense the book was deeply interesting - though I do not know that the logistics of the multiple marriage in Islamic Africa were the same as Utah.

The interesting aspect, to me though, is this: so, the relationships in this book were unhealthy, but is it possible to have a healthy polygamous relationship? And what would that feel like? Maybe if it was a true menage a trois, emotionally and/or physically, instead of a man who has two women, who both have one man. Or maybe that would make it worse. Or maybe if women had more rights in the culture. At some level, though, one is left to ask, is a man being allowed multiple wives a bad thing for women? Does it make women 'disposable' without any social stigma, the way that occurs in the book, and that seems to have occurred to my ancestor?

In this sense, one sees perhaps an argument for the laws in the United States that outlaw polygamy. And we ARE Afraid of polygamy here! (I don't know how this is in, say, Europe, I'd be interested to hear in the comments?) In fact, when people object to Gay Marriage, one of the arguments is that it would lead to a slippery slope where someday we'd have to legalize polygamy - and frankly, any practice that is used as an example of somethign scarier than Gay Marriage for Americans must be very scary indeed. And, it's worth pointing out, that what examples there IS of polygamy that make it into the news, these days, are not pleasant ones - generally religious cults (particularly fundamentalist Mormon splinters). Many of these communities seem to have problems with yougn girls being wedded off at a language that would be child sexual abuse, and women certainly don't seem to be respected - though even here, the vision we get of the communities is awfully skewed by the OHMIGAWD, and THEY TOTALLY HAVE MORE THAN ONE LADY TO SLEEP WITH shock coverage of the news. So, who knows.

So, then the question is this: does an anti-bigamy law protect anyone? And is it an ethical law to have? I don't know. It's not as if, for instance, we ban people from preaching from the Pauline Epistles, which are certainly bad for women in parts - of course not, people have the right to believe what they like. After all, it only hurts them, right?

Only, it doesn't. IT affects those people's children, if nothing else, no? So, at what point should we legislate to protect the auxilliary people?

So, look at the question from a different direction: many radical feminists, particularly on the left, felt like 'normal' marriage was damaging to women, in the precise same way that we think of polygamy, now. There argument isn't even an awful one - it's one I can see the merits of. So, if marriage could be illustrated to be as damaging to society as polygamy, should it be illegalized? And how woudl you even measure that? At some level, I'm inclined to one of two possible end scenarios.

First, we could simply legalize any relationship between consenting adults. Yes, this would be complex. Yes, many forms woudl have to be rewritten. But, at some level, we let people have sex with whoever they want anyway, so if three people want to make a home together, under what right do we prevent them from doing so? The implications for US law are complex - how do you file taxes? But in a sense, this complexity exists now, it is simply hidden. IF three people are polyamorous, and truly love each other equally, now, if one member dies, then only of the remaining partners retains the protection of US law for the same things that homosexuals lack now - and if nothign else, bringing polygamy out of the shadows would, I would think, allow any healthy forms of it to flourish - in the shadows, only sickness grows.

The other option, of course, would be to stop legislating marriage and partnership, altogether. Why not? At some level, it's rather odd that we DO stick our nose into it as a country. IF two people want to sign a contract with each other not to diddle anyone but each other, perhaps we as a coutnry shouldn't spend our energy enforcing this contract - considering its impossible to enforce fairly, anyway. Then, people could simply make whatever agreements they like, as long as noone is put in a situation of nonconsent.

Both of these solutions have problems - but both point out, to me, that there is a lot more sexual heterogeneity in the world than the rest of us are willing to admit - polygamy in the traditional sense, is simply the most obvious form. I'd love to hear what other people think: why is polygamy so scary? Are the problems in it problems of polygamy or society at large? And how SHOULD it be treated by society?

The Relationship Between Significance and Nonsense

2011-01-16T21:21:00.000-06:00

I recently read Wicked, which if you haven't read it (that is, you are the only other person on earth, it seems, besides me), talks about the Wicked Witch of the West from the Wizard of Oz, from her own perspective. Honestly, I expected this to be a smirky, silly kind of book, sort of like the children's book where the Big Bad Wolf tells about how he was misrepresented by the three little pigs, only for grownups. In the end, I REALLY enjoyed it (though the end felt a bit forced), and want to read the two sequels now, eventually.

One thing that was VERY interesting to me in the book was how Elphaba (the wicked witch) found meaning in the events around her. If you are like me (I don't know how universal this sentiment is, honestly), there are particular events, concordances, unexpected turns, etc in your life that take on a powerful significance. Some of these events are obvious - if one has, say, a very traumatic event, it becomes significant. Others are not.

What I loved in the book - and this is something I love in MANY of my favorite books and movies, probably because it is so common to tell a story deceptively to the opposite - is that really, these events, these glimmers of meaning, do not interrelate in a way that one can make a single, sensible narrative of. This feels so personal and familiar that finding it in a book is like finding a piece of myself in someone else.

Humans are a mythmaking species. For all the trouble this practice has caused us over the years, I think it is, to some extent, intrinsic to who we are - I think for instance it is the root of the idealistic leaping I talked about with Ms Wollstonecraft. There is the macrocosmic version of this of course - religion. But the microcosm exists as well. I think most people gneerate their own personal mythologies, stories they construct about their own internal gods and heroes. For me, at least, time ceases to exist without a narrative to lay it across, and some of the bleakest, most horrifying moments of my life have been those in which I saw my life stretching ahead of me, devoid of any particular story-thread, simply a span of indifferent years and directionless existence, even if this is the more honest way of understanding my life.

The problem, of course, is that life does not always tell a good story. Sometimes, life's stories are kind of awful - not awful like scary and miserable, but awful like, they wander around and make no sense, and at the end you wonder if the author was even paying attention, or if maybe you just were paying attention to the wrong narrative. Like Ulysses (joke. Well, kind of a joke). But we NEED them to make sense - just like our ancestors NEEDED there to be some REASON that the Nile flooded every year and the sun rose, and the winter was cold and harsh. Because without a reason, first of all, the awful things of the world are unbearable, and second of all, the future is scary and unpredictable. In our own lives we do the same thing - how many of us, for instance, comfort ourselves with some variation of "everything in life has a purpose?" In the paraphrased words of Christopher Hitchens, we simultaneously believe ourselves to be the most insignificant of worms, but also that the omnipotent universe has a plan for each of use individually, that the universe loves and directs us as single humans. Maybe this is true, maybe it isn't. IT feels too... easy to be true, I guess, sometimes.

And, yes, this mythmaking makes terrible messes, it makes us do terrible things. What is the classic 'midlife crisis' but a realization that our identity does not match our own narrative? I have done too many things, too many terrible things, because it felt like the way the story should go. Others are better about this than me, but I don't think it's a completely unique behaviour.

At the same time, mythology was a precursor to magic, and magic was a precursor to science, and science a precursor to real knowledge (alter this sentence according to the dictatates of your worldview). And, after all, in some sense, the 'story' that is told by, say, modern astronomy is any ways as awe-inspiring, beautiful, and meaningful as any sun and moon and stars myth, the tale of evolution lists a human destiny as compelling as Ragnarok. Maybe this is the way personal mythologies must work - as a sort of alchemy by which we learn our personal chemistry. But life is so short, so short, and the time to know the weight of your own atoms is so long...

Vindicating Rights is Messy Business

2011-01-13T20:52:00.000-06:00

I began writing this post in my cold little academic tone, and I stopped. It would be very easy. Ms Wollstonecraft was alive a very long time ago, and some of the things she said in her book, in retrospect, feel pretty out of date, even wrong-headed. Some of them even bothered me. But, writing a post about the ways we've grown as a culture since then wouldn't have been possible for me - it would have ended up being a post about how clever I am.

And it wouldn't have done much good. There are a lot of people doing the Feminist Classics readalong, right now, and I suppose the direct analysis of what Wollstonecraft said will be done far better by someone else. And to be honest, the thing that strikes me most powerfully about Wollstonecraft has nothing directly to do with her ideas.

The thing that's most haunting to me about Mary is how ideals can betray you.

All of us are children of our time, all of us, no matter how much genius we might possess. Everything we think is, in this sense, trapped inside a time, it is impossible to say anything that is completely 'timeless.' There's no such thing. This feels like a strange thing for me to say, because I read classic literature, after all, I sit and read books that are advertised as 'timeless classics'. IT's a lie. Shakespeare, if we drop our reverence for a moment, is terrifically dated. Look at, say, how all the women in his plays fit a short list of basic types. Look at his fawning adoration of kings and aristocracy. And as beautiful as the language is - there's a reason we don't enjoy it until we learn it - because, it's dated. Or the Odyssey: as grand and sweeping and epic as it is, to be perfectly frank, if it were published today, it wouldn't be terribly successful. I honestly don't think it would even be published, and at some level, this is because it isn't really that great for our time in some ways. IT is an artifact. Mary was, too.

And the great pain of literature and poetry is that, after all, for a lot of writers it is a sort of search for immortality. For some this is simple arrogance, they want to continue to be praised, even after they are dead. But not always. There is something innately human in a desire to find absolute truths, to find those things which can be relied on and really truly 'known'. Mythology was born this way, science was born this way, literature was born this way, most great human endeavors are part of this search for pure, incontrovertible truth.

In mathematics, perhaps, this is possible. Euclidean Geometry is as true now as it was when Euclid wrote it. Even in the less 'pure' sciences, perhaps there is some shadow of personality. I'm reading Hippocrates now, and one can feel in his writing, for all that it's largely guesswork and incorrect correspondences, at least the birth of a way of looking at health and medicine, that does continue on today, in some form. But in literature? No. There is no absolute literary truth. There is no provable conception of beauty. Philosophy has this fault, too, so does political science.

But, despite all this, more souls through history have stood and declared in defense of unprovable ideals than will ever stand in defense of Euclidean geometry. More souls have willingly died at the flag of the vague and misinterpreted than will die defending Newton's laws (this is not to attack the power and passion of science mind you). This is why we keep having Wollstonecrafts, and Shakespeares, and Virginia Woolfs, all in retrospect perhaps wrong in some ways, but nonetheless awe-inspiring in their defense sometimes of their very wrongness.

And who knows? Underneath all the veneer of wrongness (I do not think that modesty, for instance, is some great ideal of feminism that should be a measure of the success of women's liberation), there are germs that FEEL so incontrovertibly true, that you want to think there is something absolutely true to them. But, the moment you verbalize or systemize it, it will betray you.

This is what happened, after all, to Mary herself. Her husband, William Godwin, was himself a starry-eyed idealist, one of the early forerunners of the anarchist movement, which was for many years, the gold standard of wild idealism - at it's core, after all, anarchism seems to rely on the supposition that people, when left to their own devices, will do good instead of ill. And Godwin believed this, right down to the middle. So, when his wife died, he wrote a book, telling the truth about her life, because he genuinely and honestly believe his wife was the heroine of her life.

Was Godwin naive? Did he really think this book would not tarnish his wife's reputation? He had to have known. Godwin was an idealist, but he wasn't stupid. He had to have known that what he saw as a heroine, the world's standards saw as a a villainess, or even worse in the world's view, as a despicable, whorish, hysterical woman. At some level, it's difficult for me to grapple with this. His wife was dead, and he sacrificed her public memory to his own ideals. People, his reasoning went, SHOULD like her story, and to lie about it would be to betray the things he believed in. It was a quixotic joust at a windmill - only his used his wife as the lance. Quixote may be knocked off his horse in that situation, but the lance gets snapped in half.

But then, maybe that's how it should be. Mary was herself an idealist, after all, and the idealist is infamous for being willing to give up everything for the cause - everything. Even things that maybe are harder to give up than life. What would Mary think? Would she have been ashamed, if she were alive? Would she have been angry? Angry at her husband, or at the world that wouldn't accept that she acted as bravely as she could under the circumstance? She after all, acted similarly with a sister, who she encouraged to leave her husband, plunging her afterwards into horrible poverty. She was no stranger to the grand gesture.

I know this isn't the same for everyone, but this part of what I love in classic literature: seeing the grand gesture, the grand, quixotic leap towards the unreachable. Every single author falls - when you leap toward the sun, after all, the best you can hope for is that you stay in the air as long as possible. The sun will. not. catch. you. And there is something morbid and discouraging at seeing the places where these great lost souls fall to the rocks, the shapes and texture of their broken bodies. But, before they hit the ground - before that, you see the arc of the flight, the twist of the limbs, the thrust forward of the breast, as if that extra centimeter might be just enough to carry you... somewhere. And that curve, that twist, that sturggling hopelessness, there's no beauty quite like it. IT almost makes my own, tiny worthless little twists and arcs and thrusts seem, in dim reflection, perhaps to have their own traces of dignity

Romantic Friendship in the 19th Century

2011-01-05T21:38:00.000-06:00

I just recently finished the book "Cold Mountain", a book concerning several people in the South during the Civil War (as a side note, I found the storyline about the man kind of dull and overcooked - I am curious is me and my proclivities, or if other people felt this way?). Two of these people, Ada and Ruby, are women living in a little town in the Blue Ridge Mountains. It's deep into the war, at the point when almost all men are engaged in the war, and the women are, as it were, left behind doing the work they've always done, plus the work, in their case, of running a farm. Ada is a former rich girl who has no idea how to do these practical things, Ruby is a sort of societal cast-off with an amazing (and let me say, deeply intriguing) drive to work, who moves in on equal terms with Ada, to co-run the large farm Ada has ended up with on her hands and let fall into disarray. The two grow extremely close, both of them, in many ways, teaching the other how to live an adult life, in different ways. This aspect of the book I found very moving. At one point after Ada (inevitably) finds the man, who was her fiance before he went off to war, there is a moving scene, understated, and sad, where Ruby tells Ada that she doesn't need to marry the man, that they can run the farm without him. Ada tells her that she knows, but the she wants the man. And Ruby smiles quietly, and sets up for them to have a bit of time alone together.

Reading the scene was the most powerful moment in the book, because I could feel how palpably Ruby wanted things to stay just as they were, particularly because Ruby, a child born in abject poverty and forced to shift for herself all her life really has no other moment in the whole book where she lets her guard so completely down. She is, in a very valid way, a woman deeply in love, who knows that their relationship won't stay the way it is.

But, and this is what was so powerful to me, when I say in love, I don't mean romantically, not at all. She is sad things are falling apart, but I never feel like she is jealous, per se, of the man, or that she is attracted to Ada in a physical way. The relationship is what we now call 'only platonic'. I think the 'only' in this is a sad reflection of our times.

Before the latter half of the 19th century, it was actually remarkably common for people to have deep, powerful friendships with people of the same sex. It's interesting, because historians read the artifacts of these friendships now, and the assumption is, frequently, that the relationship was homosexual. Abraham Lincoln is an excellent example. Lincoln and his friend, Joshua Speed, spent years sharing a bed, and remained lifelong friends, exchanging letters that, in many ways, feel more like what we think of as love letters than anything he ever exchanged with Mary Todd. Emily Dickinson's life-long devotion to her sister-in-law is another example, or Shakespeare's many poems written to an unknown man or men.

This is not to denigrate or disprove the many historians who suggest that some of these relationships were sublimated homosexual relationships, or even covers for actual physical relationships. I imagine this happened at the time. At the same time, I think that some of them WEREN'T romantic relationships. And I think that's wonderful (as a sidenote, I would suggest that some of the poems written about women by men, and vice-versa, may similarly have been the admiration between extremely close friends).

Such a relationship cannot exist easily anymore, of course. A man hugging a man now is a joke, a byword, something funny in movies because it's uncomfortable. IT's something we mock because it's frightening. I think this is tragic. Friendship has become something that must retain a certain distance and boundary. In some ways, this is perhaps healthy, and a sign of the increasing equality of the genders. A hundred years ago, men's and women's worlds were so seperate that they practically spoke different languages, and it must have been very difficult to communicate across that chasm on some levels. Perhaps in some ways, the romantic friendship was for some people a way of feeling parts of closeness and intimacy that society did not account for between men and women. At the same time, it leads one to wonder - we have to an extent fetishized sexual-romantic love to the point where we presume it is the power more binding than any other - after all, can you imagine a romcom about two people who loved each other deeply but without a hint of sex between them? And I think that in a sense this makes it difficult even within marriages - because the assumption in a marriage is that the romantic aspect of the relationship (in our newer conception of the word romantic) is the penultimate expression of closeness, and I would suggest that this is an illusion that does nto hold up long in many relationships. The friendship aspect of marriage - that one should marry their best friend, and foster that friendship throughout - becomes the sort of adorable side note, the humdrum, uninteresting part of the relationship (again, how many romcoms involve people who don't really like each other falling in love in spite of that?). To some extent one wonders if perhaps it would be easier to marry by choosing someone that they are close friends with, whatever the gender or appearance, and just letting sex follow on from that (I'm a bit biased since I fell in love over letters that had nothing to do with sex...). I don't know. I don't mean to make little of romantic, erotic love. It is what it is. But I think we've forgotten that we can care, deeply and powerfully and madly and beautifully, even foolishly sometimes, or jealously, or desperately, for someone without it being a call of hormones.

My Anniversary, Rosy Thornton, and Love

2010-12-23T07:20:00.000-06:00

So yesterday was my anniversary of being married to Amanda for 11 years, and for the 11th time, I woke up yesterday with a sudden humble realization of who it was that I had married.

There is a part of me that wanted to wait to write something about it, today. There are two kinds of people you remember in this world. I have a tendency towards the grand gesture, myself, and that puts me into one type. Living with me, on a day to day basis, is I'm sure immensely frustrating, because I'm really only good at these little stabs of kindness, flashes of very bright light as it were.

Over the last month, though, I've been reading a book Amanda recommended to me, a romance by Rosy Thornton called Crossed Wires. Usually romances depict the grand gesture, and so people confusedly think that the grand gesture is what healthy love is built on. Crossed Wires has in it no moment like this - in fact, the one moment that MIGHT have been a grand gesture ends up being a big mistake that muddles up the relationship for a while. Crossed Wires, instead, is the story of two people who fall in love over a stream of a thousand kindesses, a thousand tiny beauties that they notice in each other.

This is the kind of beloved Amanda is, which is why originally I wanted to wait until today to write about her - Amanda is not, to me, the wife of the anniversary or the birthday. When I think of Amanda, I do not think of bright moments punctuating the dark. Amanda instead is better, becasue hse burns steady and true all the time. Being married to Amanda is not like an Anniversary, where you are waiting for the moment when they do whatever it is they've planned, its comforting and continuous and immensely, immensely powerful, which is very different.

At the same time, now that I write my post up on the morning after my anniversary, I wish I had written it yesterday. I have a tendency to romanticize the unexpected - to, in fact, react to the steady, comforting stream of being loved by a saint by trying to make my little flashes brighter and brighter, so that hopefully they'll last a bit longer until the next time I remember to flash (and hopefully brighten up the muddle I make of loving someone day to day and being loved). The thing I've learned from being married to Amanda, though, is that love is about kindness, not about impressions. It's about comfort, not about roller-coasters. And the irony, of course, is that as much as I am confused, awed, sometimes even slightly frightened to realize how much my wife loves me, the more it makes me want to love better in return - Amanda makes me want to be unselfish and kind.

Yesterday, I ended up running errands for a big chunk of the day. One errand was getting my haircut. The hair stylist ws cutting my hair and asked me how I was, and my first instinct was to complain - it had been a long day, and one filled with lots of little worreis. IT's easy, and it's my tendency, to perceive life as a battle. But I realized that while I coudl recite lots of things that COULD be unpleasant things, that in fact, I flet very calm and quiet and happy - something that is admittedly not my most common impression. So I responded back, "Oh, I'm wonderful. Today is my anniversary." And I wished, very much that I was holding Amanda's hand. Here's to another year, and hopefully one where I can hold it more often, more steadily, more like Amanda holds mine.

