Kubla Kong

Love

2012-02-13T16:25:00.003-05:00

What I know about love could be written on a postcard. I am not loveless, but it's an emotion that's always puzzled me a bit. If it's an emotion. I've always felt too easily manipulated by love. I am distrustful.

What else could love be but an emotion? Well, it could be an act of will. I remember, when I was in college, telling myself to love this guy, an acquaintance of mine from back home, and doing a pretty good job of it for another four years or so. Emotions were involved with this declaration of commitment, but I'm not sure if any of them were love. I'm not even sure, looking back, whether this so-called "act of free will" was anything but a rationalization of something else that had already taken me, involuntarily.

It could be a natural right--like life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It (or the pursuit of it) might even be an integral part of the pursuit of happiness.

Love could also be, of course, a myth--a story we tell ourselves and others that conveniently frames our bodily urges and the circumstances that life faces us with. I don't know. What I don't know about love could be written on many postcards.

Is love something I do, is it something I sense, or is it something I am in? Is it something I have any control over? Do we--as some modern evangelical psychotherapists would argue--choose whom we love? If so, is all love a choice (heterosexual and homosexual, normal and perverse, bad and good, long-term and short-term?)

Have I, in fact, chosen to love pineapple?

Me, I like the idea that love is a choice. I've always been a fan of free will, despite mounting evidence to the contrary. Most certainly, to act on love is a choice. How we act on love is both a choice and, much as we would like to deny it, a social construct: i.e. something we do according to (or in adamant reaction against) social rules and norms that belong not to just us individually but to a whole civilization, constructed by a given culture at a given point in history--and as malleable, fluctuating in value, and ultimately disposable as legal tender.

So what do I mean when I say I love?

I mean that the object of my love makes me a better person, that my desire is to ensure the loved one's safety and happiness more than my own, that the experience of loving this person or this thing or this idea transcends all reasoning.

Should I always act on love? Yes.

But I should not insist on loving when love is not there. I should not become so in love with the idea of love that I counterfeit its appearance, its declarations, or its deliriums. Most of all, I must not pretend to love simply to please others or to feel as if I belong--and I should be careful, very careful, of how much I'm willing to twist or cover or re-characterize my love just to suit the laws and opinions of others.

Would this fit on a postcard?

I Secretly Voted Against Your Right to Marry

2012-01-16T09:27:00.001-05:00

Frankly, I don't know why lesbians and gay men want to get married and have children. In fact, I don't fully understand why anyone, gay or straight, would want to conform to most social norms unless doing so would further some unique and self-determined ends.

Years ago in Savannah I had an arch-conservative office-mate who kept a loaded firearm at his desk and nailed a placard to the wall over his desk that read, "Heterosexuals Have Rights Too." (The sign conveniently ignored the obvious, that in 1993 in Georgia homosexuals had no rights, per se.) In my first year at the college where we both taught English, he handed me a photocopy of a psychological study he had found in a journal that concluded that homosexuality is not conducive to a normal, well-adjusted life. Out of curiosity I read the article, but said nothing about it. A few weeks later he asked me what I thought of the piece. I replied, "Normality strikes me as a rather pedestrian goal." He laughed and said, "Good answer."

He had gone to Woodstock in the sixties but converted to Reagan conservatism in the seventies. He was a libertarian and advocate of Ayn Rand's Objectivism. Had he lived, he no doubt would have joined the Tea Party. He had the temperament typical of Tea Partiers: absolutist, reductionist, ready to argue, and financially motivated. But he killed himself (with his gun) a year or two before I moved to North Carolina. He lived most of his adult life pursuing rational self-interest and promoting gender norms and laissez-faire capitalism. I have to assume that his suicide meant he had not found the pressures of such a life any more fulfilling for him than for gay and lesbian teenagers who have to live in the hostile society he promoted, kids whose rates of suicide are estimated at two to three times the national norm--a statistic I first read in the article my office-mate passed on to me.

I have led a full life, denying myself little except for the respect and support of zealous church people, the pitter-patter of little footsteps, and a supportive spouse--in other words, the traditional lifestyle that would have (according to statistics) promoted my upward mobility and financial success.

However, if other gay people want to get married and raise children, I think they should. Even though I retain my reservations about whether matrimony does anybody any real good, I don't think I or the government have the right to stand in the way. My take is that the "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" upon which the nation was founded ensures every citizen a go at finding whatever form of fulfillment he or she can find.

I support the right to any form of marriage so long as both parties can give their consent and they are not coerced, i.e. by rape or slavery, and perhaps so long as the marriage poses no untreatable health risks to their offspring, should they choose to procreate biologically.

I don't understand why only the legally married should enjoy a host of financial and health benefits, denied to us singles. These include tax benefits; estate planning; distribution of benefits through Social Security, Medicare, and disability insurance; veterans' and military benefits; benefits through employers' insurance and retirement programs; hospital visitation rights; proxy decision-making; adoption; retail family discounts; protections from domestic abuse; burial arrangements; and more. Perhaps as a single man I am prone to be a bit, well, selfish, but it would never occur to me to award myself special and exclusive privileges that, by rights, could be extended to everybody without rubbing any skin off my nose.

I don't understand why convicted rapists can get married--and, by the way, according to Mosaic law (Deut. 22.28-29), the model (we're often told) of the American justice system, must marry the women they raped--but two men or two women cannot. I don't understand on what grounds politicians who have divorced and remarried can charge gay people with threatening the integrity of marriage. But then I have not yet seen evidence that suggests that married people do have more integrity or contribute more to society than single people.

I don't see why it's okay, given the traditional separation of church and state, for federal and state laws to prohibit churches from marrying two people of the same sex. Religious conservatives would have us believe that marriage rights for gays and lesbians would force congregations to not only accept but also seal same-sex marriages. But right now any religious body can refuse to marry people for whatever reason--for instance, because the engaged couple belong to different faiths or because one or both parties have been divorced. Still, many conservatives promote the fear that legal same-sex marriage would limit a church's autonomy. Based on what evidence? At present, the opposite is the case: churches that favor extending the sacrament of marriage to people of the same sex are forbidden by law in most states from doing so. This is tantamount to, let's say, North Carolina asking its citizens to vote on which form of baptism should be the legal definition of baptism. I would think that the form of marriage that religious bodies regard as having spiritual value would be a matter for religious leaders to decide, but to decide only for themselves and their trusting followers.

North Carolina (where I live) puts the question of same-sex marriage up for a vote in four months, in a proposed amendment to the state constitution. The purpose of a constitution is to organize a centralized government and define its powers, usually with protections that prevent "the tyranny of the majority" (as Alexis de Tocqueville phrased it in Democracy in America) from ignoring the rights of individuals and minorities. The proposed amendment to the state constitution would not only ignore gay people's rights but also repeal any privileges conferred upon their relationships at their workplaces and in their places of worship.

Putting the civil rights of a minority up to a vote is antithetical to the spirit of American liberty and equality. Had the civil rights of African-Americans been left to a popular vote in the 1950s and '60s, we Southerners would probably still be under Jim Crow. The Equal Rights Amendment, which would affirm merely that "equal rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any state on account of sex," has not passed in the forty years since its introduction. North Carolina is one of the fifteen states that resisted ratification. But the effect of North Carolina's Amendment 1 would be worse. It would be as if an amendment were proposed to legally codify that men would retain certain rights that would be deliberately denied to women. That is injustice. Anyone who would hide in a voting booth to deny against anyone else's right to marry is petty and cowardly--when, with a little gumption, he or she could respond to the minister's call to the congregation to "speak now or forever hold your peace," and put something on the line for the sake of conviction ... and, with luck, spark a long-remembered brawl at the wedding reception.

2012 Golden Globe Awards

2012-01-15T15:01:00.000-05:00

I used to like the Golden Globes more than even the Academy Awards (the so-called "Super Bowl for gay men"). Back in the '80s it was shown late at night (on the east coast), and 70 percent of the show was cutaway shots of nominees getting shitfaced and otherwise misbehaving at the tables. A delight! But lately my interest in awards shows has lost its pulse. The only thing that makes me wish I had a television connection for this evening is the host, Ricky Gervais, and my fingers are crossed that he will be twice as scaldingly honest as he was last year and somebody posts it all on YouTube immediately. The only improvement I can think of there would be to have Wanda Sykes, Kathy Griffin, and Sacha Baron Cohen working red-carpet duty. Still, I am a movie lover. Less and less lately, but still ... and, besides, I might very well have to stop saying I'm gay unless I post my picks (not necessarily predictions) for the best in all the nominated categories.

Best Motion Picture--Drama

Anything but the three I saw this year: The Descendants, Hugo, and Moneyball--and probably none of the ones I haven't seen, since lack of interest was crucial to my decision not to even bother trying to see those. If I could order off the menu, I'd choose Beginners of the films I saw in 2011--and, of the ones I missed, I would probably favor Shame, Melancholia, and We Need to Talk about Kevin. Or if I wanted to go for the longshot, I'd name the very admirable Gun Hill Road.

Best Motion Picture--Musical or Comedy

Of the two I saw, I'd pick Midnight in Paris, because I think Woody Allen is (still) a genius, though his most brilliant work was over thirty years ago. Of the other three, the only one I have a real interest in seeing is My Week with Marilyn.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture--Drama

Michael Fassbender for Shame, because I'd like to see him naked again. I haven't seen the movie, but it's a point in his favor that he is not playing a historical figure or a man with a disability or homosexual tendencies. I say that with full knowledge that he plays a sex addict, but really I have not yet been fully convinced there is such a disability as sexual addiction apart from a culture that finds sex in general ridiculous, aberrant, and uniquely iniquitous. (For the record, George Clooney, whom I usually like, was just George Clooney in The Descendants, a movie I disliked for its self-pitying sympathy for wealthy males, exasperated by its thorough bashing of a woman who is comatose and unable to defend herself and whose perspective we get in only one dazzling sign of life in the opening shot.)

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture--Drama

I haven't seen any of these performances, but I will say this: I love Meryl Streep, Glenn Close, and Tilda Swinton, but I'd give the prize to Swinton in We Need to Talk about Kevin because (see above) I have a general prejudice against awarding acting honors based on a movie's educational value ("this is history") or sympathy for an underprivileged group ("this is tolerance"). Art is not about didacticism or niceness. That's my position anyway.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Motion Picture--Musical or Comedy

I'd give this one to Joseph Gordon-Levitt for yet another movie I didn't see, 50/50. But at this point in his 24-year career (and he is not 30 till next month), he has transitioned from child star to leading man and from television to big screen very well--and his accomplishment in 2004's Mysterious Skin and 2009's (500) Days of Summer was remarkable. I like Ryan Gosling, too, just not so much in Crazy Stupid Love, a decent movie that could have been a lot better than it was (no fault, though, to the acting).

Best Performance by an Actress in a Motion Picture--Musical or Comedy

I have seen Bridesmaids and liked it and admired Kristen Wiig's performance. I have not seen the three films featuring the other four nominees--but this may be the only category in which I am really very interested in seeing all the nominated films. Based on the fact that I like acerbic comedy (and love director Roman Polanski), I think I would favor Kate Winslet in the all-but-Albee Carnage--or her costar Jodie Foster (the film's trailer makes it look like she actually acts in this one).

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

Easy one. Christopher Plummer in Beginners.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role in a Motion Picture

I strongly suspect my vote would go to Janet McTeer in Albert Nobbs, had I only seen the movie. (I know it's irritating to hear I saw next to nothing this past year. Blame work. Blame Netflix. Blame blogging. Blame books.)

Best Director--Motion Picture

Woody Allen. For pretty much everything.

Best Screenplay--Motion Picture

Woody Allen. See above.

Best Song--Motion Picture

I have not seen (or heard) any of these movies (what's new?), but I would lean towards a Madonna and Mary J. Blige tie for oh so many reasons.

Best Original Score--Motion Picture

Frankly, I would like the Hollywood Foreign Press to vote for "none." Movie music has been incredibly overbearing these last four decades--and that does not even extend back far enough to cover Bette Davis's quip, "Do I walk up the stairs or does Max Steiner?" Minimalist use of music in The Birds and any number of Robert Bresson movies has convinced me that powerful emotion can be conveyed without a music soundtrack and the audiences filmmakers should be making award-nominated movies for should be fully capable of coming up with an appropriate response to narrative events without a musical cue--or, on TV, a laugh track.

Best Animated Film

Oh fuck.

Best Foreign Language Film

I'll go with the hype and say Iran's A Separation. I still love Almodovar, but I liked him a lot better before he started taking the Douglas Sirk comparisons literally.

Best Television Series--Drama

I saw two episodes of American Horror Story online and was mesmerized, even though my low-cost WiFi froze my laptop screen every six or seven minutes. That I made it entirely through two whole episodes before deciding, "Hell, I'll just wait for the DVD," is a testament to how good I thought it was.

Best Television Series--Musical or Comedy

Hands down, Modern Family.

Best Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Downton Abbey. Probably. Though I am very much looking forward to seeing Cinema Verite and Mildred Pierce.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series--Drama

A tie among all the performers except Kelsey Grammer.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Television Series--Drama

Probably Juliana Margulies. I'm shooting blind now. I haven't seen any of the nominees, and The Good Wife is the only one I recognized as the title of a TV show.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series--Musical or Comedy

Please, don't insult me. Alec Baldwin in 30 Rock. The only right choice.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Television Series--Musical or Comedy

Tina Fey in 30 Rock, if by musical we still mean singing and dancing and by comedy we still mean funny. Otherwise, I quite liked Laura Linney in The Big C--though, really, I'd still probably go with Fey.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

Idris Elba for Luther--and, crossing categories (and years), The Wire and The Big C.

Best Performance by an Actress in a Mini-Series or Motion Picture Made for Television

From everything I've heard but not yet seen, Kate Winslet for Mildred Pierce.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series, or Motion Picture Made for Television

Peter Dinklage for Game of Thrones. I want him to thank all the little people who made the award possible. Am I awful? Am I going to hell? But, yes, he does need to say that.

Best Performance by an Actor in a Supporting Role in a Series, Mini-Series, or Motion Picture Made for Television

Jessica Lange for American Horror Story. Oh my god, yes!

On Being Unfulfilled

2011-12-30T08:39:00.000-05:00

I took my Christmas tree down on Wednesday. Pine needles still gather on my socks as I pad around the place, and the tree itself lies on the curb, not yet claimed by the City of Durham Curbside Yard Waste Collection Service. I had an odd, sad feeling taking it down. It makes me sad, half empty, the impermanence of things, especially splendor, even so shabby-chic a splendor as my six-foot tree was. The inability of things or people to last, to fill up a life, except for too brief shining spasms of delight and insight, is not pessimism; it is a fact. Every passion is soon enough dimmed and extinguished by everyday reality, dwindling resources, age, adversity, sickness, and death. Even adopting a life style, or philosophy, or religion has offered, at best, only a passing sense of satisfaction and quiet.

The day, alas, cannot be seized. But I must do my best, anyway.

I am not somebody who buys books or attends seminars on how to find fulfillment and purpose. Fulfillment and purpose are never found; they are made. I make mine from the real stuff of life--the stuff life throws at me or throws me into. And they don't last for long. Well, eventually I will find quiet fulfillment in death, but in life I get flashing sensations of achievement, ecstasy, camaraderie, glamor, rage, lust, loneliness, and so forth. Even peace, boredom, and routine, which almost by definition create illusions of everlastingness, pass quickly. Rapid change could work well as a definition of life. My life, anyway. I am not one to be too settled, satiated, satisfied, filled up.

There is a way to live one's life amid the world's inadequacies. The trick, of course, is learning to accept them. I am content with nonfulfillment and change--stoically content by necessity to see things that are beautiful, wise, gratifying, and loved slip from grasp. Nothing is gained by discontent, which takes up space needed for new days of new feelings. Andre Gide once wrote that one does not discover new lands without consenting to lose sight of the shore for a very long time. I want a lifetime of discovering new lands.

I love pineapple. But what if I ate a pineapple, let's say two whole pineapples--and then felt ideally fulfilled. Eternally fulfilled. Then I might never again enjoy the taste of other things--chili peppers, vanilla, brisket, cilantro, gin, lime, or even another pineapple. The body transforms what it takes in as energy, disposes or stores what it does not need, and makes room for more. I suppose I could still commit to eating only pineapple for the rest of my days, but I don't want to do that. Life may not offer eternal satisfaction and joy, but it does offer variety ... and change.

Of course, there's risk, too. If you let a good thing slip through your fingers, who's to say that the next thing to touch them will not be painful, even deadly? I am not so much a stoic that I am free of emotion. Last month I sobbed convulsively after I had my dog Ripley euthanized. What can replace Ripley? Nothing. But life moves on. As Kurt Vonnegut put it, "So it goes." My friend Dutch used to say, "You play the hand that's dealt you." Complaining about the hand I held never did me or anyone any good. Neither did clinging to it, forever refusing to pick up the next card. Nor imagining a heavenly Hoyle deck that gives a winning hand to everybody who wants it.

As one of my favorite poets Rainer Maria Rilke wrote, "Maybe all the dragons in our lives are really princesses waiting to see us be, just once, beautiful and brave." Death--or its pale second, a life lived in dogged commitment to safe and dependable routine, in refusal of the tidal motions of reality--requires no beauty or courage. Still, it's good not to be overly idealistic or ambitious. I cannot fix the world. Perhaps I can have an impact on reality, on history, perhaps not. Perhaps my life is getting better, or worse, or it stays the same. My optimistic or pessimistic thoughts have little effect on how things turn out in the end. It's hard to slay dragons without taking out a few princesses along the way. But we must always strive to be beautiful and brave.

Is the glass half empty or half full?

This week I reread one of my favorite books, Voltaire's Candide, or Optimism (1759). In it Voltaire satirizes philosophy's attempt to stabilize a careening world of reality, especially since much of life's disorder results from people attempting to impose a too narrow and ungenerous idea of order upon it. He particularly satirizes Leibniz's optimistic philosophy, a great influence on what Herbert Marcuse later dubbed "happy consciousness." In the closing chapters our hero reunites with his long-lost true love, only to find her ugly and repulsive, broken by life's interminable misfortunes. He has sought love, understanding, and wealth--gained them and lost them. "What a world we live in!" his disillusioned friend Pangloss exclaims. But there is no choice but to live in it.

