Under which Lyre?

Animal Collective: Merriweather Post Pavilion

2009-01-31T15:14:00.000-08:00

The process of reviewing albums is a sordid musical meta-analysis. I know this description is somewhat of a mouthful—and somewhat pretentious—but then again, so are most record reviews. To that point, the introductory paragraphs often say very little about the actual content and sound of the album in question. Instead, the critic usually spawns a bombastic preamble that parades his knowledge of the musical frou-frou, like back-stories, geographies, hype, shticks, stage names, gimmicks, concept art and perhaps musical forefathers. If the critic gets around to mentioning musical influences, and the band is of an indie rock persuasion, he will of course mention whether or not the album is the Pet Sounds of the Aughts. And for all of this, Merriweather Post Pavilion, the ninth effort from Brooklyn-based Animal Collective, is the critics’ darling. They’re pontificating about the album, yes. But strangely, they actually seem to be enjoying the album—and enjoying it with abandon. With charming rashness, they’re already saying it’s the album of 2009. And I agree.

It’s true. MPP lends itself perfectly to the over-intellectualizing that inflates and aggrandizes music critics’ professions. Perhaps it’s Animal Collective’s elusion of current musical genres that allows critics to show off their knowledge of categories and subsequent sub-categories. Sure, the vocal harmonies of Noah Lennox (aka Panda Bear) and Dave Portner (aka Avey Tare) on MPP sound hauntingly similar to Brian Wilson’s and the rest of the Beach Boys on their pop opus, Pet Sounds; but it’s inadequate when classifying the strange beast that is Animal Collective into its appropriate genus and species. And they adore that. So, they might mention how Animal Collective’s style flits about freak folk, electronica, drone, ambient, jamband, tribal, soul, avant-garde, surf, gospel, dance, minimalism and pop all at once. Yet Animal Collective is not the sum of these parts, reviewers have noted; they are gestaltists. They are, in fact, creating a new sound.

Strangely, this showy wordsmithery that usually is tainted with pompousness is instead teeming with wonder, amazement and glee. At times the critics just seem plain giddy. It’s as if they were teenagers again and their older sisters just handed them Sgt. Pepper’s or Tommy for the first time. It seems like they’ve returned to listening to the music just for the love of it. I mean, it certainly says something that these professional musical elitists are declaring MPP to be the album of 2009 in the middle of its first month. Even though some of the critics are aware of their over-excitement, they still proceed with their praise. In his review of MPP, Tom Whalen of No Ripcord almost acts if he is betraying his musical rep by giving it glowing accolades along with everybody else:

MPP will surely hold steady as one of 2009's touchstones, one whose exclusion from lists of year-end-bests would represent a more profound gesture than its inclusion. Yet here I am, haplessly enveloped into the nebulous realm of "universal acclaim," kicking my pebble of praise at the foot of the imminent mountain…

And at this point, eleven days after its official release, Animal Collective does not need to go the mountain of “universal acclaim,” for reviewers are building one at its feet, pebble by pebble. I have counted and skimmed hundred of reviews: most of them are saying that the album is currently unparalleled. Naturally, however, there are dissenters who do not share the same unabashed adoration. These skeptics seem to fall into two camps: those who plainly do not like the album for its sometimes cacophonous excesses and those who to not like the album because they pine for the dissonant, unique band that Animal Collective once was. Now, I can't really address the former group: if a person doesn't like an album, she simply doesn't like an album. However, I can speak to the latter group. So here it goes: Come on. It's ridiculous to dislike an album simply because it is somewhat poppy and more accessible to a larger audience. Buck up.

For me—and this is where I conclude my drawn-out introduction about the critics' response and get on with it—pop is the necessary component to this album's brilliance. It is the newest element to their sonic palate. Yet, I wouldn't call their new sound "pop," per se, just like I wouldn't unambiguously dub their past efforts freak-folk or dance. Instead, pop is the specter that haunts MPP. Some might say that the structure of the two-minute pop song limits the potential of the whirs, drones and yawps of their avant-garde foundation. But no. I believe their sound comes to fruition with its defined structure. Granted, the album is markedly different from their back catalogue, such as the unbridled, guitar-driven experiment, Feels. And, it is certainly a departure from Brian Weitz's (aka Geologist) amelodic, textured ambience that drove Sung Tongs. They will never again create another Strawberry Jam or Here Comes the Indian or any of the other albums because frankly, they themselves have changed and matured. They have wives. They have families. And they sing about it. Just listen to the lyrics of the stand alone single, if there were to be one, "My Girls":

Is it much to admit I need
A solid soul and the blood I bleed
With a little girl, and by my spouse
I only want a proper house

I don't care for fancy things
Or to take part in a precious race
And children cry for the one who has
A real big heart and a father's grace

I don't mean to seem like I care about material things like a social status
I just want four walls and adobe slabs for my girls

You can hear Noah Lennox's filial pride when he sings those fun, simple hooks in a song that about settling down. But, just because he uses melodic pop hooks, does not mean the music isn't expansive, or authentic. Similarly, just because he wants a home for his wife and child, doesn't mean he's past his creative prime. Is it so wrong to want a house? Is it so bad to make popular, accessible music? I would hope not.

Settling down and family, then, are the noble themes that ring throughout the entire album. And although "My Girls" will probably be the track that people shout out at shows, there are multiple songs that others might call their favorite that share its sentiment. On "Brother Sport," Noah lends some advice to his depressed sibling: "Open up your, open up your/Open up your throat/And let the all of that time/All of that time, all of that time go". He might be saying," sing, dammit. Don't let your mind get muddled by your circular thoughts and what dad said. Live your life." On the opener, "In the Flowers," Dave sings of his wishes to be home with his wife instead of touring in some European countryside, watching some kid euphorically dance about. On "Summertime Clothes," they sing of the simple, cathartic desire to "walk around with you." Taken without context, these lyrics and sentiments might seem somewhat boring and naive. But the marriage between these emotions and the explosive sound environment of their talent instead conveys wisdom and a sense that they've weathered a lot. It's is if they're saying, it's OK to want to go home; it's OK to rely on your family.

Perhaps I'm just projecting all of my current emotions onto the music critics' reviews. Perhaps I'm just identifying with a small sliver of the MPP's intended theme, as well. Perhaps not. Regardless, I enjoyed reading the responses to the album for the unbridled praise and excitement. It's a good feeling to like music without reservation, addendum, or caveat. It's good that I haven't followed Animal Collective since the beginning. It gives me freedom to enjoy their music. It's as if this album boxed me in the ears and shouted: "You love listening to music. That doesn't make you more unique or better than other people. Remember when you didn't care how popular a band was? Remember when you didn't care if other people from your town knew about a band first? This is an awesome album... and that's it. Go ahead, dance in your car to it. Go ahead, tell your friends how much you like the album. Go ahead, tell your acquaintances to go out and buy it. It's just music. It's brilliant, but it's just music." So, based on the fact that Merriweather Post Pavilion reminded me of my love of music upon the first listen and that it seems to have affected many other music elitists the same way, I would say that it is the best album of 2009. And without legitimate proof or backing, I would say it's the best album of the decade.

Procrastination

2009-01-31T10:34:00.001-08:00

I'm writing this blog because I don't want to write my graduate school application essays. They're due in a matter of hours and....well, let's say they could use some work. It's not that I haven't been working on them. I have been hacking away at them, at a rate of roughly twenty words per hour, for the last week. My coup de grâce is that finished or not, I will have to submit them by tomorrow.

I was lamenting my procrastination on Twitter when a friend sent me an article by Stanford Philosophy Professor John Perry entitled "Structured Procrastination." Perry's main argument is that procrastinators can get a hell of a lot done. It's just a matter of ordered self-deception:

The key idea is that procrastinating does not mean doing absolutely nothing. Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important.

[....]

The trick is to pick the right sorts of projects for the top of the list. The ideal sorts of things have two characteristics, First, they seem to have clear deadlines (but really don't). Second, they seem awfully important (but really aren't). Luckily, life abounds with such tasks. In universities the vast majority of tasks fall into this category, and I'm sure the same is true for most other large institutions. Take for example the item right at the top of my list right now. This is finishing an essay for a volume in the philosophy of language. It was supposed to be done eleven months ago. I have accomplished an enormous number of important things as a way of not working on it. A couple of months ago, bothered by guilt, I wrote a letter to the editor saying how sorry I was to be so late and expressing my good intentions to get to work. Writing the letter was, of course, a way of not working on the article. It turned out that I really wasn't much further behind schedule than anyone else. And how important is this article anyway? Not so important that at some point something that seems more important won't come along. Then I'll get to work on it.

[....]

The observant reader may feel at this point that structured procrastination requires a certain amount of self-deception, since one is in effect constantly perpetrating a pyramid scheme on oneself. Exactly. One needs to be able to recognize and commit oneself to tasks with inflated importance and unreal deadlines, while making oneself feel that they are important and urgent. This is not a problem, because virtually all procrastinators have excellent self-deceptive skills also. And what could be more noble than using one character flaw to offset the bad effects of another?

The problem with applying Structured Procrastination to my life is that I have a Twitter and Tumblr account, black holes that can suck up hours of time, especially when there is a task that is more important. Which is every task.

Cory Doctorow might have the antidote in his essay, "Writing in the Age of Distraction."

The jury's still out.

Obama Gives Keynes His First Real-World Test

2009-01-31T08:26:00.000-08:00

Article here.

A short NPR article on what you should know about the stimulus package -- essentially the masterwork of the radical, arrogant, sex-fiend Keynes -- and why it could save us here in America.

JMH

2009-01-29T12:24:00.000-08:00

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c

Elizabeth Alexander

Colbert Report Full Episodes
Paul McCartney Appearance

Funny Political Videos
More Funny Videos

More on Updike....

2009-01-29T11:18:00.000-08:00

Updike and the Affirmation of the Ordinary Life

Brook Allen's obituary in the Wall Street Journal provides an interesting account of Updike and Christianity as well as what we might call Updike's affirmation of the (American) ordinary life, shedding light on why many despise the writer.

Way back in 1997, the novelist David Foster Wallace publicly gloated over the senescence and impending demise of John Updike, Norman Mailer and Philip Roth -- "the Great Male Narcissists who've dominated postwar fiction," pre-eminent chroniclers of "probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV." Panning Updike's latest novel, "Toward the End of Time," Wallace castigated the grand old man as a "Champion Literary Phallocrat" and asked whether this could finally be the end for the magnificent narcissists.