Fear and a Handful of Dust

2010-12-11T08:57:00.000-06:00

I made a snide comment earlier today, about Victor Hugo, how certain elements exist in all his books - this was in mind, because I've just finished listening to my third of his novels: Toilers of the Sea, a very Hugo-ish novel about a man from one of the Channel Islands struggling against the elements. I loved the novel to death, another consistent element of Victor Hugo novels, that I neglected to mention this morning. It was wonderful, I listened to the end while grocery shopping, and knew just where it would end up pretty early on, but just about started crying walking the aisles of the grocery store.

So, if I enjoyed it so much, why did I feel the urge to make a snide comment?

In specific, here is what I said:

"How to recognize a Victor Hugo novel:

1) Accidental love triangle
2) Heroic Gesture
3) Suicide near the end
4) Tangents
5) French People"

I do not intend to make of this comment more than it was. I think it sounded not too mean-spirited, a sort of gentle ribbing between friends. So, this post will not be one of my confessionals, I promise. But the question itself is interesting to me - why, if I really enjoyed the novel, did I feel the need to be snarky about it? I didn't say anything nice about it, which is what one would expect in a perfect world where I loved the novel. Why?

Well, I will tell you, after much thinking - it's a kind of self-defense. I don't think this is particularly uncommon. To love a thing is to give power to it, and power to others who know of your love. Love is a distilled and keened kind of vulnerability. And we live in a world, honestly, where it's necessary to keep yourself safe. Say all you will about how it should be from a practical standpoing, but having had people laugh over things I thought were sacred and beautiful, and it's a painful thing. I've done the laughing too, I know how easy - and socially acceptable - it is to twist each other's knives.

Fear of other people (or of myself in the midst of other people, more precisely), though, is a theme I probably talk abotu too much already. What's more interesting is that part of this fear, this vulnerability is a vulnerability to the book itself.

People spend a great deal of time talking about how a book can change your life for the better, how books can salve wounds, or staunch sorrows, or teach lessons. But people seldom mention the ways a book can stab you, mock you, or break your heart. In order to let a book change you, you HAVE to unshield yourself.

I have experienced this myself, in the best and worst of books. I read a book earlier this year that nudged me into a good few months of depression. I read a Jeffrey Archer book when I was about 12 that has a scene that has gnawed painfully at me ever since. Nor is it simply a matter of 'this book really made me sad'. In my more lucid moments, I can look at some of the books that I love, and see what they've made of me - and how it is sometimes a bad thing. Victor Hugo is a good example, one that probably goes back to why I avoided being honest with myself in my tweet.

I read Les Mis a long, long time ago, and loved it. Something in the way it echoed and spoke felt very familiar and honest to me. The problem is, of course, Hugo is a wild-eyed romantic idealist, and the echoes of his hopes for a lot of things - for love, for revolution, for the success of virtue over the world - do not necessarily reflect the world. One of the reasons I never dated in high school (one reason, of many), for instance, is because all of my favorite love stories (Valjean and Fantine, Quasimodo and Esmeralda, to an extent Romney Leigh and Aurora Leigh) were these wild, chaste, hopeless loves, loves that cannot be, and that are beautiful because they exist precisely BECAUSE they cannot be. Love, in real life, doesn't work that way. When I did finally get married, this desire for the ideal, for a love affair that told a story, instead of a love affair that was real and present, gnawed at me, made me feel as if I was failing to live up to my ideals, made me do wildly, stupidly foolish things as a result. I don't BLAME this on Victor Hugo (and his various friends). To write an ideal is beautiful and valuable, and I would be horrified if I could forget I'd ever read them. To an extent, this part of Hugo is so imbued into me, now, that I can't even realistically tell you 'this is where I stop and Hugo starts' - I am to an extent the man that Les Miserables made me (along with many other books). But, to be the man that Les Miserables made me is as dangerous (for me and others) as it is comforting.

Yesterday, Ms Amy put up a quote about characters on Tumblr, and I think it gnaws, in a way, at the duality of this power. The thing that caught me up most in the quote was that the book tv show, in this case, tore her in two different directions: it made her wonder if she could keep watching, and knowing she won't ever not watch. There is something horrible about a well-written character, a great and terrible part to it, because if we allow ourselves to engage entirely with a book, then we can feel for these figments of someone else's imagination as powerfully as for a real person. This is a dangerous proposition, one that produces situations that are almost, ALMOST horrifying. When I look back on my childhood, and try to think of the people I felt closest to, I felt far closer to Anne Shirley, Ozma, Galadriel, than I did to any of my real life friends. There is a little part of me that thinks of Wuthering Heights as a companion from high school who has stayed closer to me than any of my other companions of that time. And my relationship with Emily Dickinson, now, bears a sort of emotional intimacy in my mind, a sort of seriousness and intensity, that makes me feel at times as if I am waiting for a friend to come home who never will. But, you don't talk about it this way in real life, in everyday. IF you do, it's a joke, it's playing. Celebrating Emily Dickinson's birthday is a silly thing. REmembering how I felt about Galadriel is sort aww-cute-adorable in the way that we react to any story about the innocence of childhood. I see other people say things about books, and sometimes, I think I sense that same hesitance, that same sort of terrified self-ignorance, and I wonder if this is something other people feel.

The other thing Ms Amy's quote did, the thing that finally made me change the original topic I was going to write about in reaction to Toilers of the Sea (the idea of 'struggling against nature' and 'subduing nature'). In the middle of the quote, as she talks about how a character exists in the nether regions of the emotions she inspires, she (mis)quotes T.S. Eliot's most famous quote: "I will show you fear in a handful of dust." The full quote is longer:

(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),

And I will show you something different from either

Your shadow morning striding behind you

Or your shadow at evening rising to meet you;

I will show you fear in a handful of dust.

I will not begin to pretend that I knew what Eliot 'meant' in the Wasteland. I know people spend their lives trying to understand the poem. But for me, this gnawed at me, when I first read it, and again when I saw this in the midst of Amy's quote yesterday. To me, feeling about a person is like carrying a shadow - we can never carry a shadow on purpose, because it isn't really there, but we carry one continuously nevertheless, a shadow that can loom larger and larger as the sun gets cloer and farther from the horizon, until night when the shadow melt into the omni-shadow of lightlessness, and everyone's shadows sort of mingle until the sun returns to tease our bits apart into individual self. Emotions are only safe because, at some level, like a shadow they remain attached when the sun comes up. We each carry our own, and noone else's. To love a thing we have made up ourselves, or interpolated from a book, this is different. There is nothing casting the shadow, it's like a reverse kaleidoscope, little shafts of shadow ever whirling inwards and inwards on themselves, inescpable, and ever comingling, perhaps to form our own shadows. Imbued with meaning, but completely ineffable, inseperable (this happens, eventually with people too, we create our own internal shadows of them). But that is the handful of dust - the infinitely ineffable, gathered together to stare at, to see the two simultaneous horrors, that that which we thought was nothing, was escapable, is in fact a thing, a thing that comes about and can be held in the hand, and msut be reckoned, and at the same time, that all the significances of the world, all the things we feel matter, are just as much nothing as this nothing. Shadows falling, overlapping, combing and shifting, passing through each other, affecting and reflecting (or the reverse of reflecting), but still at some level, atomic, able to touch and combine only in the darkest, shortest moments. This simultaneous isolation into individuality, and knowledge that one's self is simply an absence, the reverse shadow of all the things that have made it, is the struggle that religions have been born over, that philosophers have tried to rationalize, that humans conquer nations and throw themselves off bridges for. And narrative is as close as we can get to it, which is it's combination, in a way of horror and power and beauty all at once.

People always quote Nietzsche when he said that if you stare at the abyss long enough, the abyss stares back. Then why do men stare at the abyss so long? Maybe it's that the abyss is the only thing that can truly stare back.

Thoughts on Heroism From the Odyssey

2010-12-07T22:53:00.000-06:00

With Ms Trish's recently completed readalong (which I did a horrible job of contributing to, sorry Trish), I have read the Odyssey three times now. I've read three different translations (my favorite, though I know this is geeky, is the old, inaccurate poetic one by Alexander Pope). I've been told the story in a number of forms outside of this, I've even read Ulysses.

And every time I read this story, my main impression of it is strengthened: that Odysseus and Telemachus are big jerks.

Let me apologize, this is in some ways my failing. I am aware of why I don't like him - it's the classic issue of a 21st century reader trying to sympathize from someone from a very different time and place. Intellectually I can understand this, but it doesn't change the fact that I really loathe the guy. He's just not very nice. At all. Ever.

Looking at WHY I dislike him so much, however, was kind of illuminating to me, so since I want to at least show that I MEANT to be a good participant in the readlong, I will try to put a few of these thoughts down.

Of course, at one level, it's very simple to explain why I dislike Odysseus. He's a misogynistic, violent, seemingly unloving man, dishonest on a whim, unabashed about taking advantage of others, and cruel to even the slightest failing of others (killing the maids of the house because they had sex with teh suitors puts the final nail in for me). But then, of course, I'm left to step back, and ask myself: why was a man like this considered heroic? And why do I hate him so much, when I can like other heroes from later in history that are obnoxious in their own ways? Why, in short, does Odysseus, whether I like him or not, not feel like a hero, when clearly he is meant to?

The trick, for me, in looking closely is that Odysseus's heroism is almost entirely selfish. Throughout the book, his entire purpose is for himself - he wants to get home, and get his life back. HE wants to be back with his wife, but only after he's tested her loyalty. He wants to meet his son, but only if he's worthy of him. He wants to reward those loyal to him, and punish those who were not. In Odysseus's character there is not. one. single. shred. of altruism. No ideals, no grand purpose, or meaningful direction. He just wants to get home, get his stuff back (his wife being more or less just slightly noisier stuff from his point of view, by the way), and get back to being the king.

At some level, this is honest. After all, at some level someone like, say, Joan of Arc to take a somewhat more contemporary mythic hero, is much more selfish. Sure, she goes out with a purpose - to save France and glorify God - but it's not really out of the goodness of her heart. The religious martyr can never do anything truly selfless, because every good thing becomes an investment in some future heaven. Joan's suffering, in some sense, doesn't matter to her, because she knows that when she dies, if she remains faithful, god will pluck her up and reward her for her goodness.

In some sense, then, the closest character to this modern martyr-hero model in the Odyssey would be, say, Eumaeus, the faithful swineherd who is a slave to Odysseus, and who could have made his life easier by being craven with the suitors, but who is loyal to his 'god', believing that when his master returns (or when he dies and the Gods see what kind of slave he was), he will be rewarded.

Not all modern heroes are martyrs, of course. Not all are even saints, to be honest - one of the more popular heroes of the last few years would be Captain Jack Sparrow from Pirates of the Caribbean. And he's the latest in a long series of rogue heroes - Han Solo is another great example. This woudl seem to be much closer to the old Odysseus model. Sparrow is not a paragon of virtue - on the contrary, his entire motivation is simply to get his ship back, to be captain again, etc. But here too there are differences, two of them really - one the writer juxtaposes the rogue character against someone truly wicked (Captain Barbossa, say, or the Galactic Empire and Darth Vader), making the rogue the lesser of two evils. Who is the greater evil in the Odyssey? The suitors? There's some argument to be made for this, but not to the same extent, particularly because of the second reason: rogue heroes are always underdogs. If they aren't, they cease to be heroes. Third, the sins of an underdog must be presented as, more or less, venial. Sparrow was a pirate, yes, but notice you never see him kill anyone except for Barbossa, you never see him rob anyone who can't manifestly afford it, etc. Of course, a moment's thought will tell us - thi sis a pirate. Of course in the normal everyday line of his business, he's going to rob a ship, which will require the use of martial force, and the indiscriminate robbery of the cargo no matter who it belongs to. But if he did these things on screen, his desire for a ship would cease to be easy to empathize with. Finally, rogues are pretty much universally comic characters, usually even a bit clumsy and clownish. In a serious picture, we'd engage the thinking part of our brain, the part that makes judgements.

Then of course there is the unbelievably competent hero - the action hero for instance. Take, Gibbs, from Amanda's favorite show, NCIS. Taciturn, endlessly loyal, impossibly talented, always wins. This is more the fantasy type - the man designed to be somenoe we yearn for, yearn to be or yearn to be with (Lara Croft, for instance, might be a female example). At surface level, I would say these are unlike Odysseus as well - again, they are always devoted to something - they are patriots, or protectors, or altruists, etc.

But in a sense, this is the closest equivalent we have to Odysseus, the man who is washed ashore after a shipwreck, and nonetheless can outplay the best people in the land at any sport, who can slip in and kill all the suitors almost singlehandedly, who could outwit the entire city of Troy. And this sort of points out the most interesting fact to me - that the main difference is simply one of cultural values. We, as a culture, value patriotism, and protecting the honor of or our country. The Greeks, at least in the evidence of the Odyssey AND the Iliad, fought more for the honor of the individual. There's some overlap in tribe and family loyalties, but even there, these things are mostly shown as simply extensions of the individual - Odysseus protects Penelope because her honor is his honor. When a friend dies in the Odyssey, it is sad because Odysseus has lost something useful or pleasing to him. To an extent, when a friend dies in NCIS, it is Gibbs' duty to pay back the affront, rather than something he does to protect his honor.

This points not to some civilizing effect of progress, I think, but rather simply shows that there are certain things in our current heroes that are equally ephemeral - heroes from a hundred years ago, for instance, often feel dated to us now, so will ours in a hundred years or so. So the hero who is a model of a 'perfect man' will appear less than perfect with time. And I would venture to say, that's a good thing. Gibbs, at a base moral level, isn't a morally superior hero really, and patriotism isn't really more productive, in the long term (or less selfish) than selfish defense of personal honor - after all, we could not fight wars without patriots, on BOTH sides of the conflict.

But then, of course patriotism has it's purposes, and is not an unalloyed evil. Patriotism and Nationalism, in many ways, were the birthing mothers of republicanism and democracy in the western world - they give a natural scope to a people's ambitions. Patriotism, additionally, does sometimes impel people to truly selfless acts in the defense and for the greater good of a group. The problem in the heroic formula of patriotism (or any other unshakeable loyalty) is in it's absolutism. A Gibbs would never, no matter what, betray his country. Just as an Abraham would never, no matter what, betray his god. In both cases, this produces an impetus in the unhealthy mind, towards extremism, in ways that it isn't difficult to find tragic examples of.

The personal honor of Odysseus, then, is very similar after all. Personal honor is not an unabashedly bad thing. A healthy respect for one's own individual welfare and reputation is, after all, at some level the basis of lawful civil society - there is never sufficient punishment available to deter crime, crime must be deterred because committing it has a social cost that is higher than it's physical benefits. Enlightened self-interest is a building block of civilization. Taken too far, though, it becomes the selfishness and mean-spirited hate of Odysseus.

The question, to me, then becomes what is the value of heroes? IS there forms of heroism that are valuable throughout generations? Or is heroism simply a structure we design to impel people to act in socially useful ways? What do you guys think? And with the age of nationalism and patriotism slowly in the decline, I think (a debatable point, I understand), what will be the next definition of hero, and will it be any better?

The Products of Writing While Angry

2010-11-29T13:49:00.000-06:00

I've just finished reading 'Maria, or the Wrongs of Woman', an unfinished novel by Mary Wollstencraft, and there is something that has been gnawing at me, an idea that Virginia Woolf presented in 'A Room of One's Own.'

Let me preface by saying that I'm glad I read this book, although it was VERY unfinished. But, the thing that gnawed at me was that the plot, while marvelously creative, is sometimes hijacked by the writing, and that this particularly gives one the feeling that, sometimes, the players in the book are there, sometimes, simply because there is another wrong Ms W wanted to display. There is no median life, there is no examination of an issue, simply a recitation of the author's opinion. And if the book was completed in the vein it was going (understanding of course that it WAS unfinished, and so this is only the bones of the work), I'm not really sure it would have been as powerful as she wanted - at least in the way she wanted. Reading it, I didn't feel a lot of emotion for the characters in the book, simply emotion for the woman who must have lived a life to inspire her to write the characters in the book (so, her anger on the pages DOESN'T come across as distant or sanctimonious the way that, say, Dickens does to me sometimes). At some level, the book is simply a melodrama, and a didactic melodrama at that. And this isn't in spite of, but rather BECAUSE you can feel how much the writer WANTS you to understand what it is she's trying to say.

So this returned me to Woolf, who in A Room of One's Own, at one point basically goes to explain why the writing of women over the last several hundred years was inferior to that of men (leaving aside, for a moment, whether this supposition is even true). One of the explanations she came up with was that a writer like, say, Charlotte Bronte had so much a sense of injuistice and anger that it imbued into her work and left it imperfect. Her basic point (and I'm wildly parpahrasing, and not a scholar to start with, so please correct me) was that someone like Shakespeare could only write what he wrote because he was comfortable enough and lived a just enough life that he need not feel anything that got in the way of his execution. (the idea of this is particularly fascintaing to me reading Woolf's own work)

This was a troubling idea to me when I first read it, and it's only become more troubled over the years. Something like, say, the poetry of Shelley is powerfully imbued with his own emotions, and this is part of why it's so powerful. It's difficult for me to imagine, say, Ozymandias being written without the fire of revolutionary fervor that sustained Shelley's life. This fire isn't subdued to keep it from tainting his work, it's instead the flames of it that burn bright enough for him to write by, in a way. This is true of any of the romantics to my mind, or as another example, to the Beat writers of the 50's.

But at the same time, one is left with the nagging question - why is it that feeling somethign powerfully can get in the way of expressing it? At some level, one CAN imagine it being easier for, say, Wollstencraft's romantic partner, one level removed from the problem of woman but still interested in the question, to write a powerful novel decrying it than she did (I speak this with some ignorance, I haven't read his novels that deal with anarchism and other ideas, yet, but the point I hope stands). I've done this myself - writing poems about things immediate and pressing can sometimes trick me into just shouting, instead of taking the time to consider and think. The more feeling, the more the lips are shut, in a sense.

But then, on the other hand, how are the problems in Maria more immediate to Wollstencraft than, say, the problems in 'Daddy' or 'Lady Lazarus' are to Sylvia Plath? And with Ms Sylvia, it's the immediacy and inevitably that reality imbued in her that MAKE those poems powerful, I think. If she had been writing about someone else's problems, as it were, she wouldn't have written as well.

Sometimes, I think, this is simply a matter of temperament. There are those tho feel things in such a way that the very feeling of them clarifies them, and then there are those who must muddle through a feeling, and look at it in hindsight before they can describe. The one can write something more fiery and scorching (say, Lady Lazarus), the other perhaps something with the power of nostalgia and hindsight, slower and more balanced (a good example might be A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, or even in a different way, Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man), and still others may be better of writing about the problems of others, playing advocates better than confessionals (maybe Les Miserables).

Another idea, maybe, is simply that we've learned to write the fiery present better over time. The confessional poets are, after all, in many ways a break from the past, as were the Romantics. But this is always a troubling idea - expressing what you feel is, after all, one of the oldest human urges, and it isn't too hard, no matter how far back one goes, to imagine that there are contradictions to a line of 'when people figured it out'. There is, perhaps, something to be said for the older literary bias against emotional writing (which does, after all still exist - how many scholars out there still think Plath is only beloved because she killed herself, and is in fact only a minor poet?). But it's difficult to make this a blanket reason.