They meet a Muslim farmer with a small plot of land, who has no idea of current events or politics, He and his four children live simply and hand-make sorbet and kaymak from the fruits of their garden: oranges, lemons, limes, pineapple, and pistachio. He tells his anxious visitors, "Work keeps us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need." He and his children treat the guests kindly and generously. Candide's final revelation is that simple, gratifying work is superior to theories, public affairs, epistemologies, and even positive thinking. "We must cultivate our garden," our hero says at the end.

The glass is ... unfulfilled. That's the good news. Meanwhile, we must cultivate our garden.

Adeste Fideles

2011-12-22T12:00:00.000-05:00

Auld Acquaintance

2011-12-20T14:04:00.002-05:00

Tomorrow it will be a month since my dog Tom Ripley died. He had turned fifteen the month before. I had never lived with any pet for as long as I lived with him.

A lot has happened since he died: I celebrated Thanksgiving Day with Tim and Dave and Dave's mother; I bought my first live Christmas tree and decorated it with help from Kirsten; somebody sent me a coffee-table book of the works of George Quaintance, anonymously, and then discreetly identified himself via email the next week; my neighbor Susan gave me a hug and a Christmas cactus to remember Ripley by--the plant will bloom every year at about the same time, she says; a new neighbor dropped by with a box full of coffee mugs filled with San Francisco chocolates, which she was distributing to everybody on the block, by way of introduction and greeting--her name is Katina, and I told her that my dog had died, and she sympathized; I entertained about thirty people at my small house for my eighth annual quasi-Christmas party; I received a surprise visitor from Savannah, Dominique, and we went to the Rembrandt exhibit together; Shane's mother, another person I know, though not well, died of emphysema that same weekend; I went to a concert with Barbara, Shane, and Ann; I went to my first ever live wrestling show, with Shane; I have eaten out a few times and seen some movies with friends; I read and approved the proofs of a sado-erotic short story of mine that's being anthologized--my second such publication; I read and graded four classes' worth of research papers and final essay exams and submitted the final grades; I attended a coworker's wedding; and I am in the process of finishing up Andrew Graham-Dixon's biography of Caravaggio, a gift from my office mate Jim. I have eaten and drunk and slept and laughed and masturbated and showered and dressed myself and listened to music and filled my gas tank and taken out the garbage and taught classes. Life and its events keep happening.

The Christmas tree is pretty. Decorated with mementoes collected over the past three decades along with tinsel and lights, it casts a warm and rosy glow in my living room. It lends a clean scent to the room that everybody likes: evergreen pine. Still, the house seems empty. Not empty--I have furniture, a TV, books, knickknacks, a Christmas tree--but it feels as if an invisible hole has opened in the place where I live. Or maybe the hole is in me, which is where I feel it. Still, in the mornings I wake up with a start, having in my sleep or semi-sleep reached out to touch something, and the surprise of finding nothing there must jar me to attention. Something is gone. Something that looked after me in ways that nothing else did--or perhaps could. I have had (we all have had) similar losses and fully felt them. I am not unusual, not specially sensitive, not even naive. I have lost a lot of things in my life, pets, places I lived, jobs, money, even people whom I do not miss in the least--in fact, I forget I ever knew them until I get the friend requests on Facebook. Other people lose boyfriends and go out and find new ones. I lost my last boyfriend eighteen years ago, and I think the commonly perceived smart thing to do would be for me to find a new boyfriend as quickly as possible. Eighteen years. He is not coming back, of course--it wasn't meant to be, that much is clear--that is what I meant when I said I am not naive. But the place where he used to be--in my thoughts and emotions--is still there. It is unfilled--still open, a blank gap. I have lost friends too. I have moved, they have moved, or they have stopped speaking to me, or they have died. All the ones I cared about have left empty places behind, places I perhaps obstinately keep empty, even accepting that they will never be refilled.

I should be used to this. I grew up in a military family redeployed every few years. I was an only child, with well-meaning, but rather chilly, asocial parents. I never had a friend for more than three years. I knew my uncles, aunts, cousins, and grandparents by name, but I knew almost nothing about them, except that my mother either didn't like them or approve of them. Until I was fifty, I never lived in the same place for more than six years, usually quite a bit less than that. Impermanence is something I grew up with. I learned not to care about a lot of things, but I never learned to let go of the things I cared for. Somebody I knew well, who let go of me about eight years ago, once said of me, fondly, "Joe always hates to say goodbyes." She was right, and perhaps she is the only person who noticed that about me--and now there's nobody that notices that about me. She was the One Who Would Notice That. Not that I am bereft of friends or people to love. It's just that when I care for something, I care for it individually and uniquely. Somebody could steal my rather expensive camera, and I would simply buy a new one. If somebody stole my photo album, I would not go looking for a new photo album to fill with new pictures. So I don't lose my friend Elizabeth and go looking for a replacement. This is not maudlin self pity. I feel lucky to sometimes love so particularly, even if not always deeply. I have friends to love. I have friends right now I could not replace, so much do I care for them. When they are gone, I will have even more holes to deal with. Other people come and go without my ever learning how to care for them, and maybe, in those moments, I pass up far too many opportunities to love and be loved.

I think the human mind finds resting places in certain rooms, certain persons, certain objects. They become so familiar that, even when they are taken away, the mind fools itself into the thinking they are still there, glimpsed often through the corner of one's eye. I sometimes suspect this is how the belief in ghosts originated. You have seen the scene in movies, where the abandoned lover rushes up to a woman with a familiar jacket and hair, only to discover she's a complete stranger. You have probably experienced the phenomenon of walking into a familiar room, expecting to find something there that used in fact to be there, but no longer is, yet for a second or two you actually think you see it, and then you realize your mind only remembers seeing it. It's gone.

There's a song about this feeling, so I know that I am not alone. Two songs, really. One song simply asks the question whether it's right to forget old friends and move on. It's called "Auld Lang Syne," one of the saddest songs in the world, the Robert Burns lyrics that everybody now associates with New Year's Eve celebrations. The other, equally familiar, deals directly with the holes others leave behind, and the ways our minds (and hearts) make these holes sacrosanct, preserved forever for persons who will never fill them again. My favorite version of this song is by Billie Holiday. It goes:

I'll be seeing you
In all the old familiar places
That this heart of mine embraces
All day through.

In that small cafe,
The park across the way,
The children's carousel,
The chestnut trees,
The wishin' well.

I'll be seeing you
In every lovely summer's day;
In every thing that's light and gay.
I'll always think of you that way.

I'll find you
In the morning sun,
And when the night is new,
I'll be looking at the moon,
But I'll be seeing you.

Christmastime

2011-12-19T16:27:00.003-05:00

Not to bum everyone out, but let's put the "War on Christmas" in some perspective. The Puritan colonists of seventeenth-century New England banned the celebration of Christmas, considering the holiday (correctly) as pagan in its origin. The worldly liberals who attempted to celebrate the holiday were heavily fined. Puritan Christian views on the subject were so ingrained that it was not until 1870 that Christmas became a federal holiday in the United States, by which time the holiday was no longer associated with drunken partying, as it had been for centuries, but rather with generosity and gift-giving (a la Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol" in 1843). This shift in Americans' concept of Christmas corresponds to the height of the Industrial Revolution and its "Captains of Industry" (Carnegie, Mellon, Morgan, and Rockefeller) and the rise of department stores (hence modern consumerism) in America's and Europe's big cities.

As an atheist (with a long, grueling fundamentalist, bible-believing background), I have no problem at all in wishing you a "Merry Christmas." It's no more tormenting to my atheist disbelief than saying, "It's Thursday," even though I don't believe in the Norse god Thor, or "It's Monday," even though many different languages, including English, associate the day with devotion to a moon deity. I rather like merriment of most every sort, even when steeped in superstition and mythology. In fact, religion is often helpful in throwing a little crazy into the mix. A party is a party, as I see it--though it is a shame that commerce has steadily choked any semblance of human spirit and liberty out of the holiday, dressed up Santa in Coca-Cola colors, and replaced twelve days of gambling and chasing skirt (December 25th to January 5th--ah, for a Pepysian Christmas again!) to a glee-less battle with long lines, heavy traffic, and purse-snatchers that lasts a whopping four weeks or more now (at the very least, taking Nordstrom's lead, from Black Friday to Christmas Day).

Oh, and how's this for a kicker? The pious picture above of the blessed virgin Mary and the baby Jesus was painted in 1913 by Adolf Hitler, who, at age 24, thought of himself as an artist and a devout Catholic. Frohe Weihnachten, holiday shoppers!

But, seriously, merry Christmas to all, especially to the poor, the ill, the lonely, the homeless, and those far away from a place they call home.

Bonne Anniversaire a Catherine Deneuve

2011-10-22T07:49:00.001-04:00

Catherine Deneuve is 68 today. Loved her then. Love her now.

Credo (a work in progress, perhaps)

2011-10-07T14:21:00.001-04:00

Let’s start with the easy stuff: what I do not believe. Idon’t believe in God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and Earth, or inhis Son Jesus Christ, or in the Holy Spirit. I don’t believe that a god or godswho require blood sacrifice—human, animal, or god-man—could possibly fit myconcept of good, not if those gods are all-powerful and all-knowing. The ideathat perfect justice requires the blood of the innocent is just that—anidea—and a not very kind one. That the innocent do suffer is a matter ofreality—one that must be accepted, surely, but as a human being I accept such areality with gravity, rather than exultation. A good man, much less a god,would fight to save the innocent from a wrongful death. Nature, which is neither entirely humannor at all divine, sometimes requires the death of an innocent, sometimes thousands ofinnocents, but it does so indifferently, not to fulfill some end apart from theworkings of its laws. Gravity sometimes kills, but it does not sacrifice, nordoes it require a sacrifice. A god who eats, murders, threatens to kill, orsacrifices his son—whether only begotten or one of a litter—or daughter or children is nobody I care to know, much less honor and worship.

I don’t believe in a life after death. It might exist—butit’s one of those things that can be neither proved nor disproved. I have noscientific basis for this disbelief, which emerges mainly from the fact that Ihave no feeling for the idea itself, which is more repugnant than alluring for me. The idea of living an eternal life is nomore seductive to me than watching an everlasting episode of Seinfeld. If either idea tickles your fancy, you are welcometo your belief. From an existential standpoint—as a being who currently livesand breathes—my temporariness is indeed a sobering thought: there are movies Iwill never see, books I will never read, cities I will never visit, people Iwill never laugh with. But then there are already myriad experiences andopportunities I have missed out on—having a dodo bird for a pet, for instance,or visiting Gertrude Stein in Paris, or fucking Alexander the Great. I do not regret not having had a life (that I knowof) before my life anymore than I fear not having one (that I know of) after mylife. My existence appears to be not only temporary but finite as well—there aremillions of my contemporaries on Earth whose names I will never hear. Suchknowledge reminds me of my smallness in the universe, but it does not fill mewith regret—or with longing for such things to be different from what theyreally are.

I am an idealist who accepts reality. I try to imbue my lifewith meaning, but I am not searching for the meaning of life. My spiritualityinvolves a deep connection (or at least a grasping for such a connection) withthings—physical, homely things, without halos—their smells, their textures,their colors, their sweetness or saltiness, their heat, the layered music ofthe sounds that rise from them. I love the senses—these are my miracles, theonly ones that strike me with wonder and a sense of the sublime. Even pain—assuming you might ask meabout pain: pain, by its very definition unpleasant, is a part of life and apart of reality. Still, uncongenial as it is, pain warns, it pulls us intoourselves, it deepens our awareness of who we are, it makes the world vivid, and arguably it makes the sweetness ofhealth and life even sweeter. So, yes, pain has my guarded and begrudged respect, aswell.

I don’t believe in a god or gods who exist apart from thematerial universe. Like the stoics I believe that all beings are material orbodily beings. What the stoics called fate, I would call natural laws, which, Ibelieve, animate persons, magnets, geisers, satellites, comets, lava, dreams,ecstasy, history, economics, breezes, tornadoes, bubbles, avalanches, waves, weather,clouds, emotions, passions, births, sexualities, deaths, decay, humor,intelligence, consciousness, war, love, valor, compassion, and so on. Whatmoves us, moves us all, is the synthesis of natural laws bearing down on us orlifting us up or pushing us forward or blocking our ways. If anything hasexisted forever, it is, I imagine, the universe—in all its material vastness,its embrace of both chaos and order (with neither ever having a firm stay onthe other), its fascinating and perplexing laws, its illusions too (illusionbeing only a misperception—or misinterpretation—of the ways things really are),its seemingly infinite extensions into both the cosmic and the molecular, itsindifference to us and to our yearning to connect with it on some grand, true,but probably entirely impossible level. The universe knows less of the divine than we do, who first thought up the idea to appease our vanity and our itchy and constantly ill-fitting consciousness.

FoxNewsworthy

2011-10-01T14:37:00.000-04:00

If the talk-show host interviewing you looks not only more hip but also more in touch with reality and more competent in his or her line of work than you, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you can't explain how highways will be built, armies furnished, fires put out, and flood victims rescued with your economic policies in place, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you think a minimum wage is the government overstepping itself but restrictions on who can marry whom is constitutional, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you think the Bill of Rights and the Supreme Court exist to protect the rights of the majority and promote the tenets of the nation's most popular religion, most of whose adherents can not get along with each other, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you think that health care and education are luxuries for the wealthy, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you applaud the deaths of prisoners who may or may not be guilty and the drawn-out suffering of poor people who cannot afford health care, but then you can cry real tears over little white children having to take a long bus ride to school, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you sit back and let your constituents boo an American soldier stationed in hostile territory because he has asked a question about something he believes in but you and your kind do not, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you are "not a racist" BUT never complained about the excessive powers of the Presidency until Barack Obama's candidacy, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If the nicest thing your opponents can say about you is that you look good on camera and "probably" have the nation's best interests at heart, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you think a man with a net worth of $39 billion is a socialist and a man on his third wife, after he cheated on the first two, is a defender of marriage, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you think fascists tax the super-rich and oppose bullying, you might be a tea-party candidate.

If you think the Boston Tea Party was mainly a protest against the very idea of government, you might be a tea-party candidate.

Some Questions

2011-09-20T18:09:00.001-04:00

(1)

Why do withdrawals from one's check card or credit card occur at lightning speeds that would have been interpreted as witchcraft 400 years ago, but charge reversals take slightly longer than hand delivery by courier in the nineteenth century?

(2)

On what grounds can Time-Warner Cable (or any communications company) charge customers $75 for discontinuing service, even when no contract is being broken or changed? Especially since the disconnect can be done automatically hundreds of miles away--and, even so, the customers must personally lug the equipment to one of the company offices? Exactly what service is being paid for here?

(3)

Why is the assumption in the nature-versus-nurture debate almost always that individuals might have done something to change the nurture part? Really? I had a choice in what happened to me before the age of, let's say, seven?

(4)

If grades motivate students' desire to learn, why do students seek the less challenging courses in the interest of getting better grades--even though the more challenging course may have more of an impact on them--and why do I rarely see a student (less than one a year, in fact) who says she is doing fine in the course but simply would like to work on improving her writing or her knowledge of literature--and yet four or five times a week I see students who want to know how they can turn a D into a C or a C into a B--and in the majority of those cases, they want the answer to be something along the lines of washing my car on weekends, rather than making a greater effort to learn the material? This is motivation to learn?

A Philosophy of Life in Under 100 Words

2011-09-11T18:16:00.001-04:00

Life is full of things that happen, and empty of the things that do not happen. The things that happen are worth analyzing, mulling over, and seeking to understand. The things that do not happen are not worth considering--either to hope for them or to fear them. The things that happen offer us keys to the future--for whatever they're worth--not our hopes, not our fears. You can spend a life working towards a goal--or preparing for something you dread--or you can look for ways to appreciate the things that really are. Now.

Three Peaches (from Barbara)

2011-08-08T10:37:00.002-04:00

My Car

2011-08-02T17:17:00.001-04:00

I don't like cars. I never have. I have never seen my car as a reflection of my soul. I've seen cars I've rather liked, of course, but then I have a nagging feeling that my tastes in automobiles simply reflect effective mass marketing. I mean, why didn't I want a car like that years ago, before they started building and selling that model? why don't I feel that cars shaped like shipping crates satisfy a desire I never dreamed would be fulfilled in reality? and why do the older models now leave me cold inside? If cars reflect our inner beings, why do so many people have closely similar tastes in automobile design? And why do those tastes seem to change just as the new models come out? Shouldn't some deep resonance--some glimmer of something personal--tell me that "here is the object I have been waiting my whole life for"? or "this seems tailor-made just for me"? or "even though it's no longer functional or admired by others, I still have a soft spot in my heart for it"? Lovers of old cars are the only genuine car lovers out there--and I'm not one of them either.

The American cult of automobiles is one of my least favorite things about America--just slightly above my countrymen's naive acceptance of trickle-down economics and the corporate elite's right to rule and their propensity for xenophobia, racism, religious intolerance, homophobia, English-first-ism, and anti-intellectualism of every stripe, while being aghast at the notion that anyone would have the brass balls to call it what it is--mean, stupid, and guilty as fuck. My idea of the perfect car is the back seat of a taxi cab. If I had my way, public transportation would be the only form of transportation--even if you had to rent cars the way you can rent bowling shoes--even if you had to put coins in a meter to make the car work and you simply climbed into the closest vehicle to you and then left it at your destination for the next customer to pick up. I'm a strong supporter of healthcare reform and education for the masses--but, for me, the first significant step towards anarcho-socialist utopia would be the nationalization of all forms of transportation.

I have had four cars in my life. I am fifty-eight. My first car was a Gremlin--hardly the badge of an enthusiast. The car I drive now I've been driving for almost ten years. I retain that specific knowledge sadly because I now drive the car my father owned when he died, the day after the Twin Towers fell, minutes after he raised a flag at half mast in Augusta, Georgia, his adopted hometown--not that my father ever saw the Twin Towers except in pictures. It was a fine car in its day. A four-door 2000 Chevrolet Malibu, myrtle green. My dad always took excellent care of his cars--he did so hands on until automobiles became so computerized that knowledge of mechanics (at which my dad was a whiz) was no longer sufficient to care for and repair them. The car hasn't been washed since he washed it--it's got a new windshield, a new battery, four new tires, but I'm convinced it still holds a whisker or fingernail that once belonged to my father.

The last time I filled the gas tank was June 16th. It's resting on empty (or close to) right now. I've been on break since the end of the first session of summer school, and I have not been driving much at all--mostly reading at home, watching my DVDs, and ordering new books and movies from Amazon. Forty-seven days between fill-ups is all the more impressive when you consider that, in that time, the car has picked up people at the airport twice. I've enjoyed my sedentary existence this last fortnight because during the school year I commute to another city to teach--33 minutes each way. I don't mind the commute--though it has become more tiring the longer I do it--I just wish I could catch a subway a couple of blocks from my home and ride to work. Even if the commute time doubled, I would not mind--I could read, grade papers, proposition handsome strangers (nothing so attracts the attention of a stranger as a middle-aged guy with a stack of student essays to grade).