[....]
Yet while always awake to his species' shortcomings, Mr. Updike evinced a spiritual tranquility that has been distinctly unfashionable in intellectual circles over the past century or so: he was probably the most untortured of all our major writers. A church-going Protestant, he had a world picture that featured not only the looming presences of sex and death, which are undoubtedly his major subjects, but the indispensable activities he once summarized as "the pleasures of parenting, the comforts of communal belonging, the exercise of daily curiosity, and the widely met moral responsibility to make the best of each stage of life, including the last." He deplored "today's easy knowingness and self-protective irony" while gently mocking "religious aristocrats, for whom God was a vulgar poor relation with the additional social disadvantage of not existing." His most explicitly theological novel, "In the Beauty of the Lilies" (1996), came as a surprise to those who thought of Mr. Updike solely as the prophet of suburban adultery.

His easy acceptance of Christianity has irked critics who seek a more strenuous, antagonistic religious stance from their great writers. The formidable James Wood has taken issue with his "strange theological serenity": "Surely John Updike is the least tragic of major writers, and of all theological writers, one of the most complacent. . . . For him the world does indeed seem to exist as a divine visual gift, and as a consolation or reassurance, rather than a proof."
True words perhaps, but how much of an artistic limitation does this constitute? It may put him below the level of a Melville or a Milton, but it is what makes him so uniquely Updike, and the ability to communicate the world's "divine visual gift" is not to be sneezed at. Mr. Updike's precise, elastic prose, its joy, its unexpectedly baroque adjectives yoked with the most banal objects and images, turn the ordinary into the extravagantly artful. Only Nabokov, with "Lolita," mined mid-American trashiness for gold with as much success as Mr. Updike did.

The "Rabbit" novels -- "Rabbit, Run" (1960), "Rabbit Redux" (1971), "Rabbit Is Rich" (1981) and "Rabbit at Rest" (1990), followed by the novella "Rabbit Remembered" (2001) -- constitute a consummate literary transfiguration of the commonplace: "The tetralogy to me," Mr. Updike commented, "is the tale of a life, a life led by an American citizen who shares the national passion for youth, freedom, and sex, the national openness and willingness to learn, the national habit of improvisation. He is furthermore a Protestant, haunted by a God whose manifestations are elusive, yet all-important." The car-dealership, the Florida condo, the basketball court, the unseemly heaps of junk food that make up Rabbit's banal world are described not with contempt, in the manner of today's hip ironists, but lovingly: They are beautiful because they are part of this infinitely beautiful life.

Updike Reflects on His Death

Today, the New York Times printed the following poem by John Updike, from his forthcoming collection, “Endpoint and Other Poems."

"Requiem"

It came to me the other day:

Were I to die, no one would say,

“Oh, what a shame! So young, so full

Of promise — depths unplumbable!”

Instead, a shrug and tearless eyes

Will greet my overdue demise;

The wide response will be, I know,

“I thought he died a while ago.”

For life’s a shabby subterfuge,

And death is real, and dark, and huge.

The shock of it will register

Nowhere but where it will occur.

On Tradition

2009-01-29T11:02:00.000-08:00

David Brooks's most recent editorial is a piece called, "What A Life Asks of Us." It's a pretty nice summary of my qualms with much of the avante garde and the current intelligentsia and states more succinctly and neatly what I would say in response to Jason, in our never-ending argument. (Brooks also appeals to Ryne Sandberg, which never hurts.) Here's the editorial in its entirety:

A few years ago, a faculty committee at Harvard produced a report on the purpose of education. “The aim of a liberal education” the report declared, “is to unsettle presumptions, to defamiliarize the familiar, to reveal what is going on beneath and behind appearances, to disorient young people and to help them to find ways to reorient themselves.”

The report implied an entire way of living. Individuals should learn to think for themselves. They should be skeptical of pre-existing arrangements. They should break free from the way they were raised, examine life from the outside and discover their own values.

This approach is deeply consistent with the individualism of modern culture, with its emphasis on personal inquiry, personal self-discovery and personal happiness. But there is another, older way of living, and it was discussed in a neglected book that came out last summer called “On Thinking Institutionally” by the political scientist Hugh Heclo.

In this way of living, to borrow an old phrase, we are not defined by what we ask of life. We are defined by what life asks of us. As we go through life, we travel through institutions — first family and school, then the institutions of a profession or a craft.

Each of these institutions comes with certain rules and obligations that tell us how to do what we’re supposed to do. Journalism imposes habits that help reporters keep a mental distance from those they cover. Scientists have obligations to the community of researchers. In the process of absorbing the rules of the institutions we inhabit, we become who we are.

New generations don’t invent institutional practices. These practices are passed down and evolve. So the institutionalist has a deep reverence for those who came before and built up the rules that he has temporarily taken delivery of. “In taking delivery,” Heclo writes, “institutionalists see themselves as debtors who owe something, not creditors to whom something is owed.”

The rules of a profession or an institution are not like traffic regulations. They are deeply woven into the identity of the people who practice them. A teacher’s relationship to the craft of teaching, an athlete’s relationship to her sport, a farmer’s relation to her land is not an individual choice that can be easily reversed when psychic losses exceed psychic profits. Her social function defines who she is. The connection is more like a covenant. There will be many long periods when you put more into your institutions than you get out.

In 2005, Ryne Sandberg was inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame. Heclo cites his speech as an example of how people talk when they are defined by their devotion to an institution:

“I was in awe every time I walked onto the field. That’s respect. I was taught you never, ever disrespect your opponents or your teammates or your organization or your manager and never, ever your uniform. You make a great play, act like you’ve done it before; get a big hit, look for the third base coach and get ready to run the bases.”

Sandberg motioned to those inducted before him, “These guys sitting up here did not pave the way for the rest of us so that players could swing for the fences every time up and forget how to move a runner over to third. It’s disrespectful to them, to you and to the game of baseball that we all played growing up.

“Respect. A lot of people say this honor validates my career, but I didn’t work hard for validation. I didn’t play the game right because I saw a reward at the end of the tunnel. I played it right because that’s what you’re supposed to do, play it right and with respect ... . If this validates anything, it’s that guys who taught me the game ... did what they were supposed to do, and I did what I was supposed to do.”

I thought it worth devoting a column to institutional thinking because I try to keep a list of the people in public life I admire most. Invariably, the people who make that list have subjugated themselves to their profession, social function or institution.

Second, institutional thinking is eroding. Faith in all institutions, including charities, has declined precipitously over the past generation, not only in the U.S. but around the world. Lack of institutional awareness has bred cynicism and undermined habits of behavior. Bankers, for example, used to have a code that made them a bit stodgy and which held them up for ridicule in movies like “Mary Poppins.” But the banker’s code has eroded, and the result was not liberation but self-destruction.

Institutions do all the things that are supposed to be bad. They impede personal exploration. They enforce conformity.

But they often save us from our weaknesses and give meaning to life.

Painting with Words

2009-01-28T02:04:00.000-08:00

I knew John Updike as an author. I remember him as a force of art.

John Updike once described an elderly Edward Hopper as painting as an “old conjurer… calling up images with hardly a glance out the window.” I’d like to use that notion to recall Updike. With nary a glance to his work, I can feel the caress of his words upon the page.

There are critics who are to be quoted stating, in jealousy, that Updike was not a good steward of his profound poetic gifts. Though at times it may ring true, that the message of his stories rarely matched the strength of his prose, time after time Updike captured the soul of what he was describing, showing us, in ways unthinkable without his tremendous gift, how we might imbue our brushes were we artists painting the world.

Updike ends his commentary on Hopper, an artist he critiqued late in life, by wishing he could rush back and examine one last time all of his works and find a “final word torn from the depth of what Henry James may have termed “the so beautifully unsaid”.” As Updike yearned to snatch at something vital felt, or just unsaid, in a lifetime of another’s work, so we, the immediately bereaved, are initially compelled to turn back and rediscover his writing, we settle for casting our thoughts inward and reflecting on the impression he has left on us.

Selling Advertising

2009-01-25T06:42:00.000-08:00

Lovely Package seems to have taken over FFFFOUND! recently (which I suppose is better than the occasional smattering of stuff that looks like it's been pilfered from Deviant Art.) In looking at the non-descript, but well-designed packaging, I was reminded of a passage from DeLillo's White Noise, which I'm currently reading, in which the main character runs into Murray Siskind, a former sports writer turned professor of cultural studies, at the supermarket:

We ran into Murray Jay Siskind at the supermarket. His basket held generic food and drink, nonbrand items in plain white packages with simple labeling. There was a white can labeled CANNED PEACHES. There was a white package of bacon without a plastic window for viewing a representative slice. A jar of roasted nuts had a white wrapper bearing the words IRREGULAR PEANUTS. Murray kept nodding to Babette as I introduced them.

"This is the new austerity," he said. "Flavorless packaging. It appeals to me. I feel I'm not only saving money but contributing to some kind of spiritual consensus. It's like World War III. Everything is white. They'll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort."

Who's the better bar band?

2009-01-25T05:13:00.000-08:00

Andrew W.K. or The Hold Steady? I suppose it depends on the sort of bar you're at....but I might go with the Hold Steady. I mean, just listen to "Stay Positive."

[It has since been pointed out to me that NPR's Sound Opinions makes a similar claim. I've been beaten, again.]

The Innauguration Poetry, or I will now read my poem in the style of a filibuster

2009-01-23T14:22:00.000-08:00

This past Tuesday, I found myself where I find myself every weekday: manning the phone at the front desk on the industrial side of a staffing agency (I will write more on the joys of this soon). No one had come in to apply, which I attributed to people staying home to watch inauguration, but I had given up hope on seeing it. The streaming video coverage was lagging terribly, probably a by-product of everyone else trying to watch the event while at work. Then one of my co-workers turned on the TV that we normally use to screen videos instructing applicants not to stick their hands into machines, let hazardous chemicals touch their skin, grope co-workers, or make quid pro quo remarks ("This is a Latin phrase meaning 'This for that'.") I'd get to see the inauguration, after all.

Then, just after Biden was sworn in, people being confronted with the horror of life by Biden's hair-plugs decided they needed to get a job. The lobby was suddenly full, and I found myself scuttling back and forth to the copy machine, copying IDS and handing out applications. I was only able to hear a minute or two of Obama's speech, and then I had to go back to work. By the time the crowd dissipated and I could return to watching the innauguration, Elizabeth Alexander was reading her poem, "Praise Song for the Day." I hadn't read her poetry, but I recognized her from the inside cover of The Essential Gwendolyn Brooks, which she edited for the Library of America. (I smugly noted this fact to a co-worker, who obviously didn't care.) Here's the video of Alexander reading the poem:

My excitement at seeing poetry read to millions of people and broadcast to hundreds of millions more soon dissipated. I noticed a few things:
1) The poem is pretty mediocre, at best.
2) The reading of the poem is poor...even unpleasant.
3) CNN, probably in an effort to lend Alexander credibility, has labeled her as "Yale Professor" instead of "Poet."