Perhaps a better explanation is in the idea of literary crticism itself. I have over the past year read some Plato, and his quotation of Socrates, and one of the things that continously gnaws at and bothers me is this emphasis on 'perfection' and the ideal. Read, for instance, Socrates almost gleefully discarding 95% of the mythological, musical, and literary traditions as one of the precursors to describing the perfect state in 'The Republic', and if you love diversity of voices like me, you'll shudder a bit. So much of the ancient philosophy centers on teh ideal, the perfect. There isn't any such thing, and NOT for the reasons I was taught as a child I think, not because we're not CAPABLE of perfection the way Christianity has taught through the years. One of the reasons, at some level that it's difficult for me to imagine a fair version of Christ or Heaven is that is impossible for one person or place to be just what every human being would want it to be - one cannot hold that many contradictions in one object. Christianity classically took this issue and flipped it upside down, just as Plato does, and says that htis is simply because most people have not discovered, or fully understood, what it is that is ideal for them. IF we all knew everything, and understood fully the plans of God, we would all want the same thing - to sublimate our individuality, and become a piece of god, having sacrificed everything, including our selfdom. I can see the nobility in this idea, but I can also the vice in it - it is painful for me to read the Odyssey right now, and see how, for instance, the swineherd is praised for essentially becoming no more than an extension of his master.

It is my supposition that perfection cannot exist, becuase there IS no ideal, no one perfect state. Happiness is intrinsically contraidctory when described as a universal state, and there is no recipe for it, or even any universal test to see if it has been attained. This is, after all, the root of what makes human existence so isolating - each of us is prisoner of our own head, unable to open the door sufficiently to crawl out, or let anyone else crawl in. All we can do is hold things up to the bars so that the prisoners nearby can see them, perhaps occasionally reach something through so that someone else can touch them. For us, then, to assume we know the outlines of happiness, then, is to assume that each mind is essentially identical - it is to assume that difference is intrinsically wrongness, imperfection. The closest, after all, that the greeks seemed to come to appreciating difference, was in describing friendship or the idea of a soul mate - which is not so much saying difference is good, as that difference is something that can only be overcome by borrowing things from each other - that the differentness of the two individuals is a wrongness, but a remediable one, if only they can find each other.

But, this wrongness-feeling is deeply embedded in our culture, perhaps one might suppose looking at the behavior of animals sometimes towards their own outliers and freaks, genetic. And when it is inculcated day to day, it's very difficult to overcome. Looking at Maria through that lens, you can see Wollstencraft (or Dickens in some of his work, or Shelly in Prometheus Unbound, or Browning in her social justice poetry, or a thousand other examples) running against the edge of a cliff that she has been taught never to look past, for to look is to desire something wrong, it is to step over that cliff, and surely die. So, they stand at the edge of the cliff and wail that they cannot step off it, struggle to understand how to consign their 'imperfections' to a world that demands a standard they (or others whom they defend or love) are ill-suited to. So, to read the book with no appreciation of it's context, is to read dull, noisy circles, whirlpooling around a vortex that we want to understand, but never allowing itself to be sucked in. But, to read Maria, understanding how it must have felt to want to write it, but to be unable, to wish to be and not be all at once the thing that you are, that's a very different experience, and one I'm glad I had. After all, it's not so different from what some of us do now

Lovebirds Challenge

2010-11-27T19:35:00.000-06:00

First of all, I'm sorry I haven't been very talkative for a very long time. It's been a wild year, but I won't do a long, tiresome 'guess what I did last indefinite-time-period' post for you, I promise.

Instead, I wanted to let you know, Amanda and I are doing a little challenge together. Of course, I imagine you all already know that, since you posted it on her blog already, here. But I'm telling you again. So there.

Amanda and I have WILDLY different tastes, at times, so picking lists for her was somethign of a challenge, my sense of defeatism tells me she'll probably hate the two books I shouldn't have put on there... :D. But, I am excited about the ones she chose for me! I am so horrible about reading anything contemporary, it's fun to have someone push me into it in spite of myself. So I will be reading:

Reading Lolita in Tehran by Azar Nafisi - I've heard from everyone and their dog that this book is wonderful, so I'm looking forward to it. I really don't know that much about Iranian history, either, so it will be good to brush up.

Ella Minnow Pea by Mark Dunn - I honestly, intended to read this anyway. Word play, parable, semi-dystopia, epistolary, messages about what language means, cleverly funny title...

Plain Kate by Erin Bow - It's a fairy tale retelling, with a talking animal, that Amanda liked. Honestly, this is a confluence of factors so rare as to make the book valuable with no further explanation.

Little Children by Tom Perrotta - I don't know a lot about this book, but I do know it has a pedophile that is apparently an actual human being instead of a soulless monster, and it has Kate Winslet on the cover... I like Kate Winslet. She just seems like such a wonderful person.

Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett - The only one of Mr. Neil's books I've ever read is Blueberry Girl, and one book of Sandman comics. Mr Pratchett, I only know that Ms Nymeth loves him to death. And this book plays unshrinkingly with Christian Eschatology, which is awesome.

So, we'll see. I'm MORE worried Amanda will be coming to me in March, going 'Oh God, Jason, do I HAVE to finish this challenge?" ;P

God Desires, but Cannot Yearn

2010-11-27T19:21:00.000-06:00

Each single soul for a thousand thousand years
Has longed for something.
Six billion tiny vials of desire
That yearn and grasp
At something, something, something.

A thousand thousand years ago,
When first a creature
Something like a man,
Stood up and stared across a lake, alone.
We yearn to remember what he had,
To reclaim the secret germ
Of what-we-cannot-name.
The fruit of a tree in a garden
We wish we could vomit back up --
The burning flame of sword set
Tight in an angel's fist --
The flutter of a fig-leave
Across a lover's thighs --

------------------------

"A thousand thousand years ago," we cry,
"You, man who stood and looked across a lake, alone.
Who first could hear the echo in himself
When a gull cried out,
What did you know that we forgot?""

He does not answer.

But, I will tell you.
I will tell you what his secret was --
For I dreamed him up,
I wrapped my legs around him as I slept,
And murmured in his ear.

He murmured back, the primeval rolling gurgle
Of a voice choked in the dust his cattle stamped into the air,
A voice soaked deep with the sweat of his brow,
Soaked in the blood of the sacrifice,
Soaked in the moans of a woman giving birth.

And I will tell you what he said.

-----------------------

He woke the first time, long ago,
Before the serpent or the fruit,
Before the lake or gull or cooking fire.

He woke in a garden laid rich with all
The things God left nameless.
God asked him to go out and name these things --
But he would name nothing, but the little stream.
He looked at it, and ached,
And named it "I-have-longed."

It was then god thought to lay him to sleep,
To shiver out his rib,
To draw it long and flesh and bone.
And then to slip away while still his little playthings slept.

He woke, he told me, and saw her,
Sitting close,
A moan trapped in her throat,
Her eyes trained on the stream.

She turned and looked into his eyes,
And murmured soft as the young and tender sun,
"Come brother, come.
Come yearn with me -- I do not know what for."

And they sat together by the banks of "I-have-longed",
And yearned for something,
Something they could not name,
From a thousand thousand years before they came.

(Image by Madamepsychosis)

...and I stick my shest, and I'm off to the races again!

2010-09-03T21:43:00.000-05:00

So, Ms Trish recently posted something about 'Newsies!', kind 'cause I told her she should. So, I kinda feel bad now, beause, kinda I told her I was posting something about it. I've had these funny thoughts rolling around in my head around it for a few weeks. If you don't like musicals, or long drawn out overthought analyses of what amounts to a silly cabaret number, you may want to skip this post.

Because I not only will talk about Newsies, I will be talking about what is possibly the most underloved part of the film: the song 'High Times, Hard Times'.

For those of you who may be in the dark, Newsies was a movie-musical made back in the 90's, telling (loosely, mind you) the story of the Newsboys Strike in New York City around the turn of the century, when the newsboys of New York stood up to a pay cut from the likes of Pulitzer and Hearst. If you've never seen it, go now. Educate yourself. You can even watch the whole thing for free, on Youtube: starts here.

I LOVED this musical. It's corny, yes, it's unrealistic, the New York and the inhabitants of it look kind of like the idea you'd get of people-a-long-time-ago from reading Oliver Twist mixed with O Henry stories. They are the sort of adorable, good-hearted gamins that only exist in novels - and they dance, excellently, which just adds to the sense of realism, of course. But it's also wonderful, and full of songs that are great to sing along with, slightly unbelievable New York accents included (I am too timid to try the dancing, admittedly). And, what's more... alright, now here's where you'll chuckle and turn away from me... whether it's on purpose or not, it's also a wonderfully meaningful movie.

Possibly, as I said, the most reviled part of the movie by it's critics is the cabaret number. The Newsies decide to have a rally to build up support and excitement, and of course the lead character happens to be friends with a burlesque lady. And she's played by Ann Margaret. Yes, that Ann Margaret, the one in all the old Elvis movies (and in my wife's personal favorite, 'The Villain'). So, they do some untrained speechifying, and then, as the cops slip in to bust up the rally, the 'Swedish Songbird' performs a little musical number, entitled 'High Times, Hard Times.' So, here you go, the scene in question:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jDTqZElzcBs&feature=related

Mostly just the first 2-3 minutes. And since I know you'll want to sing ALONG, here's the singalong version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D2dbxFbUhds

So, now.

Now you're REALLY thinking I'm crazy, right?

But wait a minute. There's two sides of why I like this song (well, three, the third being that it's really fun to sing at the top of your lungs). On one side, look at Ann Margaret herself. Ann Margaret... ok, I'm just going to assume she's not reading my blog. She's kind of scary. No, I mean it. Ann Margaret - particularly in the garish stage makeup she wears in the scene - looks kind of phantasmagoric, kind of livid and desperate. Look how thrilled she is at the end of the song, and reflect, she performing for a bunch of teenage or younger kids, for free. In a movie where EVERYONE is spry and choreographed, Medda moves around the stage with an aching, tottering sort of leftover grace. She really FEELS like a cabaret girl spinning out the ends of a career beyond the realm of believability. Think, for a moment, most low class women in New York wouldn't even LIVE as long Ann Margaret, back then. She sings this terrifically banal little ditty, with it's implied dirty jokes, and forced rhymes, in this awful imitation of a Swedish accent.

But you know what, I think it's SUPPOSED to feel awful. Watch her as she's dragged off stage by the police, crying out to them to stop, that they're only children, and you see a real person, and you realize, the woman who they are wolf-whistling is less like a stripper and more like a mother for them (the chemistry is priceless earlier in the film with her, as well, and I recommend watching the whole thing). So, there comes the question - why put this scene in? Why take this nice 'hooker with a heart of gold' character and make her sing a cabaret piece? Roger Ebert, for his part, thinks it was just an excuse to stick an Ann Margaret number in the middle of the film. I don't.

Look now for a minute at the boys. Like I said, they crowd around the stage, wolf-whistling and cat calling, and shouting out that they're in love. The kids, here, already know how you are to behave, here - and it's easier to read this as a simple 'gosh, men were kind of trashy back then'. And there is that, too - if you want to see the genesis of a culture where women were objects, and men could do whatever they wanted with them, here it is, children being taught that this slowly dissolving woman is a piece of meat to be thrown on the skillet and eaten up.

But, there is more than that. These kids are miserable, poor little castoffs, the refuse of a city where most of the citizens were considered expendable anyway. And aside from the young hormones, there's somethign else to - a moment of communion and joy. And that's the real pain of this scene, to me. Nobody in this scene wants to be a monster, they all want to just be human, to have real relationships and joy, just simple joy. And this is the only place in their life that, for a moment, they're allowed to let their guards down, just a bit, and be, in a weird sort of way, actually children again. Taken to the cabaret, they are allowed to play. And, then, again, this is such a painful moment, this forced, cancerous sort of exuberance, both because you can see it training them to STOP being humans, to be animals, servants of the moment, instead of masters of their destinies (and to do this to others). Both sides of the exchange are broken, deeply broken. This mother gathers up the lost children of the city, only instead of a hen gathering her chicks beneath her wings, it's a 'floozy' gathering her children up in the folds of her poorly-cut dress. This is all they have, and even it is just a tool of a culture that wants to grind them into trained animals, and even this, is taken away.

And then, at the SAME time, as they're busted up, you see the mother, for a moment, shorn off from the ugliness of it all, by the very ugliness she's being attacked with, and for a moment, she's simply a woman who wants, so terribly much, to be kind, to take care of these children, there's simple human kindness, unmixed with any society's structures.

That's the mixture of things there, for me, and there's no pretty solution, just what happens at the end - a bunch of kids, still half-blinded by the very giants they're trying to overthrow, pushing back against the bulwarks of a society that wants them to learn to be dogs instead of men. And you turn the film off, and it's kind of pitiful, you realize, it isn't really like that, as Jack puts it at one point, they really were 'beat when they was born.' None of these kids are really any better off for all the courage, they're earning an extra halfpenny per paper, and on the road to being the dogs that the world is still teaching them to be. Jsut dogs with one fun little story to tell their puppies. That's it, nothing more.

And yet, 100 years later, the world, truly, has changed. And that's the juxtaposition that's so exciting, and confusing, and terrifying, and beautiful. Somehow, failure after failure after failure, in the end, the world changes

To Think in Curves

2010-09-03T13:34:00.000-05:00

Parabolic vectors float

across a sea of simple blank.

The soul transfixed with formulas

Dependence, duodecima,

I saw it start just as it sank -

Unknowing, keep its path by rote.

The flexibility of curves:

An algebraic miracle

Tweak variables, or invert sets -

The formula just smiles and lets

The little mathematician pull

The thought into a gentle swerve.

But,

My thoughts have bottoms, tops and sides.

My thought have limits, edges, lives

Of digits, integers. I hide

Behind constriction.

But,

Could I but calculate this 'me'

Into a logarithm rise,

A swooping sort of curve, to glide

Out lightly to the sea!

For the Girl With a Scar on her Left Wrist

2010-08-13T16:49:00.000-05:00

Pretty, pretty eyes,
They told me.
Pretty, pretty eyes,
As clear and green as a go-light.

Nobody ever hit me,
Ever did me ill enough -
the real hard grain of it
is deeper, too deep.

The real grain of it sits just just just
Behind my left eye,
A little crevice,
Just between skull and orb.
I can feel it when I turn my eyes.

I try to ignore it,
but it does grind,
the little grain,
it cannot help itself.
It is immobile,
drawing jagged images
an inch behind my sight.

Don't cry little thing,
Don't cry, don't cry,
Such pretty, pretty eyes.
Pretty pretty eyes,
Kept still,
Locked up,
Behind glass, to be viewed.

My head is a display case,
and if only held them still
my eyes would never grind,
never grind, but my eyes still have to turn sometimes, sometimes, sometimes, sometimes.

And the crystal grinds,
behind my stoic eye,
never drip,
never weep, but the crystal still grinds,
the sand still scrapes it's images,
just an inch behind my sight.

And so I put my eyes into my left arm,
and massage them open,
and let them weep.

(I would love to attribute this beautiful picture, but I don't know where I found it. If it's yours, please, please let me know)

A Love Poem to my Wife

2010-08-13T13:34:00.000-05:00

I love, because the world is oh so large:

The world, it's like a sea without a shore,

Just islands rising from the ocean floor,

And th'other sea above, of moons and stars.

An island is too fickle. Though the sand

Can welcome little boats, and let them rest,

It takes a single wave's incautious crest

To pestle ship against the mortar-land.

So I? I choose to love a sacred star.

Perhaps I'll never reach her, but I'll try.

Perhaps a ship can't sail into the sky,

But I'll always know which way to tip my spars.

An Afternoon Drive Through Austin, Texas

2010-08-01T22:50:00.000-05:00

I love Austin, it's a beautiful city. It has some disadvantages mind you - it's in Texas, which is a strong mark against it for me. But it really is a great town.

The fascinating thing about Austin, in terms of it being an American city, is an accident of geography. Texas is NOT a state well known for it's urban planning, and most of the major cities I've visited exhibit not so much urban sprawl, as a sort of urban ooze. San Antonio is a perfect example - it's like, at some point someone dropped a bomb in the San Antonio river, only instead of a ring of dust flying out from it, there is a slow moving wave of human habitation. So there is a certain tourist life to the very center of the city, then there is this ring of emptying, or decaying subdivisions, largely built out of ramshackle and chicken wire, to last for a few years before it begins to fall apart. Houses, in San Antonio, are like cars - sure, some people keep them for decades, but oy vey, they put a lot of work into them after the first 3 or 4. Outside the ring of desertion, then, is this ring of trendy neighborhoods, always at the far reaches of the city, always clawing onto barely tamed land - one such neighborhood physically collapsed, last year, when a retaining wall collapsed, and the neighborhood backyards began pouring out like water through a burst dam. These houses, built in shifting backfill walled in by a pile of concrete blocks, were behemoth McMansions, more expensive than two of my house (I'm on the far edges of the ring of the deserted, just behind the blast cloud).

Austin is different. Sometimes, maybe once every 3 months, I have to work in Austin for my present job (the job I am currently thinking of changing, mind you, a fact which may later be cogent to the story). The office for Pearson in Austin is on the northern edge of the city, by Pflugerville, and I, coming from San Antonio, drive into the southern end of the city. Austin is, as this implies, a city that has ends, instead of a circle. Originally built to be a nice, modest town, as it began to burgeon, it became apparent that it was easier to go North and South than East and West (Hills, mostly the other directions), and so the city has slowly puffed into a long cylinder, like foaming pipe snake. In the center is the university, and the capitol, and at both ends is a burgeoning wall of houses, falling on top of each other, clinging as closely as possible to the one artery of the city: Interstate 35.

This is what makes Austin, when experienced as a driver, fascinating (I imagine those who must drive it regularly use other words) - That there is only one way in, and only one way out. IH-35 is not some beltway, routing around the city to dump you on the other side, it is the aorta of the city, pumping cars straight into the heart. To escape San Antonio if one is on the edge, one may simply circle round the outer-most ring, until they reach the 'Abandon all hope' gates at I 10, I 37, or I 35. To escape Austin? One most follow Dante through the great rings, closer and closer to the frozen (or in this case, boiling) heart of the inferno, and crawl down the devil's tail, only then to struggle through purgatory before reaching the paradise of a highway with sensible traffic patterns.

Like I said, I work on the Northern edge, just where Beatrice waits for Virgil to pass Dante on (only the road leads on towards Waco, which makes a pretty poor paradise), and I live in San Antonio, which is somethign like Limbo, I suppose, only without the Greek Philosophers, so this journey in and out of the Devil's Maw is a familiar one. It's usually not so bad. I get along with sinners, really. If one leaves at the right time, it can be quite pleasant, to tell the truth (one can overlook the seedy triple X shops that slaver over the highway like hungry gargoyles, after all, with a bit of practice). The drive in, this Monday, was really quite pleasant. There was a moment halfway where I frowned, to realize that my air conditioning was not blowing cold air anymore, but I have a '93 Chevy Corsica, one learns to live in the moment and accept life's blows. So I opened the window, which is kind of nice when you're driving fast.

The journey home, however, was an epic. A tale to tell my grandchildren. If I were a John Steinbeck, it is the sort of story I could use as a metaphor for the very soul of what Texas, no, America, no, not even that, what humanity ITSELF is.

You see, what happened was, I called Amanda, to see how she was towards the end of the day, and she had gone out to visit her family with the boys, during the day, and she said they were staying late - then that they were staying for dinner. Being a practical man (well, not really, but go with me on this one), and knowing that we're trying to build up a nice cushion in case we should have to move, I made a suggestion at this point - why don't I just stay a bit late? There's a lot of work to do in Austin, and I could get a bit of overtime, which never hurts anyone. What this meant was, I left around 4:00. It had been a long day, and I am such a clever fellow, that I thought ahead.