The only thing I ask of a car is that it get me from one place to another. And that is the only thing my car does. In theory. Right now my car is having electrical problems--it's had them for about five years now, and nobody I've seen about it, not even the local Chevrolet dealer, can pinpoint the problem. It's dumbest effect is that it makes funny noises--tickatickatickatick-dingDINGding-ticktick-ding-tickatick. It's scariest effect is sometimes the directional signals work and sometimes they don't. Also, the air conditioner sometimes works and sometimes doesn't--it's running fifty-fifty, these days. Since the temperatures hereabouts have hit 100 fahrenheit a couple of times this past month, I have had a strong disincentive to drive far from where I live. Making matters worse, when the a/c doesn't work, neither do the power windows roll down--oh, the simple beauty of a hand-powered crank for me! I don't listen to the radio--or any music at all--when I drive. When a car is brand new, I listen to the stereo just for the novelty of it--but then something happens (the news is about Republicans, it's Sunday and all there is is radio preachers, Bruno Mars is topping the charts, etc.) and I lose interest--preferring to sink into my thoughts and direct my attention purely to the task of driving.

I used not to mind driving. Now it's an odious task. I would much prefer--have always much preferred--being able to walk places. Perhaps I am becoming a sedentary kind of guy--maybe because of my childhood spent on military bases, packing up and moving every two years. Who knows? On the weight of limited experience, last summer's vacation, I think I would enjoy living in a French village, not far from the Mediterranean, with a stockpile of books and DVDs, my dog, friends, a good Internet connection, a boulangerie at the end of the block, an outside cafe with Jupiter on tap and cute young waiters who smile at my bad French. The first morning I walked fifty steps to the corner tobacconist--in a town of 1600 citizens--and bought a stack of gay porn and a stack of pro-wrestling glossies, feeling perfectly at ease and getting a wink from the old gent behind the cash register, I knew, "Here is the desire I never dreamed would be fulfilled in reality."

Amy Winehouse 1983-2011

2011-07-23T14:34:00.003-04:00

"Tears dry on their own."

Lucian Freud 1922-2011

2011-07-22T07:39:00.000-04:00

It Can Be Done

2011-07-19T14:05:00.001-04:00

"As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I had become more and more enraged and mystified by the idiot decisions made by my countrymen. And then I had come suddenly to pity them, for I understood how innocent and natural it was for them to behave so abominably, and with such abominable results: They were doing their best to live like people invented in story books. This was the reason Americans shot each other so often: It was a convenient literary device for ending short stories and books.

"Why were so many Americans treated by their government as though their lives were as disposable as paper facial tissues? Because that was the way authors customarily treated bit-part players in their made-up tales.

"And so on.

"Once I understood what was making America such a dangerous, unhappy nation of people who had nothing to do with real life, I resolved to shun storytelling. I would write about life. Every person would be exactly as important as any other. All facts would be given equal weightiness. Nothing would be left out. Let others bring order to chaos. I would bring chaos to order, instead, which I think I have done.

"If all writers would do that, then perhaps citizens not in the literary trades will understand that there is no order in the world around us, that we must adapt ourselves to the requirements of chaos instead.

"It is hard to adapt to chaos, but it can be done. I am living proof of that: It can be done."

--Kurt Vonnegut, Breakfast of Champions (1973)

Summer

2011-07-18T08:45:00.001-04:00

76 American Books

2011-07-04T15:26:00.001-04:00

I set myself to this task as a way to celebrate my country on its 235th birthday--as traditionally observed to the exclusion of the histories of its earlier inhabitants. For conciseness, I have limited myself to just one work per author. I have also limited myself to the books I have actually read, not just read about or wish I'd read. I gave myself 76 minutes to complete the task, but it took almost two hours.

I have made no effort to make the list politically correct or canonical. I have welcomed and tolerated my idiosyncrasies in taste--and the limits of my memory. These are the works that shaped my concept of the United States of America, of American writing style, and of myself as an American. These are the American books I measure myself against.

A Death in the Family by James Agee
Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
The Smallest People Alive by Keith Banner
Snow White by Donald Barthelme
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
Little Big Man by Thomas Berger
Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan
The Wild Boys by William S. Burroughs
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote
The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon
Bullet Park by John Cheever
Closer by Dennis Cooper
A Home at the End of the World by Michael Cunningham
God Is Dead by Ron Currie Jr.
Apples and Pears and Other Stories by Guy Davenport
An Autobiography by Angela Davis
Underworld by Don DeLillo
The Sisters Brothers by Patrick deWitt
Play It As It Lays by Joan Didion
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
American Tabloid by James Ellroy
Light in August by William Faulkner
The Circus of Dr. Lao by Charles G. Finney
Tender Is the Night by F. Scott Fitzgerald
The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen
Fat City by Leonard Gardner
Howl and Other Poems by Allen Ginsberg
Second Skin by John Hawkes
The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Old Man and the Sea by Ernest Hemingway
The Talented Mr. Ripley by Patricia Highsmith
Dancer from the Dance by Andrew Holleran
Dear Mr. President by Gabe Hudson
The World According to Garp by John Irving
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey
To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Elmer Gantry by Sinclair Lewis
The Executioner's Song by Norman Mailer
Tales of the City by Armistead Maupin
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
Moby-Dick by Herman Melville
Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller
Edwin Mullhouse by Steven Millhauser
Gone with the Wind by Margaret Mitchell
Becoming a Man by Paul Monette
The Four Fingers of Death by Rick Moody
Beloved by Toni Morrison
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Wise Blood by Flannery O'Connor
Meditations in an Emergency by Frank O'Hara
Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk
The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig
True Grit by Charles Portis
Gain by Richard Powers
City of Night by John Rechy
Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins
Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
Franny and Zooey by J.D. Salinger
The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck
The Confessions of Nat Turner by William Styron
Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson
After Dark, My Sweet by Jim Thompson
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
Myra Breckinridge by Gore Vidal
Slaughterhouse-Five by Kurt Vonnegut
Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace
All the Kings' Men by Robert Penn Warren
A Worn Path by Eudora Welty
Miss Lonelyhearts by Nathanael West
The Age of Innocence by Edith Wharton
Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman
The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder
Close to the Knives by David Wojnarowicz

Sunday Beefcake

2011-06-05T05:44:00.000-04:00

Top Ten for the Evening of June 4th, 2011

2011-06-04T22:10:00.000-04:00

Gil Scott Heron: “New York Is Killing Me”
Des Ark: “Two Hearts Are Better Than One”
Kate Bush: “The Man I Love”
The Kills: “Sour Cherry”
Lulu: “To Sir With Love”
Arcade Fire: “The Suburbs”
The Flaming Lips: “Do You Realize??”
Devendra Banhart: “16^th & Valencia Roxy Music”
The National: “Think You Can Wait”
Tilly and the Wall: “Sing Songs Along”

Blood Atonement, Made Simple

2011-05-31T13:48:00.005-04:00

To explain the Christian concept of blood atonement adequately would require more time than I'm willing to free up to get into, not today anyway, but this morning the thought of it came up as I was thinking about, of all things, V8, the 100% juice drink. Actually, I was probably on an unconscious level thinking about the HBO series True Blood, whose third season just came out on Blu Ray, which I have been chomping at the bit to have as part of my extensive collection of films featuring shirtless guys. And I do not doubt that vampire lore has a not too subtle connection to Christian theology, a link which may be freely investigated post-1975, back when Anne Rice finally put to rest the notion of vampires' not liking crosses--more specifically, crucifixes, with their shirtless and very buff Jesuses.

Anyway, here goes. First, the basics. Blood atonement is Christians' attempt to explain why their god not just chose but also needed to sacrifice his only begotten son to wash away the sins of the world. Blood is necessary because their god's sense of justice is so high. Only most Christians are quick to add that, unlike Genesis 1:1 and so on, we must not take the word "world" (John 1:29) too literally because apparently the atonement works only for those who believe what various parcels of Christians insist that we all believe, exactly as they do. And, of course, we have to forget the painful logic that an all-sovereign, all-sufficient, and all-powerful god would probably not "need" to do anything he didn't already intend to do from the beginning--well, from before the beginning, to torture logic and language further.

The atonement is evident even in the Old Testament, say the Christians. It involves the sacrifice of something that bleeds--so, even in Moses' first book, God favors Abel's sacrifice of a lamb over Cain's vegan offering. More importantly, the thing that bleeds must be innocent and without blemish. To sacrifice something that by all ethical standards should not be put to death--the innocent--is precisely what the Judeo-Christian god demands as fulfillment of his sense of justice--a sense of justice well beyond our small human minds' ability to understand. Clueless mortals that we are, we tend to think of an innocent as precisely the one we would not want to kill--or have killed for our satisfaction.

At one point, evidently, children were a satisfactory option because, I assume, they had not yet lived long enough to be corrupted. (Christians vary on the point--often within themselves--of children's innocence: they are born into sin, which is why it's okay to scare the hell out of one's children to turn them towards the paths of righteousness, and they are born into sinless innocence, which is why it's not okay to let them watch R-rated movies. Nobody's very good at explaining the contradiction.) Of course we all know (or should know) that it's the pagan god Moloch who demanded the sacrifice of children--not the god of the Hebrews and later of the Christians. Moloch got a lot of bad press in the books of Leviticus, Second Kings, and Jeremiah, long before Allen Ginsberg singled him out as the god of the military-industrial complex.

However, if Moloch is the bad guy, explain this. It is Abraham's god who suggests to the "father of faith" that he should deliver up his son Isaac on an altar. See Genesis 22. As we're all told in Sunday school, this is just a "test" of Abraham's faith--but it's worth paying attention to the fact that Abraham neither balks nor regards the command as unusual--and this is only four chapters after Abraham begs till the cows come home to save the citizens of Sodom for the sake of ten or so righteous men. But about his own son, he doesn't say a peep. Had Abraham lacked faith when he pleaded for the lives in Sodom? Or was a son--specifically his favorite son, born of his and Sarah's old age--somehow less worth pleading for?

Ultimately, even the sacrifice of harmless innocents is not enough to satisfy this god's idea of perfect justice. The sacrifice must be human and entirely without sin--i.e. morally perfect--and as much god as man. This ideal and completely good man must die. Christ! He must not die like Socrates, drinking poison from a cup, and he cannot simply die of old age. He must die a brutal and bloody death--of the sort only the cinema of Mel Gibson can do justice to. If he dies--in just such a vicious and comfortless way--with his god and father's back turned on him the whole time--then the rest of us can have everlasting life and go to heaven after we shed this mortal body (still dying, as it turns out, no getting around that).

Well, some of us can have everlasting life--about 3% of the whole human population, according to some estimates, perhaps as few as 144,000, indeed a small "world." Very small. Hardly enough, it would seem to me, to warrant the death--and such a grisly death!--of a perfectly innocent god-slash-man. But, then, the Christian god is a good god, not one of the cheap phonies the Mesopotamians, Egyptians, Greeks, and Indians cobbled together out of their studies of nature. The Christian god won't hesitate to sacrifice his only begotten son--born miraculously without regard to rules of nature and norms of sexual partnership (keep in mind that Mary was purportedly about 15 years old in 0 B.C., which would constitute an age difference in Jesus's supposed parents of upwards of 13.75 billion years--Mary Kay Letourneau, eat your heart out!)--and for all the god's trouble, and it was reportedly the best he could do, we have fewer people going to heaven than presently living in poverty (~80%), the famously "blessed" poor (no numbers yet on the "meek").

So whether there's a god or no god, I cannot pretend to be an authority. But if the Christian god is the one and only--and if he is exactly as described by professed Christians (about 33% of the world population--perhaps 11 times the number actually "atoned")--and if this god is loving, holy, good, all-powerful, all-knowing, never-changing, though not exactly punctual (ouch, Harold Camping!)--I strongly suspect the atonement would not meet even FDA standards of efficacy--much less be all that impressive to me.

End Times

2011-05-22T11:15:00.003-04:00

It must be a sad, gray Sunday morning at Harold Camping's house. Camping, of course, is the 89-year-old California false prophet and cofounder of Family Radio who predicted that Jesus was coming again yesterday--and that those who had been faithful to God would be scooped up into the clouds to meet the lord halfway. I take hardly any pleasure in the wrongness of his calculations, more than anything because I was hoping the seven years of tribulation predicted in the Books of Daniel and Tim LaHaye would be slow to kick in and we'd enjoy one or two weekends free of Christians, real ones anyway--and, I'm sorry to have to say it, folks, I sincerely do love some of you guys, but you do tend to be wet blankets (and that's when you're not being utter assholes). And except for the terror that must have filled the hearts of trusting children for the last few months and the credit-card-bingeing of some of the shopaholic faithful, it was a harmless enough prank--old fart gets his last hurrah in before he dies, an HBO movie gets made starring Ed Asner or Don Murray, watching it we all get a few more laughs out of our system, and the delusional fool is duly forgotten before another dozen years pass (as new spokesmen for Jesus draw new crowds, who think this sort of thing has never been said before). Supposedly, according to Reuters, nobody was answering the door at the Camping home yesterday. No wonder.

Sure I made one or two snide comments, but, on the whole, I avoided jumping on the bandwagon of those who reviled Camping and his followers. Not because I was holding out "just in case" their prophecies were correct. Rather, because it's too easy to laugh at the gullibility of others. Who are we to point fingers? We live in an age of harebrained beliefs--bomb shelters and "duck and cover," trickle-down economics, Y2K, President Bush's sixteen words--or that Brokeback Mountain would sweep the Oscars. And the sky has been set to fall so many times already that our Chicken Littles now find gainful employment as talk show hosts and political commentators. In an era of mass communications, mass hysteria has become pretty ho-hum. Even when there are some shreds of evidence for some cataclysm--climate change or "Bin Laden determined to strike in U.S."--we prefer to fully experience our emotions over these revelations than to actually try to find out the facts and do something about them.

Back in my churchgoing days, my bible-believing and soul-winning days, the church I attended would not have necessarily believed his prophecies, but Camping would have been welcome as a special speaker--or someone else attempting to explain Camping's "theories" to us. We did, for example, get to hear Tim LaHaye speak, back in the days before he realized his stories would be even more salable as unconcealed fictions. We had a lot of special speakers who'd drop by, like Chautaqua educators explaining the latest archeological dig or scientific finding--only ours never spoke of science, except disparagingly, as an ungodly false faith. The word "knowledge" was highly regarded in our circles, not so much its essence. Feelings were our preferred currency. We did get to see and hear the guy who drove the getaway car for Bonnie and Clyde (who'd found Jesus, only to face a diminishment of his life's interestingness, as a result) and the guy who played Eb on TV's Green Acres (whose interest factor was, for most of us, the allure of his being both redeemed and hobnobbing with the worldly likes of Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor).

When we had speakers who predicted end-times events with more particularity--we had learned, for instance, that Henry Kissinger is the Antichrist (more farfetched back then than it is now, in retrospect)--our pastor would politicly say, when questioned, that he both agreed and disagreed. That is, the prediction seemed "likely"; however, he himself did not think the details were important. It was more important that we all live in anticipation (fear and dreamy hopefulness combined) that Jesus would return at any minute--in the twinkling of an eye, less than a scientifically probable pinpoint. Like Jesus and the apostle Paul, our preacher believed that the end times would be in our lifetime--but he was never so foolish (like Camping) to actually put a number on it--or money.

Frankly, I prefer Camping's approach. Foolhardy--but better foolhardy, than merely fool. There's some backbone to being hardy that I have to respect. Still the man was a fool, no doubt about that. As were those who believed him. As were those who thought they were better than those who not just believed but (the truly hinky part) did so robustly. I'm of the camp that thinks it's better to believe nothing than to believe bullshit. However, there's a great danger in putting all knowledge, all beliefs, all opinions, all statements of fact in the same basket--like those who say, "Let's just agree to disagree," or "You've got your facts and I've got mine," or "Nothing is worth arguing over"--fools like that, the biggest fools of all.

Sunday Beefcake

2011-05-22T08:14:00.002-04:00

God Gave Me This Message for You

2011-05-20T18:34:00.006-04:00

Though he may be saving the gift of heaven for special people like you, he gave rights to every human being. His perfect will for you, for all of us, is, at the very least, to keep hands off the souls of others--which partly consist of their autonomy as people possessing free will and the capacity for reason and love. It also includes their physical lives and well-being--and their right to pursue happiness so long as doing so does no real harm to others.

Zeal is understandable, times being what they are--especially so, the more furious your concept of God happens to be. But think hard--where might Jesus hanging on the cross for the sins of the world stand on the issue of church leaders and religious groups opposing legal protection for children and young people whom others perceive as gay, lesbian, or whatever, regardless of whether they are or not? How might he, who took the sins of the world on himself so as not to put the blame on anyone else, look at his would-be followers blaming every earthquake, hurricane, and economic downturn on a group of people his followers happen to revile (or rather, as you might say, whose sins you revile, not the sinners)?

He knows you hate it when other people think that perhaps you act and look the way you do because you are a self-loathing homosexual. So imagine how you would feel if people bullied you or your children because of this idea that somehow got put in their heads--and how would you feel, inside, if you heard others who claim to love God objecting--with some vehemence--to the idea that anyone might want to do anything to stop that bullying. What if the time came when simply badmouthing gays and lesbians all the time no longer convinced others that you yourself are not a child of Sodom?

He also wanted me to tell you that while you're doing a pretty good job at resisting the temptation to engage in homosexual practices--though you might do a better job of it when you think nobody is looking too--he wants you to obey the WHOLE revealed truth--which means you probably ought to stop eating pork and shrimp, gossiping, and working and shopping on Saturdays--and, if you're really serious about this (it's your choice so I won't push it), you need to give away all your possessions, leave your families, and follow him only.

That's quite a lot to ask, I know. I couldn't do it, but then I don't claim to be one of God's people. Possessions and families are nice and hard to resist (but then so are the other pleasures of the flesh). I suppose it's a lot easier to oppose the gay agenda (which is, basically, to protect everyone's God-given rights, including yours) than to actually follow all the commands God mentions in the scriptures. Whew, there are a lot of them, aren't there? By the way, not one of them is to boycott gay-friendly businesses or petition for legal injunctions against homosexuality or the miserable sinners (and here we're all in the same boat, aren't we?) who practice it. (Some, I hear, not only practice it, but have gotten pretty good at it too.)