Over at the New Republic, Adam Kirsch has a very insightful analysis of why Alexander's poem was bad, and more so, why, unlike the Romans, modern poets can't write official poetry. Some excerpts:

In our democratic age, however, poets have always had scruples about exalting leaders in verse. Since the French Revolution, there have been great public poems in English, but almost no great official poems. For modern lyric poets, whose first obligation is to the truth of their own experience, it has only been possible to write well on public themes when the public intersects, or interferes, with that experience--when history usurps privacy.

....

The contemporary poet who set out to write an official occasional poem...gives up the privacy in which modern poetry is born, without gaining the authority and currency that used to be the advantages of the poet laureate in Rome or England. Her verse is not public but bureaucratic--that is to say, spoken by no one and addressed to no one.

"Praise Song for the Day," the poem Elizabeth Alexander read this afternoon, was a perfect specimen of this kind of bureaucratic verse. There was an extraordinary burden of expectation attached to Alexander's poem; I don't recall Maya Angelou or Miller Williams, the poets who read at Bill Clinton's inaugurations, getting the kind of attention that Alexander received in the last few weeks. The reason, I think, is that Obama's inauguration was just the kind of event that might inspire genuine poetry: it was that rare moment when the public intersected with the private for good instead of evil. And of course, Obama himself has often been cast as a "poetic" figure, thanks to his eloquence and the appeal of his image. Last January, E.J. Dionne wrote that Obama represented poetry to Hillary Clinton's prose, a contrast that became a standard trope of the campaign.
....
[P]oetry is a matter of having your own words, not of having words for others; and the weakness of Alexander's work is precisely its consciousness of obligation. Her poetic superego leads her to affirm piously, rather than question or challenge. This weakness is precisely what made her a perfect, an all too perfect, choice for inaugural poet. Indeed, in "Ars Poetica #1,002: Rally," published in 2005 when Barack Obama was still just a first-year Senator from Illinois, she already imagines herself lecturing a crowd with inspirational banalities:

I dreamed a pronouncement
about poetry and peace.
"People are violent,"
I said through the megaphone
on the quintessentially
frigid Saturday
to the rabble stretching
all the way up First.
"People do violence
unto each other
and unto the earth
and unto its creatures.
Poetry," I shouted, "Poetry,"
I screamed, "Poetry
changes none of that
by what it says
or how it says, none.
But a poem is a living thing
made by living creatures...
and as life
it is all that can stand
up to violence."

This poem, written for a book and not for an inauguration, is already public in the worst sense--inauthentic, bureaucratic, rhetorical. So it was no surprise to hear Alexander begin her poem today with a cliché ("Each day we go about our business"), before going on to tell the nation "I know there's something better down the road"; and pose the knotty question, "What if the mightiest word is ‘love'?"; and conclude with a classic instance of elegant variation: "on the brink, on the brim, on the cusp." The poem's argument was as hard to remember as its language; it dissolved at once into the circumambient solemnity. Alexander has reminded us of what Angelou's, Williams's, and even Robert Frost's inauguration poems already proved: that the poet's place is not on the platform but in the crowd, that she should speak not for the people but to them.

But perhaps we shouldn't be too hard on Alexander. If Robert Frost couldn't do it...well, good luck.

update: Apparently you can already order the poem from Amazon. They sent me an email about it today: "As someone who has purchased or rated books by Gwendolyn Brooks, you might like to know that Praise Song for the Day: A Poem for Barack Obama's Presidential Inauguration will be released on February 6, 2009." No thank you.

Happy-Go-Lucky

2009-01-23T05:55:00.000-08:00

Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky is one of the best films I saw all year. I was practically dragged into the theater kicking and screaming. When I left, I knew that I'd experienced more than a few moments in that small room that I will not and cannot forget. No spoilers here; just, see the film. Tonight, if possible. Nevermind the trailer.

JMH

You are a champion if....

2009-01-21T20:43:00.000-08:00

You can name all nine members of the Wu-Tang Clan.

(It's harder than you think.)

Ribcages, History, and Obama

2009-01-20T14:48:00.000-08:00

I’m on a bus to Boston, Massachusetts. The Indian girl next to me has been fiddling with her laptop for the past half hour and delivering a series of unsuppressed moans in my general direction while elbowing me in the left ribcage. I don’t mind. Obama is being sworn in almost as I write. She’s reading Middlemarch and has that disdainful attitude of someone who knows, already, I wouldn’t understand the book if I tried. I’d bet all the money in my recently opened savings account that she’s a freshman at Harvard. I don’t dare ask. She asked if I knew how to fix her wireless, so I tried to walk her through some basic troubleshooting, unsuccessfully. I find Windows Vista as useful as accidentally biting my own tongue.

The point is, however annoying it is, I’m sitting in the middle of the bus and not the back. I have the option to walk forward. A matter of years ago, this was absurd. This morning, hungover at work from birthday festivities last night, I made a point to take a drink from a single drinking fountain. I watched video clips on the New York Times website. I can’t help seeing Obama smile without welling up with pride. A professor e-mailed me, telling me she was in tears at the sight of the whole procession. Also demanding more pages from the novel.

The second most stupid thing I did all year was have the idea to write a novel on black history. The first most stupid thing I did all year was actually doing it. I’m too young; I know that. It’s probably not in me yet to write the book about my family members, from slavery to St. Louis cocaine habits to me, in a dorm in a university.

I’m not done, not by a long shot, so technically I still belong to the genus of unduly-vain, sensitive “writers” who haven’t yet contributed a damn thing to the modern world of publishing. But I am trying. I’m black, and I felt entitled to it. The same way Spielberg felt entitled to the Holocaust, or Herman Melville felt entitled to whales, or Scorsese felt entitled to the entire city of New York. That history is mine—my blood is there. The importance of this moment, as I read in someone’s blog, is not that our president is black, but that the nation elected a black president. The evils of our American past are finally and palpably showing their corrosion. The word hope has never tasted so good when saying it. Makes me shiver. Dare we look forward? What is the next obstacle we can overcome? The next unsolvable social depravity to which we can respond, “Yes We Can”?

I’m still a little drunk from yesterday, but I’ve turned on the overhead light and a bit of Chopin and settled into a book of Billy Collins. A momentous day.

JMH

A Trip to the Casino

2009-01-18T10:43:00.000-08:00

Well the money's pouring down and the people all look down,
And it's floating out of town
I hit the second deck and I spend my paycheck,
And my wife that I just met, she's looking like a wreck
-Wilco, "Casino Queen."

This past Friday evening, I found myself bundled up in -20 degree weather, wedged into a bus that looked like a trolley, sipping a can of Old-Style and watching the smoke and lights of the South Side of Chicago whip by. It was a good friend's birthday party, and we were on our way to Hammond, Indiana. We were going to the Casino.

If you go to the Hammond Horshoe's Website, you will be greeted with a video of a suave, Bond-like man of about 50 strolling into the casino with a briefcase full of money. Music that sounds like it's been lifted from Pulp Fiction or Snatch plays in the background. We see the "infamous gambler" land at a craps table, and as he throws the dice, we hear the sound of jets taking off. In no more than than 5 seconds, we see video of: sky diving (with a snowboard), a fighter jet, a skier in mid air, people riding ATVs through the desert, a soccer player doing a bicycle kick, a white-water kayaker, a women ripping her shirt open to expose a red satin bra, a motorcyclist, a surfer, and finally, the space shuttle taking off in a cloud of fire. The man walks out of the casino 3 rolls later with 1.5 million dollars. He now has two suitcases full of cash. We are informed that "Horshoe ignites the true gambler's soul." There is one minority in the video—an out-of-focus black man in the background of the gambler's march to the craps table.

You can see the casino for at least a couple of miles. It's built in the middle of a bunch of gas stations that advertise cheap meat and fireworks in an almost pun-ish fashion: "Big bangs for cheap." From the road, the building looks at least as big as the Field Museum in Chicago, and houses a hotel, several restaurants, and an enormous parking garage. The casino itself is a sort of barge-like monstrosity on an inlet of Lake Michigan.

We were getting excited, wondering what the night would hold, and we clambered out of the trolley-bus and pile into the Casino. The first impression I had is not of the decor of the lobby, which looks like something you might see in budget hotel in South Florida, but of the overwhelming smell of cigarette smoke. Smoking indoors in public venues has been banned in Illinois for a year now, and I had forgotten the heaviness of the air of smokey bars. On a wall, a sign tells us that "Responsible gambling is not leaving your child unattended." We checked our coats, the smokers lit cigarettes, and walked into a maze of flashing lights and slot machines.

The Hammond Horseshoe allegedy contains 46,000 square feet of gambling space and houses over 2,000 slot machines. To my virgin eyes, it seemed like far more. I had never been into a gaming portion of a casino. When I was thirteen, my family and my grandmother packed into a room the size of a walk-in-closet in the bottom of a cruise ship and went to Cozumel, Mexico (where my dad hired a driver and took us to see the corrugated metal shacks on the other side of the island). I once convinced my mom to play a dollar at one of the twenty slot machines at the storefront casino on one of the decks. She won five dollars. The next day, I convinced her to play the five dollars. We lost it all, and she swore off returning. When I was twenty, I stopped off at the Indian Reservation Casino—Sky City— in New Mexico to eat a disgusting avocado burger in the middle of the night on my way to the World's Largest Dream Catcher outside of Winslow, Arizona.

And here I was in the middle of a football field of slots with names like "Rembrandt's Riches," "DaVinci Diamonds," and "Who wants to be a Binoinaire?" Where to go first? The bar? The gaming tables? The bathroom? I looked around with wide eyes and couldn't help but thinking, as I do whenever I am at a dance party, that my education in Christian schools had failed me in social skills that I never thought I'd admit to wanting (namely grinding and gambling).Remembering the slot machines on the cruise ship, I had loaded my pockets with spare change. I reached into my jeans and with a little bit of effort to find the coin slot, jammed a quarter in the slot machine, then pushed the button. Nothing happened. I was on the verge of putting another quarter in when my friend informed me that the machines took either cash or casino cards. I looked up at the hundreds of cameras hidden by copper balls, became a little worried, then walked to the bar. There I was dissapointed that unlike Nevada Casinos of which I had heard, drinks are not free. They are cheap, though, and I was delighted to see Wild Turkey on special. Then I began what amounted to five hours of strolling up and down the casino floor.