"Hrm..." I said to myself, "I am leaving at four, which is rather close to rush hour, isn't it? And my air conditioning, as I recall, is not working terribly well. And I'm a bit thirsty anyway. You know what? I have earned fruit smoothie. I shall get one, and drink it on the way home, it'll last a good 40 minutes, if I space it out, after all, and by then I should be through the city, and onto the highway, and the hottest part of the trip will be over!"

What a lovely idea! Oh, though, my friends, woe be unto thee, thou arrogant children, woe, if thou wouldst say to thyself, "My God is a patient god, he is a forgiving god. I shall sin a little, I shall sip smoothies, and sing Bob Dylan loudly, and walk very swiftly through hell, and God shall beat me with a few stripes, but he shall say, then, 'come now, thou little one, into my presence'." Oh, ye fools! Ye fair, foolish virgins! Would that I could teach you to keep close to the ways of the Lord, to walk in the paths of avoiding-rush-hour righteousness! Thy god is a just god, but he is a fearful god to those who disregard his warnings!

I learned these things, because I saw a vision, as I pulled my A/C-less '94 Chevy Corsica onto the IH-35 access road. In my vision there were three forms, two were quiet black men, one sweating profusely, the other in a broad straw hat, both in brightly coloured vests like construction workers wear. Were they doing construction? No! No, do you think I would ramble on this long, if that's the only story I could tell you? No, they were nice fellows, doing what is done in Texas intersections everywhere: collecting money for a church ministry. I don't generally give to these ministries. It's nothing personal - I disagree with their underlying reasoning, but we more or less agree in the long term outcomes: drug addicts hsould be helped, the homeless sheltered, the sick taken care of, etc, etc. I don't give, because I never have cash, and because it's difficult to check the veracity of the claims of a man holding a ten gallon jug full of quarters towards your window. It's nothing personal.

"But," sayeth the observant reader, "But, Jason, you said there were three actors in our passion play! Who is this third?"

This third, my friends, is the hero of our drama, a man on a desperate mission to save the world from... something, unclear. I first noticed this man from a distance - he had just arrived I later surmised, but traffic was backed up a bit already, so I was some ways from him. I could only see him gesticulating, leaning in and dancing around wildly while he shouted at the ministry workers. He seemed animated, deeply concerned. HE would shout, and dance, and shake his fists for a few minutes, then stop, turn to the cars, and bow, deeply, profoundly, powerfully, his hands first clutched to his chest, then thrown before him, in a theatrical gesture that suggested either great sorrow, or an operatic tenor accepting the adulations of a standing crowd. One could almost imagine him picking up the scattered roses on the stage of the Access Road Playhouse, and drawing them in to his breast, to call out 'Oh, my adoring ones, you are too kind! I am but a humble musician!'

The other gentleman looked merely confused. Perhaps slightly incredulous. And then the light turned green. The third man turned, and began again to shout, to gesticulate wildly at his two companions, who by this point were sitting on the guardrail, dumbfounded. Only, now, the man in his turning had stuck a foot directly into an active lane of traffic. The cars took a moment to process that. There was a moment of stillness, a dramatic pause. One could imagine the drivers of the Ford Expedition blocked by the man's wayward foot, speaking in hushed whispers,.

"Oh, Carlotta, can he have? He has broken the fourth wall! The arrogance! His performance... it will all be for naught!"

"Marius! How can you speak that way, about the great Pavaligni? He is the greatest tenor in Austin! If he has broken the fourth wall, it's.... there is some genius that we, mere audience members, cannot yet understand! Is it possible, is it CONCEIVABLE, my beloved Marius, that we, we humble drivers of a Ford Expedition, have been invited to participate in the performance? That we, with our humble skills, are asked to play a role?"

"It is... it is inconceivable! Carlotta, I... oh Carlotta, you know the dreams of my youth, in the mountains of San Marino, when I believed one day, that I would be a professional Car Horn Symphony performer, but... oh, Carlotta, God cannot be so kind..."

"Marius... when fate calls... you do not lay off of the horn. This, my beloved, this is your moment!"

And with the care and emotion of a raw performer, the horns began, first simply as a gentle hooting, like the twittering of some great, half-ton mechanical bird, but soon rising, rising in a Wagnerian wave. The man leaned back, and laughed, and shouted louder now, his foot staying immobile. Very slowly, cars tried to edge past him. He stepped back into the shoulder, and a few cars past, and the light turned. He turned, with the profoundness of his sorrow in his eyes, and bowed, bowed, bowed again. The ministry collectors now stood, to try to play there part, walking from stopped window to stopped window, the man followed, calling out his hollow chorus in their wake, leaning in to the windows with them, raising his fists like a great, piping Mephistopheles. Laying a foot into the street, again. And the light turned. The chorus repeated, over, and over, sometimes longer, sometimes shorter, but each time calling him back, calling 'Encore!'. Encore! cried the car horns, 'Encore! Cried people shouting at him out their windows (Well, they didn't say encore PER SE, but I think it was the gist of what they meant.

I finally drew close enough to hear the lyrics - as with most operas, they were in a lanaguage I could not understand, a language which involved long strings of invective, particularly the invective beginning with an f, frequently paired with a reference to matriarchy, often in close proximity to that racial epithet one hears in Huckleberry Finn, but seldom 'in the wild' anymore. IT was difficult to follow the plot, but it had something to do with him informing the two ministry collectors/Greek chorus members that noone was going to give them any **** money because they were too ******* smart to give any ******* money to ******* who ****** around on ******* street corners. The irony of this statement - he carried a sign which simply read '25 sents' - I am sure struck him sometime in Act three. The two ministry fellows leaned in exhaustedly at my window, at one point even, and mumbled a broken, tired chorus, about how they were just trying to help jesus, and could I give something, even a few pennies. Their companion leaned of course, to tell them I wouldn't ******* give them a ******* penny, which made me feel terribly lame to tell them I actually didn't have any cash. The man cackled a wild cackling that reverberated around the windows of my '94 Chevy Corsica, and informed them I probably had a ******* hundred dollar bill, but I wouldn't give it to no ******* ****** because I knew ******* didn't need to something, something something shouted loud enough it was difficult to decipher, which made me burn with an unaccountable shame. I offered them my smoothie, but they just went on glassy-eyed, almost weeping out their 'god bless, man', as they passed on. The next man gave them a twenty. IT struck me that while it was probably terribly disheartening, having a mad man was actually quite possibly good for the collections business. I finally passed onto the highway. It had been 30 minutes.

The road moved - slow but moved - for a bit, but as I approached the split, where the road goes into two different levels in the College district, it began to sputter into a slow crawl. I looked down worriedly - my smoothie by now had gotten a bit lower than I expected. And as I rose over the hill, I saw that the crawl lasted farther than i could see.

Oh, my friends! If you have been in this place, where you feel the force of god's sandal on your neck, do you do the same as me? Do you look wildly around, desperate to see why? Why, god, why are the cars sitting still? Is there a tipped tanker truck? A sinkhole in the middle of the highway? Did the Tenor of Access Road theatre take helicopter downtown for a late afternoon showing? Is there flashing lights? The green cartoon glow of a radioactive waste spill? There must be a reason!

It was when I got into the heart of CollegeTown, then, that I saw them, protesters on the bridge that passed over the highway, holding great vinyl signs, reading 'Legalize Pot', and 'Tax Pot, stop the Drug War'.

Now, my friends, I cannot fault these gentlemen. I cannot entirely embrace their cause - I am that rare breed known as the libertine Mormon, so on the one hand, I have a great understanding for those who, like me, have their vices, and wish to be left alone with them, but on the other, I have bben raised to fear anything that I wouldn't see Brigham Young advertising for as a terrifying demon, a harbinger of the end, the first step into a downward spiral that will leave the imbiber scrabbling through dumpsters desperate to find some scrap they can busk a sale for on the street, to scrape together just enough to have one more rendezvous with demon dope, when at the bottom they find a half worm-eaten Gideon's Bible, which they somehow end up reading, only to pray fervently and beg god to forgive them for not listening to their parents. These fellows didn't look as if they'd gone quite so far down the road of sin, they were dancing a bit, and one had a rather ridiculous, and borderline offensive set of fake dreadlocks sewn into a stocking cap, but I felt that the misery of wearing a stocking cap in the 98 degree heat was punishment enough for what was probably a youthful indiscretion.

What truly perturbed me was that people were slowing to 5 or 10 miles per hour under the bridge, to honk wildly, and lean out their windows, hooting incomprehensible calls of support.

'Honk if you agree' said the sign. "It's a straw poll, my friends", I called out to these drivers, "They, I am sure have a tallier on the bridge, you need only toot gently and be on your way. Why! Why, my friends! Can you not see? Look! My smoothie is almost gone! Please, please move along!"

IT wasn't every car - it does not take every car, just enough of them. The traffic would jerk on a few cars, then a slow wave of brake lights would flutter down the highway, as a girl leaned out the window to squeeze her breasts together with her handsand call out her agreement, the gesture I can only assume suggesting that her breasts also supported the legalization of marijuana. I crawled along moaning softly, Bob Dylan now shut off as it no longer sufficiently reflected my mood. My windows were down, of course, to try to let the breeze in. I sat parked on IH 35, next to a 80's model Ford Pickup, driven by a very angry looking elderly gentleman in a white cowboy hat, the image of his head framed by stickers that expressed his righteous outrage at the actions of the Obama administration, and his unguarded support for government action in formalizing English as the official language of the United States, while diplomatically suggesting that those who were not familiar with English's intricacies perhaps ought to instruct themselves in said intricacies, so they could join the national discourse. Well, perhaps not diplomatically.

He too had his window down, and his radio moaned out an incomprehnsibly warbly lyric over the artistic styling of a steel guitar. This was the soundtrack to my incomprehension. We finally reached the overpass - I did not honk, my companion in the pickup did not honk either, but did spit through his window, which perhaps expressed his impressions of the Marijuana Legalization Movement. We moved then at a more acceptable pace. For a bout a mile.

Oh, my friends! Now the true torture, NOW the devil's tail. All that I had was taken from me, I drew deep sucks through the straw of my smoothie - it was empty, but the air was still cooler in it, with a vague taste of fruit. When this began to fail, I came to a realization - that smoothies taste nice, they cool one off, but they do not hydrate you. IT could beargued, in fact, that they do the opposite.

Oh! I cried to myself. Oh, why did I drink a smoothie! Why, why was I seduced by it's wiles, by the plumpness of it's iciness, and the firm, healthy curve of it's pomegranete juice and mashed bananas! Did I not know, that all sins, all self indulgence leads inevitably to sorrow? The forces of heaven bore down on me now, in a heavy parched torpor. Amanda called, I whimpered something weakly back. I don't remember clearly even what I said. I dropped the phone, and it fell in a hot shaft of sunlight, so I fumbled weakly to move it so it wouldn't overheat. I took off my suspenders. My tie. My shirt. I considered taking off my pants - I did undo them.

It was not, however, any of these actions which lead me to rear-ending the nervous, kindly city employee in her late-model Mercedes.

My friends, you must understand, I was in the boiler of hell. 98 degrees, you may say, I have been in that! But, I was in a deep canyone of cement and blacktop, still with my companion's Ford, but now alternating also between a semi truck carrying Subaru parts and one carrying Tyson chicken and pork products, each throwing of a wall of engine heat and exhaust fumes. In Texas, on a 98 degree day, a parking lot will get up to 105 or 106. And I, I was leaning my head out the window, because in comparison to the inside of my '94 Chevy Corsica, the impromptu parking lot - only one with great walls of glittering concrete - felt cool and refreshing - except for the smell of course. The whining sonorousness of the Ford trucks country music began to trace secret messages into my brain wrinkles 'My lover left me in Little Rock, Murder the president, Join PETA, I gotta keep on drivin' this 18 wheeler, till the sun rises over Atlanta.'

But even this, even this did not cause me to rearend the Mercedes. No, I rearended the Mercedes because, I swear, I reached up to wipe my eyes, which were burning with the salt of my own sweat.

It wasn't MUCH of an accident - I mean, for God's sake, I hadn't travelled faster than 5 mph in more than hour. But we pulled into the shoulder, I stumbled towards her car with her insurance information, apologized quietly. Attempted not to vomit, from dehydration, because I didn't think that would make a good impression. Pulled back into the jealous bumper-to-bumper traffic of IH 35.

The traffic did not clear until about 30 miles out of Austin. This is the sign, this is a sure sign of the apocalypse. When I WANT a bottle of Gatorade, then the next thing you'll see is the Pale White Horse, whose name is Death. It is a sign of the beginning of the battle in the valley of Har Meggido, when the Mountain shall be split, nad the temple restored to it's former glory. On this day, when the traffic finally allowed me, I bought a bottle of gatorade and drank it in 30 seconds. I then drove home.

The Problem With Sex Scenes

2010-07-20T22:00:00.000-05:00

CONTENT WARNING: Discusses sex and the erotic, and mentions rape, peripherally.

I've recently read several books with very vivid sex scenes: Summit Avenue, which is by the way, a BEAUTIFUL book, and Memoirs of a Beatnik, which quite possibly is the most sex-soaked book I've ever read in my life (No, I've never read the Marquis de Sade, and Sacher-Masoch did a lot more TALKING about sex then actually having it, in what little I read). This has me thinking about the sex scene as an art form - I don't read a lot of modern lit, so this is probably simply because my normal books don't HAVE a lot of explicit sex in them (though I have often thought it'd be really interesting to see how, say, Charlotte Bronte or Elizabeth Barrett Browning would write a sex scene). As such, the things I say here are probably kind of naive and obvious. I apologize.

To summarize my feelings, it is interesting to me that, when one hears the words 'good sex scene', one assumes that this means the scene referenced must be erotic. I don't know, I guess that sounds silly. But let me say it a different way: If I say the words 'good wedding scene', that could be something solemn, something funny, something sad even. We accept that 'wedding' is a very complex topic, that it is a canvas to express something larger, rather than simply to express the idea of the ideal wedding. The title 'Four Weddings and a Funeral' is intriguing, quite simply, because one expects that if there are four of them, that each will be wildly different in emotional tenor. 'Four Sex Scenes and a Funeral' has a different effect (and what a movie that would be...).

I think this, in part, has to do with the relative youngness of the respectable literary sex scene. I know that is an arguable statement, but I would submit that while sex has been written about explicitly likely since the dawn of writing, it has not been always, particularly in the western world, accepted as a part of the palette of the general audience storyteller. If Wuthering Heights were written now, it would be more explicit, I would venture to say, and if most books today were written a hundred years ago, they would be less. Sex Scenes written before the modern era, in fact, seem to revel in their prurience. Even in 1969 when Memoirs of a Beatnik was written, the very explicit sex scenes feel defiant, and rebellious, the author thumbs her nose at the literary establishment every time she says describes a man's penis. Of course, at times now, this can seem a little tiresome, a little bit like the author is being self-indulgent even, but this is the lens of time in large part: a woman writing an explicit description of losing her virginity or having sex with other girls at college in 1969 was a truly rebellious act. And so di Prima quite frankly tries to make the scenes as erotic as possible, to grab the reader and say 'yes, sex is, in fact awesome, and it's awesome whether or not you are a nice nuclear family doing it quietly in your two twin beds pushed together, it's awesome in a hovel of a garrett in New York, or in a field in Connecticut, it's awesome when it's happy and it's awesome when it's sad.' The statement 'sex is kinda awesome' is no longer an entirely controversial one (though there is conversation to be had there) - one can imagine it on a t-shirt, in fact. Sex feels nice, we have, as a culture, come to terms and accepted that.

But, then, I think to an extent, this is still what we've been trained to expect of a sex scene. I speak only anecdotally, here, and I do not know if this is universally applicable, but I would suggest that most children's first emotional exposure to sex (a clinical, academic exposure perhaps preceding it, if they are taught the birds and bees lesson), is usually a prurient one: it's sneaking a book off your parent's shelf, or making out with your significant other and having it go too far, or hearing a dirty joke, or seeing a pornographic movie or picture. Sex is something that we have taught our children must be ignored or sniggered over. So, when those children grow up and become the target market for a movie, a novel, whatever, when they see a sex scene coming, they expect it to titillate and excite. And so, to a certain extent, I think this is how sex scenes end up being written. There is a tendency to describe bodies, instead of minds, sensations instead of emotions, there is a tendency to fantasize (in one direction or another, not always positive), a tendency to glamourize.

And this is not to say that a truly erotic sex scene is not a powerful and worthy thing. Sexual longing and release are very powerful, real parts of the human experience, and at least somewhat close to universal ones. But, at the same time, I think that we discourage the exploration of other parts of what sex is to us, more specifically even, what consensual sex is. A teenager masturbating can be sexually powerful for them, or it can be sort of embarrasingly funny, and these two ideas are expressed pretty widely in films, for instance, but it can also be a lot of other things, solemn and self-searching, angry, self-absorbed, deluded. Masturbation can be very poignantly lonely, or it can be very poignantly comforting. A sex scene between two consenting adults can be very sexy or very awkward, it can also be very upsetting without ever being a rape or a power game, or it can be very exhausting, or very chummy and friendly, or it can be very horrifying, or introspective, or distracted, or sad, or triumphant, or disappointing, or any number of other things. I have had more scenes in my life that fit the outliers (positive and negative), personally, than fit the standard story of no-strings erotic or hilarious. Sex's resonance is not simply that it gives you something snigger over, and it's not just that it feels nice.

I understand that there are authors, directors, screenwriters, actors, etc that go to express this (the song 'First Orgasm' by Amanda Palmer is an interesting example), and I also don't want to suggest that the world just needs more sex scenes - I don't mean to suggest that sex is the ONLY reservoir of emotional resonance. Thank god, it isn't, or we couldn't ever be friends without nudity ensuing. And I think we are much better at, for instance, exploring the intricacies of the buildup to sex, the long courting period (I know Amanda hated it, but I found Fingersmith to be an excellent example of this, or the above-mentioned Summit Avenue, for a wonderfully sentimentalist take on it). I think the responsibility lies on us, as readers, honestly, to make a dialogue about sex scenes that goes past joking or discussing the erotic (both of these being fine in their place, but we need to do MORE than that, you know?). I've had haunting, powerful conversations with people about other scenes in books, but sex scenes, we shy away from - or we say, simply, there was a 'really great sex scene', which the reader, generally, interprets to mean 'it was very erotic.' Of course, this is difficult, because I know that there are people who, with very good reason DON'T feel comfortable discussing a sex scene. But, we overcome that in other places - warnings about spoilers come to mind, or warning at the beginning of the review that we're discussing rape, so that we don't traumatize someone who has been a victim in the past. But, you know, I think it would be possible to have a really fascinating, enlightening conversation about, again, say, the sex scene in Fingersmith, or those in the film Lost Highway or Mulholland Drive, or the sexual scenes in Tender Morsels (and not just the rape ones, either).

Anyway, just a thought. Perhaps I'm just naive.

The Pros of Millenialism

2010-07-15T21:57:00.000-05:00

As someone who probably talks too often of having wrestled with God (unlike Jacob, God did not grab the small of my thigh, and I didn't take him down), there is an (admittedly somewhat natural) assumption when people speak with me that there are things that I will not like to hear about. And honestly, this is very, very sad for me (if nothing else, it makes me a little sorry that I must throw off an air of snubbiness, or a lack of understanding, or aggression, or something).

When I started school, a very long time ago, I originally went in order to study religion, mythology, folklore, because the WAY people grapple with the ineffables of the universe is beautiful to me - in all the many incarnations of it. I am aware the reticence on the part of the speaker is my fault:

I have my biases, and I can be very rude and snarky.
I have a tendency to feel uncomfortable in a situation where people don't think well of me, so I'll say some very stupid things to get approval of the people around me.
I have a problem with latching onto the idea of a story in a situation, and not being able to accept things that contradict it.

I know these things, and I promise, I'm suitably ashamed of them. I do my best to fight them, but I know they make me less than a trustworthy person to talk about the affairs of heart and soul. I get that.