God doesn't talk to me a lot, but he did press upon me the importance of urging you to clean up your own life, seek goodness and holiness in private (and stop praying in public--he hates it--Matt. 6.5), and leave other people in peace. Much better that the godless look upon God's followers as people who make the world a better place for everyone--or at least no worse--than as a bunch of meddlers whose own gnawing sense of guilt triggers the persecution of those who have never met you, much less done anything to hurt you.

If Jesus wants you to turn the cheek when others hit you, imagine how he wants you to behave towards those who have done nothing whatsoever against you, who would be just happy enough if you were to mind your own business and leave them in peace--perhaps to find God and God's will for themselves in their (and God's) own sweet time.

Sunday Beefcake

2011-05-15T07:25:00.001-04:00

Richard Lima via Hunk du Jour.

We Must Be Doing Something Right to Last 200 Years

2011-05-14T00:56:00.000-04:00

If you have seen Robert Altman's film Nashville (1975) and did not like it, do not (do not) tell me about it. I have ended more friendships with people over this movie than I have over politics, religion, or pets. Some friendships survive as mere shells of what they might have been had I never known the person's cinematic tastes. I can think of only one strong friendship that outlasted a difference of opinion over this movie--and, as much as I would like to say I mostly respect this friend for her honesty with me over what she knew was a sensitive subject (I do, I do in a way), I have to admit that, deep down, something was lost that night long ago. If you do not think Nashville is a good movie--let's not even mention its greatness--and you tell me so, then at the very least, the most minimal repercussion will be that I will never give a rat's ass what you do consider a good movie.

I do not relish being a petty man. I feel reduced by my extreme allegiance to what's just, let's face it, a movie. I am even surprised at myself--even now, 36 years into my fandom--when I feel a person's rejection of this movie as if it were a knife wound. I'm not saying I am right to feel this way. I'm not saying it makes sense by any standards of decency or good taste. I'm just saying what happens--and let me say that no reason or excuse ("I respect country music," "The ending's too pat," "The humor seems stale and the timing is off") mitigates the sickening coldness I feel (personally!) at such a rejection.

I must have seen this movie fifty times or more in my life. The first time I saw it was a matinee in Miami with my old friend Luis, who had the good sense to love it nearly as much as I. It was a sweltering day, so we went inside even before the previous showing was over--thus we saw the "surprise ending," seconds after the screen-filling image of the American flag, as seen above, before sitting through the showing we'd paid for, as rapt as if we didn't know what was about to happen. The truth is we didn't. Plot and story arcs are not what the movie is about--and this many years later I still can't tell you what it's about--not with authority. Mind you, I can say a lot about this movie, but nothing--no one thing and no combination of things--entirely explains for me what the movie does for me. After the initial viewing, I came back the same evening and bought another ticket and watched it again. I must have have seen Nashville ten times in theaters in 1975.

I bought the two-tape VHS version when it came out, and the only reason I ever bought a DVD player was that I'd read that a digital Nashville was soon to be released. Over the past ten years, I have thought perhaps my ardor for the film has waned. I have let as much as two years lapse between viewings, thinking, based on memory, that the cinematography is not good, the acting styles clash, there are continuity errors (I have seen the movie enough times to notice them all), so maybe I've been overreacting to what is, let's say, just a very "interesting" movie in a certain style that had its moment back in the 1970s. Admittedly, a good part of it is I'm spooked by my fervor for this movie. I no longer recommend it to anybody. One of my worst moments in teaching was when, in a History of Film class at Savannah College of Art and Design, I tried to show and analyze the film, and some kid in the back row--whom I never liked anyway--said, "So this is supposed to be a great movie?"

Ouch. It still smarts to remember that.

This weekend I found the way to manually control brightness and contrast on my widescreen TV and Blu Ray player to optimize the comparably slipshod (dark and murky in spots) disk Paramount released in 2000, and I watched Nashville again after the longest hiatus yet. I was awestruck all over. Tears come to my eyes--not because it's sentimental (it's not) or sad (it has its sad parts)--but because I am struck (still!) by the sublimity of this movie. I think it was Pauline Kael (who loved the movie and spurred its good reputation among critics and cineastes--a reputation I knew nothing about until well after my first experience of it) who said that once you've seen a movie three or more times, it's not the movie doing the trick for you--it's something inside you that's rising up independent of the movie. Be that as it may, the movie does something to me I cannot sum up in words.

Sure, it elicits memories of Luis and of my being twenty-two. That's part of its appeal for me, certainly. Its portrayal of a reality I knew--particularly the "Amazing Grace" number in a Southern mega-church, just like the one I belonged to--impressed me deeply--and triggered a long process in me that eventually led to liberating advancements in my life philosophy. Its symphonic drawing together of disparate motifs--women, guns, politics, celebrity, automobiles, religion, the seldom-mentioned American class system, music, regional stereotypes, grace, sex, racism, the mass media, money--still amazes me. The many acting styles on exhibit--Henry Gibson, Karen Black, Keith Carradine, Ned Beatty, Keenan Wynn, Julie Christie, Lily Tomlin, Ronee Blakely, Timothy Brown, Allen Garfield, Robert DoQui, Geraldine Chaplin, Barbara Harris, Shelley Duvall, Scott Glenn, Barbara Baxley, Jeff Goldblum, Michael Murphy, Dave Peel, Bert Remsen, Gwen Welles, Cristina Raines, David Arkin--from the comic to the tragic, from the hammy to the deadpan--all blended as a kind of Boschian preamble to America's overhyped bicentennial (right after Watergate, Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and the first clear signs since the 1930s that the American economy was near collapse).

I have read the books about this movie and enjoyed them, but none of them explained how this movie has come to fascinate me every time I see it. I saw Star Wars twice. I saw E.T. just once. I didn't get Titanic. I couldn't sit through the first Lord of the Rings movie in its entirety even once. I'm not prone to enthusiasm, but Nashville gets under my skin--and though it's snarky, misanthropic, and anything but "feel-good," it elates me every time I see it. It changed my life--and it seems to change it all over again every single time I watch it.

PlayTime

2011-05-13T16:53:00.002-04:00

For some people Jacques Tati's PlayTime (1967) is a huge disappointment. (A famous commercial failure, it bankrupted Tati, costing him his house and even the rights to his own films.) For other people it's their favorite film. The confusion is (and always been) how are we supposed to watch it? As Roger Ebert points out, in many shots you don't know what you're supposed to be seeing. And the movie--almost free of dialogue, and what little there is muffled in favor of naturalistic sound effects--is designed to dumbfound its audience--and perhaps awaken it to deeper perceptions of the modern world? Who knows. Perhaps it's only a throwback to the elaborate sight gags of the silent era--back when, before sound, it didn't matter to audiences whether a movie was French or English.

You have to expect the unexpected--and accept that the film is going to catch you with your guard down. What appears for quite a long time to be a hospital turns out to be an airport terminal. Characters--ostensibly principal characters--are introduced in the background of crowd scenes--and ultimately disappear back into the masses--without a trace--or, to be accurate, with a faint trace if, in previous scenes, their actions (and humanity) warrant it. A movie that is at least partly about the city of Paris, PlayTime (the most expensive movie made in France at the time of its release) was shot on a gigantic set outside Paris--all the more remarkable because the "set" includes an airport, several city streets, a huge exposition of some sort, and a climactic, carousel-like traffic circle. The only glimpses of Paris landmarks--the Eiffel Tower, the Arc de Triomphe--are reflections in large plate glass store windows and glass doors. Watching the film for the first time is all the more difficult on TV, instead of a giant wide screen, for which it was designed.

At the time of its release, Tati helpfully explained that the movie is meant to be a movie from another planet, where movies are made differently. In the intro to the Criterion Collection DVD of the film, Terry Jones points out that the film is constantly teasing its audience with "false Hulots" (M. Hulot being Tati's trademark character in his more commercially successful films, Mr. Hulot's Holiday and My Uncle)--lookalikes dressed in trenchcoats and hats and carrying pipes and umbrellas--of different nationalities and races--so our eye is tricked into looking places that other movies try to draw our attention away from--for instance, backgrounds and the left side of the frame. It's also worth noting that buildings, no less than people, are the "characters" in this film--but you'd have to see the film to fully understand how that might work.

Jones also notes that, if My Uncle depicts the destruction of the old France (world) and its replacement by a modern one, in PlayTime the old world has already been demolished. The question the movie puts forth, though, is what kind of humanity (in all the word's shades of meaning) inhabits the new world? Interestingly, unlike Kubrick's 2001, where human characters are less "human" than the machines, PlayTime shows the human spirit very much alive--in its curiosity about the world, its ability to make the best of hard and confusing times, and, mostly, its ability to draw people together--to connect--despite a sterile, colorless, and alienating environment created by no doubt well-meaning architects.

To enjoy PlayTime, which runs just over two hours (a bit long for comedy), you have to appreciate its ambitious comic choreography. You have to let go of characterization and plot, as inappropriate to the film's spirit, at least--perhaps tellingly as inappropriate to modernity, as well. Ebert notes--and I think he is right--that the only way to prepare yourself for watching PlayTime is to already have watched it at least once before--not too many movies you can say that of. Several bloggers and commenters I've read, who discuss the movie, say pretty much the same thing--that they were unimpressed and frustrated by the movie on first viewing, but enchanted by it when, for whatever reasons, they saw it again (and again).

Watching the movie on DVD this afternoon, I felt the movie's depiction of huge glass-encased offices, where everything can be seen but little can be understood, and tiny cubicles that splice and dice living space was not just reflective of Tati's dismay at the boxy architecture of the late twentieth century but predictive too of the twenty-first century's virtual environments. Moving from the movie to Facebook and then to my Blogger home page, with their clean lines and Apple-inspired sense of style, was, for me, a jarring and illuminating experience.

Dog (A Review)

2011-05-13T13:59:00.000-04:00

My dog seems to know I like to be gazed at, as I know he likes to be touched. His intense attentiveness gets rewarded with a touch, and every time I reach over to touch (especially) the top of his head, he gazes into my eyes with the ardor of a moony lover.

I do not think the dog is surprisingly smart or well behaved (though, I think, he is a little ahead of the curve in intelligence and sociability). He has been around me for fourteen and a half years, so perhaps he knows me better than anybody else ever has. That's not to say he understands me (or I understand him).

I feel guilty about not spending more time with him when I am working--or traveling. Like all dogs, he is a pack animal, and our relationship, whatever to call it, is just a substitute for having a pack to belong to. And whatever fondness he feels for me, the truth is that he never chose me. He may love me, if that's the appropriate word, but he did not decide at age eight weeks to spend the rest of his life with me. And he stays with me because I am what he knows--not that he has options. (On the other hand, in the wild, he would have no choice of packs either. He would take and accept what is available to him.)

I credit him with a lot of moral goodness, even wisdom. Right now I admire his contentedness with things as they are. Maybe he lacks the mental resources to imagine things being different--but, then, he does dream, and his dreams do appear to concern things that are not actually happening, so I can't say. His ability to live in the moment seems untainted by a desire to understand--mere knowledge and familiarity seem to be enough for him.

The past, for instance. Do dogs have anything resembling nostalgia? They seem to grieve when something or someone is taken away from them, but couldn't that be more a knowledge of what is NOT, as opposed to a fond consideration of what used to be? They remember things, but do they have regrets? I am almost certain that they do not--even though they whimper and cower sometimes when they sense their human companions' displeasure--or when they know, without our knowing anything, that things are not as they usually are. They seem to know (as well as any of us know) things that have happened in the past, but perhaps they do not pine for or repent of them. Their histories, to the extent that they have any narrative capacity, seem to merely contain all that has put them where they are today. They are apparently as unconscious of free will as they are of fate.

But if he is anything, my dog is a realist. He knows and accepts things as they are. If he has ideals, I cannot comprehend them. What he values is what he is used to--but he is easily adaptable to changes (within boundaries--he seems to accept change only insomuch as it involves a carry-over of a good many things he's familiar with: me, a toy, his bed--and I or somebody like me--a human provider--seems to be the irreducible good for his sense of well-being).

But what I love about my dog most is how mysterious his mind seems to me. Knowable, to a certain extent, but incomprehensible. What does he think of music? Not much, apparently. And he seems neither amused nor alarmed when I get up on my feet and dance to something I like. (Is it just that he has better tastes than I do?) And this morning, after looking lethargic all morning--and having earlier agreed to an only perfunctory walk to relieve himself--though the morning was shining and beautiful--after defining the words "hang dog" all morning, he came running to me with his toy in his mouth. He wanted to play--out of nowhere this urge to amuse himself and me--and so, careful not to let him hurt himself, I tussled with him for a bit with his toy. It took only a minute or so to reach the game's end, but I was so touched by the spurt of life energy in him that tears came to my eyes. It was the happiest I have been all week. That minute was better than all of Thor in 3-D.

Impure Thoughts

2011-05-10T13:42:00.001-04:00

My current reading in Montaigne has pegged me as a Pyrrhonian skeptic with leanings, like Montaigne, toward Epicureanism, with a woodsy aroma of Stoicism. A Pyrrhonian skeptic is one who doubts everything--even doubting whether he truly doubts. The Epicurean and Stoic biases keep me rooted in reality--both Greco-Roman philosophies are rooted in atomism and philosophical materialism. In particular, the teachings of Epicurus (which, yes, I have read--but it has been a while) account for my tendency to savor things--sensations stirred by texture, weight, density, vast spaces, and vibrant color especially--as part of my mindfulness of the surrounding world. But, typically of skeptics, I live in my head a lot.

I forget what I read. I forget what I know. I forget the bases of my own opinions. I am inconsistent--and relish contradictions (like Whitman, "I am large. I contain multitudes"). The advantage of such a mindset is that I am open to change, that I am constantly examining my reality and updating my judgments on it. I am not nostalgic, and I am not hidebound. I have been teaching college English for thirty years or so, and I have revamped my syllabus every semester. I don't teach off twenty-year-old notes. I don't even teach off one-year-old notes. My opinions and impressions change even as I am in the process of teaching--especially then. My mindset also makes me appear to be forgiving--I'm not--because I often forget (and often fail to deeply feel) others' wrongdoings.

The obvious disadvantage of such a mindset is that you can't take anything I say to the bank. I certainly don't. As I am with money, I am with impressions and affections and moods--easy come, easy go. I am not so much the proverbial commitment-phobe, as one whose commitments are scant and somewhat volatile. That is, I'm not so much afraid of commitments as immune to their (no doubt many) charms. They are intense ... while they last. I have loved a good many people in my life--many of them for long periods of time (in fact, I can think of no one I have ever loved that I can't easily imagine loving again, under the right circumstances)--yet even one-night stands have received the full fervor of my love and devotion ... for one night. Like the nineteenth-century Russian mystic Madame Swetchine, I say, "In this world of change, nothing which comes stays, and nothing which goes is lost." I do not love unconditionally, but my conditions are fairly simple: mainly, you can't let me forget you.

Permanence is not one of my values. Neither is purity. After decades of struggling for everlasting life, through faith, through the good graces of a holy god, I finally realized I didn't want it. I probably never did want to live forever but had not realized there was an option for not wanting it. I like my love--I love it--and, like Montaigne, I can say that, given an opportunity to live my life again, I would choose to live it exactly as I have. Most importantly, that means once. Unlike Montaigne, I might wish for better circumstances, but being a skeptic and an introvert, I have only rarely been deeply affected by my circumstances.

People who are pure, unchanging, certain, and consistent amaze me. I admire them, sort of, but I would never want to be them. I find it hard to believe that they are real. But they have somehow made their values the values of the whole world, so that someone like me, I know, comes off as narcissistic, flighty, wishy-washy, slightly unhinged. But I am fully hinged, perhaps too equipped with hinges to suit the world. I've got trapdoors all over the place. The two values I share with almost everyone else in the world are life and love. It's just that, for me, I can't imagine either as unchanging, pure, or eternal. An unchanging, pure, eternal "life" is just another way of saying "death," right? If I'm wrong, please help me understand the difference. And a love that is unconditional, indiscriminate enough to embrace everyone and everything, everlasting, and unvarying strikes me as the very definition of "indifference."

So here's where the Stoic part of me comes into play. I do believe in duty. There is a place in the world for indifference. But it is a last resort--as is, by the way, justice--the insistence that everyone get what (and only what) he deserves. Duty and justice step in where love fails. Love steeps us in ourselves and in blissful mindfulness of our individual existence, but duty and justice make it possible for us to live in peace with others, letting them live and love as we wish to be let to live and love, freely and uniquely. But duty and justice stand at the endpoint of love, so as important as they are to human society, to our ability to live with each other, one should carefully select the number and kinds of duties one undertakes and temper one's desire for pure and perfect justice with mercy, which is to say "laxness"--because there are glittering ideals (purity, perfection, consistency, permanence--ideals that look good enough "on paper") that may and often do kill life and love.

This is what I believe--for now--perhaps.

Against Effort

2011-05-08T13:32:00.000-04:00

I like blogging because it requires little effort. There are no deadlines to meet. There is no sense that what I write is for posterity, so its flaws are forgivable. The good and the bad alike are written in binary codes transmitted by electric currents, less substantive than writing on the sand. Blogging is like keeping a diary or a journal, only public, with opportunities for readers to comment, object, or praise--and the freedom for me as a thinker and writer to change my mind. I value the freedom to change my mind. I dislike the idea of publishing a book that I would then have to beat a drum for at bookstores and on talk shows. I dislike the idea of being haunted by something I wrote ten or twenty years earlier which I no longer believe or believe now in a different way.

I like immediacy and spontaneity. I don't like to cram--to rush to make a great effort. As an undergraduate I even reached the opinion that to study for exams was a form of cheating. My reasoning was that exams exist in order to find out how much and how well a student understands the material. To cram the night before the exam would then falsify the findings, making it appear that I understood more and better than I actually did, since almost everything I ever "learned" through cramming I forgot within days of the examination--and what would be the point of that? I preferred (and still do prefer) to learn slowly--gathering knowledge and understanding in small increments, which I then mull over, over time.