There were no Danny Oceans, no men like the man in the video on the Casino's website. Nor was this anything like Casino Royale, which I had recently seen. The people were the same kind of people that walk into the staffing agency where I work and try to get an eight-dollar an hour job on an assembly line. Women with low-cut shirts exposing names tattooed on their breasts, men wearing their shirts from the plastering union that employs them. They had canes. They looked like they had smoked two packs a day for thirty-five years. Some were gathered around the gaming tables with bright eyes and stacks of chips. Others were seated at the slot-machines, mindlessly pushing the play button over and over again (their arms would get tired by pushing the lever.) They had their Horshoe cards on bungee cords so they would never leave them in a machine. Some of them rested their head on the machine, their finger moving up and down like the needle of a sewing machine in slow-motion.

The majority of the $3.7 billion in revenue of Harrah's, the owner of the Horshoe franchise, and nearly 80% of the company's operating profits come from slot-machines. Harrah's uses rewards cards for their slot-machines so that they can track players' age, gender, area of residence, games played, and amount of money spent. Players are encouraged to sign up because they can earn rewards, much like a credit card, based on how much money they spend. But it gets worse. The central processing center in Memphis Tenessee tracks the data on each gambler and generates marketing strategies tailored for each one. They know how much each will spend and what sort of coupons and incentives will get them to return regularly. Out of towners are given discounted rates on hotels. Locals are given free meals at the restaurants. The money pours in, mostly from local residents. The ideal Harrah's customer according to the data? A 62 year-old woman who plays dollar video poker and lives within 30 minutes of the Casino (according to a marketing book I found on google books...which was concerned only with praising Harrah's strategy).

What is in thirty minutes of Hammond, Indiana? Chicago, yes, but I don't think the majority of the players were from Chicago. My friends and I were the only ones on the shuttle trolley-bus (I like writing that word.) Rather, I would bet that the majority of the players were from Hammond, or nearby Gary, with its median household income of under $30,000. I had no business being at the casino. But I couldn't help but think that these people had less.

The birthday boy managed to walk away with $150 dollars in winnings from Black Jack. Another friend walked away with $600. This didn't suprise any of us. His mom enters mail-entry competitions as her job and has won vacations, a cruise, video game systems, and plasma tvs, among other things. He won a trip to France to be a ball-boy in the 1998 World Cup. Luck is in his blood. And with his black blazer, dark jeans, and leather boots with a zipper on the arch, he looked like a gambler.

I had walked in with the intent of spending no more than $40 on gambling. My secretarial job and my student loans wouldn't permit me to spend more. I spent $3. Or $3.50, I should say, as I won 50 cents on a slot machine and then immediately lost it. I was too frustrated with the slot machines to spend any more. I thought it was a matter of pulling a lever. Nope. There's all sorts of betting options and video screens that pop-up. The minimum buy-in for Black Jack was $25, so I didn't play that either. Instead, I wandered around in the smoke for a long, long time, gazing with a confused awe at what was going on around me.

Yes, I had a good time, but the whole thing seemed rather Dante-esque. Like an outer ring of hell, in which people are punished with the banality of their desires for an eternity under bawdy chandeliers.

In light of the recent events in Palestine...

2009-01-16T11:43:00.000-08:00

I'm not going to say anything about what's going on in Palestine right now except that it's terribly saddening. But I did want to post a portion of an essay written and published in America by King Abdullah I of Jordan six months before the Israeli/Arab war of 1948, which I found over at 3QuarksDaily:

Palestine is a small and very poor country, about the size of your state of Vermont. Its Arab population is only about 1,200,000. Already we have had forced on us, against our will, some 600,000 Zionist Jews. We are threatened with many hundreds of thousands more.

Our position is so simple and natural that we are amazed it should even be questioned. It is exactly the same position you in America take in regard to the unhappy European Jews. You are sorry for them, but you do not want them in your country.

We do not want them in ours, either. Not because they are Jews, but because they are foreigners. We would not want hundreds of thousands of foreigners in our country, be they Englishmen or Norwegians or Brazilians or whatever.

Think for a moment: In the last 25 years we have had one third of our entire population forced upon us. In America that would be the equivalent of 45,000,000 complete strangers admitted to your country, over your violent protest, since 1921. How would you have reacted to that?

Because of our perfectly natural dislike of being overwhelmed in our own homeland, we are called blind nationalists and heartless anti-Semites. This charge would be ludicrous were it not so dangerous.

No people on earth have been less "anti-Semitic" than the Arabs. The persecution of the Jews has been confined almost entirely to the Christian nations of the West.

Key to the City

2009-01-16T09:44:00.000-08:00

The Captain of the US Airways flight that crashed into the Hudson River yesterday, Chesley B. Sullenberger III, has been given the key to the city by Mayor Bloomberg. From what I've read, Captain Sullenberger is very deserving of honor. But it begs the question: What is a key to the city?

According to our good friend Wikipedia, the "Key to the City," is an American version of the "Freedom of the City," which has its roots in the Roman Republic. Roman legions were not allowed to enter the city gates in formation or with weapons without permission for fear of military coups. The "Freedom of the City," military edition, was an honor that allowed legions to come into the city.

The more common form is the civilian form, which boils down to freedom from serfdom. Basically, through this honor, you were elevated to the level of human-being.

"The key to the city is a similar award that is descended from freedom of the city. It is used in several countries, but is especially popular in the United States."

But what is it?

According to Wikipedia, the key to the city is, "An ornamental key is presented to esteemed visitors, residents, or others the city wishes to honor. Evoking medieval walled cities whose gates were guarded during the day and locked at night, the key opens every door in city limits."

We could talk about who deserves a key to the city and all those questions of honor, but I'm more interested the key to the city being able to open every door. If this is true, it is horrifying. Imagine the people who could walk into any building....

If you are cursed to live in Flint Michigan, you might come home from being laid-off from your 10th job in 2 years to find American Idol finalist LaKisha Jones lounging in your house. If that doesn't sound bad, watch this video.

And all you wanted to do was come home, drink a sixer of High Life and fill out your unemployment papers.

In 2004, Atlanta gave Ludacris the key to the city, not for having hoes in different area codes—they wanted him to stay local—but for his contributions to scholarship funds. When he steps into the room, it's "shirts off and panties dropping." This may or not be appealing to you, depending on whether you want Ludacris sleeping with your wife.

And before Captain Sullenberger recieved the Key to New York, every member of the 2007-2008 New York Giants did, as well. Which means Plexico Bures has a key. And as he sits on your couch, his gun, which he still carries in his pocket, goes off and hits you in the leg.

But Detroit, as it does with all things bad, takes the cake. In 1980, the mayor of Detroit gave the key to the city to Saddam Hussein for contributions to a local church.

But then again, if you were living in Detroit in the 80s and 90s, you had bigger problems then Saddam Hussein walking into your locked house.

In response to Jason

2009-01-13T14:55:00.001-08:00

"It is not then, the violation that makes avant-garde art (or really, any transgression) so seductive, but the idea that new ways are being experimented with and found--better ways."

But of course, the violation is exactly what makes the avant-garde "seductive," at least to most people. Certainly Aliza Shvarts, the Yale student whom we talked about earlier, fell prey to this notion, this idea that the violation of taboo makes not only for provocative but good art. She probably should have spent her undergraduate years drawing and painting nudes, perfecting the fundamentals of art. Which brings into question Jason's statement about the Princeton students wanting to photograph nudes. I don't know enough about photography to know whether photographing nudes is a fundamental step, but I am worried by undergraduate students who want to immediately break the rules. Learn the rules first, then break them if you have a reason.

I do think it is a mistake to say that the new ways are always "better ways." I attended what can only be described as an avant-garde poetry reading a few weeks ago at Myopic books in Chicago. The main poet was accomplished—he had held a Stegner fellowship—but his poetry wasn't that great. Clever at times. And he broke a lot of rules. But cleverness doesn't last. And it doesn't rewrite the rules. It illicits a grin here, a wide eye there. Nothing more.

On the Nude, and other Transgressions

2009-01-11T15:04:00.001-08:00

"I don't think it is any longer necessary to make nudes, which might be a way of saying it is no longer necessary to enact transgressions in order to make significant works of art, even modernist art. This is, again, not to suggest that the cultural and social antagonisms which provoke the whole process of art as transgression, from Romanticism on, have been cured or calmed."

Jeff Wall in an interview with Arielle Pelenc. Jeff Wall: Selected Essays and Interviews. p 256

Does the law crush the soul? Is obeying the law living in bad faith? Is transgression the beginning of authentic existence, the origin of art's truth and freedom? Although one might be drawn to think that these are the tenants of avant-garde art (which finds itself necessarily embattled against traditional, official culture), Jeff Wall asks these questions, ultimately opining that "it is the writing of laws, not the breaking of them, that is the most significant and characteristic artistic act in modernity." So, encrypted in the act of transgression, the avant-garde experiments by positing new behaviors, not just breaking old ones.

It is not then, the violation that makes avant-garde art (or really, any transgression) so seductive, but the idea that new ways are being experimented with and found--better ways. The artistic nude emerged against a social attitude that demonized the human body rather than curing society's arcane, philistine conception that the nude body was a hazard and hotbed of iniquity--that it, rather than society itself (among them, politicians of both church and state), needed to be tamed and educated. In Western Europe, we see this social attitude nearly entirely usurped by a more liberal mentality. One need only flip on the TV to see women nude in shampoo commercials.

What that also does, importantly, is call into question those artists still existing in that pre-mentality. If you stumble across a young photographer looking to do nudes (there are a few here in Princeton), you might first ask yourself if they've done their homework. The Monk or even The Scarlet Letter were once polemics against sexual legalism. Today "erotic" clit-lit stocks grocery store aisles. The Godardian Breathless jump-cut, child of the New Wave, tires itself in standard MTV fare.

Laws are meant to be broken, re-written, attempted, and broken again. How else can we progress? How can we live but by transgression?

JMH

We're not dead, yet.

2009-01-09T20:27:00.000-08:00

Some time ago, sitting in my lonely apartment at the school where I used to teach, no doubt longing for some contact outside of the thirty teenagers running up and down the hallways outside my rooms while calling me gay in Korean, I installed Google Analytics onto both of my blogs. If you don't know about Analytics, its a fascinating tool that Google developed for businesses that allows users to monitor the hits on websites. But it's more than a hit-counter. It will tell you the time spent on each page, the web searches that brought viewers to the site, and, perhaps most amazingly, the locations of each viewer.