But like I said, I think a lot of things that I may not believe can be beautiful, I think the way someone else may believe these things is intricate and beautiful.

I grew up in a faith with a strong millenialist piece - I was a Mormon as a child, and the very name of the church reflects it's sense of history: The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Growing up, the idea that history was reaching it's pinnacle, that we lived in the fulness of times, was ingrained in every lesson we were taught. Each week, we would sing hymns, some the same old songs most Protestant faiths have sung (Rock of Ages, for instance), intermixed with Mormon hymns, which seemed to all speak to the coming day of glory when Christ Jesus would return to the earth:

How Blessed the day when the lamb and the lion,
Shall lie down together without any ire,
And Ephraim be crowned with his blessing in heaven,
And Jesus descend in his chariot of fire

These lessons, growing up, were not impersonal theology, they weren't the sort of things one learned if one was interested. They were the bread and butter of everyday activity. Mormon boys should be missionaries when they are 19, because the end of the world is at hand, and God calls forth these boys as an army to spread his gospel to as much of the world as possible before his second coming, for instance. We needed to live exemplary lives, because the world was drawing to it's close, when god is sending his greatest souls, and Satan is setting his worst traps. We sang, forever, of being part of the Army of God: "Onward Christian soldiers," "We are as the Army of Helaman," "Holding aloft, our colors, we march to the glorious dawn."

And there was something glorious, and stirring and powerful in all this, - Religion is not just a search for understanding, it's also a search for relevance. There is something in life, at least for me, that strikes one with a feeling of extraordinary smallness, something that makes you realize how insignificant your actions are in one sense. Millenialism reminds you, that what you do is urgent, by placing a timeline on it. There is no someone else who will come later and do what you leave undone, because there is no time for someone else to come. Christ has saved you, one of his chosen souls, for these last days, because he can depend on you. And that's something you can hear, that can make you feel valuable in spite of any evidence to the contrary. I remember, very strongly in my life really WANTING to believe this.

There is something in that urgency, that compression of time, that can give a clarity and direction to life. The reason, at least to me, that many people could believe in the Mormon church that there was a prophet, and believe that the laws he gave were from God, and worth following, was because the compression of history into it's final moments gives a feeling of perspective. To many of the Mormons I knew who were most faithful, it was easy for them to empathize with history, to feel for Moses, or Daniel, or Jesus, or Martin Luther, or the Founding Fathers more directly than many of us can feel for someone that far from us. Millenialism, because it forces the viewer to broader and broader spectrums, CAN make someone very sympathetic, very compassionate.

It doesn't, always, of course. As with any powerful idea, it can be turned to good or evil, and Millenialism is very easy to twist into cruel, hateful dogmatism - after all, it is just easy to compress history into a story of a hateful god as a loving one, I'm afraid, and I have found, souls tend to live the way they imagine their gods (whether this be cause or effect being a discussion I'm not smart enough to have).

And here's the part where you'll laugh at me, I had this idea finally congeal into something recognizable, a few weeks ago while listening to Queen and David Bowie singing 'Under Pressure' (Hey! You can't judge me!). And the reason is this: because the idea of millenialism, the song reminded me, is not something that is limited to the religious. Secularly, Millenialism is a huge part of our culture, and has been for years. The lyrics of Under Pressure are not particularly unique:

'Cause love's such an old fashioned word
And love dares you to care for
The people on the edge of the night
And love dares you to change our way of
Caring about ourselves
This is our last dance
This is ourselves
Under pressure

"Edge of the night", "Our last dance", and even the title itself, stirs up in my mind the same feelings I got when I imagined history when I was trying to be a Mormon, this sort of defiant teetering along the edge of the chasm of the end of history. Mankind, particularly I think since the World Wars and even more so since the Atomic Age, has this terrifying, invigorating sense that, actually and truthfully, we really have arrived at the end of history, in some sense. Our history has reached a point of extinction, of course for the gloomy reasons (nuclear weapons, global warming, engineered diseases, etc). But, also, in the same way that the Apocalypse promises the Millenium, there is the vague sense (and a powerful and meaningful one, I think), that there really is the hope of a future grandeur. Really, think of it! We live on the edge of the future! We can grow (mechanical) wings and fly, we can literally move mountains, we live in a greater perpetual level of cooperation and interconnection, in spite of everything else, than the world has ever seen! Think of it, for just a moment, 50 years ago, when my mother was alive, blacks rode on the back of the bus. Heck, 10 years ago, a man could be ARRESTED in Texas for having sex with his boyfriend. 20 years ago, I would never know any of you, and 10 years, I PROBABLY would never have known you. The world is bubbling into the grand struggle for the greatest dreams humanity has ever had, a struggle that really IS very much one between, if not the load words 'good' and 'evil', with their feeling of exclusion, at least between progress and destruction, between the eyes that look forward and the annhihalation of the void.

And of course, this is all nonsense in another sense. In another sense, we all ALWAYS think of ourselves as being that moment. In the year 1000, people believed the millenium was coming, too. In the 50's, people thought they'd be flying rocket cars by the time they died. The world is forever coming to it's end, and forever being born. But, that's not just part of the human mental disease. It's not a weakness - that sense of urgency is, in one way, a gift, it's the root of the urge to go forward, to leap forever into the void. Yes, when we leap into the dark, the lights turn on and we find the new road is the same as the old. But without that millenial urge, that sense of the finality of life, we'd never be able to leap into it, it would be too terrifying and hopeless. Without the sense of future, the world is just what the news always say: an endless progression of crime reports, wicked leaders, greedy corporations, murder, mayhem, the threat of destruction of ourselves, of the very world itself. The sense of apocalypse is unavoidable - the sense of a millenium, that is a choice.

About a year ago, we had some friends over, and we were talking about Mormonism, and I told them, I still have an affection for it in part of me, and when they asked me why, I said, Mormonism tells you there is something worth dying for, and there is nothing worth living for that isn't worth dying for. I wonder, still, if that's true. Of course, the problem is that if something is worth dying for, to some it is worth killing for, or hating for, or mocking for, or, if there is such a thing, sinning for. And that's the great balancing act of life, I guess - do we risk greatness, or settle for fineness? Do we fight for what we think is justice, knowing our own minds to be imperfect, unjust? That's the call of the Millenialist streak in us, whether we believe in God, or not, it's that streak that whispers to us that this day, this hour, this moment, is the very last of it's kind, this instant is the last chance to do what we might do this instant, and that this isn't a curse, it's a blessing.

The Sound of Drowning

2010-07-08T22:11:00.000-05:00

I read a fascinating article, today, on drowning. I highly recommend it both for the fascination of it, and for the fact that, if you are ever near the water, it is decidedly useful information to know (which, in a story about bad things that can happen to your kids, is a rarity, being far more often drowned out by 'you should be frightened' and 'we are heroic for telling you so'. Sorry, don't mean to snark my bias).

But what was interesting to me was the concept (which I had learned before, but never so vividly) - that drowning, a kind of death that (at least for many people) is inescapably connected with panic, is, more or less, silent. The silence is, in fact, one of the best signs that something is wrong. Which of course, made me consider, the deeper implications of that, the metaphorical parallels. People who are going to commit suicide withdraw sometimes, people who are being abused can become uncommunicative, people who have been traumatised can do the same (this is not a professional statement, I know that people react in very different ways, and may do just the opposite, so forgive me the generalization). But silence, generally, is a sign that something is wrong.

That's interesting to me, because what we, as humans, do (or at least *I* as a human do) is to begin to be afraid of that silence. In a joking way you hear this from parents all the time - 'Those kids are too quiet, they must be up to something.' But in a more serious way, someone who is silent makes other people uncomfortable, makes them want to fix things, to make them not silent. This is good, on the one hand, of course, because it's an instinct that, when our children suddenly stop talking, makes us probe to see what's wrong, to try to offer help. On the other hand, we sometimes confuse things, and become afraid of the silence, in and of itself, instead of the lurking horror of the silence.

The drowning article illustrates this, to me, perfectly: the silence is a sign of distress, but it is also a natural reaction, and one that developed because it is the best way for an individual to try not to drown - they stick the arms out and push themselves up, instead of flailing wildly, they take deep gulping breaths instead of wasting their oxygen screaming, etc. The silence is a coping mechanism, a response where the body takes over because it knows the brain has gone (quite literally in this case) beyond it's depth.

Silence, in a psychological situation, then seems to serve the same purpose, for me. If I am miserable, I grow more and more silent. I've seen this same silence in others, and I know it can be unnerving, threatening even. It makes you uncomfortable. It leaves you in a difficult place. But the problem, for those of us who are the 'lifeguards' (because we all need to be each others lifeguards), is to know how draw the person into shore, without panicking them, or having them pull us down with them - by the time silence comes, reason has been compromised, after all. It has to be, because the silence is a deeper, more bodily response than the very human, reasonable search for daily validation and help that accompanies frustration and problems, normally. Silence comes, instead, when we approach a profundity so deep that we know that to move, to twitch, even to speak is to risk teetering into it. There is a slow work of moving the self, quietly, quietly, back toward a firmer ground, to seek a better crossing than the one that's almost swallowed us. And sometimes, that moving is beyond us, sometimes we are truly drowning, we are, in fact, beyond our depth and struggling to bob up just long enough for a lifeguard to snatch us from the water.

But, in that case, there is two things to remember. First of all, the silence itself is not the true source of our horror. The silence is the sign of a human response, of a living self trying to cling on until reason can be refound. Treating the silence, itself, gets the sort of strained, vague responses that probably everyone has gotten from someone when they know something is wrong: "Oh no, I'm fine, just tired," "Don't worry about it, just a headache," "I'm sure it'll pass." This isn't evasiveness on the part of the drowning person, it's the confused, teetering effort to do nothing too drastic or severe, for fear of losing balance. After all, they don't know if you are looking to find the source of the silence, or looking to just end the silence.

The second thing to remember is that the profundity is real, even if invisible, and terribly, terribly deep, and that with two people, one of them drowning, there is only one person who has the chance of a full access to their faculties. Just as a drowning victim can pull a lifeguard down with them in their panic, and kill them both, a silence disturbed can hurt both parties. On the one hand, this is why it's good to pull in professional lifeguards sometimes (psychologists, psychiatrists, a suicide help line, a teacher at school, a social worker, etc). On the other, it is also a little reminder of the awesome, humbling power that some of us DO have, to draw people up from the depths. The ability to draw someone in from that brink, or at least to give them a life ring long enough to find a lifeguard is an awesome one, one that we forget.

Finally, and perhaps a bit more troublingly, the thing this story made me realize was the great, and terrible beauty of nature itself - not just the sea, though the crushing, silent force of the sea is certainly great and terrilby, but of us, of our human frames, so great, silent, and terrible, able to save us in ways we cannot expect, and destroy us with the same innate force. When Emily Dickinson said her life was like a loaded gun, this is what it means to me - we are each of us a coiled spring of great, terrible force, force that can save and destroy, ourselves or others. A force like that should be nurtured, trained, applauded, kept sacred - and treated with a healthy dose of sober respect.

As a final note, please do not think I mean this as a subtle commentary on anyone who has dropped me a line or said hello over the last little while when I haven't been very talky. Rest assured, I'm not feeling totally silent, just kind of agoraphobic, and the big, big room of the internet is just a bit intimidating right now. Thank you very much for everyone who DID drop me a line. If I were Emily Dickinson, I would have sent you each a cake or a flower, and a poem. I can't bake very well, and I have a black thumb, and my poems are grouchy and far between, so I virtual hug will have to do.

Charlotte Mew

2010-04-22T21:49:00.002-05:00

The district of Bloomsbury in London is a storied one, around the beginning of the century. It was the home of Vanessa Bell, from which came the famed 'Bloomsbury Group' that included her sister Virginia Woolf (who also spent time living in Bloomsbury) and many other of the leading lights of the day. J.M. Barrie lived there when he arrived in London (the home where he lived, supposedly, is the model of the home in the old Disney Peter Pan film). William Butler Yeats made Bloomsbury his London home. Dorothy Sayers spent the greater part of the 1920's there. It is, even now, the home of the British Museum, as well. It is strangely fitting, then, that in 1869, when Karl Marx would have been studying the workings of Capitalism and the transformations of the Industrial Revolution in the British Museum reading Room, that in this same neighborhood, the poetess Charlotte Mew was born. Charlotte Mew was the daughter of Frederick Mew, an architect (the trade runs deep in her blood, her grandfather and several other relatives shared the calling), who, later, died without leaving enough money for his family. Four of the Mew children lived into adulthood. Mew's brother and one of her sister's were admitted into institutions early in their grown years. Mew herself, and her remaining sister, Anne, made a pact with each other never to marry, for fear of passing insanity down to their children. It was, thus, outside of the confines of the traditional Victorian family and in somewhat straitened circumstances that Mew spent her adulthood. Mew, in many ways, is a British Emily Dickinson. In the same way as Dickinson, Mew wrote poetry that was, frankly, unclassifiable and incomprehensible in it's time, from a position of relative solitude. She formed intense friendships with several women (most notably, it seems, her sister and Emma Hardy, the wife of author and poet Thomas Hardy), and otherwise lived a life of almost pathological privacy, actively working to make sure there was as little biographical information on her as possible at her death. And more than anything else, like Emily Dickinson, she was a poet with a startling, powerful vision of what it is to be alive:

The Peddler

Lend me, a little while, the key
That locks your heavy heart, and I'll give you back--
Rarer than books and ribbons and beads bright to see,
This little Key of Dreams out of my pack.

The road, the road, beyond men's bolted doors,
There shall I walk and you go free of me,
For yours lies North across the moors,
And mine lies South. To what seas?

How if we stopped and let our solemn selves go by,
While my gay ghost caught and kissed yours, as ghosts don't do,
And by the wayside, this forgotten you and I
Sat, and were twenty-two?
Give me the key that locks your tired eyes,
And I will lend you this one from my pack,
Brighter than colored beads and painted books that make men wise:
Take it. No, give it back!

Mew lived in a strange, transitional sort of poetry, halfway between the Victorians and the Modernists, and at the same time neither of these two things. Her poetry almost feels the prophetic echoes of a future, in the same way that you feel the coming echoes of the Romantics in a poet like William Blake.

Her main publication was 'The Farmer's Bride', at first a very short collection of poetry, but later expanded to include several other pieces (the version on Gutenberg is the short one, I'm afraid, though if you want to listen to them, the long version is on librivox in audio form, and read quite well). The book was never extraordinarily popular, but drew praise from many luminaries of the day. Thomas Hardy considered her the best female poet of her age, and Virginia Woolf called her "very good and quite unlike anyone else" (which, from Virginia Woolf, is high praise). She got a small government pension and lived frugally, putting out several other poems over her life.

No shadow of you on any bright road again,
And at the darkening end of this--what voice? whose kiss? As if you'd say!
It is not I who have walked with you, it will not be I who take away
Peace, peace, my little handful of the gleaner's grain
From your reaped fields at the shut of day.

Peace! Would you not rather die
Reeling,--with all the cannons at your ear?
So, at least, would I,
And I may not be here
To-night, to-morrow morning or next year.
Still I will let you keep your life a little while,
See dear?
I have made you smile.

In 1827, her sister Anne died. Charlotte was broken. Several years earlier, the sister in the asylum had died of tuberculosis, giving Charlotte a great fear of germs. Anne's room, at her death, was found dotted with black spots, which Charlotte felt sure were the cause of her death, though a coroner declared them to be simply soot from the London air. Charlotte grew increasingly disturbed, and several friends suggested gently that she admit herself to an asylum. She refused, but did eventually go to an asylum, where her phobia of germs grew stronger, still. In 1928, Charlotte Mew was found dead, after having drunken half a bottle of Lysol.

The Changeling:

Toll no bell for me, dear Father dear Mother,
Waste no sighs;
There are my sisters, there is my little brother
Who plays in the place called Paradise,
Your children all, your children for ever;
But I, so wild,
Your disgrace, with the queer brown face, was never,
Never, I know, but half your child...

Sometimes I wouldn't speak, you see,
Or answer when you spoke to me,
Because in the long, still dusks of Spring
You can hear the whole world whispering;
The shy green grasses making love,
The feathers grow on the dear grey dove,
The tiny heart of the redstart beat,
The patter of the squirrel's feet,
The pebbles pushing in the silver streams,
The rushes talking in their dreams,
The swish-swish of the bat's black wings,
The wild-wood bluebell's sweet ting-tings,
Humming and hammering at your ear,
Everything there is to hear
In the heart of hidden things.
But not in the midst of the nursery riot,
That's why I wanted to be quiet,
Couldn't do my sums, or sing,
Or settle down to anything.
And when, for that, I was sent upstairs
I did kneel down to say my prayers;
But the King who sits on your high church steeple
Has nothing to do with us fairy people!

To Frieda Hughes

2010-04-19T02:00:00.002-05:00

(Note: This poem is in response to the beautiful poem by Frieda Hughes that Ms Nymeth recently posted, which has been haunting me and reminding me of my own voyeurism, ever since. Sorry Sylia, sorry Frieda. I meant well) Ms Hughes,

I must apologize,
I am one of the cowards,
Of the vultures,
Ever gnawing at the gristle stripped bones.

I am the worm
Imbibing tender flesh,
producing only excrement.

No pride in that.

We are but humans,
We, the readers,
We are simply mechanisms,
Gnawing forward, forward
Always to the one
Who speaks without
A crankshaft in her throat.

And if the lady non-machine
Lay in the turf
We earthen wind-ups
Shake our jittered spades
We burrow through the sterile earth
To birth our maggots on
The only flesh
That can accept our eggs.

Forgive we little worms,
There's voyeurism in
Our tin-toothed cogging brains.
We mean no harm.
Someone must disconnect the bits of life
And leave behind the loamy soil
Of history digested -
In digestion, death transformed
Into fertility.

Sincerely,

Jason Gignac

(Image from kevincollins123)

"Creating Artifacts to Experience"

2010-04-13T20:50:00.000-05:00

I read a very interesting article on Bobulate recently (Bobulate, btw, is a very wonderful blog that talks about beauty and design and their interaction with our lives - the author Ms Danzico is a unique genius, and if you've never read her blog, you're missing out. If you're keeping your blogroll short, drop mine and read hers - I fumble awkwardly at ideas that she presents iwth clarity of a grocery list). Anyways. I read an interesting article, talking about design, particularly in the case of Frank Lloyd Wright. Conceptually Wright designed buildings to generate a particular experience - his determination of 'perfect' home living. The houses are beautiful and well designed for that particular experience. But unfortunately, many people who actually LIVE in the houses come to dislike them. The kitchens are small and out of the way for instance, the furniture is built in usually and difficult to move. The little things that they want to be their own way simply aren't that way, aren't MEANT to be that way. The assumption in a Wright house is that the occupant should adapt to the perfect lifestyle Wright discovered for them, rather than the house adapting to the lifestyle the occupant wants.

Of course, this is an oversimplification of Wright's work, and I don't bring this up to get into an argument about architecture (a subject which I admittedly know very little about). What was interesting was the way the author described this problem - designers cannot design experiences, they can only design artifacts to be experienced. In other words, designers (and I would argue all artists) must eventually accept that they cannot force an experience on their audience, they can only give fodder that the audience generates their own experiences out of.

I, as a budding, awful writer, have struggled with this myself. When I write, the writing comes not because I have these plots float through my head, but because I have specific impressions, sensations, and internal moments that I want to communicate. My writing, thus, has a tendency to be very pedantic, sometimes even badgering, as I smash the reader over the head, INSISTING that they FEEL THIS ONE THING. Which, when I go back and read it, if I'm not feeling that one thing, is grating and a little dull. Some writers make me feel this way too, and I see the outlines of it in the reviews people put up of some of the books that they dislike (or like - it can be quite flattering to have a book tell you that what you believe is ever so clever).