It is perhaps for similar reasons that now as an instructor I loathe PowerPoint presentations, since slide presentations suggest that all the speaker's knowledge of and thinking on the material have been completed hours, days, weeks, months, before the speech--that perhaps the speaker really doesn't know the material at all but simply found some shit online he or she would now like to receive credit for, in show-and-tell fashion. I realize that, for others, a sharp, snappy PowerPoint presentation suggests that the speaker is well prepared, that he or she has taken the speech seriously enough to make a "real effort." I prefer to walk into the classroom knowing what I'm talking about, as much as possible, and continue the thinking process even as I speak before the class. My approach may come off as more a shambles, with too many digressions, too many unanswered questions, but it strikes me as more intellectually honest--and such intellectual honesty is something I try to impart to my students--students already too prone to cheat, to plagiarize, and to cram--to aim for grades instead of understanding and skill.

I am not, of course, against every kind of effort. But the word "effort" now suggests a kind of force--and, really, a kind of pretense. The phrase "making an effort" has come to mean putting on a good show. It has very little to do with substance anymore. It has to do with dotting one's i's and crossing one's t's. It has to do with putting on a jacket and a tie and forcing a smile to create the appearance of enthusiasm. It has to do with filling out paperwork to prove that you are doing or have done what you might be doing for real if only it weren't for all the paperwork that needs completing.

The great ideas come when you are prepared--but usually not when you are preparing. If you know your stuff, if you have done your research, if you have made it your life practice to think critically and creatively, the great ideas will come when you least expect them, perhaps in the middle of the night, waking you from your sleep, perhaps while you are in the middle of doing something else or, even more likely, doing nothing at all. That last point is important. Without leisure, there are no new ideas, no true (i.e. deep) thinking. The deep waters must be still. Busy-ness, a life of mindless routine and habits, procrastination and panic, time sheets to fill out, obsessiveness about keeping up appearances--all these are part of the so-called Protestant work ethic, the backbone of what passes as integrity and conscientiousness in business. It's all "effort"--with nothing underneath to prop it up or at the end to show real accomplishment. (Some teachers grade effort. I don't. I grade outcomes. I expect students to do their best. They often don't, usually because they have been too busy "making an effort.")

Effort may be a large part of what is supposed to work in business. I suspect it doesn't even work there especially well. But supposing that effort does work in business, what evidence do we have that it works in other disciplines--academics, science, politics, religion, art?

And what of "genius"? Nobody seriously speaks of genius anymore--not in the ordinary sense it used to be spoken of, back when it was not the exclusive domain of artists and inventors with high IQs, back when it was of fundamental importance in education. The discipline of learning, not the making of efforts. What ever happened to the shaping of a human life, the making of genius--as opposed to the mere ornamentation of life with a long series of gold stars, trophies, resumes, promotions, and a gold watch and a tombstone? Well, let's say the reason is perhaps that genius, in its original sense, has never been an especially "measurable" outcome. When it comes to evaluating human beings in ledgers and accounts sheets--two columns for debits and credits--efforts are indeed much more quantifiable--you can check them off and tally them up.

But what, I ask, is the point?

Back to blogging, though. I blog for the same reason I used to take snapshots of myself--to chronicle a life in progress and hopefully to leave something for friends and family who might genuinely want to know me better. It's personal but also very public, community-minded. Sure, it requires an exertion of sorts, but the blog accumulates organically, at its own pace (slowly, very slowly), with no particular claim of certainty or completion or regularity or consistency. Perhaps in the future, in an academic setting without grades, without hoops to leap through, I will ask my students to blog--and my instruction, leisurely as always, will consist simply of prodding here and there, commenting, raising questions, and stirring the waters in such a way, I hope, as to leave the task of "settling" them in the students' hands.

Sunday Beefcake

2011-05-08T09:15:00.000-04:00

Big Time Sensuality

2011-05-03T17:20:00.003-04:00

I'm reading Montaigne now. Today I was delighted by what he has to say--mostly by his comment, at age 53: "I now defend myself against temperance, as I once did against sensuality."

My greatest worry about the younger generation--and it's my obligation as a 50-something to find young people worrisome in some way--is that they have very little sensuality and almost no curiosity. They are freakishly chaste in body and mind, it would seem, just to hear them talk. Descartes would be appalled at how blank their slates still are even at age eighteen. They have narrowed their self-indulgence down to food--junk food mostly--and greed--I'm pretty sure they'd do just about anything (except have sex--or give up Cheez Whiz) for money.

I was a late bloomer, so I can sympathize, having been raised fairly strictly to be a good Christian and little else. But at least I was curious--fascinated by divorcees, Catholics, Miss Kitty from Gunsmoke, and other wrong types. I suspect a good quarter of my 17 to 25 year old freshmen would have a difficult time sitting through an episode of Glee without its causing a mild (of course "mild") panic attack, whereas at age 14, I, between devotional readings in my bible, read James Bond novels and even did an oral book report on the dirty parts of The Painted Bird (I was scolded by my teacher afterwards, but gently and humanely). I had sex for the first time at age 14, too, with a girl my age, nobody I was interested in or would ever be interested in, it turns out, but at least I had a healthy curiosity about how things were done.

Who else today still uses the word "racy"? Or "keen"? Or "far-out," "snappy," "tangy," and "mind-blowing"? Where do you find purple prose anymore? WTF is the emoticon for "zest"?

Everything is virtual now--and digital. I suspect smell, touch, and taste will disappear off the human nervous system entirely. Holograms are what we'll be.

The boys drenched in British Sterling, Old Spice, and Aramis (sometimes all at once) are a distant memory (not a particularly pleasant memory, but nice in that, back then, people still luxuriated in strong and zingy smells).

The giddy pleasure of brushing up against somebody or holding hands may have to wait till a Wall-E rediscovers it. God help the first-grade teacher who fondles a child in her lap these days. God help the first-grader who wants to climb a tree.

Can any of us say we actually like the taste of McDonald's burgers?--or are we just used to it, the way we grow used to pop songs we are told we will like, which are then played everywhere so that, in time, we come to believe we do actually like them?

The average twenty-first American has a color palette that runs the gamut from beige to bone white. No wonder some of us are starved for color. Perhaps the recent (and now perhaps spent) popularity of Bollywood spectacle is based on India's lavish respect for gaudy color and noise.

Rasa (relish, passion, sensual exuberance) is both an aesthetic and a spiritual concept in Hinduism, but then look at Bosch, Rabelais, and Chaucer and see there that "carnivalesque" was once no less a part of European Christendom!

In time we may not remember what the aura of a live human being feels like. Emaciated, cool, perpetually safe, abstinent, bored, we will all be lightly lemon-lime scented, dry as Facebook pages, placid as cows, tasteful and blandly groomed as cemeteries and politicians--"with a hint of" real life left in us.

Bin Laden Dead Americans Rejoice

2011-05-02T08:13:00.004-04:00

News of Bin Laden's death leaves me empty of feeling. I do not rejoice. I have no urge to chant "U-S-A." Neither do I feel any compassion for the man. He was a terrorist. He was a theocrat. He belonged to a class of wealth and privilege that I can neither understand nor admire. I was not personally acquainted with him or any of his victims, so I have no reason to feel anything but a callous disregard for him and his family.

The media want me to feel something about this, I know. On one hand, I am asked to feel relief, some sense of vindication, and, on the other, I am warned that Bin Laden's death is not the end of terrorism (as if anybody could know that--ever) and that it may even spark a new wave of terrorist activity. If the crackpots are ready for a new wrong tree to bark up, the body's sea burial seems tailormade to invite speculation about a hoax and a coverup. Already, one young woman on Facebook, a "friend" of a "friend," suggested that the corpse should have been put on public view so that Americans might have "closure"--as if the probable desecration of the body would likely help open communication and heal old wounds, as if such a display would not encourage support for terrorism or provide a focal point for anti-American rage, as if we still live in a nineteenth-century America where we could prop the corpse up in a barbershop window with a sign on its chest: "Shot fer terrerizing."

It turns out that the terrorist was living in a million-dollar "mansion" (do mansions go for as cheap as a million in the Middle East?), not in a mountain cave. That fact should give pause to anyone tempted to revere Bin Laden as an ascetic saint or as a common man of the people. He belonged to a class of oil-rich snobs--the Bin Laden family were business partners with the Bush family. I doubt he was a man I might like to have had a beer with. That he was either a religious fanatic or one willing to use religious fanaticism to consolidate power is neither something I can respect nor something, as an American, I can pretend to be unfamiliar with--it's the world I live in every day--what else can I say?

Along with Bin Laden, three other people were reportedly shot and killed, supposedly trying to defend him. About their deaths I have the same icy indifference and absence of rejoicing I have about their leader's.

Do I feel justice has been served? Yes, I do. Bin Laden deserved to die. His sudden violent death saves the world years of intrigue in international courts and months of handwringing and whatever passes for debate in the American mass media. That he now has an official termination date diminishes his mystery somewhat, and that's a good thing too, though Marilyn, JFK, Elvis, and Kurt Cobain offer precedents for the kinds of speculation I can expect to hear over the matter for the rest of my life. (Do I deserve to be exposed to a lifetime of inane and invalid conjectures? No, I do not.)

Do I rejoice that justice has been served? Not really. My feelings, negative or positive, do not usually extend so far as to cover instances in which people simply get what they deserve. Is it a happy day when people get what they deserve? Sometimes. It is an uncommon day--that much I will say.

Sunday Beefcake

2011-05-01T08:01:00.002-04:00

Sunday Beefcake

2011-04-24T03:08:00.002-04:00

Zen Spice

2011-04-18T17:46:00.000-04:00

Last night, or in the small hours of this morning, I dreamed I was watching the Spice Girls perform the Japanese tea ceremony. Some interest in how the Spices became skilled in the way of tea, particularly as they were brewing a particularly thick tea, was my only remembered response to the ceremony. I learned the ceremony in a sixth-grade class in Japanese culture in the mid-1960s, but I have forgot it all, consciously anyway, although the dream--and its seemingly accurate details--would suggest that some of that knowledge still clings to my unconscious.

I've taken the dream to be a self-admonition to be more mindful in my daily life. Good luck on that, I say to myself, having descended to a kind of willful slovenliness in the past several years. Still, I made my bed smartly before leaving for school this morning, and tried to be there while washing some bowls and serving ware in my sink this morning. I may not get to the point of ritualizing dusting and sweeping, as I really should, but who knows?

Baby steps. Baby steps on the flat stones towards the irregularly clicking water wheel. Wannabe-zen.

Socialist Leanings

2011-04-17T13:32:00.010-04:00

Cuba looms large in the imagination, disproportionate to its size and population, as large in most Americans' imaginations as Mexico, at times larger than Russia or China. Its history is linked with ours--New World colonies (Cuba's independence lagging over 100 years after ours), shared ethnic heritage (like ours, its culture is a distinctive blend of native, European, and African influences), and shared economic interests in the first half of the twentieth century, especially for the decade after World War Two, when US investments enriched the island nation and Havana was a playground for rich American playboys.

At the time that the Batista regime (i.e. those most enriched by US investments) fell to communist guerrillas, the US was succumbing to what President Eisenhower shortly thereafter warned was the malign influence of "the military industrial complex." Fidel Castro governed Cuba through the ups and downs of nine, ten, or eleven US Presidents, depending on whether one counts Eisenhower and Obama (whose inauguration preceded Castro's retirement by a month). [Point of interest: if we go with the number eleven, Castro's presidency equals a quarter of total US Presidencies since Washington.] Reportedly, Castro survived 638 assassination attempts by the CIA--arguably, if one is prone to see history as Oliver Stone envisions it (and, frankly, darkly, his view of things strikes me as often fairly close to the mark), that's 638 more than JFK. At 84, Castro still casts a daunting shadow over US capitalism. His death, inevitable if not imminent, even at such a great age, will no doubt be treated by the American political right as a godsend equivalent to the unforeseen (and, as yet, unexpected) capture of Osama Bin Laden.

Much is made of Cuba's human rights violations. They are indisputable. I should note, however, that the rights of lesbians, gays, bisexuals, and the transgendered have been protected under Cuban law since 1979--24 years before the US Supreme Court overturned states' sodomy laws criminalizing the lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness of America's equivalent citizens. On Saturday, Fidel's brother and successor, Raul Castro, announced further democratizing steps--limitations on presidential terms (to no more than two five-year terms per president) and continued support of loosening restrictions on private enterprise and decreasing government subsidies where such funding tends to diminish citizens' drive to work.

The catch, as one commentator on public radio expressed it, as I was waking up this morning, is that Castro wants to put caps on the amount of wealth an individual can acquire. Three years ago a reader of this blog called me a socialist because I suggested that it might be reasonable to cap CEO salaries at no more than 100 times what a company's least well paid employee earns--so that if the lowliest receptionist earns, let's say, $25,000 a year, the company's highest paid employee should earn no more than $2,500,000. The proposition still strikes me as generous--but then I do favor unions over Wall Street--and an even lower cap at 50:1 still seems generous (and fairer) to me.

I can't say I'm a particularly adept socialist. My knowledge of economics is all but nonexistent. I have a pretty good bullshit detector, though, and most of the cant I hear through the American media sets its alarm off. I can't see how, for instance, advocates of the idea that all Americans should be responsible for themselves, especially those advocates who claim we all have the capacity (on a "level playing field," no less) for pulling ourselves up into wealth by our own bootstraps ... I can't see how these same advocates can complain about inheritance taxes (what the right likes to peg as "death taxes"). Why should a billionaire's children inherit anything at all? Isn't it the billionaire's responsibility to train her or his children to make their own billions? When a billionaire dies, what's wrong with cashing in the estate, minus a generous allowance for a surviving spouse, if incapable of maintaining an independent living, and putting the money into public works--hospitals, schools, military, highways, national parks, air traffic control, fire departments, and so forth?

While I am confessing my failure to understand the US economy, let me pose three more questions: At what point in history, ever, has the wealth of the wealthiest in America "trickled down" to the poorest? And, two, how is it possible that businesses must be ever-growing and ever-expanding to survive, when resources and demand have natural end points? And how, if capitalism's "invisible hand" ensures that the ready, useful, and hard working are rewarded as they deserve, did we ever reach the point where WWE wrestlers make more money than nurses--or Jersey Shore cast members (presumably both untrained and relatively inexperienced as entertainers) make more than police officers?

I may be a "socialist" for just asking such questions, but at what point does somebody become a "greedy capitalist pig" for expecting the poor to work two or three jobs to make ends meet, and still plummeting deeper into debt, while letting GE not pay a cent in federal taxes for 2010 and pampered heirs of adult age, already privileged with tony business contacts and legacy admission to the country's best universities, claim billions as their own, to the earning of which they contributed nothing?

[Note: The chart at the head of this post is dated 2009. It is used only to prettify the post, and I make no reference to it whatsoever.]

Sunday Beefcake

2011-04-17T12:15:00.000-04:00

Rx

2011-04-10T18:57:00.003-04:00

Sunday Beefcake

2011-04-10T01:56:00.000-04:00

Quixotica

2011-04-09T13:45:00.001-04:00

We're doing Quixote again in World Literature class. And, again, it impresses me with its modernity, its central theme being the madness and the irresistible romance of living by outdated principles and beliefs. Who today can't relate to that struggle? The mind is an impressionable organ, and the dents and nicks it receives in just a single lifetime pretty much define what it is and how it will be remembered for however long it will be remembered. And, on top of that, an entire culture! The baggage of culture--norms, revelations, prejudices, myths, traditions, laws, rites--all received ready to wear, and into this crib we are born, and in it all the hard knocks of the individual life are defined, contained, and reinforced.

Don Quixote does irreparable harm by living in his dreams, spawned from too much reading about false realities that, as Cervantes notes in his prologue, Aristotle, St Basil, and Cicero never spoke of--that is to say, as I take it, realities that science, charity, and civil law know nothing of. His chivalrous concept of justice leads him to attempt to rescue a 15-year-old servant from the harsh master who has tied him to a tree to beat him, but no sooner has Quixote left the scene, self-righteously waving his makeshift spear, than the master ties the boy back up again for an even worse beating. And the harm ultimately comes back to Quixote himself, in the end, surrounded by mirrors and confronted with his measly absurdity and decrepitude, so that his relatives and neighbors may "cure" him of his "madness"--a cure that succeeds admirably ... and absolutely, since Quixote dies immediately thereafter, a shivering, neurasthenic mess.

So, too, there is the romance of living in one's technicolor dreams. Reality is a bitch, as they say, and it's a crutch, Lily Tomlin said, for people who can't handle drugs. In Don Quixote, what we see of the outside world, the world outside Quixote's romance-fevered imagination, is no great shakes--peasants who have learned to thrive on cruelty and guile; businessmen whose whole world revolves around turning an ever-inflated profit, unaware that supply and demand are limited; noblemen whose whole world languishes in inherited wealth and a jaded and corrosive sense of irony. No wonder Quixote cracks and decides to wear kitchen utensils and speak lines straight out of potboilers.

Then there's Sancho Panza, too. Not an educated man, foolish enough to cater to Quixote's grandiose fantasies just on the promise of an island kingdom of his own at the end of the line, but with enough native wits about him to see the plain light of reality more often than not. But then, being a realist, why does Sancho persist in following Quixote despite strong, well-founded doubts and an ability to recognize that Quixote's quests pose more risk than glory for them both? The answer is sad yet understandable. Without Quixote and his madness, there can be no island kingdom at the end of the line either. Sometimes to give up the fantasy is to give up hope--as, again, demonstrated in Quixote's ultimate downfall: bereft of illusions, his life is demolished.

At the end of Annie Hall, Woody Allen recounts an old joke: "This guy goes to a psychiatrist and says, 'Doc, my brother's crazy. He thinks he's a chicken.' And the doctor says, 'Well, why don't you turn him in?' The guy says, 'I would, but I need the eggs.'" The human need for illusions--even destructive and paranoid ones--is an idea Allen explored in other films (Stardust Memories, The Purple Rose of Cairo, and most recently You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger), and it's one our culture has not yet worked its way through yet--witness the growing number of atheists and agnostics coming out of the closet, matched only by the number of theists arguing their beliefs in a deity and an afterlife on the basis that life would be too terrible without them. But the postmodern condition is not modern, much less post-modern. Cervantes was outlining it 400 years ago.

M A D A M I M A D A M

2011-04-08T17:16:00.001-04:00

It occurred to me this afternoon, while mulling over Milton's Paradise Lost, that for years I had misread the story of the Garden of Eden. In my youth I thought it was about man's disobedience to God in a vaguely sexual way, what with all the co-ed nudity and all. Later, Milton's epic half-convinced me that it was about man's failure to put God first in his life, Adam choosing damnation with Eve as opposed to everlasting life without her, then that the curse for disobedience would be mankind's inability to understand goodness from a pure state of innocence, but only in opposition to evil and suffering. Even later, I considered the possibility that it was about missed opportunities--that is, man's failure to nab something off the Tree of Life (which granted eternal life and, I assume, youth) before being ousted from Eden by the angel with the fiery sword--sort of like a primordial Aladdin using up his three magic-lantern wishes without remembering to make one of them "three more wishes." It was only this afternoon that the (now) obvious psychological significance of the story struck me. In Eden, Adam and Eve were permitted to eat of all of the trees in the garden except that of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Isn't it just like human nature to want precisely the one thing that is disallowed? And even in a garden so perfect as to have allegorical trees and talking animals, the quintessential human impulse is to cross boundaries and fly in the face of authority. Go, humankind, go!