I was fascinated to know that people, granted a very small number of people, outside of my friends read what I was writing, or in the case of my other blog, posting. Checking the statistics and the locations of the hits became somewhat addicting. I have no social life? It's cool—somoeone from Russia just read my tumbleblog. This is admittedly a very poor substitute for friends, but you can only handle playing so much Super Smash Brothers with 13 year-olds before resorting to ridiculous options.

Of course, the key to attracting viewers to a blog is to post frequently. Scroll on down to the next post—a half-ass affair of one paragraph—and you'll notice it was written in September. September is a long time ago. I was still unemployed, still somewhat hopeful about the the current year, and my feet weren't cold all the time. And so the hits fell. Which is fine—what does it matter if you get 150 hits a month or 20? Except for the fact that Google Analytics mapped out my sloth with humbling acumen.

Everytime I would log on to see the hits on my tumbleblog, which I posted to regularly, I would also be confronted with the sobbering statistcs that 50% less people read my this blog than last month. I don't care about the numbers. I'm not interesting enough to expect big numbers. But I always felt like Google was more or less admonishing me for not writing more, which is akin to your parents reminding you that you haven't cared for your dog, the dog you allegedy love, as evidenced by the fact that the only thing covering its ribs are scabs.

To put this feeling (and the blogs readership) in graphical form:

A line getting as close as possible to 0.

Rather than deleting my Analytics account or shutting this blog down—both easy and probably advisable—I'm going to try to remedy the lack of writing.

But you'll have to stay tuned for the next post because I can't waste what little I have to say on one post.

So long, Muxtape

2008-09-30T16:00:00.000-07:00

I was very sad to see the demise of Muxtape as we know it. I initially wondered why the site wasn't shut down sooner, but it was, on the whole, pretty innocuous. It even linked to Amazon so you could buy tracks if you liked them (downright saintly compared to The Pirates Bay.) Muxtape will be reincarnated, according to the site's letter from it's founder, now gracing every old Muxtape page, and this time, it will be centered on independent musicians. Perhaps that is good news considering MySpace's recent troubles with the indie community.

It does make me wonder if Tumblr's music option will stay.

Electing the Vice-President

2008-09-08T12:41:00.000-07:00

Today over brunch, a friend proposed that the way we elect the vice-president is one of the most undemocratic aspects of American politics. Perhaps this is true. I don't think it's ever a problem, given the vice-president's role as a glorified adviser and figurehead. But it might be a problem, or at least cause for concern, if the president dies or is impeached, in which case the vice-president surpasses the vote of the American public and takes command of the country (this is most poignant in the case of Gerald Ford, who was neither elected Vice-president or President). But then again, giving the vice-presidency to the runner-up was a disaster, as the vice-presidency of Thomas Jefferson proved. In any case, I don't know if it's a problem in this election, especially if McCain wins, as I suspect many people—the religious right, at least—will not be voting for him so much as Sarah Palin.

Courting the Women's vote

2008-09-02T07:51:00.000-07:00

We here at Under Which Lyre have not blogged much on politics (or blogged much at all, really). I hadn't found the campaign too interesting (with the exception of Hilary v. Obama) until recently when I watched the both McCain and Obama at Saddleback.

I have also found McCain's recent choice of Sarah Palin as his running-mate very interesting. The choice is a bit baffling to me—she has been Governor of Alaska for only two years, and before a brief stint as the chairperson of the Alaska Oil and Gas Conservation Commission, mayor of a town of about 9,000 people. She also has no strong background in foreign policy, which is troubling considering that the 72 year old McCain is a cancer survivor and may very well pass away in the next four years.

Of course, she's a social conservative and an evangelical, and McCain had not been that attractive to the religious right. (I would agree with Andy Crouch, and disagree with the folks at This Recording, that the best thing about Sarah Palin is her choosing have to have her child despite the diagnosis of Down Syndrome.) McCain has also decided to meet Obama on idea of change in Washington and has therefore nominated an outsider with a record of working against the political establishment in Alaska. And she's more attractive than McCain, Joe Biden, and even Obama. And then there's the idea of winning the women's vote, courting Hilary's disenchanted voters, which Palin made abundantly clear with her reference to Clinton's "18 million cracks" in the glass ceiling. Which is a long way of bringing me to my point:

I think that the idea of McCain trying to help "break the glass ceiling," or even of McCain courting the women's vote, is humorous at best. Why? Courtesy of the Drudge Report:

In his book The Real McCain, author Cliff Schecter claims that John McCain made extremely ugly remarks about his wife Cindy McCain during a tirade witnessed by three reporters and two aides. "At one point, Cindy playfully twirled McCain's hair and said, 'You're getting a little thin up there,'" Schechter writes. "McCain's face reddened, and he responded, 'At least I don't plaster on the makeup like a trollop, you cunt.' McCain's excuse was that it had been a long day.

There isn't really much to say after that, is there?

Psychoanalysis, Theology, and the coming of Joel Osteen

2008-08-01T09:49:00.000-07:00

From the Introduction of Theology, Psychoanalysis, Trauma: By Marcus Pound

Arguably [Frank] Lake was the first to understand that psychoanalysis needed to be practised within a participatory and liturgical framework—the argument of this book; yet if his work remains problematic it is not because of his liberal advocacy of LSD, but because in the end theology is subordinated to psychoanalysis and nt the other way around. For example, salvation seems to care less about God than achieving an autonomous and secure ego which is to be supplemented with supernatural 'fortitude'. God appears as the religious equivalent of a body-builder's steroids, providing extra muscle to a more general course of well-being.

Lake's problem arises because he assumes the ultimate autonomy of the secular sphere. Yet according to the work of John Milbank, the secular is not itself a given reality, a space of 'purely human' to be discovered once the cobwebs of superstition have been cleared away. Rather, the secular was imagined, discursively created through the emergent disciplines of the social sciences which are of themselves already bastardized forms of theology. Take natural law for instance. From the perspective of the political sciences natural law was no longer a means of mediating the divine, the basis of a participatory good. Instead, it was posited that humans, left to a state of nature, were self-seeking individuals whose sole motivation was the preservation of their own sphere of interest. Therefore, it was in their best interest to enter a mutual contract, curbing some of their rights at the expense of securing their sphere of influence. In this way the human subject was manifest within relations of pure immanence and the secular was constituted as a field of the formal power relations required to maintain the social order. What remained of religion was deemed utterly private, transcendent, and ineffable and as such banished from the social, thereby confirming the autonomy of the secular.
Yet as Milbank argues, theology is a social theory, one that seeks to promote mutual social relations, without being predicated upon the notion of the private individual or need to formally exercise power; but of neighbourly love, spontaneous charity, and learnt virtue; and it fails to challenge the autonomy of the secular it will inevitably be positioned by it, reduced to an immanent field of knowledge such as wish-fulfilment, or tucked away in some private ineffable realm.
It is not difficult to extend Milbank's project to psychoanalysis. After all, psychoanalysis was key in securing at the level of the individual what was posited of the social. Early interpreters of Freud such as his daughter Anna, Harry Guntrip, or Heinz Hartmann, all argued that the self was in origin a bundle of self-seeking drives, the primary expression of nature, a chaos which needed to be brought into social conformity through the rationalizing principle of the ego—the approach known as ego-psychology. And like Hobbes, man would pass from nature to society through a contractual agreement; only now the contractual agreement specifically targets the sexual relation: the ban upon incest. Moreover, like the social contract, it affords a certain compromise: one may not have exactly what one wants (i.e. the mother); nonetheless, one can always find a respectable substitute. Psychoanalysis was therefore a profoundly conservative project, aimed at helping the subject adjust to a reality defined in advance by wider secular and political thought. And it is perhaps for this reason that should theology fail to assume a meta-critical stance apropos psychoanalysis, it will inevitably be positioned by it, confined to existing social reality. Salvation will become indistinguisable from achieving a secure ego-identity, and the Church's ability to speak out against wider political and economic injustice will be seriously compromised.

A few thoughts on The Dark Knight

2008-07-24T00:34:00.000-07:00

I'm in Pasadena at the moment visiting a friend. Earlier in the day after we visited Silver Lake's hipsters at Intelligentsia (yes, it's spread from Chicago), we went to the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was incredibly sketchy to say the least. Among the myriad of jugglers, rappers hawking their CDs, and performers dressed like movie characters, I saw the Joker. Well, a poorer, taller imitation of him. But no mistake, he was Heath Ledger's Joker, not the iconic Jack Nicholson joker of the first Batman movie. My first thought: "Well that's awfully quick—the movie came out last week." The other characters—Gene Simmons, (a drunken) Spiderman, Captain Jack Sparrow, the Tinman—somehow seemed more appropriate, not only because the movies have been out longer, but because Ledger's joker, a sociopath, seems too dark, too psychotic to be juxtaposed with French tourists and vendors selling Maps of the Stars.

I saw the movie for the second time tonight (at double the price of my Illinois matinée), and I was as taken with it the second time as the first (especially the chase scene on lower Wacker Drive.) I won't review it for you here—there's a litany of reviews online. (I'm fond of Thomas Hibbs's piece in First Things). But in spite of Christopher Nolan's brilliance, I think he could have taken notes from the Coen Brother's film, No Country for Old Men.

As one reviewer aptly noted:

Imagine No Country for Old Men, change the plot some and throw in people dressed up as bats and clowns and that's the sort of sandbox of ideas and areas of darkness that The Dark Knight plays in. Without a doubt, if you combined the film's interpretation of Two-Face and The Joker you would have Anton Chigurh.

And while No Country for Old Men revolves around the same themes of chaos and destruction (though it should be said that the crushing blow it delivers to determinism manages to destroy any potential hope; The Dark Knight manages to keep hope alive, as Hibbs notes in the aforementioned review), it does so in a more subtle manner than The Dark Knight. Here I am referring to the scene between the Joker and Two-Face in which the Joker.....dare I use this line....seduces Harvey Dent to the dark side. The Joker says something to the effect of "Unlease a little anarchy," and "Chance is fair." In this scene, with both villains present, we have a glimpse of Anton Chigurh from No Country. But Chigurh's character is all the more disturbing because he never mentions the word anarchy, never goes into a detailed discussion of his morality of chance save to say that the coin he uses got there the same way he did.