The BEST books, of course, are EXTREMELY subjective, and SHOULD be so. I was thinking of this after reading the very intelligent review Ms Nymeth put up recently of "The Good Man Jesus and the Scoundrel Christ." She put this very well in terms of the Bible:

The appeal of stories is of course that they’re both memorable and open to interpretation, and this allows them to illustrate more complex realities than simple definitions ever could. But this also means that absolute truths cannot really be built upon them.

This gets into the problem with most religions to me - the law is a series of strict, dogmatic standards by which things can be scientifically judged, but the stories largely deal with the exceptions to those rules. To accept the stories as evidence of the law too often leads to an exclusionist megalomania, either saying that the rules apply as long as the church leaders say so (there is, for instance, in my mind, a subtle kind of arrogance in the Papacy deigning to forgive the sins of the Beatles or to allow Galileo posthumously back into the arms of the Church), or even beyond that, as long as God says so. It is, I guess, something that is a bit dangerous to say, but I offer this as a struggle, not as an attack: it was always difficult for me not to think the God of the bible was something of a hypocrite, like a parent who teaches their children rules they themselves are unwilling to follow (in this sense God seems very human, since parents make this mistake all the time, but it undermines my desire to worship him, since it seems to me to point out his fallibility). Either way, the problem is that the power of stories is best used to make people look at themselves and others and society and the universe, not to tell them what they would see if they bothered to look.

But, again, at some level this is advice that goes beyond the composition of scripture and the building of houses. This can be true of any book (or work of art). The power of literature is in it's ability to draw people out of themselves and illuminate the bits of human nature that it's difficult to see on our own. But, the power of this illumination comes from us nooking ourselves into the empty places. Like a fortune teller, the great author tells enough to compel attention, then leaves the listener to fill the magic in themselves. That's the thing - there is no perfect work of art, because art requires two things - an artist and an audience, and neither of those things ever SHOULD be under the control of the artwork.

Solder

2010-04-08T03:00:00.001-05:00

Smell of metal, Calvin Klein,
And concentration floods her nose.
Her wrists are cramped from firing
a solder gun against her skull.

It soaks her clothes, like river-damp.
The lead and ground are both attached.
She jabs the probe, the current pulls
Across the synapse. Sparks can catch

A flame, for just a moment, yet
A flame. The indicators light,
The splice, the trap admit the flow
Of voltage for the coming night.

She closes, latches shut her skull,
She tucks away her daily tools.
She brushes up, puts on her smile -
And picks the children up from school.

The Problem With Stories About Mine Disasters

2010-04-07T09:08:00.000-05:00

This week, I've been hearing a lot about coal mining. Amanda recently read 'Germinal', Zola's epic story about coal mining in Second Empire France, and wrote a beautiful review of it. More than that, there has been a disaster in the coal mines here in America, that already has left several dead and wounded, and the chances don't look good for the rest of them.

Mining is actually a subject that I've been interested in for some time (I'd like to say this is because I'm a nice, humanitarian person, but unfortunately it's more selfish than that - the book-I-am-writing-but-will-never-finish draws on mining pretty heavily). From a metaphorical perspective, there is something powerful about it, something almost ressurectional in these groups of men and women descending down into the ground every day then rising up at the end, drawing their living directly from the breast of Mother Earth by main force. Before the industrial revolution, mining had an air of superstitious wickedness to it. Mining was a job in many communities for those outcast from real society, frequently even the work of slaves. And, the product? Well, Pluto and Hades were the patron gods of the riches drawn up from the earth, and the connection with Satan took a very long time to dissapear.

Of course, mining is the very lifeblood of our economy now, particularly coal mining. If it were to stop, if we were to shut down all mines our economy would quickly fall apart. Our lights would turn off, our factories would stop, all the complex, delicate web of modern civilization would dissapear.

Which makes disasters like the one this week even more painful to me. Like the image of Moloch in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, we, the 'overlanders' as it were, send human souls into the mouth of destruction, as a sacrifice to appease the gods of modern living. This is, it seems to us, unavoidable. Much like car accidents, mine accidents are simply a part of life, something tragic but that one expects will happen, simply because someone must keep the coal-fires burning. Sad, but almost banal in it's sadness. Another mine disaster, that's so unfortunate, man that'd be scary. A 5 minute byline on the news. A dramatic rescue, or a moment of sorrow when they find the bodies.

This is made worse for me because - and understand, please, that I don't believe this is intentional - of the way we cover these stories in America, because in the way we cover a mine disaster, one begins to see the outlines of the way that we protect ourselves from the horror of the system surrounding them. This morning on NPR, for instance, the story came on that they're still looking for these miners. A byline comes up about the awful safety record of the miners, and then a long description of a meeting 2 weeks ago of industry professionals, union leaders, and journalists, where they more or less celebrated how safe mining has become, how last year was the safest year ever of mining in America. The pathos of this was fully explored, the feeling that, yes, these people were sincere, EVERYBODY figured that disasters like happened at the Sago mine in Utah a few years ago were behind us as a country. Everyone was shocked when they heard the news. Everyone, of course, being those that were flown to Washington to drink and celebrate how damned nice we all are for trying to make sure miners don't get killed. The mining industry journalist they spoke to was devastated by the news, shocked.

How shocked can the owners have been? The owners who kept sending down miners into a mine so hopped up with coal dust and methane gas that they had more than citation per day last year. They were fined $900,000 last year for violations of safety codes. Of course, the problem is, that it is economically viable to run a mine fast and loose on safety rules, and just pay those fines. Safety, they say, takes time. Safety is important, but must be balanced with productivity. The company is only trying to stay competitive in a difficult market. The company is doing nothing that is too far out of band for the industry, and they've vastly improved over the last few years.

And the painful thing is (and again, I know there are reasons for this), I listened to a lot of running time talking to these mining experts, and how sometimes circumstances come together in unforeseen ways (yeah, I loved that one - see, yeah, methane + coal dust + oxygen + spark = boom. There, now you can 'foresee' it next time, jerks), and how they just don't understand how this could happen, and they're heartbroken. But then, there is only a few minutes, where they apologize for not notifying the families of the dead that they found the bodies of their loved ones. There is just a few minutes listening to mining families say 'yeah, well, we send him down every day knowing he might not come back up, but you just sort of have to get used to that. That's how it is, he's a miner.' The story on our nightly news yesterday shows these vague, indistinct images, taken from a helicopter, of a lot of people milling around a hole in the ground with machines. The horror, in all this, is that we were surprised, the story seems to say, that we really meant well, but it just didn't work out.

That's not the horror at all. This isn't a story about how good intentions go awry. It's a story about what happens when a spark hits fire and instantaneously entombs the living souls of men we take advantage of in order to have our lights turn on in the morning. It's a story about horror and isolation and the endless, endless dark, and desperately scrabbling for the emergency food and gas masks, and sitting under the ground waiting, waiting, for days you can't even count anymore, for hopefully someone to come for you. It's the story of sitting on the surface, watching a machine drill holes into the ground because the place where maybe, hopefully, their best guesses say, your husband, wife, son is is so full of methane that it isn't safe for rescuers to go on. It's the story of crawling around in half-collapsed passages, looking for your friends who are probably dead, calling into empty chasms, trying to hear in every creak of a pipe and echo of air and metallic tapping some little morse code saying what you are increasingly sure isn't so, that you are not just digging up a corpse so it can be reburied somewhere else.

But there's a problem, there, and the problem is that in a mining story, there is a we and there is a them. Them is the miners, and we feel for them. We are the listeners, though, and the media speaks to our concerns, our needs, our worries. And it reflects our feelings, the vague sense of othering the incomprehensible, so that we can find a way to emerge still able to forget to turn off the light, and not feel that we've extracted the blood of some far off soul as a recompense for our carelessness. So, we talk about our story, the story of not being able to comprehend how awful it must be, the story of wondering how this happened, of not being able to comprehend how those distant someone's who must of caused this couldn't have been controlled by the regulators or congress, or whatever. And then, at the end, the story fades out over the sound of melancholy bluegrass music, the music of 'them', those poor guys far off who are dying (it's even worse when it's a Chinese mining disaster - those we hardly even notice, despite the mines powering our desire for fully stocked Walmarts). And we feel sad for them, and this sadness gratifies us, it is our sacrifice - it's all we know HOW to sacrifice.

There will be, now, a great deal of talk about resolving the underlying issues in mining. Talk will center on the amorphous word 'regulations', and 'stiffer penalties'. Talk is already surfacing calling these miners heroes, sacrificing themselves bravely for the greater good. But, none of this talk looks at the root issues. I am not an expert in mining, but from the outside, here is the problems that I see.

1) First and foremost, mining is a capitalist industry, and in capitalism, the only truly effective impediment to bad behaviour is the machinations of the market. And in this case, the coal industry, from a safety point of view, is more or less insulated from market effects. The market does a fine job of regulating price (assuming the presence of strong anti-trust regulation), and it has been very effective at this in terms of coal (too effective perhaps, which I'll talk about in a minute). But, the only way 'soft' issues like safety and ethics are regulated by a market are by offending the sensibilities of your customers. Well, unfortunately, you or I have no choice as to whom to buy coal from. We simply get power. Their 'customers' are big power companies, who, of course, have no control over the coal companies they will say, and therefore can't be responsible for the ethics of their suppliers. This isn't to say Adam Smith was wrong - simply Adam Smith assumed that cost/benefit could be measured. And it's pretty difficult to measure the cost of a human life. After all, the direct cost of someone in West Virginia dying, to me, the consumer, is pretty darned low, really. I have no idea how to fix this. The best solution we've come up with in the past for this sort of thing, is extremely heavy regulation - basically forcing the industry to do what we as a country think is right.

2) Coal is too cheap. It is very easy to just look at the bosses and say 'those bastards, what were they thinking?' But, the problem is, they are right in a sense - what they are doing isn't abnormal, and it would be difficult for them to be profitable on a large scale WITHOUT a 'gradual' approach to safety. They need to produce, and safety slows production. The problem is, ironically, that we demand cheap power on our side of the equation (and other countries are providing it with no particular concerns as to the safety of miners). When we demand cheap power, it must be produced cheaply. For it to be produced cheaply, there must be a plentiful, cheap supply of consumables. This pushes the market for coal down, speeding the frenzy for production, leaving less time for safety. This is what gets forgotten in debates, for instance, about renewable energy - yes renewable energy is more expensive in dollars, but that's because we don't figure the actual price of a coal-fired power plant, largely because much of the cost is immeasurable (don't even get me started on the 'cost' of pollution). If we were paying as much as we OUGHT to pay for coal-generated electricity, there would be a lot less power use, a lot fewer dead coal iners - and unfortunately a lot of angry constituents complaining to their congressmen, and a lot of people dying of heat stroke and hypothermia because they can't afford to run their heat/ac.

3) We, as citizens, are blind to the production process, and no longer have to worry about where our stuff comes from. This has been true, of course, throughout much of history, but the problem now is that, really, the mine disasters in West Virginia are only the tip of the iceberg. True, crushing, murderous poverty is now outsourced to other countries in the name of development and industrial growth, so, like I said if I we aired every dead miner in China, we'd spend a lot of time looking at dead miners (and dead industrial workers, and dead children from breathing in factory smoke, and dead rivers from being dumped into, and a whole lot of blood that goes into our happy meal toys). These things, though, are far away, now, and not our fault - it's not OUR fault, after all, that the Chinese government doesn't regulate it's industry, right? But again, this is the irony of the American position. We worked hard for years to spread the free market economy to the world, as the harbinger of freedom and opportunity. And then, when the market is unable to regulate human rights and ethics, we just shake our heads and figure those countries just aren't free enough.

Again, I don't mean this to be a diatribe. I do not know what the solution to these things is. I just don't know. I do know that in the meantime, we wake up each morning and ask human beings to get out of bed and hurl themselves into complex, devious murder machines, and then fret and feel confused when the blades draw one or two of them in and hack them to bits. Maybe, we say, maybe they just need a little thicker leather suit. Maybe they just need to be taught how to hurl themselves in properly. Maybe we need to move the blades a little so they aren't pointed directly at their vital organs. Maybe. Sure. Or maybe we need to work together to find a way to stop hurling men to their death.

Ash, by Malinda Lo (Buddy Review with Amanda at Zen Leaf)

2010-04-02T07:55:00.000-05:00

Amanda and I read 'Ash' by Malinda Lo at the same time, so we did a little buddy review of it. This is the second half of that review, the first half being at her blog.

The story in Ash is pretty simple - it is a retelling of Cinderella, but one in which the 'fairy godmother' (a man in this case) is in love with Cinderella, and where instead of falling for the prince, Cinderella falls for the King's Huntress. I didn't enjoy it as much as Amanda, but it was a wonderful premise. Here's the second half of the review:

**************

Jason: I did not notice that. You'll laugh at me, but for a minute, I thought she was going to say the prince had a boyfriend at one point :D. But, then, it's interesting because even in this world, homosexuality felt like a rare exception to the general rule, an outlier not described properly by the 'rules of the game' - but that's just an impression. What you bring up about the romance is an interesting point. I didn't feel like it was like that with her fairy lover, but I certainly did with the huntress. But that didn't bother me, or impede my feeling like they were in love. I mean, part of what makes people so well suited to each other, I think, is that they can give each other what they need, you know? True love is more than just romantic attraction, it's feeling a comfort with each other. Some people need someone to be a comforter, some people need someone who is good at appreciating them, some people need someone who makes them feel like they are at home, etc. We all have things we need, and part of the beauty of love is that we can give those things to each other. So, which characters did you feel like you related to?

Amanda: I think it's uncomfortable to think about people choosing their romantic partners based on them being mother or father figures to them. Maybe it's because I was once in one of those types of relationships, but I think that there's automatically going to be a block in such cases. I get the impression that Ash and Kaisa could not live happily ever after because Ash really has some major issues to work out in herself. And I liked that about her. I liked that that was realistic.

I'm not sure I really related to any of the characters personally. I usually don't when it comes to fairy tales. Certainly I didn't to Ash or Sidhean. I understood Ash's stepmother and stepsisters, but didn't really relate to them either. I suppose in some ways I could understand Kaisa the best, though I felt like her character was a bit underdeveloped. I do like that she was considered a high station even though she was the king's huntress. I guess I assumed, when I first heard of the hunters and huntresses, that they were similar to the king's military - upper lower class, higher than servant but not royalty. It was interesting that she had a status above Lords. That wasn't something I expected. An interesting little twist in their world.

Who did you relate most to?

Jason: I think, in fairy tales, I usually relate to situations, more than characters. But in that sense, I related to Sidhean's situation, the sort of steady descent. Particularly at the end, where you learn that he has a curse that he, frankly, earned fair and square for his actions, I understood his character. I think sometimes I have to be cursed in order to learn, that I'm too oblivious to learn things without having my eyes opened by force. And so, the feeling that for him to grow he had to decay, and to be opened into real, genuine emotions (both love and regret, and then loss), was poignant to me - though I wish the last scene with him could have been a bit more evocative. I didn't mind it fading out then in the way it did, I just felt like that was the climactic scene for him, not her, and that he is almost absent in it.

Amanda: I'd agree with you on that sentiment. That was part of the place where I wish there had been MORE to the text. I personally am not convinced that Sidhean felt any real emotions, honestly. I don't know that a curse could actually make him feel something real, or that his feelings were ever anything more than lust/greed. There's argument both ways, but I couldn't feel like he really loved her, which I guess is why part of the ending felt false/unsettled to me. I needed more in order to buy into the way the book ended, to the way the characters all resolved their fates.

But overall, I really enjoyed the book. I'm sorry you didn't like it more. :/

Jason: Yes, that's part of the frustration, for me, is I felt like I had to really work to make up my own stories in this book - a fairy tale, to me, is just the opposite, it's this sort of infinitely fertile ground, that lets your brain spring up in different ways. Here, it felt like it was explained too much for that, but then not explained enough to be a world-intensive story like historical fiction or high fantasy might be. It kind of teetered back and forth and didn't succeed as either for me. But, honestly again, I think it is probably just me. I probably wanted the book to be something it just wasn't intended to be. Thanks for reading it with me, though :).

Responsible Escapism in Literature

2010-03-29T21:15:00.000-05:00

One of the frustrating parts of being a reader is (as with a lot of parts of life) dealing with snobbery. This is a danger that takes a special and easily recognizable form when you read a lot of old books. There is the temptation to segregate the world into two spheres: those things which are worthy of notice, and those things which are not.

Of course, this leads to a number of answerless arguments: what is the purpose of literature? How do you recognize good literature? What makes literature a classic, as opposed to just a fun read? These questions are unanswerable, in part, because they're irrelevant. Literature, for most people, is like any form of art - it is worth experiencing if it makes us a better person. This can be in a little way (cheering up a bad day, for instance) or in a monumental way (changing one's outlook on life), but nonetheless, that's what literature is for. If Twilight improves you as a person, it's a good book, for you. If the Bible does nothing for you, it's a bad book for you (or, you're just not ready for it. On both ends of the spectrum, books change over time).

This isn't to preclude all arguments over whether literature is 'good'. If a book is good for two people, and out and out damaging for two billion people, then it's important for us to talk about that. If a book cheers up some people, but also subtly teaches misogny or racism, then there's a reason we have conversations and argue about it. But in the end, these conversations can't be inspired by exclusivity and a search for a canon. They have to, simply, be a kindness we do each other, helping each other avoid books that hurt us, and find books that make us better people. Anything that distracts us from that goal is damaging, in the end, to our search for happiness.

One of these damaging fallacies is the subtle snobbery against books that are 'escapist'. I hesitate even to write the book. My friends who are fans of 'genre' (another subtle slur word) literature probably growl and get their hackles up just hearing the word. Fantasy, mysteries, historical romances, these sorts of books, says the conventional wisdom, are books that have some mild value as simple entertainment, but they're 'just escapism' - they don't have any intrinsic worth, except as a way to wind down and escape. They are the sitcoms of books, says this wisdom.

Examine this for a moment, though: it rests on the assumption that 'escape' is 'just for fun'. That the only value in becoming someone, something, or somewhere else is that it lets one ignore one's problems for a bit. And, in my personal opinion, no assumption could be more wrong.

'Escape' (already a loaded, and probably inappropriate word) is one of the most ancient and beautiful traditions of creative endeavor. Think of it - escape is the ability to put one's mind somewhere else. 'Escape' is, the root of all our ideas of divinity. It is the schoolmaster of empathy and selflessness. It's one of the most natural forms of play and self-education. It's a powerful form of introspection, and used by psychologists and sociologists every day. Putting one's self in someone else's place (real or imaginary) is at once playful, solemn, sacred, and benevolent, if done with the right spirit. (If you would like me to further justify any of these points, let me know - the essay was already getting a bit long).

But, nonetheless, we think of escape as the realm of children's literature. Something that we need when we are young, but that we cease to need when we age. But then, at the same time, we wonder why children are so much more openminded, so much quicker to learn and grow, so much more self-assured and powerfully vulnerable than grownups are. 'Mere' escapism is a vital part of our growth throughout our lives, not something that simply helps us figure out how to get to adulthood.

This week, at the GENIUS suggestion of my friend Nymeth, I read 'Emma', a Manga by Kaoru Mori about a Victorian maid and a rich young gentleman who fall in love. It was the most wonderful escape I've had in a very long time, and one that has, unmistakably, made me a better person for having read it. The story was amazingly, powerfully immersive, rich with detail, and with the ineffable sense of it being a truly different world, instead of simply a modern story set in dresses and gaslights.