Sunday Beefcake

2011-04-03T01:58:00.000-04:00

On the Town on My Birthday

2011-03-27T17:37:00.000-04:00

Sunday Beefcake

2011-03-27T17:25:00.000-04:00

Annus Mirabilis

2011-03-25T05:35:00.000-04:00

"Heaven lies about us in our infancy!"--William Wordsworth, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" (1807)

Liz, 1932-2011

2011-03-23T16:38:00.000-04:00

Elizabeth Taylor died today, after a long illness. She was considered the most beautiful woman alive when I was a boy, first choice to play Cleopatra and Helen of Troy, a woman whose passions were legendary and front-page news. There was no way I would not be enthralled. I remember the moral disapproval of her, which was a constant refrain in the church circles my family belonged to. My mother thought she was sin incarnate, yet she wouldn't stop me from seeing Taylor's movies, even though it was against her scruples to go to them herself.

Cleopatra--the epic flop that I still consider one of the great films of the 1960s--was restricted to adults and minors accompanied by their parents. So when neither of my parents would take me to see it, I wound up going with Sergeant Sherman, one of the men who worked on jets with my father, and Mrs. Sherman. Nobody at the base theater at Yokota seemed concerned that my "parents" were black. This was in 1963 or '64, sure, but it was also the military, which was integrated my entire life.

Frankly, despite my fascination with her personally, I did not think much of Elizabeth Taylor as an actor--her voice a bit shrill and throaty for my tastes, too sharp even for her career-changing (and perhaps career-killing) role as Martha in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? She was her most beautiful and well cast in A Place in the Sun, but it will always be for her flamboyant entrance to Rome in Cleopatra that I will remember her. And in her rare interviews and talk-show appearances, she was radiant, down to earth, and shyly nervous all at once. She led a courageous life, and I can't think of higher praise--or a higher form of moral integrity.

Sunday Beefcake (The Second Coming, A Second Helping)

2011-03-20T15:01:00.002-04:00

Operation Odyssey Dawn

2011-03-20T14:34:00.002-04:00

Next Friday I will have lived on God's less and less green earth for fifty-eight years. I was born in 1953 in a US military hospital in Tripoli, Libya, the same hospital, I believe, President Reagan bombed in '86, purportedly killing Qaddafi's adopted daughter, at which time it was no longer a US hospital and I, of course, was long gone. For the first fourteen years of my life, I held dual citizenship, US and Libyan, only vaguely aware of that fact and, obviously, since I left the country at age nine months, with little feeling for the place. But with the Six Day War in '67, the Department of Defense insisted that I and other military dependents in my situation become "naturalized" citizens, in addition to only technically native-born, and "renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty of whom or which [we] have heretofore been [subjects or citizens]." Besides the addition of three new words to my vocabulary, the day did little for me the private person, the only identity that mattered (matters) to me.

Last night I rode with a friend and work colleague to a departmental planning dinner at our boss's house in Raleigh. On the way we discussed the tsunami in Japan, the closeness of the moon, the coming again of the thirteen-year locusts, and some radio prophet who predicts that Jesus is coming back this May, perhaps in time for the premiere of Shania Twain's new reality show on the Oprah Winfrey Network. My friend is a devout Christian and Tea Party Republican. I am somewhat different than that. We do, however, share a keen taste for the apocalyptic. We were movie buddies for both 2012 and Zombieland a couple of years ago, and I lent her my dvd of When Worlds Collide and had to wait a good long while before I could pry it back out of her hands.

In the course of our conversation, I mentioned that a US serviceman in Japan, when I lived there, told me and some other military brats at Yokota Air Force Base, that Nostradamus predicted the end of the world would occur in 1968, which at the time was still in the future. Specifically, the sixteenth-century pharmacist had said that there would be "fireworks on Earth visible from the planet Mars." We kids were mesmerized and shaken by the news. Later, after 1968, in a Christian high school, my Americanism Versus Communism teacher assigned me and my classmates the project of creating a scrapbook called The Signs of the Times, in which we taped newspaper articles that correlated with biblical prophesies of the end times. Off the top of my head, I vaguely remember that my scrapbook contained news of volcanoes, riots, and a production of O Calcutta--the section on prophesied decadent sex in the latter days was the thickest and richest section of my finished project.

My understanding is that the world has been ending for quite a long time now. The early Christians believed it would happen in their own lifetimes. Jesus promised his disciples that they would live to see him returning in glory. The apostle Paul taught the Corinthians that there was not much point in marriage and procreation with the end of the world being right around the corner, but admonished those who couldn't keep their legs together for even that long that it is "better to marry than to burn." This is not to suggest that the world will never end, just that, like many of us, the world tends to procrastinate--and certainly quite a bit more than fundamentalist Christians think it should, its having taken approximately 3,799,800,000 years to create mankind in God's image, as opposed to the preferred six-day (E-Z drive-thru) version in Genesis. (More statistics and side note: the Google search terms "Obama Antichrist" produce 877,000 results in 0.08 seconds.)

Having now lived almost 58 years, I say that life is good, if seldom great and if often prone to fall on your head from time to time like a cheap cabin tent. According to Complexity Theory, the more complex things (including societies and hairdos) become, the more likely they are to collapse. I am not a good one for offering people hope. Things are bad right now. They look like they're getting worse. But I am not a fretter either. I believe we all need to do whatever we can do to make things better, if not altogether right. Feeling disturbed or anxious never fixed anything. In times like these, it helps to remind ourselves that we are mortal, that we are all in this thing together, that it will not kill us to show compassion and act mercifully. It perhaps neither helps nor hurts to write a letter to our democratically elected representatives in government from time to time. We will "get by" for as long as we can and then will no longer "get by." Over that eventuality, we have some--but so very very little--control.

At the end of his satirical novel Candide, inspired by witnessing a tidal wave hit Lisbon in 1755, Voltaire admonishes us, "We must cultivate our garden," an admonition towards unworried simplicity that I have followed religiously ever since I first read it. Or, as Jesus said, "[D]o not worry about tomorrow, for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own" (NIV, Matt. 6.34).

Amen. You can say that again. Duh.

Rhetorical Questions

2011-03-15T23:04:00.007-04:00

What becomes of a democracy where the people think ideas are burdens? Where to be opinionated means the same thing as closed minded? Where you have your facts and I have mine? Where those who think at all are told, "You think too much"?

What kind of democracy urges everyone to vote but encourages fascination with public figures the citizenry of no state has voted to current office, figures whose profoundest insights fit on bumper stickers? What kind of democracy has only two parties, both of which value the rights of corporations over those of workers?

What kind of democracy encourages hope, pride, faith, and work but not debate, maturity, whimsicality, and pleasure? What kind of democracy promotes private ownership as the chief happiness available to its citizens? What kind of democracy celebrates the diversity of choice in breakfast cereals that differ only in shape and color and branding and packaging?

What kind of democracy celebrates 200-year-old deists and rationalists as supporters of biblical Christianity and a 2000-year-old bachelor as a promoter of marriage and family values?

What kind of democracy interprets a constitution framed by slave owners strictly according to original intent?

In what kind of democracy are "fascism" and "socialism" regarded as synonyms? In what kind of democracy does the statement "lack of faith is itself a form of faith" make sense, but "lack of orange juice is itself a form of orange juice" does not? In what kind of democracy can you not say certain words in public yet proclamation of any sort of hateful opinion is protected, as long as its wording is generally latinate?

What kind of democracy rewards children and teenagers for attracting attention on sports teams more than in classrooms? What kind of democracy pays coaches more than school nurses? What kind of democracy thinks it is not child abuse to tell children that they or their friends are in serious, imminent danger of hellfire?

What kind of democracy supports maintaining personal convictions without routinely subjecting them to the test of facts, experience, and sound reasoning? What kind of democracy rewards following orders more than following one's bliss?

Go Get Em, Tiger

2011-03-13T17:46:00.006-04:00

I know what the expression means, but "He's the kind of man who knows what he wants and goes after it" has never resonated with me. My problem has always (always) been the first part. I don't know what I want. I have no problem with the "going after it" part. Back in the days of my impressionable youth, all it took was for somebody to tell me what it was I wanted and I went after it and got it.

In high school it was a girlfriend. I had several--really nice girls--the best friends I could hope for at the time and real "catches" too--but ultimately it seemed like I had them the way I had clean underwear on whenever I went somewhere. I had them because I was urged to have them. I had them because you never know if and when something might happen to you, so you had better be ready.

In church it was a personal relationship with God. I had that. Maybe too much of that. I was raised believing "once saved always saved," and if that's really true then I am saved still, even though I am an atheist and do not believe in salvation specifically--not at least in a God who requires a blood atonement, not even one who's willing to put up his own son to seal the deal, especially such a God. I suppose my old crowd would tell me that I never was saved to begin with, but I tell you now, from the depths of my soul, if I was not saved, then nobody is saved. I was earnest. I was transparently trusting in the unseen. I spoke to God every day and convinced myself I could hear him speaking to me in return. I read the bible cover to cover three times a year from age sixteen to age twenty-four. People think it's Darwin or Nietzsche that turns guys like me into atheists, but for me it was God's holy and inerrant word that did the trick. Reading it so much, I got jaded, I suppose. It simply started to seem ridiculous. I never decided not to believe in God, any more than I decided not to believe in the tooth fairy. It's just that, after a while, I discovered I no longer did. In fact, I suspect there were five or so years there when I thought I still believed--just because it was what I was used to and what, I thought, I was supposed to do--but looking back I was an infidel in fact well before I was ready to accept that I was.

Sticking with this point a bit further, some people would assume that my homosexuality turned me into an atheist. My mother thought so. When I first told her I was gay--she who had once warned me that if she ever found out I was gay (see, she must have suspected), she would put a bullet through my head (the one thing you've got to hand to Christians is that they have no qualms at all about killing off their only sons)--she gasped, hurt, and spurted out, "Then you must not be a Christian!" Which was a fact, but with uncharacteristic clear-headedness I replied, "Let's just take things a step at a time." Some might say the church's stance against gays and lesbians, the transgendered, the bi, might have pushed me away from God. I can say for sure the Christian church's homophobia did not help matters, but, no, sorry, even if I were straight as Roy Rogers, I would probably be an atheist today.

I would never have gone for my doctorate had there not been professors in college who saw some ability in me and urged me to pursue my education further. Graduate school was never on my must-do list. It was not even on my nice-to-do list. The biggest dream I had for myself, back then, was either to teach at a Christian private school or at a mission school abroad. It's a good thing I had those professors. I can't imagine the shit hole I would be in today if gay as a three dollar bill and faithless as the devil, I were teaching at a Christian school--probably married, with kids, too. Thank God (ahem) that's not a hole I ever dug for myself.

I would like money, but how much? I don't know. I'm deliriously happy so long as my pockets are full. I might like a lover, but what kind? I don't know. I'm not sure that a long-term relationship is even for me--or just one of those things I should want--or had better want unless I want to die of AIDS. Again, the LTR as clean BVDs! The thought of buying a new car makes me physically sick. I can more easily imagine my own death (apologies to Freud) than I can imagine liking a house so much that I would want to buy it and live in it. (By the way, I'm a renter, not a hobo.) There's not a whole lot that I want that I don't have. Some Blu-Ray disks, some books, some more Coca-Cola Zero, some more years with my dog Tom Ripley.

I feel reasonably content with my life as it is. People say I'm hard to shop for. The real problem is I'm way too easy. If there ever was a real "the thought is what counts" kind of guy, it's me. On birthdays (and lesser holidays) I just want to hang out, usually with just a few friends, quietly, humorously, maybe a bit drunkenly. The two times in my life people (in both cases, people I didn't know well and, in both cases, against the advice of friends who did) threw me big surprise parties, the surprise was on them--for the life of me I couldn't be convincingly appreciative of the imposition, thoughtful though it undoubtedly was.

Maybe I'm this way because, for the first fifteen years of my life, my father was in the military, and in the military (even if you're just a GI's dependent) you don't have any wants. You do what you're told to do. You want nothing, "but to do and die." Or maybe my experience has been that when I have gotten what I wanted, I quickly realize it is nothing I wanted at all and am bitterly disappointed with the vanity of existence--like that kid at the end of "Araby." Or maybe I'm just a weak-willed kind of guy--stubborn, but no gumption, no get up and go, perhaps. Maybe I'm just a sorry excuse for a man. But like the bald girl says, "I do not want what I haven't got."

You know that trick you're supposed to play on genies? Where you're granted three wishes, but your third wish is always for three more wishes? That's just one more thing I understand intellectually, without feeling very deeply. Even as a child, still bursting with hopes and dreams, I was petrified by the pressure of coming up with three whole wishes. I couldn't do it. I'd be doing well to come up with two. And why do I not believe in an afterlife of some kind? I just can't imagine its being much fun, so I'd prefer to concentrate on enjoying what comes to me in this life. And it does come, just not all at once, and it's often not what you could have imagined, so it's never what you could have hoped for.

Lacking ambition, as I do, makes being idle a whole lot easier to do. I have no particular hopes, so I have no particular worries of their never coming to pass. So now that I am grown, an independent thinker, with a stubborn streak, I don't much care what other people think I ought to be going after. But it does make me a little sad, at times, not so very often really, to think that I'm the type of man who doesn't know what he wants.

Wish List

2011-03-12T12:33:00.001-05:00

If you have not been paying attention, there are only 12 shopping days left till my birthday. Time to look busy, people! One friend has already wished me a "happy belated birthday" on Facebook, which is what I call planning ahead.

I will be fifty-eight on the 25th. I will not be attending any of my classes that day. It's my high holy day of the year. (Keep your Christmas.) Some of you ask if I will be sixty this year, which is offensive, grossly offensive, on two levels.

One: When I say kindly, No, I will be fifty-eight, not sixty, you snap back, "I didn't think so." But, Bitch, it was your FIRST GUESS! Own up to it.

Two: You ask if I will be sixty assuming that sixty, a round number, 6-0, is a "special" birthday, warranting a special celebration, perhaps more expensive gifts for my Diamond Jubilee--as if you think I'm going to let you ... or anybody ... get away with taking my 58 years on the CHEAP!

So let's clear the air here. Fifty-eight IS a big deal, okay? Taking into consideration the Darwinian "dead pool" of longevity, I have already outlived Lincoln (56), Shakespeare (52), Proust (51), Gorgeous George (48), Billie Holiday (44), JFK (46), Van Gogh (37), Mozart (35), Alexander the Great (32), Kurt Cobain (27), Tupac (25), and James Dean (24), none of whom lived long enough to accomplish much of anything of importance blog-wise--so show a little fucking respect.

My prematurely dilatory Facebook friend aside, the rest of you guys need to get on the ball. As you know, the longer you wait the pricier the gift ends up being--or you wind up giving me something "thoughtful," like a crinkled foil gum wrapper you will try to pass off as being in your pocket the day we first met--Bullshit! To give a cheap thoughtful gift, you have to actually be thoughtful, which means you are already on top of this looming crisis, but for the rest of you, it's time to call Visa and verify your available credit.

To help you along, here's a wish list. Study it. Be prepared to be held accountable for it.

Ten-year membership to the Rent Boy of the Week Club--though undoubtedly it would be cheaper simply to pay my rent for ten years.
A year-round, permanently reserved carriage house at the Maison Dupuy Hotel, New Orleans.
Front row seats to WWE's Wrestlemania XXVII in Atlanta on April 3rd. Yeah, that's very expensive now, what with scalpers and all, and it is ten full days after my birthday--but was it me who told you to procrastinate?
A 17-inch MacBook Pro in brushed silver, an iPad 2, and, oh, might as well, an iPhone 4.
A small but memorable role as Ryan Reynolds' valet, dresser, confidant, and personal assistant in the sequel to The Green Lantern.
Every Tarzan movie ever made on Blu-Ray, fully restored in high definition and enhanced 7.1 surround sound.
World Peace, an End to Hunger, and an internationally signed agreement that the climate not be permitted to change ever again.
Front row tickets to see Lady Gaga in concert at the MGM Grand Hotel in Las Vegas ... on my birthday!
A lifetime supply of Coca-Cola Classic (pricier than you may think--I'm addicted to the stuff--like frigging heroin).
A 24-hour shopping spree at Nordstrom's, the downtown Seattle location will do--it's the biggest ... I checked.

Zombies!

2011-03-08T12:55:00.002-05:00

Last night I watched the first disk of the AMC series The Walking Dead. I'm realizing that zombies are probably just not the right fit for me, monster-wise. Vampires, yeah, because they're sexy. Werewolves, definitely, because they cut loose every four weeks. No doubt about giant apes because, you know, they are giant frigging apes! But zombies? Too close to my reality.

I am enjoying the fact that the series is set in Atlanta, a city I lived in for a year and a half in the 1970s and have visited frequently since then. It's a modern city, with malls, sprawl, gated communities, and every fast-food chain known to man, encircled but hardly contained by a gigantic highway (285). I love the city, but it strikes me as a perfect setting for a TV show about zombies.

The scariest part of The Walking Dead, so far, is the scene in the first episode when three human characters are bunkered in a house, windows covered to escape the undead's attention, characters only whispering so as not to be heard, knowing full well that zombies are swarming around the neighborhood after dark, including one who used to be the wife of one of the characters and the mother of another. Just the whole situation of being vital and alive, yet forced into immobility and silence, just strikes me as eery and nightmarish, especially since people without pulses control the new social order--as I said, too close to my reality. Especially creepy is a shot of the front doorknob twisting as the former lady of the house, with masklike lack of affect, except for her constantly moving jaw, tries to reenter what used to be her life.

I suspect American conservatives and liberals view zombie movies contrastingly. Perhaps one reason for these movies' popularity right now is that different audiences can understand them to mean different things. The human characters in these movies must strike conservatives as prototypical survivalists--good decent "real" Americans who hunt and fish and pray, who, when the times get apocalyptic, are tough enough to do what it takes to thrive--which basically means looking out just for yourself and your own (family, race, etc.) first of all and steering clear of the freaks (me and people like me). It must also be fun for them to imagine a world without taxes or zoning laws.