My second qualm with the movie is that the score can be a bit too much. I can only handle the dramatic music for, I don't know, 2 hours, not 2 and a half hours. There are moments, especially in the latter hour of the film, where the intensity or horror of the moment are detracted by the music, which depending on your theater's sound system may overpower the dialogue. Recall No Country, which had no soundtrack whatsoever, making the film somewhat less human. I do not think that Nolan should have jettisoned the entire soundtrack of The Dark Knight. On the contrary, I think the music is quite helpful at times. I do think that it could have been regulated more.

Of course, one could argue that subtlety is not the mark of a movie in which the main character is wearing tights. But Nolan's movie is too clever to be lumped with other comic book movies. His treatment of Two-Face, for example, He eschewed the heavy handedness of the George Clooney Batman films in which both villains seem to play an equal role, which led to the dismal failure of the characters. Allowing Dent to metamorphose into Two-Face in the last 1/4 of the film does not distract from the Joker, and more importantly, from Batman's internal struggle between good and evil and the sorrow and loneliness that accompany it. It would be foolish to say that the director was incapable of being subtle. I would perhaps be willing to buy the argument that the heavy-handedness was needed for the general audience of the film, though.

Reading Lolita in Wheaton, Illinois

2008-07-01T18:26:00.001-07:00

Is awful.

As this post hints at [and yes, here I am shamelessly shuttling you off to my commonplace book], Lolita is known as a dirty book. When I was in high school, not having read the book, I thought it akin to literary porn.

Of course, the old Vintage International Cover doesn't help:

[seen here as the cover of the audiobook]

So of course, I'm quite embarrassed when I take this out of my bag at coffee shops in Wheaton, Illinois, where it often seems like the majority of coffee shop patrons are there for Bible studies. I quickly break open the book, hiding the cover and the spine. I think that's easier than saying, "But no, no, no....do you know how beautifully Nabokov writes?"

What it means to be human

2008-06-11T08:41:00.001-07:00

Recently, at the World Science Festival in NYC, a group of scientists and social scientists gathered together to look at the question, "What does it mean to be human?" Wired has taken the panel's answers (or lack of an answer, in the case of Paul Nurse and Harold Varmus) and condensed them for readability. Here's they are:

Marvin Minsky, artificial intelligence pioneer: We do something other species can't: We remember. We have cultures, ways of transmitting information.

Daniel Dennett, cognitive scientist: We are the first species that represents our reasons, and can reason with each other. "The planet has grown a nervous system," he said.

Renee Reijo Pera, embryologist: We're uniquely human from the moment that egg and sperm fuse. A "human program" begins before the brain even begins to form.

Patricia Churchland, neuroethicist: The structure of how the human brain is arranged intrigues me. Are there unique brain structures? As far as we can understand, it's our size that is unique. What we don't find are other unique structures. There may be certain types of human-specific cells -- but as for what that means, we don't know. It's important not only to focus on us, to compare our biology and behavior to other animals.

Jim Gates, physicist: We are blessed with the ability to know our mother. We are conscious of more than our selves. And just as a child sees a mother, the species' vision clears and sees mother universe. We are getting glimmers of how we are related to space and time. We can ask, what am I? What is this place? And how am I related to it?

Nikolas Rose, sociologist: Language and representation. We are the kind of creatures that ask those questions of ourselves. And we believe science can help answer. We've become creatures that think of ourselves as essentially biological -- and I think we're more than biological creatures. I'm not sure biology has answers.

Ian Tattersall, anthropologist: It's not "what is human," but what is unique: our extraordinary form of symbolic cognition.

Francis Collins, geneticist: What does the genome tell us? There's surprisingly little genetic difference between human and chimpanzee. Yet clearly we're different. There's brain size and language. A language-related gene, FoxP2, evolved most rapidly in the last few million years. How did we develop empathy? Appreciate our mortality? And we should admit that there are areas that might not submit to material analysis: beauty, inspiration. We shouldn't dismiss these as epiphenomenal froth.

Harold Varmus, physiologist: Intrigued by our ability to generate hypotheses and make measurements.

Paul Nurse, cell biologist: Is excited about the ability of science to answer this question.

Antonio Damasio, neuroscientist: The critical unique factor is language. Creativity. The religious and scientific impulse. And our social organization, which has developed to a prodigious degree. We have a record of history, moral behavior, economics, political and social institutions. We're probably unique in our ability to investigate the future, imagine outcomes, and display images in our minds. I like to think of a generator of diversity in the frontal lobe -- and those initials are G-O-D.

Out of the panelists, Nikolas Rose, I think, gave the most satisfactory answer. I also found the answer of Francis Collins, who headed the human genome project, to be satisfactory. I've always gravitated to the idea that language was what made us human. That is, anyway, what most poets will tell us. However, I don't know that that answer will hold once A.I. develops to the point of language. I wonder, is it the knowledge that we will one day die, the knowledge of our own mortality? The Christian is obliged to say that humans are made in the image of God, but what does that mean?

Burn After Reading

2008-06-05T18:08:00.000-07:00

After finally seeing the Cohen brother's film No Country for Old Men last week, I was delighted to see that they're coming out with a new film, Burn After Reading. Here's the trailer:

It seems like it's more in the vain of Lebowski rather than the bleak No Country.

The Right and Global Warming

2008-06-05T17:50:00.000-07:00

I've just returned back from New York, where I didn't have a TV, so this might be old news, but I as I sat in my mom's family room where she keeps the Fox News Chanel running, well, pretty much all day, I saw this ad:

Now, I don't really like Pat Robertson, and I certainly don't like Al Sharpton, but this ad struck me for two reasons. First, and most obvious, is the non-partisan nature of the ad: we have both Republicans and Democrats getting behind a major cause. And it seems like that's been a while since that happened.

But what struck me more was Pat Robertson's presence in the ad. The Christian Right has been loathed to get behind the idea of conservationism, mostly, I think, because it has become such a political issue. To my mom, who if nothing else is a member of the Christian right, global warming smacks of Al Gore and leftists. The science of the matter (either way you look at it) doesn't interest her so much as the political nature of the problem. And I think that goes for many Americans, especially here in middle America. (Here I am reminded of my U.S. history class my sophomore year of high school, the same class in which we were forced to write an essay on why the Republican party was more biblical than the Democratic party, when I made some environmentally friendly comment and was accused by several kids of being a "tree-hugger.") S for Pat Robertson to get on board with climate change and global warming...well, that's a big deal.

We hereby award you this award

2008-05-27T06:23:00.000-07:00

On Friday evening, after my school's baccalaureate services, I attended "Class Night." There the school handed out awards to the top achievers. There were 88 categories of awards, each with anywhere from 1-10 winners. I think at least 300 awards were given out. (The evening lasted 2 and a half hours, down from 3 and a half two years ago.) The upper and middle schools combined consists of only 350 students. Of course, many of the students won multiple awards. Many won none. But really? 300 awards for 350 students?

When I asked one of my colleagues why the evening lasted so long and we handed out so many awards, he smugly smiled at me and said that we don't want all the kids running around the dorms for hours on the last night before they move out.

Viewing Violence

2008-05-14T07:22:00.000-07:00

I think Benjamin's post raises some good questions. I must admit that I watched the video for "Stress," not once but twice. The first time I grimaced. The second time, I was more intrigued. Of course it helped that between viewings I read a blurb or two about the video and discovered that it was directed with actors. (To the director's credit, I thought it had looked very authentic, especially after watching the video that Jason posted.) But still, I think this video does raise the question of how we should respond to extreme violence. At my high school, which was run by the Assemblies of God, I was continually subjected to debates on stupid question, "Is it okay to watch 'R' rated movies?" If you're curious, the leadership and those deemed pious answered "no." (Jason, you saw your first R movie at Princeton, didn't you?) Having sworn off the fundamentalist subculture, I have been tempted to give myself carte blanche in what I watch and what I listen to. Everything, after all, can provide some sort of instruction, whether it be in how to live or how not to live. I don't know that that's a satisfactory answer, though.

Alan Jacobs wrote on the fad of Discovery Chanel animal carnage shows in his 1997 article, "In on the Kill." We're not talking about animals, per se, but I think the article is helpful in sorting out some of the same issues. Here's a couple passages:

Such shows are, I believe, the modern equivalent of bear-baiting, or the educated middle-class counterpart to cock-fighting, only with several insulating layers between modern viewers and the violence they endorse:

1. We're just watching what others have filmed; 2. They're just filming what the animals are doing; 3. The animals are just following their instincts. This kind of argument is made possible by what Stanley Milgram called "the fragmentation of the total human act." Milgram's famous experiments on obedience revealed that people can justify participating in the most dreadful deeds if an authority commands their involvement and if they can understand themselves as caught in a chain of events over which they have no control. It seems to me that the modern display of nature's pornography is analogous: since we are neither the ones who kill nor the ones who film the killing, we have no moral stake in the events we watch. But by watching such programs we endorse what happens in them and bear a certain responsibility for them. We have not simply failed to turn off the TV; our sin is not merely one of omission. By watching we will the continuation of such shows and hence, inevitably, the acts represented in them.

Dante understood this peculiarity of human character perfectly well. In the eighth circle of Hell, he and his guide Virgil meet the Falsifiers- among them a thirteenth-century counterfeiter named Master Adam and the infamous Greek Sinon, who tricked the Trojans into allowing the fatal wooden horse into their city. Dante watches as Master Adam and Sinon fall into a bitter exchange of insults and vituperation. For thirty lines of verse they snarl at one another. Then Virgil, the personification of human Reason, turns to Dante and says, "Now keep on looking a little longer and I quarrel with you." Why is he troubled? Because, as he later explains, "the wish to hear such baseness is degrading." There are certain events and actions, Virgil seems to say, toward which the only proper response is to avert one's eyes. This need not be a denial of reality; in fact, it is an acceptance that reality is often terrible. Predation is of course unlike the bitter recriminations of Sinon and Master Adam in that there is no sin in it. But I cannot think of it as a good thing that some creatures live only by the dying of other creatures; and still less can I think a fascination with such killing good.

and later:

There may at times be reasons for us to force ourselves to look at the killing and eating of animals by other animals (just as there may be, and indeed are, good reasons for forcing ourselves to watch films of the Nazi concentration camps). But if we do not have to force ourselves, if we look upon such scenes with pleasure and fascination, something is terribly wrong.

The difference between the two videos, then, is that the Russian Neo-Nazi video serves an educational purpose. Or, there is a good reason for watching it. The Justice video, "Stress," serves a primarily aesthetic purpose. And certainly it's goal, at least on some level, must be to inspire delight?

Jacobs's response, though, seems to be suitable only in the Christian context. I am curious as to how one might take an ethical stance against such videos outside of a religious framework.