And, from a 'literary' perspective, I can make my arguments. The artist/author is a careful student of symbolism and human nature, tiny subconscious clues suggesting depths to the individual characters that would have taken a book of Dickensian prose to suggest otherwise. The art in this (and this is from someone who doesn't always like the Manga art style) was beautiful, sweeping and echoing across the pages. This is the sort of book that a Bronte would write in different circumstances, and as someone who thinks of the Bronte as more akin to sisters and friends than favorite authors, that's the most sincere praise I can offer.

But to an extent, this misses the point - or more (because these elements are not ones I want to say aren't beautiful), it presumes that there is the important elements of the story, and then there's the ones that are just there to make it easy to read. Emma is very much an escapist book, and part of the appeal of the book for me was that I really, really wanted to be someone else for a little while. OF course, this could be a bad thing. This could mean I simply 'veg out' and read something useless and just pretend my problems don't exist for a while. Escapist reading (like any reading) can be a drug, and a very dangerous one.

But like many of the most beautiful of escapist books, Emma is both an honest and an ennobling experience, one that, instead of tricking you with a sense of false betterness, simply lets you stretch into a place you cannot normally be, to feel it's freedoms, and it's constraints, to let you play quietly with the pieces of you that resonate in the work, the pieces that otherwise atrophy, so that when they're needed they're too tired to stand. To, like the Greeks with their myths, stretch and figure the shards of the divine, by reflecting them off of the selves we choose to be, instead of simply the one life we live simply because of circumstance. That's what 'escapism' should be - the refreshing rites we play at naively as children, and that we practice with a whimsical solemn knowledge when we're grown.

(Image: Princess Hyacinth, by Alphonse Mucha. Incidentally, Mucha, one of my favorite artists, was a 'low artist' himself - painting everything from cigarette ads to theatre posters to advert calendars)

Ada Byron Lovelace Day: Susan Kare, Graphics Pioneer

2010-03-23T13:39:00.001-05:00

Happy Ada Byron Lovelace Day! I've been mentioning this around to a number of folks, but a group of very nice people have been organizing today as a day for people to talk about some of their female heroes in science and technology, to raise awareness about women in these industries (where they're sadly underrepresented :/ ). There are SO many women I could feature here, so many great heroes, I just wanted to mention one of my personal favorites, and why. I work in computers, as many of you may know, specifically with Macintosh computers, and (now, please, no political arguments), one of the reasons I like working on the Macintosh is because, since it's inception in the early 1980's, the Macintosh has worked hard to make itself beautiful. Pretty. Call it what you will. Some people call it cute, or fluffy, or showy, or whatever. I call it beautiful. I am NOT someone who is good at making beautiful things, but I love beauty - it is beauty that, in the end, helped me to be okay with my career path. In the modern world, we spend enormous amounts of time in a world entirely of our own construction, one made of devices, files, graphics, data streams. This is no longer just somewhere geeks and techies spend their time, it's a home to people of all stripes now. Yet, in spite of the amount of time we spend on these devices, we do not think of any of this as 'real' - and therefore we tend to just think past the computer, to attempt to ignore it and marginalize it in our lives. Working for a large corporation, I see this all the time. Computers are tools. We treat them something like enormous staplers - only staplers burdened with a great weight of machinery meant to make sure that the user doesn't accidentally waste staples, or staple their hand. A computer - or more accurately, a virtual world, since a computer is mroe than simply a box - is more complex than this, it is, temporarily the home of one's consciousness, often for hours and hours at a time. It is an office, a lounge, a night club, it's many places rolled into one place - a place designed not for users but for managers, for profiteers, for technicians. I find this very, very sad - to me, my duty as a computer worker, is to give the people I work with somewhere they can be happy - at least a little bit. A computer should be a place that listens to you and acts the way you'd like it to, rather than one that retrains you into being something you're not. Of course, huge strides have been made in this area over the last 30 years - and Susan Kare is one of my heroes in this work. Kare is a designer, her portfolio is available, in part on her website. Flipping through that portfolio, for an old geek like me, is something like looking at your childhood picture album. On the Mac, she designed most of the original icon set, things you take for granted now - things like the happy mac and the bomb icons one used to see on startup, or the command key logo that's on an Apple keyboard. She designed the Monaco typeface - the one that, for instance, was the text on all of the original couple of generations of iPod. She design Moof the Dogcow - which, if you don't know Moof the Dogcow, you should look it up, because it's a happy, happy little bit of joy. And that was just it - in a world where computers were beige and bland and meant to feel like accountant's tools, the little splashes of life that Ms Kare designed were whimsical, playful, and very, very human. On Windows, she designed the cards in Solitaire. Most of her most famous work is not used anymore - or it's used in a highly refined form. Part of the beauty of her work was her ability to render ideas with clear meanings and a distinct soul in the kudgy, bitmapped screens that computers had when she was building - 8 bit color, drawn one bit at a time. While her icons themselves are slowly dissapearing or being reformed, the spirit behind her work is still a guiding principle across the computing world, and one that is growing more important today: that a computer should speak to humans, should help them to relate to the unfamiliar, should be beautiful, and fun, and simple. The visual look of the iPhone - simple uncluttered design with subconsciously recognizable, bright iconography - owes an immeasurable debt to Susan Kare. Every graphical operating system - Windows, Mac OS X, the various Linux desktops - looks and feels the way it does, at it's best moments, because it's imitating the successes that Kare was such a part of in the beginning. Susan Kare is one of my heroes in technology. She didn't invent the microchip, she didn't program the Linux kernel, and the work she did is largely defunct now. But what she DID do was, in a culture of insular, excited technospeak, whisper out in her little way about people, humans, and about the noble reality of a geeky, copper-wire dream - that computers are more than table saws, they are ways to live more fully, more completely, and more beautifully.

Two Poems about Growing Up

2010-03-18T09:49:00.000-05:00

Two Poems on Growing Up

I

The recipe for 'grownup' is'nt complex -
Three things: the first a set of faces: one
For sneering, chuckling, shouting. Thing the next:
A roll of bandages for putting on
If you, by chance should graze your grownup blades
Across the tender skin beneath your wrist.
The last? You need a book, blank or pre-writ,
To exercise the parts you might have missed
When scalpelling out the withered child bits.
They're like the burn-marks on a frying pan -
You grind them down, but always leave that look
Of bloody-brown, like paint from ancient hands
Cluthched into walls of caverns. But a book
Will let the crackling remnants run their course,
Then shut them in their covers by sheer force.

II

The Cancer of Maturity
Metastizes slow
It splays across your bangs, at first
And creeps into your clothes.

It slips onto your lips at night,
Your throat, and then your breast
Then Lodges in your diaphraghm
And echoes with your breath.

The lungs rebel and bloom their youth
Into an angry mass,
A cancer as the cancer's foe -
The two begin to clash.

But youth imbues it's vital strength
Into a killing blow.
Adulthood reels, but lives, then waits,
Metastasizing slow.

(Image by Valerie Everett. Herein describing the inside of my wrist (which, no, I've never 'grazed' with 'grownup blades', and never intend to, no worries :D), this concludes my somewhat irregular tour of the pictures on the top of my blog. )

The Nature of Taste

2010-03-16T14:33:00.000-05:00

Last year, I started using Pandora when I am listening to random-music (iTunes is mostly for songs I want to listen to on repeat for hours at a time *cough Radiohead*, or if I want to listen to an album *cough Miss Saigon*). I have to admit that there is little part of my brain, that agonized every time I pushed a button on Pandora. If you've never used it, the interface is pretty simple: you choose a seed song or artist, and Pandora plays a song, and you mark it with a thumbs up or thumbs down, so Pandora can slowly learn your taste. Everytime I put a thumbs down, I felt this little twinge. What if Pandora thinks I don't like this whole genre? What if this artist has, like, lots of songs I'd totally love? What if the Pandora software thinks I'm a snob, or I'm being mean? Yes, my friends, I am aware that it would require a feat of programming currently beyond modern science to produce a computer that could resent you for your choice in music, but sense and reasoning aren't always part of my thought process.

So, I've had the same station for a long time, and I felt quite proud of myself. The music I was listening was about 80% people I'd never listened to before. This is it, I thought, I have become one of those cool people like Amanda and Nymeth and Chris and Debi who have distinct, individual taste, taste that they have cultivated so that they can feel excited about concerts and music and new albums and stuff! I have arrived!

So, this is great, right? Jason is diverse! Jason is creative! And then the other day I had a revelation. In tarot terms, I don't mean one of those shining, glorious, Sun revelations. I mean more like a falling tower revelation. The one where your imagination of how things are is dispelled. Where listening to Pandora, I realized that I actually could reduce my newfound taste into three simple rules:

1) I like sad or angry people, especially girls, playing the piano or guitar
2) I like Jack White, but hate everyone who sounds like Jack White
3) There is no rule 3

If you add to these rules that I like musicals, scat singing, and things that make me look cool, this actually explains at least 85% of my music collection. The remaining 15% is stuff Amanda likes that I've inherited out of sheer respect for her good taste.

No, this is not going to be a complaining post. Promise.

This is a Jason-philosophizes blindly post (hurrah! the crowd shouts sarcastically. That's much better!).

Now, the question here, as to how my taste could be distilled quite so simply into such easy, oddly specific rules is an interesting one to me academically. There's really two possibilities in my mind, either of which is intriguing. The first would be that I like these things because they are what Pandora plays for me. From a a human history standpoint, this is a remarkably complex consideration - because the world of marketing, and therefore the world of disseminated taste, is built on a Pandora model. Sometimes, of course, this is obvious. Look at, for instance, the recommendations that Amazon, or Goodreads, or any other search service hands over to you. With varying degrees of accuracy and complexity (but with a slowly increasing level of both, most of your internet browsing gently, invisibly makes assumptions about you, and uses those assumptions to guide your behaviours - targeted ads, suggested content, recommendations, even blogs like Daring Fireball that take one of your interests (Macintosh Computers) and connect them to other interests (design, Stanley Kubrick, writing). Nor is this ONLY a big brother-ish conspiracy. In the last example, Josh Gruber writes about those other topics because they are the things that interest him. The interesting thing is, however, that these create strange, trended cultures-within-a-culture, where our affetion for something slowly, slowly narrows and is reinforced into the particulars that an algorithm can derive about us. It is easy to at this point have a luddite reaction, but really, while the breadth may change, the depth of experience is intense and powerful this way - It is a tradeoff, but not necessarily a negative one.

But it DOES have ramifications, ones that are already slowly showing. There is, once business and government learn how, the ability to manipulate opinion (though it's notably more difficult to do this on a mass scale than it was with, say, 1950's television, or 40's radio). Additionally, it tends to segmentize society. Book blogging is a perfect example of this - it is very easy to find bloggers with very precisely similar interests - and in knowing those persons, your opinions become even MORE similar over time, as a group, on the trend. This makes these pockets of culture that at times can clash. Use cable news as an example: each year passes, and broadens the gulf between what it is that the news says on CNN versus Fox News, to where someone who watches one channel begins to find it difficult to have a conversation with the other - because the channels are built to encourage argument and righteous indignation instead of mutuality.

I said there were two possible reasons. The second is even more intriguing to me: perhaps, there is a reason I'm attracted to this very narrow band of musicians, independent of the medium that I find them through. Maybe there simply is something about sad female voices, or about an uncluttered piano, or (for whatever reason) Jack White, that speaks something to me. The INTERESTING thing then is, on the one hand, we normally discuss music in the same way as literature: we spend a great deal of time talking about the lyrics, or in trying to relate the music to a hard, verbal idea (or at least, I guess, I do). But, when I strip away to the shallowest level of the subconscious selection, I select on something that has nothing to do with the verbal world, I am attracted to certain aspects of the music itself, certain frequencies, certain qualities of sound and interplay of vibration. The question then becomes why don't we have a better vocabulary to talk about this? One can discuss it scientifically or clinically, discussing this or that scale or harmonic break, or whatever. But this is something like discussing the musicality of a poem by discussing linguistic theory - it's obtuse and useful for analysis but not expression.

The other interesting thing is that it's even POSSIBLE for me, someone who is very much a casual amateur, to even discover something this specific. 100 years ago, the music I heard would be the music that was available, the same music everyone around me heard. If I lived in a small town in the midwest, in middle class comfort, for instance, I'd hear whatever the latest popular sheet music, a small selection maybe fo gramaphone records, and the one or two concerts that travel through the town per year. Perhaps a calliope at the circus. I would hear the popular music of my particular culture, basically. Well, if there is, let's say, 3 girls in my town who play piano and sing, and the only sheet music they have has perhaps 15 out of 100 songs that are sad (and none of them are Jack White) I'm not very likely to discover something so specific - I may be attracted to particular songs, but in my MIND I will process this as an attraction to these specific songs, and will not be ABLE to analyze further and understand what it is about the songs that attracts me, as easily. Even 20 years ago, I was likely to choose some particular genre of music organically, that most closely fit my interests, and then I would simply hear whatever the radio station played. From there I would be able to pick out the bands I liked, and buy their albums, and I would become deeply attached to certain particular bands, through their good and bad (or suited to me and unsuited to me moments). To an extent, this is now changing. Where I 100 years ago would have liked particular songs, and 20 years ago particular bands, I now like particular sounds or modes. So there are certainly particular songs I like - but I like these because they express the sound I like. A band is the same way, or more so for me, an album. If I, for instance, heard one particular song off of Miss Saigon on the radio, I would probably not have been particularly fond of it. But, having partiuclar sounds and modes, I could pick out the echoes of that mode in the overall album, and then use that to understand the foreign things, that interact with it.

Music industry executives bemoan this - because generally what this means is that if a band doesn't change my life, I'll buy one of their songs, and be done with it. They speak darkly abuot the death of the album and a day of empty singles-driven music. I disagree - again, having an intimate relationships with the particular connects us deeply enough to a particular sensual self, that it DOES allow us, in the context of a 'true' album - one that tells a story, and explores the interplay between different themes - to understand things we WOULDN'T normally understand, and to form a relationship with music, rather than using an album, a band, a musician as a benchmark for our taste. And, again, this grows more and more so with every passing year, and musicians are beginning (I think) to pick up on this) - a Dresden Dolls album, for instance, is cautiously planned (at least it feels that way to me) and has pieces that wildly disparate from each other, and Palmer uses this as a tool to draw the listener's mind into directions that they wouldn't normally expect - so, where I would normally only like particular songs of hers, I can begin to understand a song like 'Girl Anachronism' which, the first time that I heard it as a single, I thought was... well, kind of awful, to be honest.

Isn't the future wonderful?

The Problem With Being a Raina

2010-03-06T14:31:00.000-06:00

I have had a number of friends read Blankets by Craig Thompson lately, and LOVE it. I read it this morning - it was a beautiful book, technically precise, carefully balanced, perfectly tuned. But I didn't enjoy it. This isn't to say I didn't APPRECIATE it, because I did. It was a wonderful book - if they book was less well done, I would have enjoyed it more, probably. As it was, with all things to tell the truth, it is only fun to read if the truth is something you'd like to know.

If you haven't read Blankets, and you don't like spoilers, stop reading. Seriously. It is a wonderful book, and you should read it. THEN come back and talk to me about it. This isn't a review, so it will do a poor job of protecting your ability to enjoy reading the book the first time.

The real beauty of Blankets, to me, was that, more than any of the comics I've read so far, this book did a pitch perfect job of combining art and text in a meaningful, surprising way. This book is, in my mind, the reason that graphic novels shoudl be written - because art and words both have their own unique power, and the synergy of those two powers creates something neither could create on its own. The most striking example in the book for me is the way Craig visualizes Raina.

The climax of Craig's relationship with Raina comes, for me, on page 337. In a playful/serious allegory, we see Craig as an Eastern Monk, kneeling before a shrine where the idol of his Muse, Raina, sits cross legged like a Buddha, surrounded by vestal fires, and by the curling shapes of Indian patterns. Look closely for a minute at those patterns - because they recur, over and over. Look, first, at the symbol of their relationship, the blanket that appears on page 182-183:

But, again, this theme isn't just something that shows up here and there. The paisley in particular (for me at least) raises it's head over and over as he thinks of her. Shadows of it, of the curve versus the angular, appear in their first meetings, intensifying as they get to their intimate quiet moment underneath the basketball hoop. The psalm on 310-311 is another beautifully realized, and very brazen appearance. The sex scene on 420-423 devolves to the point where the very frames of the comic have a paisley-esque fluidity, and her body itself seems to struggle to curve - the movement towards orgasm is, for me at least a continuous effort of him to wrap himself around that pattern, to work his own slouched angularity into the Eastern curvaceousness that he imagines of her.

But there's the problem. And don't get me wrong, this is totally realistic. But there are two Rainas in this book: Raina the goddess-muse-angel, and Raina the woman. The book is from Craig's point of view, and Craig sees what he needs to see - in his noble naivete, he sees what Raina could be, perhaps. But she isn't. She's a human. She fails to be a goddess, over, and over, and over. Amanda, when she read it, said she just didn't get Raina, like it seemed like she was always changing her mind. I understand Raina, I connected with her in a way that I was incapable of connecting with Craig: because I've been that person. And what she does makes perfect sense - only what she does and what Craig SEES her doing are very, very different things.

In the end, for me, that's what the book ended up being about - the moment where you learn that someone isn't what you thought. And that's why I didn't enjoy it. It was uncomfortable, because I have no idea what it is like to fall in love with someone and find out they don't exist - I had the good fortune to marry a Craig - someone who is unfailingly, completely, exactly who they are. Not that Amanda is perfect, but she is honest, and Craig is the same way - even when he lies, he's telling the truth. I HAVE been the opposite - someone who desperately needed the world to make more sense, someone who made up a story because it seemed to explain things - and then painted over it when it turns out that telling a story doesn't make it so. There's a moment, as I saw all the prints of his blanket seeping into his vision of Raina, that I wanted to shake Craig, physically, and shout at him "Don't you see? She didn't give you a blanket of her, she gave you a blanket of you!" But of course, you can't do that - in a sense, perhaps Craig had to look in someone else to find himself. But for me, this story was foreign, distant - the story that felt present is the story of Raina - who is she in the end? She can't learn what's right, just one more thing that's wrong - and the wrong isn't in Craig, or even in their relationship. Those things were healthy, it's Raina that wasn't healthy - if she were healthy, she could have, perhaps, been what she needed to be. You can only paint the wall so many times, her story whispers, you can only paint the wall so many times. One more coat of paint, now, but still I know. You can only paint the wall so many times.

In Defense of Happiness

2010-03-05T21:44:00.000-06:00

Having been generally grouchy lately (special apologies to Ms Nymeth, Ms Debi, and Amanda on that one...) I have noticed myself falling at times into an old trap - glamorising misery. It's a classic trick, as old as Greek Tragedy (and older), the tendency to believe that sorrow is greater than joy, that misery is a more real and powerful feeling than ecstasy.

Heck with that!

Happiness can be meaningful - I feel silly even having to SAY that. Happiness has it's gradations and variations, it's intensities and mysteries, it's secrets and ceremonies, just like sorrow. And sometimes, I think it's hard (especially for snotty nosed snob jerks like me) to remember that. So, here's a quick list of five books that are filled with happy, and pregnant with beauty and meaning, all at the same time:

1) Silas Marner - There are those who call this book saccharine, and it has been imitated so many times it's easy to read past. But Silas Marner has a gentle joy that suffuses it, even through a drug addled mother dying, a burglary, and an angsty secret. The book is beautiful because it accepts the sorrows of the world, accepts that there's no God waving his happy stick and making them all better, and nonetheless, in the end, shows how beautiful and joyous life really is. No book tells the healing and sanctifying power of love quite like Silas Marner.