For liberals and leftists, the unavoidable analogy (or it seems unavoidable to me) is that the constantly craving, never satiated zombies are prototypical consumer capitalists. Indeed, George A. Romero, father of the modern concept of zombification, which he uprooted from its voodoo context and spliced with 1950s sci-fi invaders, suggested as much in 1978's Dawn of the Dead, when the undead gather at the local shopping mall ("This was an important place in their lives").

Unlike other kinds of horror movies that invoke the supernatural, it is really unnecessary to "set a mood" for a zombie movie. Zombies fit into ordinary reality effortlessly--unlike vampires or ghosts or giant apes. No need for dark shadows, cobwebs, theremin music, dry ice, and medieval iconography. A Pizza Hut is as good as a castle in a zombie movie.

One thing you never see zombies doing in a zombie movie is drive cars. This is an oversight, in my opinion. I never feel so dead and so out of touch with my environment as when I'm behind the wheel of a car ... in traffic. And when I make the effort to look through the windshields (assuming they're not tinted to prevent such an invasion of privacy ... er, in public places) at the other drivers and their passengers, I am always struck by the occupants' glazed, expressionless faces--even when (and this is creepy) the people are swaying and nodding and hopping to the beat of music. It's not so much the fact that I can't hear the music they're quasi-dancing to, it's the fact that their faces so often look crematorium-ready even while their shoulders rock and jiggle back and forth. A couple of years ago my car broke down on a busy interstate highway, and my long walk along the shoulder of that constantly roaring road (yet curiously lifeless--witness all the dead animals I had to step over) has changed my perception of postmodern reality forever.

Besides wandering the mall and driving cars, zombies should do more things that would enhance the movies' realism--stand in line, for one. Long slow lines, preferably. Watch television. Go to church. Text. Lurch toward familiar brand names. Sit in desks and stare straight ahead while their teachers lecture. Stand, blank-faced, with phones glued to their ears, waiting for the next available representative. Take their shoes off before shuffling through security checks. Have blogs. Yeah, zombies most definitely would blog.

Not Nice

2011-02-26T14:14:00.002-05:00

Teddy Roosevelt's daughter Alice Roosevelt Longworth once quipped, "If you haven't got anything nice to say about anybody, come sit next to me." It's not really that I have a taste for mean gossip, but a certain kind of niceness rubs me the wrong way--and I find a certain kind of meanness wildly entertaining. To be "mean," after all, really only means to be "common, public, general, universal, shared by all." "Nice," however, once meant "foolish, stupid, senseless"--I cite the Online Etymology Dictionary on this point--derived from the Latin prefix ne-, meaning "not," and the root scire, meaning "to know." Of course, that definition is about 700 years old. Since its origin, "nice" has come to mean "timid," then "fussy, fastidious," then "dainty, delicate," then "precise, careful," then "agreeable, delightful," and now "kind, thoughtful." Still, its roots do show through, since, in even current usage, the word often means to pretend not to know, or to ignore. I would add that "nice" now suggests a certain class superiority--the modern form of gentility (with the full force of "Gentile" in effect here, too), whereas "mean" denotes the merely common--riffraff.

Ricky Gervais' patter at this year's Golden Globe Awards was widely panned as "mean" spirited (and widely praised by others as hilarious). What I caught of it online was funny, poisonously funny in the manner of Groucho Marx, W.C. Fields, and Mark Twain. Americans used to be good at this kind of roughhouse humor, holding nothing back, body-slamming hypocrisy and pretension left and right. Meanness in the service of truth, justice, and equality is, I think, rather a good thing. In front of the emperors who had gathered together at the Beverly Hilton Hotel to pat themselves on the back, Gervais pointed out that they wore no clothes. This is mean, of course, and it is also satire with its moral force intact. That such honesty is scathing--that it hurts--is of course what bothers so many people about it, especially when the people getting roasted are "of the better sort." However, insulting whole classes of people--mainly the working poor--is not only acceptable, but also politically shrewd. Few Americans seem to mind attacks on labor unions, welfare moms, or nutjobs who break from the pack to criticize the high, the mighty, and the legally incorporated.

We have been assured that tomorrow night's Oscars broadcast will be meanness-free. James Franco and Anne Hathaway will be as well-scrubbed and nice as they can be. Franco told the Hollywood Reporter that Gervais had submitted some material for the Oscars, but it was rejected. Franco said, "He did his award show and he bombed. Why is he trying to get in on ours?" He further stated that, as someone who was in the audience at Gervais' Golden Globes performance, he found it "not funny"--or perhaps just not the laugh riot the Globes show was in 2009, when Glenn Close and Jake Gyllenhaal co-hosted.

We should keep in mind that all social reformers have been criticized as "mean" and that, despite their murderous tendencies, HAL the computer and Hannibal Lecter are as "nice" as nice can be. Niceness is a social quality, not an ethical one. Our objections to someone who refuses to behave nicely are much like our objections to someone who fails to dress appropriately for an event. This delicacy wouldn't be so bad if we as a modern people, in an age of political correctness and compassionate conservatism, were not so blithely tolerant of the arrogance of the powerful, the burdens crushing the poor and the sick, and the thousands of deaths that are the "collateral damage" of our "peacekeeping" efforts abroad.

We have the Brits to thank for keeping meanness in satire alive. Of course, they have a tradition--Swift, Pope, Wilde, and Sasha Baron Cohen. In America, we still have the Jews--Jon Stewart, Larry David, and Sarah Silverman--to keep us grounded with their knowing but often indelicate jabs at our pretensions and petty cruelties, to which we may prefer to turn a blind eye--but then the Jews do lack the "kinder and gentler" airs of us Gentiles.

Godlike

2011-02-25T17:42:00.003-05:00

"Godlike Helen." "Godlike Achilles." It was just two or three weeks ago that my students and I were working out the implications of these phrases in the Iliad--and then in the Oresteia, where they sound more ominously in the ear. For the Greeks, "godlike" is miles away from what, say, Pat Robertson or Mike Huckabee or Barack Obama might recognize as "godly." The Greek gods, though fashioned in the Greeks' own image, were mostly reflections of the amoral forces of nature, including human nature, not the withered and cross god of the Christianity I grew up with. Not that the Greeks were amoral--far from it--but their morality grew not from their religion, where it was not to be found, but from their consideration of the needs of others, as necessary to a well-ordered society.

"Godlike" meant, for the classical Greeks, what I loosely paraphrase as "full of oneself." It was a quality the Greeks knew and appreciated--and, all the same, were wary of. Helen is "godlike" when, full of buoyant lust for Paris of Troy, she forsakes her husband and daughter to run off with the handsome young man from abroad. She is "godlike" because, like the gods of the pantheon, she acted purely out of her own nature, authentically, without regard for her actions' social (and, as it turns out, political and military) implications. Gods need not worry about consequences--no more than hurricanes or earthquakes do. To be "godlike" is to be wholly at one with oneself, fully and deeply inspired by one's own nature and spirit. It may also lead to recklessness ... and tragedy (no less than hurricanes or earthquakes do). For the Greeks, she is "godlike" also because her attraction to Paris finds its cause in a god, Aphrodite, who wants to reward Paris for giving her the golden apple, the prize in an Olympian beauty contest Paris ill-advisedly agreed to judge.

Achilles, too, is godlike ... in his anger with Agamemnon and the other Greeks. His rage is a full expression of who he really is as an individual, without regard for the probable consequences or the needs of others--not until his beloved friend Patroclus dies and he turns his wrath on the Trojan Hector, who killed Patroclus--and not until (after Achilles kills Hector in bloodthirsty revenge) Priam, Hector's father, risks his life to enter the Greek encampment to beg Achilles to let Priam take Hector's body home for proper burial--a request Priam, King of Troy, makes while kissing his son's killer's feet. It is Priam's visit that reminds Achilles of the needs of others--turns him from his godlikeness to his humane manlikeness. (Helen has a similar conversion when she sees the death and destruction caused by her "godlike" actions and repents--not of her lust, but of her ego-centrism--"I Am That I Am," as the singular god of Moses put it, who once "repented" of destroying the whole world in a flood.) Priam's visit reminds Achilles that his own father will mourn his death when, as is fated, Achilles' death follows close behind Hector's.

Anyway, what made me think of this was something splendid. I was walking my dog Ripley, who at 14 years, five months, in age, has his good days and bad days lately. The bright sun and cool spring breeze this afternoon brought out his own "godlike" nature. He began to pull on the leather lead that held him back. He leaped and bounded into the wind, his body ecstatically tense. He was full of himself, all right. He was delightfully at one with his nature. He forgot his aches and pains and neglected any amount of caution over his well being. He was divinely delighted with himself, and it struck me that this is heaven, what he was experiencing and what I was experiencing, just being with him at that moment.

Of course, fate awaits us all, as it did Helen of Troy and "godlike" wrathful Achilles, as, in fact, the Greeks believed it hovered over the gods themselves. But these moments of exuberance are what it means to live--full of ourselves and abandoned to our own natures. And, if we can keep this aspect of ourselves in balance somehow with our consideration of others, we achieve what the Greeks, as far back as Homer, recognized as "the good life"--a balance no god could ever achieve, only we humans, with our knowledge of suffering and death (unknown to gods) and of the joys of our natural and occasionally unbridled impulses.

Guilty Pleasures

2011-01-15T14:15:00.000-05:00

Pleasure is nothing to feel guilty about unless its circumstances involve the degradation of oneself, others, or life. Taste is a matter of class and education. I'm not sure that I feel particularly compelled to be mistaken for a Rothschild or a Harvard man, so my contemplation of the correctness of my tastes is mostly the residue of bourgeois wannabeism. Sure, poor taste also reflects poorly on one's education, but then my tastes are not likely to exploit the labor of children or extort the life savings from war widows either. Posh and trendiness have a lot to answer for, too.

How I Know I Am Not a Foody

2011-01-11T11:46:00.000-05:00

Last summer I got to spend three weeks in the south of France with friends (foodies every one) and dined on the best food of my life and drank some of the best wine--and, somewhat less successfully, conversed on the delicate beauties of French cuisine. The fact that I do not do very well in conversations about food and drink was perhaps the first sign I had that I am not, alas, a foody.

Another sign is that I like iceberg lettuce. Not to ruin anybody's day, but I actually prefer it to other forms of lettuce and I'm well over eleven years old.

And I drench my salad in dressing. Iceberg lettuce floats, though only a tiny bit of it breaks the surface of (I should warn the fainthearted) Thousand Island dressing. (If some wag is thinking about quipping that if I actually ate greens with more flavor I would not need so much dressing, I have just said it for you. So there.)

Also, I like mayonnaise. A lot.

Also, I cannot name two ingredients in a Cosmopolitan. And I have never made a martini. I have drunk several, without thinking much of them.

Also, I have never knowingly watched the Food Channel.

Also, although I could look up the word "nougat," I will not, even though I have no earthly idea what it means. Okay, if forced, I would guess it means "gooey."

Though my brain knows better, my tongue still thinks Velveeta is cheese.

And I think it's pretentious to say "bon appetit," even if you're French. But if you're not French, I actually feel my skin crawl. Literally. I really do.

I like hot dogs, and, yes, I know how they're made. My friend Shane has taught me to prefer dogs with some snap to them, and Prague reminded me that I do like sausages that retain some resemblance to meat under the skin. But no matter. Give me a hot dog, and I will want mustard, relish, slaw, AND chili on top of it, which can bury a lot of shoddy workmanship in the wiener-making business.

French's yellow mustard.

Because my mother was not a good cook--color-coding was her idea of culinary art ("Everything we're having is BROWN!")--I prefer condiments in general to actual food in general.

I prefer sweet iced tea to hot tea. Even I feel pretty crummy about this, and tend to drink more hot tea than iced tea, thinking perhaps that I can reform my taste buds in this way, though I drink more Coke Zero than any kind of tea.

Over the years, I have learned to appreciate and prefer steak that is bloody (in France I impressed my friends to no end by ordering steak tartare at a restaurant, which served the dish with mayo, by the way). I prefer dark to milk chocolate, and especially dark chocolate served with (thank you, Dominique) a dark dark dark dark dry red wine. I absolutely delight in foie gras, even though I ordinarily detest organ meats ... and even though I am sympathetic to the plight of ducks. I now know, too, which dining utensil to pick up first without even waiting for somebody else to make the first move. But however much I love asparagus and cabbage, I still can't get down a single brussels sprout (the love child of asparagus and cabbage, as I see it), unless the sprout is roasted and I can pour catsup on it.

I should get some points for spelling catsup with a "c" and an "s." Thank you.

The Three Temptations of Pinocchio

2011-01-09T22:38:00.001-05:00

Pinocchio is a tale of a puppet on a quest to become "real." I do not know the book, only the 1940 Disney movie, a movie I saw as a child during one of its re-releases in the 1960s and came to love because my father, perhaps without meaning much by it, once stated that it was his favorite movie.

In the course of the story, the puppet Pinocchio, with the ineffectual assistance of his "conscience," a cricket named Jiminy, faces three pivotal obstacles in the form of temptations. The first is to skip his first day of school and become an actor in the company of the puppeteer Stromboli. I take this to be the temptation to be inauthentic--a "player" pretending to be something he is not. The second is to lie to the Blue Fairy--to distort what he knows to be true--a distortion that manifests itself in the distortion of Pinocchio's face: his nose grows. And the third is to succumb to the lure of Pleasure Island.

As depicted in the film, the suspect pleasures of Pleasure Island are brawling, smoking, and playing pool, activities associated with hooking up with a bad crowd. For me, the problem with Pleasure Island might have been its association with just the sort of escapism that elsewhere Disney seems to endorse. But then I didn't make the movie.

What Disney suggests is that Pinocchio needs to find equilibrium and balance. But life, I think, is change, a perpetual becoming--and to live one's life for "real" you have, to some degree, to accept and negotiate the constant changes. This requires you to accommodate imbalance somehow. The sort of "balance" American popular culture recommends is "happy consciousness," as Marcuse called it: "the belief that the real is rational and that the system delivers the goods." This false consciousness or bad faith demands that each of us "get in step" and pretend to a rational balance that does not exist in reality--a belief we enter through otherwise banal amusements that encourage passivity and avoidance of the realities that do not fit the model. It is more perfectly imagined in the land of the lotos eaters in the Odyssey than in Disney's Pleasure Island.

This is the temptation to remove yourself from the energetic and erratic pulse of life. Lulls no doubt are needed as a part of the wavelike pattern of progress, but I tend to think it's a mistake to seek ways to remain in those lulls. I am not a big one for "creature comforts." I do not want to live perpetually in a warm cocoon.

Heraclitus thought that pleasure poses a threat to the life of the soul, a way of turning a blind eye towards life and reality. By pleasure he seems to have meant drunkenness and the sodden escapism of the couch potato (or whatever equivalent of the couch potato he might have been familiar with). Heraclitus was not a big one for "creature comforts," either.

Karl Marx famously spoke of the opium of the people. For him it was religion. He followed this metaphor with the statement that "the abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness" (emphases mine). "Real" happiness involves real engagement with the world, not escapism, not bad faith, not creature comforts that dull the wits and blunt the will.

Real pleasure, then, is the opposite of the dehumanizing pleasures depicted on Pleasure Island. It is the opposite, too, of the obscurantist aspects of religion and the opposite of the enervating escapism of mass media. Real happiness and real pleasure sharpen the senses and fire up the emotions, which, in turn, encourage self-discipline--and a sense of adventure--to navigate through the complicated fluctuations of life ... and the real world.

I don't think I am altogether reading Pinocchio against the grain in saying that through his failures in all three temptations, the little wooden protagonist learns to value life--to love the true as opposed to the illusory, and to seek adventure, as opposed to mindless self-destructiveness, the counterfeit of adventure--to accept the "becoming" of life as its real and only meaning--to face with courage the sometimes discomforting struggles of life (read: "Monstro the whale"). This is the true heart and goodness of soul that Pinocchio displays to prove his authenticity--his humanness--at the end of the tale.

Pasolini's Gospel

2011-01-08T19:14:00.002-05:00

I remember seeing Pier Paolo Pasolini's Il Vangelo Secondo Matteo (1964) at a rundown arthouse theater in Columbia, South Carolina. I was in my late twenties, still nominally a christian, though vaguely aware that I then liked everything about christianity but the theology and the christians.

If I were ever to consider myself a christian again, it would be along the lines of Tolstoy's christian anarchism or Pasolini's austere cinema poetry--a gospel inflected with the director's marxism, atheism, and homosexuality. It was Pasolini's film, in fact, that convinced me that St Matthew's gospel, the most radical of the four, was the most humane and beautiful version of the life and teachings of Jesus.

Like Sergei Eisenstein, another commie pinko fag (literally), Pasolini builds his narrative and theme on the power of faces in tight close-up. Not the glamorous faces of Hollywood, but the faces of ordinary people. Like Eisenstein, Pasolini relied on the evocative power of the faces of his extras, whom he cast for their ability to convey whichever emotions the film needed at its key moments. Casting of the larger roles in Matteo followed the model of neorealism, as Pasolini cast non-actors as the biblical characters--ordinary wage-laborers as the disciples and a half-Basque, half-Jewish university student as Jesus.

The human face is the soul of humanism, I think. Renaissance painters seemed to think the same thing. The power of Pasolini's version of the Jesus story comes from his rejection of Cinemascope and Technicolor "epic" in favor of stark black-and-white compositions. Dialogue is stripped to a minimum. Many scenes are silent, with the director relying on the fact that perhaps no story is as familiar to his audience as this one, so exposition is superfluous. And whereas Mel Gibson (like the greater part of christendom) relishes Jesus's blood, Pasolini pays homage to Jesus's teachings, including the sermon on the mount in its entirety, the camera tightly on the face of the actor playing Jesus, for the greater part of the long recital. The crucifixion and resurrection take up less screen time than this sermon's eloquent quietism, and much of the drama of the climactic execution centers on its effect on those who loved the man Jesus, notably his mother, Mary, played by Pasolini's mother.

Choices

2011-01-07T17:28:00.006-05:00

For the last month the gay blogosphere has been buzzing over Carrie Fisher's outing of actor John Travolta as gay in the GLBT-targeted magazine The Advocate. Even in the gay community Fisher has been as criticized as she has been applauded, even though Travolta's gayness has been pretty much an open secret in gay circles for a couple of decades now.