Benjamin also raises the question of the medium being the message. While I initially cringed while watching both videos—and the Russian video I could not bear to even finish—I don't think that I would have been particularly shocked if I had read about what I saw. Text, what McLuhan would call a "cold medium," cannot so easily cut me. The same, I think, can be said for music.

DM

Justice - Stress

2008-05-13T11:37:00.001-07:00

apropos the russian hate-clips. the french indie-electronica groups Justice's new music video is stirring up controversy. i don't want to say to much, just watch it.
the russian youtube violence and this video taps into the same phenomenon. what do these new media do with us as observers (a question which is adressed in the last few seconds of this clip)? the distance and anonymity of the internet creates a habit of distance and allows people to bring that distance into their real lives and violate other people. the medium is the message?

b.

From Russia With Hate

2008-05-08T04:40:00.000-07:00

Nearly three years ago, I had to make a decision. Either I would spend the next four years of my life studying Russian or German. Someone told me of the movement that was happening in Russia at the time, and now I'm ecstatic that I chose Germany. Does that make me a coward? Watch.

JMH

It's Official...

2008-05-07T16:42:00.000-07:00

The United States is in a depression. The source? Sushi Park—Long Island's fusion of the American all-you-can-eat-buffet and Sushi. I drove several of my students there the other night, and as I entered the restaurant with its endless lines of overweight Long Islanders stacking sushi on their plates, I saw a sign announcing the restaurant's "Depression Sale," a drop of $5.

I have no idea if we're in a depression, but I do wonder if it's easier for an outsider or an immigrant to announce a depression. For many Americans, a depression is replete with the morbid connotations of the 1930's (or Prozac). Perhaps they're just not afraid to call it like they see it—they charge you extra for left-overs that you throw out.

The avante garde/ art and miscarriage

2008-04-29T07:10:00.000-07:00

The blogosphere (I hate that word) has been buzzing with news of Aliza Schvartz, a Yale senior whose art show was supposed to day. According to the Yale Daily News:

...Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

My moral qualms with this are many, but I think Michael J. Lewis, in the Wall Street Journal, has pointed out some of the artistic problems with the piece:

Immaturity, self-importance and a certain confused earnestness will always loom large in student art work. But they will usually grow out of it. What of the schools that teach them? Undergraduate programs in art aspire to the status of professional programs that award MFA degrees, and there is often a sense that they too should encourage the making of sophisticated and challenging art, and as soon as possible. Yale, like most good programs, requires its students to achieve a certain facility in drawing, although nowhere near what it demanded in the 1930s, when aspiring artists spent roughly six hours a day in the studio painting and life drawing, and an additional three on Saturday.

Given the choice of this arduous training or the chance to proceed immediately to the making of art free of all traditional constraints, one can understand why all but a few students would take the latter. But it is not a choice that an undergraduate should be given. In this respect — and perhaps only in this respect — Ms. Shvarts is the victim in this story.

I think that Lewis is right—the option to stray into "making art free of all traditional constraints" should not be granted to undergraduates. On some level, it's a matter of mastering the fundamentals before moving on. (I would say this should be the case for not only the visual arts, but for the performing arts and writing, as well.) On another level, it's a matter of maturity—Ms. Shvarts, I think, suffers from pretension. This is true of most undergraduates...but it becomes problematic when it leads to inducing several miscarriages.

from W.

2008-04-20T15:38:00.000-07:00

"Some on the left compare W. to Hitler. Nothing could be more wrong. It is our embarrassing distinction in the United States to have acquired a follower as our leader. You don't picture him on the podium at Nuremberg. No, you see him in the third row of the crowd on the rally floor. Look for his face, there, among the other sons!"

[from the story W. in n+1, a bi-annual journal you should subscribe to; photograph of young Adolf, 7 years old]

Reflections from Psalm 23

2008-04-16T18:51:00.000-07:00

Below is my chapel talk that I gave to the students and faculty at the Stony Brook School. I really wanted to say this, but I'm not on too good terms with the administration, so I went for a more orthodox approach. (Posting a chapel talk? So much for the group blog idea...)

Many of you have asked me what life is like for a single teacher here at the Stony Brook School. Though it is often phrased a bit mockingly: “Why don’t you get a life, Michael?” or “You need to get a girlfriend instead of sitting in your apartment all night,” it might be phrased, “You don’t have to change diapers at night like almost everyone else, so what do you do with your free time?” My hobbies, reading, writing, and running—yes, I do really enjoy these activities—all take considerable time, and as any teacher here can tell you from experience, there isn’t really any free time the first year of teaching. So in the twenty minutes that I find here and there, I read blogs. For those of you who don’t know what a blog is, let me clarify: A blog is a website that is regularly updated with articles. I peruse dozens, whose subjects range from education, theology, design, literature, or even, in the case of one of my favorites, graffiti and street art in cities across the world.
Yesterday, I stumbled across a discussion of the recent American Idol special, “Idol Gives Back,” a benefit show to raise money for causes around the world. From what I understand, at the end of the show eight of the remaining contestants sang the song “Shout to the Lord.” Apparently, the folks at American Idol, afraid to offend, decided that it would be better to substitute the word “Jesus” for “Shepherd” because the contestants sang, “My Shepherd, my savior.” The alleged secularization of the song didn’t bother me at all, but I was surprised that “Shepherd” was deemed secular enough. The Bible, after all, is filled with many references to God as a Shepherd, perhaps the most popular of which is the 23rd Psalm, which we heard yesterday in the lectionary reading. When I hear the word Shepherd, my mind generally darts to that passage: “The Lord is my Shepherd.” But I have, you might say, a difficult relationship with the Psalm.

My father died when I was eighteen—my freshman year at college. In mid October, his stomach started to hurt. He was dead three and a half weeks later, a victim of cancer. He had spent the last week and a half of his life in our family room, wrapped in a blanket in front of the TV, barely speaking or eating. My sister had taped several Bible verses on the walls. Much like Psalm 23, they were encouraging verses, and my sister believed that if we prayed hard enough, if we believed the verses well enough, my father would live.
When I buried my father, my uncle, my father’s older brother, read Psalm 23. “The Lord is my Shepherd.” As a sniper in World War II, my uncle had faced the cruelties of war, even spending 6 months in the hospital after a German mortar destroyed the French theater that his tank battalion was occupying. Now he struggled to mouth the words of the Psalm as he wept bitterly. The Psalm was read again a couple hours later at my Father’s memorial service. “The Lord is my Shepherd.” I sat silently in the front row, too numb to think about the meaning, too numb to hear any words of comfort.
The next few months went very poorly. Of course, I was at Wheaton College, the Protestant Vatican, so there was no shortage of people to remind me that God would care for me. But I didn’t know where God was. I tried to find Him, like a boy trying to swat at a thick fog with a stick. As the great Polish Catholic poet Csezlaw Milosz wrote:
I am only a man: I need visible signs.
I tire easily, building the stairway of abstraction.
Many a time I asked you, you know it well, that the statue in church
lift its hand, only once, just once, for me.

But there was no miraculous sign. I thought God had abandoned me. In my “small group”—an odd phenomenon of the Evangelical sub-culture in which people share far too much of their lives and then talk about Jesus—I would sit silently, declining to pray with the others. I was alone. I plummeted into a deep depression and swore off God. But as John writes in the first letter, “for whenever our heart condemns us, God is greater than our heart.”

I think that one of the most powerful moments in the New Testament occurs in the Gospel of John. After many of Jesus’ followers have left him, he turns to the disciples and said “Do you also wish to go away?” Peter responds by saying, “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life.” Like Peter, I did not know where else to turn. By the grace of God, I eventually returned to my faith. I did not know why God had allowed my father to die, nor did I suddenly feel filled with happiness. I did, though, find my faith deeper and stronger, and I found that I was able to empathize with others who were suffering.
God does not bring about our pain intentionally to achieve his will, for he is perfect and is Love and need not...no, cannot...create evil to bring about some greater good. But he can use it if it should occur.
There is something redemptive in suffering, as the lectionary reading from 1st Peter Chapter 2 makes clear: “For it is commendable if a man bears up under the pain of unjust suffering because he is conscious of God. But how is it to your credit if you receive a beating for doing wrong and endure it? But if you suffer for doing good and you endure it, this is commendable before God. To this you were called, because Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his steps.”
In suffering, we learn to humble ourselves—willingly or unwillingly—just as Christ humbled himself to the point of a “death reserved for slaves.” In suffering we learn to empathize with others, to stop offering platitudes or catchy phrases or simple answers and instead, to listen. In suffering we learn that happiness is fleeting, but that the Lord can give joy in the midst of turmoil. But suffering can also be dangerous.
W.H. Auden said in an essay on Søren Kierkegaard that “the Christian who suffers is tempted to think this a proof that he is nearer to God than those who suffer less.” This is a peculiar temptation, the temptation to look upon others who may not have encountered difficulty and almost scorn them for living inauthentic lives. This was a temptation I have fallen prey to repeatedly. This is wrong. If suffering is to be beneficial, I think we must bear it humbly and meekly, not calling attention to ourselves or assuming that we are somehow more attuned to life than others.
Since autumn, I have spoken with many of you about suffering in your own lives. Some of you never had a father. Others have lost loved ones. Others have suffered the crushing weight of depression or anxiety.
It would be too easy to tell you that, in this lifetime, things always turn out for the best, that you may suffer now, but eventually you’ll be flourishing. Several years after the death of my father, I still sometimes struggle to believe the Psalm, to believe that God is constantly caring for me and looking out for my good.
This past summer , I buried two of my best friends, both committed Christians, both victims of suicide. I was studying on a fellowship in Berlin this summer, and I paused one weekend to go to Dresden to meet my friend Stephen, with whom I graduated college . We spent the weekend walking around the beautiful city, now rebuilt from the horrendous devastation that allied bombers wreaked upon it in 1945. On Sunday, after church, I took a train back to Berlin. Stephen, who was studying in a town called Gottingen, never made it back. I learned of his death a few days later when the American Embassy called to ask if I knew any details.
I came to Stony Brook in August, still grieving his death, though I don’t really think I had processed it. After my first day of teaching, I returned to my apartment wondering how I would make it through the year. I was greeted by a phone call from the mother of Luke, another of my best friends. A victim of bi-polar disorder, he, too, had battled depression for years, unsuccessfully attempting suicide a few times. During the week before I began teaching, I had spoken with Luke almost everyday as he spiraled further and further down. That Friday I called his parents to say that he was doing very poorly and that they should be watchful. On Monday, his mother called to say that “we had lost Luke.”
Let me be perfectly clear: I do not wish to convey the message that life is bad, that it is just a matter of riding out a long storm in which we are buffeted by wave after wave of hardship. No. Life is beautiful and holy. Though it can be difficult, life must be affirmed vigorously and joyfully.
There are, though, countless cases of people like this, people whose life seems to be marked by tragedy. The countless victims of disease or poverty who never see the rosy, halcyon days that we think are promised to us. And many are Christians. Where is the Shepherd, watching over his flock?