2) Better Angel - I just read this book recently. It was written in 1931, and tells a very frank tale of what it was like to be a homosexual in the 20's. I honestly read this book fully expecting it to be a downer, and character after character was introduced that I fully expected to end up lettign me down. But Better Angel is filled with a passion and honest affection for romantic love that lets the author redeem men with sincerity and feeling. The scene in the book where the protagonist tells his best female friend (who's in love with him) that he's gay was one of the most bittersweet, but frankly love-infused moments of reading I've experienced in a long time.

3) The Arrival - Ms Nymeth just reviewed this recently, but in case you missed it, The Arrival is a graphic novel with no words, that tells a fantastical tale about emigration and immigration. The world Tan builds is a pitch perfect mixture of terrifying and exciting exoticism, where everything you meet has an equal chance of being filled with danger or filled with compassion and hope. And in the middle of the world is human beings who, through their mistakes, love each other, care for each other, take care of each other, in spite of the instinct for self-preservation. And by the end, you see some of the terrifying newness of the beginning transform almost magically into symbols of hope and joy. This is the most joyful book I read last year, I think.

4) A Tree Grows in Brooklyn - Another coming of age story, and ironically another story of immigrant life, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a book that loves everyone. CArrying all the stock characters and situations of the worst of tragedies: drunken father, crushing poverty, gender discrimination, racial discrimination, childhood in the shadow of hopelessness - this book manages, by sheer force of will, to refuse to pity itself for even the shortest of seconds. And in the process, you learn what it is to love characters, even the ones you would normally hate, unconditionally and completely.

5) Emily Dickinson - When I told Amanda the books I was thinking of putting on the list, I mentioned Emily Dickinson and she looked at me funny. Yes, Dickinson wrote about Death. But she also wrote some of the happiest, most soothing and gently courageous poems in the history of mankind. She also had a wicked, winking sense of humor, and a cheerful unvarnished affection for beautiful things. If you've only read the ones they give you in school, try Emily again - it's where I turn when I need to cheer up.

So! I feel better! Do you have any favorite books that show how powerful joy can be? Feel free to leave them in the comments - or make your own list if you like. It's so easy to create this false dichotomy between Happy Books and Important Books. But, to be blind to joy in the world is just as crippling as to be blind to sorrow - and just as unfair and productive of injustice to those around you, really.

Luna, Manchester, and Why Political Correctness IS Important

2010-03-04T11:33:00.003-06:00

(Warning: This review makes occasional use of 'the f-word'. I don't use it OFTEN in life, but once in a while it finds it's way in. Sorry if I offend :/)

I recently read Luna, a book about about a transsexual girl - originally I had intended to write a more extensive conversation about it, but I don't think I could do so while maintaining my composure entirely (it was that good). And nobody needs that. I will only say that it was a beautiful book - it has it's faults, but fuck that, because it was beautiful and made me feel more awake than many a far more 'perfect' book. I don't know if it will affect everyone the same, but it did for me.

That being said, and my little store of comabtiveness being worn out...

I've actually had a number of places lately where I've been in contact with liminal things - those things which are neither this nor that, one thing or the other in our mind, and it has made me thoughtful on the idea.

Let me start with something that isn't as emotionally charged for us now: Victorian Manchester.

Manchester

Having just started a history of Manchester (Manchester in the Victorian Age: The Half-Known City, by Gary S. Messinger), but having long been fascinated by the city, I found one of the early statements he makes very intriguing. Manchester (if you're not familiar with it's history) was the world's first truly industrial city, the first city that was built entirely around factories and industrial production (during the Industrial Revolution of early 19th century England). The city was a sort of shorthand for the horrors of modern living, as a result, for most of the Victorian period. And with good reason - people there lived in dire poverty, the rivers stank of chemicals and shone strange colors, the air was mired in endless smoke, the people were a mishmash of displaced immigrants, and the city government was forever trying to deal with problems it simply could not understand. This was early 19th century England - 'city' meant London, a mercantile city resting largely on the arms of merchants and tradesman, containing a (literally) medieval governmental structure. Manchester was something different, and it took a long time for people to find a paradigm to understand it:

Growth [in Industrial Manchester] posed fundamental problems of perception.... Educated Englishmen could have cited ancient Athens and Rome as more impressive than Manchester on all counts. Even easier were comparisons with the cities of the Low Countries... [or] London. Nevertheless contemporaries could find no complete precedent for Manchester.
To the present-day historian the reasons for this perplexity are clear. A modern observer can see that Manchester was the first predominantly industrial city in the history of the world... Contemporaries, of course, could not view matters in this perspective. But they did sense that Manchester's growth posed a challenge.

This challenge was, in many ways, a challenge of naming. People did not know what industry WAS, because they did not have the vocabulary we have now: simple words like 'blue collar workers' and 'urban growth'. Even words like 'industry', and 'wealth' had meanings that simply were not equipped to deal with these huge changes (consider that 'the spinning industry' pre-industrial revolution was something women did in the evenings in their homes, to earn extra money for their families, and a wooden spinning wheel was a complex, expensive piece of machinery).

The results of this phase shift are too complex to list hear, but they were deeply coloured by fear. Consider this is the period of the Luddites, who tried to destroy the machinery because it made it too easy to produce goods, reducing labor costs, for example. When the thing was an unnamed, belching smoke and displacing cultures, the thing was a monster, eating the green fields of England even as it bankrolled the empire. William Blake epitomized his horror in one of his poems, written as he calls for a struggle to return England to a state of New Jerusalem:

And was Jerusalem builded here,

Among these dark Satanic Mills?

That which is unknown and new is evil. The Faustian connection with science, progress and discovery is as old as the hills, and continues to hold resonance today (name me a movie about cloning that approaches the subject differently than a movie might approach a demon...). It was only, later, when we as a world had lived with the thing long enough to know it and to name it, and to learn what we meant with the name, that we could accept the new thing, and make it into something at least LESS disorderly. And in the end, industrialization has certainly had it's faults, but people live longer, more comfortably, and with a greater degree of equality than they did before the 'dark Satanic Mills' sprang up.

Before this could happen, though, people had to make a human, intuitive relationship with their new world. All the science, all the reason, all the evidence of the world couldn't win out UNTIL people had words and thoughts and history to understand themselves with.

Which is not to demean the science, reason and evidence - after all that's wher ethe words, thoughts and history CAME from. The industrialisation of England was accompanied by education - often feared and opposed by those in power, but in the end inevitable, and powerful. Common workers, put together in a small space, could take classes, discuss the world, come up with ideas, and make decisions about things larger than their own house. And for all that factory owners frequently feared that an educated populace was a cauldron of discontent, it was education that eventually saved the factories from public hatred. Education, after all, taught people to write and spell the names they had created, and taught them what the names meant.

Calpernia Addams

So, I know, that's oversimplifying a very complex issue, but turn now with to an (equally) complex issue that is more contemporary. In 1999, Barry Winchell, a PFC in the US Army stationed in Tennessee started dating a performer from Nashville. The two loved each other, they were happily dating, good sex life, the whole bit. The difference, the woman Winchell was dating, Calpernia Addams, happened to have a penis.

At this point, I find myself, paradoxically, in the same position that 19th century thinkers were in over Manchester: namely, what do I CALL Ms Addams? Is she a woman? Is she gay? Is she a she? I don't struggle with these names because I dislike transsexuals, but simply because there ARE no names that aren't terrifically loaded with meaning that I don't necessarily want to carry in what I'm saying. If I say gay, that implies something that doesn't exist in this case, for instance. Winchell was attracted to someone who he, and the other party, considered a woman. Winchell was asked, point blank, if he was gay, and responded 'no.' The same issue occured in Luna: the father asks if his son is Gay. Well, from the son's point of view? No, not at all. She's attracted to men, and in her mind, she's a woman.

With other words, there is just too much baggage. 'Transsexual' as a word, to me, feels either clinical (like a diagnosis) or derogatory (ie, the root of the word 'tranny'). Of course there are many transsexuals who don't feel this way, and in fact many words in a lot marginalized communities are derogatory terms that are being reclaimed as badges of pride (queer is a good example). But that's the thing: until the world has time to settle in, the world HAS baggage - negative or positive depending on the readers point of view, but baggage nonetheless.

This can make it uncomfortable, even dangerous to have the conversation. If I don't LIKE the word transsexual, then when you say it to me, the meaning of what you're saying changes, unavoidably. If the word Drag Queen has associations of ridiculousness to you, it's difficult to discuss someone who likes to wear women's clothing without marginalizing them, EVEN IF YOU DON'T WANT TO, simply because our vocaublary is designed to marginalize people.

And the marginalization is sadly very effective. After being harassed by some of his fellow soldiers for his relationship, one of the harassers pounded his skull in with a baseball bat as he slept.

The immediate reaction in this situation is, for me at least, horror, abject and terrible. Followed by a deep desire to believe the murderer is, simply, a monster. But the problem is, believing men to be monsters is what created the situation in the first place. This isn't to remove any personal responsibility from the situation. The murderer is, DEFINITELY a murderer, and the act he committed is horrific. But, to make actions like this stop, just like making Luddite riots stop, we have to be able to name things, we have to be able to give people a vocabulary, because without a vocabulary, there is no world of ideas and thought, there is no change. You cannot get rid of monsters by killing monsters, you can only get rid of monsters by teaching them to be human.

Creating Names

Names are very powerful things. Consider the history of the last 10 years of the United States without the word terrorist, or the history of the holocaust without the words holocaust and genocide. Words DO matter - that's why I love to read, after all. The problem is that, naturally, the past has an advantage in loaded words over the future. When homosexuality became more public, it was the old word, first, that people knew: sodomy.

The trick is the future must find a way to make a new word. Sometimes, this is done, again, by subverting the old words, taking them back to make new meanings like I mentioned earlier. Sometimes it isn't - perhaps the old word is unreclaimable, perhaps the people affected want a fresh start. One way or the other, new language is created: 'Negro' becomes 'African American', 'sodomite' becomes 'homosexual'.

Of course, this new-word attitude is easy to lampoon, and can be overdone. This is where a lot of the animosity towards political correctness begins. If *I* say Negro without bias, why shouldn't I say it? Frederick Douglass said Negro. WEB Dubois said Negro. MLK said Negro. Why make a new word? Why be upset when people don't use your new word? It's a tricky balance, of course, but you have to remember that while you can control how you say an old word, you CAN'T control how someone else HEARS it. And even if using an unloaded word, using careful language feels awkward now, and even if it changes noone's mind, it educates a new generation with a new, more compassionate vocabulary - just as the old Mancunians had to learn a new way to describe a city, a factory, a world.

One of the truly painful things in the story about Addams and Winchell to me was that the two men most implicated in it were not designed to be bigots. One of them had a transvestite fetish and may have been homosexual. The other had known homosexuals in high school and had no problem with them. The issue is that the words still carried the weight of bias, and the stiuation provided no vocabulary to talk the situation over like humans. The argument: "You're a faggot!" "No, I'm not!" is, if you tease it apart, an argument over labels, a war of definition. The argument never made it beyond definition into conversation - partly because there IS no general definition for the situation Addams and Winchell found themselves in. Would the murderers have magically been nice guys who could have overcome their fear if there was a way to define the situation? Perhaps not. Perhaps the conversation would have solved nothing, perhaps it would have revealed only an irreconcilable hatred. But I wish they could have had the conversation, that they could have tried. And I wish WE could have the conversation, as a society, without having to struggle to define what it is we're even talking about.

Reviews, and the End Thereof

2010-03-03T08:59:00.005-06:00

I imagine anyone who WAS following my descriptions of the images in the banner of this blog has since lost interest. I apologize - I have a long standing tendency to begin things, and then not to finish them. I am writing today's, simply, because I need to write on the topic anyways. But my thoughts (as is the average for me), are unfocused, so perhaps a picture will help maintain some cohesivity throughout this .

The image underneath reviews above is a Polyphemus Moth. Moths of all animals are the ones I've identified most closely with. As a child, I remember seeing the moths at night, the way they threw themselves over and over at the porch light bulb. The mothe would circle, wildly, blinded I imagine by the light it was so attracted to, then throw itself against the heat, startle away, circle, throw itself against again. I remember wondering when they left - if they'd eventually give up, or if they waited, entranced until the light dissapeared. I remember, and I don't know when, one morning seeing the dessicated corpse of a dust moth, clinging desperately to the bulb.

It's that relationship with light and warmth that attracts me first to the moth. My life is more or less a long series of things I've fluttered blindly around, beat myself against, fluttered blindly - this is sort of the internal battle around the pattern I mentioned before - the beginning without the end. I have a tendency to love great works - works that are, unfailingly greater than my own capacity to perform them. This is how I review books. I don't like writing the classic starred review. I'm not opposed to these types of reviews, but they don't meet my needs as a writer - I'm too selfish to review for the benefit of my readers. The problem is that the only other way to write a satisfying review is something that I can occasionally imitate, but never accomplish, and frequently not even approach. At the moment, to offer perspective, I have 9 books that I haven't reviewed - which since I'm am much slower reader than most of my compatriots in the book blogging world, is a whole lot. Some of these books I loved. And, when I sit to review them, I stare at the lighted screen, beat myself against it for a while, produce nothing, flutter about, try again. It's not simple blogger burnout - it's simply that I want to be a reviewer I'm not capable of being.

The other thing that attracts me about moths, uncreatively enough, is the transformation, the cocoon. As a child, the more classic image of the butterfly meant more to me. Life, to me, has always felt cocooned, wrapped too tight and warm, a little crucible that noone can see inside of, and there's something irresistible in believing that, though the dark of the crucible hides it, that if one struggle hard enough to crack the cover, one will find struggle had SOME purpose, that there is a brightness and perfection that people will see and know.

I'm past those days, now. I don't even want to be bright winged and visible anymore, I'd like to be something small and dusty and quiet, to break out simply so as not to be wrapped so tightly, and flutter off unnoticed. A nuisance to the gardener, perhaps, but more or less inert, a quiet little creature to live it's day and lay it's eggs and quietly dissolve someday.

One way or the other - cocoon or dust moth - the way I review now (or the way I do all my great grand projects. Ask about my writing sometime, I'll laugh long and hard) is unsustainable. I'm no butterfly. When I TRY to be a butterfly, I become arrogant, stuffed-shirted (witness a rather snotty generalization I recently made on Ms Emily's blog, regarding experimental literature), as well as very insecure at being discovered as an imposter. I'm a smaller, drabber creature (thank god, I'm not made for the responsibility of great works). So, and I hope I don't offend or irritate anyone, but if I bore and drive away, I'm willing to accept that: I don't think I'll write reviews anymore. This will probably actually INCREASE the amount of writing about my books that I do, because I will be able to write little quiet dispatches of my experience reading, instead of trying to build grand constructions of budding wisdom. But, I can understand these dispatches may be less interesting. I am not a good place to come if you are looking for recommendations to read, or deep and meaningful insights into thought (for either, I can recommend a number of excellent resource - Ms Emily, Ms Nymeth, and my own Amanda all come to mind immediately, and many others I could also list). I'm really not sure WHAT you might get from my bookish thoughts.. But if you'd like to watch the moths around the bulb, I won't hold it against you. :)

From a business perspective, I'm not sure what this means for challenges I've signed up for - honestly I've done a rotten job of remembering them anyways, so I'm not much of a loss. Most challenges are rather review-centric, so I'll figure out how to manage that - but in short, I apologize for the irresponsibility of a mid course bearings change, to all those who I've committed. Who knows - I honestly have a long history of thinking I've figured out something, only to realize I'm being stupid: to flutter about blindly, as it were. I am still a moth, and I'll probably never escape the fatal desire to overreach my bounds. But I suppose I'll wait and see.

mother, cell, key

2010-02-18T21:06:00.000-06:00

every life
is a tiny room
with one door
and one key
and one order:
never turn the key

wait, it sneers
wait,
wait until
the key is turned for you.

(Image by angus mcdiarmid)

Orlando by Virginia Woolf

2010-02-12T09:01:00.000-06:00

Having just read this book for the readathon last year and reviewed it here (though looking back it was an awful review, re-reviewing it seems kind of silly. Lord knows I had little enough original to offer in the first place - to do it TWICE? Not so much. I don't want to talk about Orlando as itself then, I would like to dicuss an interesting trend I noticed in the reviews of it.

Orlando, unlike the other two Woolf novels I've read, is funny - or to be more British about it, witty. Woolf's writing here is at time laugh out loud funny, frequently delivered with a quirking sneer you can feel stretching across her lips. The novel, after the stormy seas of To the Lighthouse, and the tidal wave of Mrs Dalloway, feels more like a fresh spanking wind over a playful sea. If you sail the seas of the other books, this book feels more like you roll up your pant legs and wade in it, or wait till noone is looking and skinny dip in it. Ms Frances over at Nonsuch Books talked about the issue behind a witty book in literary circles:

In college, fellow Woolf lovers would mock me a bit for saying that Orlando was my favorite Woolf novel. So many see it as the throw-away novel, something to pass the time in between her more serious works of literature.

I read this a few times this morning in one form or another - Woolf herself said this book was sort of her playtime after writing so many dark, heavy, carefully poetic novels.

But, as I mentioned I my previous review, I felt this novel very strongly.

Now part of this is for personal reasons not relevant to a discussion of the book, but that's not ALL part of it - Orlando, more than TTL or Mrs D made me feel like I knew something about Virginia Woolf. And I think this is inextricably linked to it's wittiness. Wittiness has a particular power that we as 'guardians of high culture' often forget - I realized this the other day, as well, while reading Plato's 'Apology', throughout which Socrates keeps his tongue firmly in his cheek. Gulliver's Travels is another example, as is Catch-22. Shakespeare was a master of this.

Of course, there is humor that is meaningless, and there's humor that is repellently arrogant. These things exist (just like there's drama that is voyeuristic and drama that is overflowing with it's own self-importance). There is two differences that make a witty work great for me: first, the author is not afraid to tell an honest story, with good and bad in it. Catch-22 is the perfect example of this. Real wit not only accepts the real world, it has real, honest human emotion in it, in all the multiple forms that human emotion takes. Secondly, true wit is not something for the author to hide behind - it makes the author more vulnerable, not less. (Honestly, and perhaps meaningfully, both of these statements could be applied to drama with very little modification).

Orlando, more than any of the other books I've read, lets me feel Virginia, rather than Mrs Woolf - tellingly, it's not that the book brings her down to my level, but rather it lifts me up to hers. It's a sort of inversion of Mrs Dalloway - in Dalloway, the author is an invisible god-like force and we drift between her various creations. In Orlando, we are invited into the kitchen of God, and chitchat with her as she cooks up a new batch. Chit-chat can be banal, sure, but it can also be honest, vulnerable, and filled with love and trust: intimate in a way that other ways of communication can't be. Mrs Dalloway, in places, serves as portraiture of Woolf - stiff and formal, carefully formed, methodically rendered. But, in Orlando, we knead bread with Woolf, hands plunged with hers into the self-same bowl.

Particularly in Modernism, the age of James Joyce who couldn't keep a straight face for 3 pages (Ok, I'm exaggerating a LITTLE), it amazes - and kind of saddens - me, how easy it is to dismiss wit and playfulness and humor as 'light', and 'charming.' Humor is a tool that it's easy to dismiss - but to do so shows a weakness in us as readers, not in the author, because humor can carry profound beauty.

Finally, just as a quick note - I don't think any of the reviewers I've read have been doing this, not at all - to the conrary, the reviews I've read have sparkled and danced just like the book did. Just that in several I felt just the slightest edge of defense, as if loving something funny had to be justified. I want to do my little bit to justify this myself, is all, because loving Orlando SHOULD be justified - or Catch-22, or Alice in Wonderland, or Edward Lear, or Finnegan's Wake. Anyway, off my soapbox for the day, and thanks to EVERYONE for the reviews today :).