The question is whether it is fair of Fisher to out a man like Travolta who has been married (to a woman) for almost 20 years, with whom he has three children ... who has built a career on an image of himself as a winsomely caddish ladies' man ... who is a prominent member of a religion (Scientology) that teaches that the "sexual pervert" (by which is meant "homosexual man") is "so extremely dangerous to society that the tolerance of perversion is as thoroughly bad for society as punishment for it."

At the very least, the religion's founder, L. Ron Hubbard, conceded that the homosexual can't be held accountable for his "sick" condition, even while asserting that the society that tolerates his existence is doomed like the Greeks and the Romans who likewise ignored the "flaming danger signal" of homosexuality. Hubbard humanely prefers "cure" to "punishment." But, then, one has to define electric shock to the genitals and/or chemical castration as something other than "punishment"--perhaps something as benign as waterboarding.

So is homosexuality a choice, a mental illness, or an innate orientation? The short answer is I do not know. From a human rights and civil liberties standpoint, the answer to the question simply does not matter.

I am surprised to find that there are still people who believe that homosexuality is a choice. I grew up on American Air Force bases, in fundamentalist Baptist churches (the kind that used to preach hellfire damnation EVERY Sunday), at a time when homosexuality was both a criminal act and a category of mental illness, in a culture that routinely portrayed homosexuals as villains, pathetic suicides, and effete ne'er-do-wells. Beyond this I was the only child of conservative parents who were homophobic--my mother worked with Anita Bryant to prohibit gays from teaching in the Dade County public school system and told me that she'd put a bullet through my head if she ever found I was gay. (Oh, Mom!) So it is no wonder that I might "choose" to be a gay man: the social and economic benefits looked irresistible.

Of course, as even some conservative church types concede, the real choice is whether or not to live actively and openly as what you are by nature. Around the age of thirty--about fifteen years after my heterosexual peers began to express their sexuality openly--I made the choice not to hide anymore. I also chose to teach, to work and to live someplace (even though the laws, even in the eighties, allowed employers and landlords to boot anyone found to be gay, much more so if he actually was working at it), to love some people whom I would never be allowed to marry, and to (as much as possible) live without being bullied ... or murdered (as my gay cousin Jimmy was). So, yeah, I chose to become a part of the "gay agenda," undermining the very values of a Christian society that would want to deprive people of livelihood, residence, happiness, and freedom from harassment and violent death. But then that's just me ... selfish ... me, me, me.

2010: The Year We Made Contact

2010-12-31T08:01:00.008-05:00

As of this writing I have not seen The King's Speech, Buried, Cyrus, Burlesque, The Other Guys, Blue Valentine, Another Year, or 127 Hours. That understood, here are the movies I've seen this year that I've liked the most.

The Fighter (Dir. David O. Russell, Perf. Christian Bale, Melissa Leo, Mark Wahlberg)
True Grit (Dir. Ethan Coen and Joel Coen, Perf. Jeff Bridges, Hailee Steinfeld, Josh Brolin)
Please Give (Dir. Nicole Holofcener, Perf. Catherine Keener, Rebecca Hall, Oliver Platt)
A Prophet (Dir. Jacques Audiard, Perf. Tahar Rahim, Niels Arestrup, Hichem Yacoubi)
Howl (Dir. Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, Perf. James Franco, Jon Hamm, Jeff Daniels)
Kick-Ass (in retrospect, after reconsideration; Dir. Matthew Vaughn, Perf. Aaron Johnson, Mark Strong, Chloe Moretz)
I Love You Phillip Morris (Dir. Glenn Ficarra and John Requa, Perf. Jim Carrey, Ewan McGregor, Leslie Mann)
Winter's Bone (Dir. Debra Granik, Perf. Jennifer Lawrence, John Hawkes, Dale Dickey)
The Town (Dir. Ben Affleck, Perf. Ben Affleck, Jeremy Renner, Blake Lively)
I Am Love (Dir. Luca Guadagnino, Perf. Tilda Swinton, Flavio Parenti, Edoardo Gabbriellini)

Honorable Mentions: The Kids Are All Right, The Social Network, Scott Pilgrim vs The World, Let Me In, The Ghost Writer, Machete.

Respectable Movies That Simply Didn't Do Much for Me: Inception, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Black Swan, Shutter Island, Black Dynamite, Toy Story 3.

Best Leading Performances: Christian Bale (The Fighter), Jeff Bridges (True Grit), Jennifer Lawrence (Winter's Bone), Jim Carrey (I Love You Phillip Morris), Catherine Keener (Please Give), Tahar Rahim (A Prophet), Emma Stone (Easy A), Aaron Johnson (Kick-Ass), Annette Benning (The Kids Are All Right), Hailee Steinfeld (True Grit).

Best Supporting Performances: Melissa Leo (The Fighter), Michelle Rodriguez (Machete), Josh Brolin (True Grit), Dale Dickey (Winter's Bone), Blake Lively (The Town), John Hawkes (Winter's Bone), Rebecca Hall (Please Give), Richard Jenkins (Let Me In), Jeremy Renner (The Town), Justin Timberlake (The Social Network).

Quasi Vegan

2010-12-28T10:57:00.001-05:00

When the rich young man approached Jesus about attaining righteousness, Jesus told him that, to be perfect, he must give away all his money and sell all his possessions and give away all the money thus acquired, as well. The young man turned away, because he was very rich. The moral lesson here is twofold, I think: one, money is a detriment to one's spiritual well-being, and, two, absolutism in ethics can be a dead end.

I gave up any form of puritanism years ago. Scars of my fundamentalist Baptist past, in part, as well as a recognition that purity is, at bottom, anti-life. If I refused to travel on any highway that was in part constructed through the toil of underpaid, exploited, immoral, racist, or Fox-News-watching laborers, I would be spiritual dynamite, but stultified as a human being ... as a life form, even. I would be removing myself not only from the corruption of the world, but from the world itself.

That said, I want to hurry to explain that my lack of puritanism is not the same thing as freewheeling moral relativism. It comes close, I suppose, but even as a relativist I am imperfect. My moral code derives from the great books, including the bible. What can we do in a world where good and evil are as hopelessly intertwined as they are--and where the outcomes of our actions are undeterminable (our good deeds can be destructive, our selfish intentions can work miracles)? Well, the advice of Jesus, Voltaire, and Tolstoy is remarkably similar--we do what we can, enough or not enough, and make it do, for now.

Barrington Moore Jr.'s remarkable (and dense) little book Moral Purity and Persecution in History supports the position that I have long held by intuition--that much of the evil of history derives from individuals' and groups' attempts to purify the world.

Even on a mundane level, like the way I eat, I can't quite make myself into a purist. The movie Food Inc. radically affected the way I think about what I eat. It is not a polemic against carnivores. At the beginning of the movie we see Eric Schlosser ordering his favorite meal, a hamburger and french fries. Later in the movie we meet a Virginia farmer who raises and butchers livestock in a manner he regards as humane, wholesome, and compassionate. What the film decries is not any particular kind of food, but rather a system of food production that is unethical, exploitative, undemocratic, dangerous to the nation's health and liberty, and nearly monolithic. But, even there, there are limits to what we can do. Is there any direction I can possibly move that would not be complicit, to some degree, with the system?

Of course, I can do more than I do. Being a vegan is doable--and personally it's an attractive option. Veganism, as a concept, strikes me as a better way of living--economical, simple, ethical, healthful. My best friend is a vegan, give or take a cookie and a chocolate bar from time to time. Perhaps it's only weakness of will that keeps me from taking the pledge. I like to think otherwise. I am a person of unusual scruples, at times--feeling vague pangs of guilt for owning a pet, for instance, which approximates involuntary servitude, in my opinion. (But then what would happen if we liberated every dog and cat? How cruel and ineffectual would that be?)

I adopt a quasi vegan lifestyle. That's a laugh line. I do minimize my intake of meat, eggs, and dairy, but the pleasures--perhaps more a matter of habit than taste--of certain foods forbid me from taking the 100% plunge. Pleasure is important to me. It's a fundamental aspect of what I regard as valuable in life. It is not all-important, but by my standards, it far far outweighs the importance of purity. So I have a shortlist of exceptions to my "veganism." You will note, no doubt, that they are huge exceptions. You would be right in saying that the word "vegan" (even "quasi vegan") should not even breathed in the context of this list. Still, by minimizing my consumption of meat, etc., I do some little good to the environment, while, according to my Epicurean principles, intensify the pleasure it affords me.

In my oddball sense of ethics, I count my sins the way a Weight Watcher counts his points. Deprivation, within limits, is one way to sharpen the senses when one does, at last, indulge. My dietary sins, of which I have not repented, include the following, which, to my mind, bestow blessings to compensate for whatever harms they cause:

bacon cheddar cheeseburgers (especially the ones at Broad Street Cafe, 1116 Broad Street, Durham, and, in balance with its ambience at 3:00 a.m, the Clover Grill, 900 Bourbon Street, New Orleans)
steak, bloody medium-rare
pot roast
brisket
ice cream, especially vanilla (I know, the "banality of evil")
eggs benedict
and the poor man's version of eggs benedict: sausage, egg, and cheese croissants (a multiplication of evils, compounded by the fact that I am particularly fond of Jimmy Dean's microwavable frozen sandwiches)
chili slaw dogs
chocolate-chip cookies
brie

Snow

2010-12-26T08:26:00.000-05:00

True Grit (Review)

2010-12-24T10:40:00.005-05:00

People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avenge her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Fort Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carried in his trouser band.

Thus begins one of my favorite novels published in my lifetime and the first book I ever bought for myself in hardcover: Charles Portis's True Grit (I proudly have that first edition from 1968 still). What enchanted me then was the language, perfectly captured in its opening paragraph with its economical and commonsense use of commas, disregarding grammatical rules for rules' sake (which might beg for a comma after the word "blood" but which our narrator Mattie Ross knows full well is not needed to get her point across and cares not how others might judge her for the omission). In two sentences, her age at the time of the atrocity is repeated--establishing (1) that our narrator is no longer that age and (2) at that age something incontrovertibly turned her into the person she would become. Then there's the naming of what Chaney took from her father, clear and exact as the red ink markings in a T account. Then, too, there's the use of the word "credence," an old-fashioned word with reverberations of credibility, credit, and credentials that an adolescent prone to making deals and casting judgments (such as calling somebody a "coward") would be inclined to use. In fewer than 100 words, Portis tells us pretty much everything we will need to know about our protagonist and narrator.

These words also begin the new film adaptation of the novel by writers and directors Joel and Ethan Coen. Their respect for Portis's diction and their appreciation for nineteenth-century America, when a colorful turn of phrase was still a form of public entertainment, are what make this film vastly superior to the Oscar-winning John Wayne version of 1969. Unlike that early version the Coens' film retains the pokerfaced Gothicism of the novel--matter-of-factly recounting the horror of violence ("The woman was out in the yard dead with blowflies on her head and the old man was inside with his breast blowed open by a scatter-gun and his feet burned"), with a dusky look that conveys the malarial enervation of frontier life, which Portis's prose and Paul Davis's original book jacket design likewise connote, entirely missing from the 1969 film, whose tone is virtually indistinguishable from El Dorado or The War Wagon or most other Hollywood westerns of the late sixties.

The performances of Hailee Steinfeld and Jeff Bridges are more nuanced and drolly humorous than those of Kim Darby and John Wayne. I would not mind at all if Bridges won his second Oscar in the role that gave Wayne his first and only. (I do not begrudge Wayne his Oscar for his portrayal of Rooster Cogburn, though not one of his best, because he clearly deserved the award 13 years earlier for his performance as Ethan Edwards, the racist with a heart of granite in The Searchers.) I hope the Academy remembers Steinfeld and Josh Brolin (as Chaney) too. I hardly need to add that Matt Damon (as LaBoeuf, a Texas Ranger) is a better actor than Glen Campbell.

What's more, the Coens' and music director Carter Burwell's decision to use traditional music (notably "Leaning on the Everlasting Arms") instead of something resembling the 1969 film's sweeping orchestral score, is a good one, evoking the sterner fiber of the nineteenth-century American soul, without the sturm-und-drang and smarmy sentiment of late sixties Hollywood. Even more noteworthy are the long stretches where no music score undergirds the action on screen or tries to cue us the audience as to how we are supposed to feel about it. The Coens lift long swatches of dialogue from the book, without embellishment or updating (or dumbing down), and lets Portis's earthy prose, often mumbled, always drawled (therefore requiring some attention), carry its own weight.

If True Grit is not the best screen adaptation of a book I love, I cannot for the life of me remember the one that is. Oh, yes, I do recommend it.

When Those Blue Memories Start Calling

2010-12-23T09:21:00.002-05:00

I am the only child of parents who died in 1995 and 2001. My father was in the military for almost 30 years, for the last half of which I was on the scene, my small, taciturn family trundling its shit from base to base every two or three years.

I like to tell people there were Christmases when all I got was a sock with oranges and walnuts in it. This is true, too, if you make that singular "Christmas" and understand that the exaggeration is meant to convey the fact that plenty of other Christmases and birthdays were meager too, though not quite as much.

The military paid little to NCOs and their dependents, but then we got health care, a quality on-base education for me, and, on holidays, a free meal from the NCO club, sometimes served in an open hangar due to the crowd overflow.

As I recall, I spent only two Christmases in the company of grandmothers, aunts, uncles, and cousins, so my extended family was (is) distant and largely unknown to me.

For the past nine years, I have spent Christmas alone or out at restaurants with friends who now have real boyfriends or still have family requiring their attentions at this time of year. Early on there were attempts to include me in other families' festivities, and these were fun and enlightening, of, if nothing else, the fact that my own family had been peculiarly unjolly at this time of year.

But on the whole I prefer to spend the day by myself. The loneliness of only children is sometimes exaggerated. I don't mean that we don't feel loneliness, and deeply, but I suspect it's considerably less traumatic for us. As for me, my father and my mother were asocial and uncommunicative to the extent that, now, the company of a good book or something on television brings back my fondest Christmas memories of childhood--which glow of nostalgia more than balances off the, truth be told, rather comforting loneliness.

For the past five years or so, I have tried to expropriate the season with a party of my own the first Saturday of December. After this party, I usually feel the holiday is over, except to join in on other people's parties and to surprise myself repeatedly when I realize that we have still not reached the 25th. Last year I went so far as to take down all my holiday decorations on December 6th! But this year is different.

As I mentioned yesterday, I am feeling an odd-for-me Christmas-y vibe. I'm looking forward to Saturday, by myself with my dog.

Among other stops planned for today--getting said dog his rabies booster, seeing True Grit with Kirsten, and downing a few evening cocktails with Barbara and Shane--I plan to pick up a pre-ordered Honey Baked Ham (R) with untrademarked mashed potatoes and green bean casserole, and buy myself a few presents ("from Santa") to open Christmas morning, just for kicks--not that I have been neglected, not at all, I already greedily tore through all the presents my friends plied me with, except for a gift card for a massage, which I'm saving for after Christmas.

I hope I am conveying the fact that I am not sad. Otherwise I'm missing the point. I do not suffer from seasonal affect disorder. I rather like the long nights, and the low temperatures tend to highlight the coziness of homes and bring out the most affectionate natures in pets and friends. To be sure, I prefer spring, season of my favorite holiday, my birthday, but winter is good, too. And this winter seems to me, for some reason, particularly dreamy.

There is a sweetness to loneliness that often gets overlooked. Perhaps I feel it as I do because I'm an introvert or because, as I mentioned, it's my nostalgia. I don't pity the lonely, only those who cannot understand the pleasure of filling one's space with oneself. On days like these, I occasionally like to drift through my home like a docent in a private museum, touching objects my friends and lovers have given me, remembering the stories behind them, and amusing myself with the quirky things only I would want and buy for myself ... by myself.

I also like to use these times to reinvent myself, make blueprints for whatever courageous follies await me. For me, a secular humanist, Christmas is the time of year when the year's record has played out, and all that's left is the soothing tick-tick-tick of the needle bumping against the center label, waiting to be turned over and then replaced with something new.

Amazing Grace

2010-12-22T16:54:00.000-05:00

His Eyes ... How They Twinkled!

2010-12-22T16:45:00.000-05:00

I have the most Christmas spirit that I've had in a while. I don't know why. I'm close to bankrupt ... in a world that is turning more "Mad Max" by the second.

On the other hand, I feel good that a few things Obama promised are starting to happen--pretty much exactly as he said they would two years ago--DADT has been repealed, and now, let's hope, the first responders on September 11th, 2001, may be getting the help and health care they need.

On a personal note, I feel at ease with where I am in life. Life is good. Not life in the abstract or general, but my particular life ... right here and now ... is good. This morning I got a new battery for my 2000 Chevy Malibu, which, instead of starting when I turned the ignition, popped open the trunk, so now that it's fixed, all is right with the world. There's really nothing to say about it. What can I say? Being 57, gay, single, and in the lower half of the 25% tax bracket works for me. Works for me very well.

It helps that I've been reading some Virgil and Horace lately. They are incredibly calming influences. Not only have they been dead for a couple of thousand years, but they also led settled, wise, and pleasant lives--in the midst of scandals, a civil war, political intrigue, religious extremism in high places (Augustus Caesar passed a law making it illegal for males to remain unmarried--it was later dropped as unenforceable), not to mention extremely poor WiFi--and that accomplishment heartens me today.

I have often called myself a "happy pessimist." Sometimes I think of myself as a "true" Christian. Not that I believe in God. No way. Or a life after death. No thank you. But certainly I do

consider the lilies of the field ... they toil not, neither do they spin ... Therefore, take no thought, saying, What shall we eat? or, What shall we drink? or Wherewithal shall we be clothed? ... Take, therefore, no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day the evil thereof.

I am a life coach's worst nightmare. And, like Jesus, I have the very opposite of a "purpose-driven life." (I know, I know ... I grew up hearing all about Jesus's "purpose," but, frankly, if Christians loved Jesus's teachings half as much as they love his blood, they'd have a halfway decent religion.)

My philosophy of life is Voltaire's, at the end of Candide; or Optimism (1759): "We must cultivate our garden." This is what Horace did on his Sabine farm, and this is the gentle, narrowly scoped equilibrium Virgil seeks in his Georgics and Eclogues. And for all the tons of theology under which Jesus has been buried since his supposed resurrection, his words reveal him to be a man little concerned with the "big picture."

The secret to happiness--and the true "reason for the season," I think--is "Fuck the 'big picture.'"

It Ain't Susposed to Be Funny

2010-12-20T11:42:00.000-05:00

The Neighbor's Christmas Tree

2010-12-20T11:36:00.000-05:00