Over the past few months, I have spent several hours talking with the parents of each friend. Both couples acknowledge that the great pain and destruction caused by the death of their sons—it will decrease over time but it will never disappear. At least on this side of eternity.
And this is where we must return to the end of Psalm 23. It closes with the beautiful declaration that we “will dwell in the house of the LORD forever.” The idea of eternity is difficult to grasp. Indeed, I doubt that we can grasp it. We can try to graph it, to mathematically represent it—the curve forever approaching the limit of infinity—but we are hard pressed to understand, even imagine eternity, let alone an eternity with God, an eternity of perfect joy. But this is what we are promised. In the face of such incomprehensible joy, the struggles of this earth fade away.
The hope that we have in Christ is too much for me to communicate. I, a mere teacher, cannot do justice to what the Psalmist so beautifully describes. I can only gesture at it, and repeat the closing words of the Nicene Creed: “We look for the resurrection of the dead, and the life of the world to come. Amen.”

Graphic Design and the War

2008-04-16T10:44:00.000-07:00

I was reading an article on the future of Catholic Higher Education, over at the National Review. Now, though I imagine that the National Review is wildly unpopular in my generation (it is probably not much of an overstatement that all of the readers are probably over 40 and either work for defense contractors or make over $100,000 a year—and very educated), but I tend to fall into more of the conservative camp, at least on issues of religion and public life, and the magazine has thoughtful things to say here. However, I was bit turned off this afternoon when I gazed to the right of the text of said article and saw this add:

Of course, the people over at NRO are in favor of the war. But the design of this advertisement smacks of delight in war. And I don't even say "the war," as in the war going on now, but war in general. The stencil lettering above a tank shooting fire out of its barrel—its the sort of thing I might expect on the cover of a tank commander game.

I'm not wholly against the Iraqi war, but I do think that war, in general, is to be looked on with disgust, as a viable option but also as the last option. That is to say that it is perhaps necessary, at times, though it is never to be delighted in.

I understand that the graphic is mirroring the site's web address, but perhaps something a bit more tasteful is in order. It is the responsibility of the country, if it is to be in this war, to at least acknowledge the tragedy of war.

Mild Case of Necrophilia

2008-04-13T12:44:00.000-07:00

Let's talk Pygmalion. Ovidian sculptor. From Cyprus. Falls for this sculpture he carves from ivory. Eventually, Venus (what an incredibly sexy name) takes pity on Pygmalion and brings the statue to life. They copulate and produce two offspring, women, human: Paphose and Metharme, names to which, historians steadfastly agree, Cypriot middle school was not terribly kind.

On a serious note (and what is not serious?), I mention this find because I think Shelly's account of a artist/artwork relationship much more devastating and far more realistic than Ovid's. Frankenstein's monster rebukes him, kills those he holds dear, and leads him on a chase that literally costs the troubled doctor his life. To see creation turning on its creator, one need go no further than the mall. Or any church. Or the art museum.

There is something about the artwork that makes the artist both wonder in awe and recoil in terror: its autonomy. It is not uncommon that the creations we make far outdo ourselves; that is, though they come from us, they can be far more powerful and catastrophic in singular capacities than ourselves (i.e. the atom bomb, the printing press, the machine gun, the song "Nobody Does it Better" by Carly Simon).

We cannot be taught to ask the question:

Can God sin? Is that sin, in fact, us? If we do ever get around to asking it, it is certain that no teacher can have asked it for us.

JMH

We're renovating...

2008-04-13T07:23:00.000-07:00

Clay Shirkey, in a guest column for Penguin, wrote "Most user-generated material is actually personal communication in a public forum. Because of this personal address , it makes no more sense to label this content than it would to call a phone call with your mother "family-generated content." A good deal of user-generated content isn't actually "content" at all, at least not in the sense of material designed for an audience." The problem with this blog was that it was caught between offering up content and "personal communication in a public forum." Admittedly my job—teaching and coaching at a boarding school—has left me little time to write, but when I did stumble upon some time (usually by neglecting class prep), I was struck at the loneliness of the whole blogging bit. That is, there wasn't much of a conversation going on, which was my original intention for this blog, which I named after Auden's 1946 Phi Beta Kappa poem, "Under Which Lyre." The poem wittily describes the battle that Auden perceived on college campuses— the battle between the humanities and the sciences, the romantics and the pragmatists. The poem, which traces the success of the scientists, draws to a close with the resistance of the poets, the "sons of Hermes":

Lone scholars, sniping from the walls
Of learned periodicals,
Our facts defend,
Our intellectual marines,
Landing in little magazines
Capture a trend.

By night our student Underground
At cocktail parties whisper round
From ear to ear;
Fat figures in the public eye
Collapse next morning, ambushed by
Some witty sneer.

Which, in some fantastical, delusional way, is what I originally wanted for this blog—a sort of cocktail party where ideas could be discussed. (Although in writing this, it sounds awful. I can taste the pretension, people casually alluding to books they've never read with an air of authority, the name dropping of professors or intellectuals that might have once said "hello.") But it didn't happen, really.

So I've decided to make this a group blog, a collective conversation, an idea I stole from a friend's similar endeavor, and the folks over at the American Scene. So I'm pleased to welcome Jason Harper, a student at Princeton and Die Freie Universität Berlin; James Hoey, a student at Chicago's divinity school; and Benjamin Ekman....who is from Sweden.

2008-04-12T07:40:00.000-07:00

Over at ayjay's, I found a humorous section of an article by David Brooks, "The Great Forgetting." Here's the excerpt:

Society is now riven between the memory haves and the memory have-nots. On the one side are these colossal Proustian memory bullies who get 1,800 pages of recollection out of a mere cookie-bite. They traipse around broadcasting their conspicuous displays of recall as if quoting Auden were the Hummer of conversational one-upmanship. On the other side are those of us suffering the normal effects of time, living in the hippocampically challenged community that is one step away from leaving the stove on all day.

This divide produces moments of social combat. Some vaguely familiar person will come up to you in the supermarket. “Stan, it’s so nice to see you!” The smug memory dropper can smell your nominal aphasia and is going to keep first-naming you until you are crushed into submission.

Your response here is critical. You want to open up with an effusive burst of insincere emotional warmth: “Hey!” You’re practically exploding with feigned ecstasy. “Wonderful to see you too! How is everything?” All the while, you are frantically whirring through your memory banks trying to anchor this person in some time and context.

A decent human being would sense your distress and give you some lagniappe of information — a mention of the church picnic you both attended, the parents’ association at school, the fact that the two of you were formerly married. But the Proustian bully will give you nothing. “I’m good. And you?” It’s like trying to get an arms control concession out of Leonid Brezhnev.

Yes, David Brooks, I'm the bastard who peppers his speech with references to Auden, and, admittedly, enjoy gaining the upper hand in conversations with people by either remembering their name or casually pointing out the fact that we've met....several times.

Google does it again

2008-04-01T07:16:00.001-07:00

I was about to write a blog questioning Google's introduction of "Custom Time," which the folks at Google say is a great way to pretend like you actually sent the email on time—helping solve the problem of missed anniversaries, etc. The opening page of gmail bragged about how useful it was, but then, paradoxically said that Google was limiting the number of custom time emails to 10 per year. Ah....so they know it's deceptive, thus the self-imposed limit. This is great, I thought—I haven't given anyone a self-righteous moral thrashing for a while. It's about time to utilize my wit in the service of morality and self-aggrandizement.

Then, as I read the testimonials, I came across that of Michael, an epistemology professor:

"This feature allows people to manipulate and mislead people with falsified time data. Time is a sacred truth that should never be tampered with."

And then I remembered it was April 1st—April Fools. And then I was filled with appropriate shame. Of course, I should have known better. Last year, on April 2nd, I tried in vain to access Google's paper email, was advertised, on April 1, as unlimited printing through Google.

Intensive Courses

2008-03-29T05:48:00.001-07:00

There's a new article over at Inside Higher Ed., which states that a new poll shows students prefer intensive courses—"those [courses] taught on a tighter than normal schedule, with more class time each week, but fewer weeks."

This may be true, but I wonder if the same educational value exists in shorter, more concentrated courses. It seems to me that people need time and space to process what they learn. In my case, I don't know that I was able to learn that much in my concentrated courses because it was all so quick. The one quad class that I really benefited from—a course on W.H. Auden—was helpful because I returned to the material later, revisiting poems and themes discussed in the class. I look back on my term at Oxford, which was as concentrated as it gets, and I know that I learned how to write and think more effectively, but I don't know how well I learned philosophy.

Of course, concentrated courses are a great idea if one is just trying to jump through hoops—which is why they are so often used in for-profit education.

Jim Lewis in Slate

2008-03-18T07:14:00.000-07:00

Jim Lewis has an interesting article in Slate about Erich Auerbach's landmark book of literary criticism, Mimesis. Lewis (perhaps only partially facetiously) dismisses MFA programs, saying instead that writers can learn far more from Auerbach's book:

What emerges from all this is the idea that prose should be as dense as verse and as welcoming of close reading; that not a paragraph of real writing escapes the context of history; and above all, that style is philosophy, that a decision to use commas where others might use a semicolon, or to elide the word "afterwards," or to shift narrative perspective twice in a single paragraph, is as momentous as the decision to believe in the infinite, or to act in accord with the Categorical Imperative, or to endorse an inalienable right to privacy. They're all part of the same will to represent the world: Kings may stand or fall on the point of a period.

I use the word "interesting," to describe Lewis's article because I don't know what to make of it. He background as a novelist is all to clear when he dismisses the historical nature of Mimesis:

"The subtitle of the book is The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, which gives you some idea of its scope and ambition. "Real," of course, is an almost meaningless word in its standard broad use, but Auerbach has a something specific in mind; not the metaphysically real (as opposed to the fantastic) but the socially real—that is, the lives of more or less ordinary people engaged in more or less ordinary activities: the literary equivalent of genre painting.

To be honest, the overarching theme of the book may be its least interesting aspect. Realism of this sort is mostly a phantom concern, from a 21^st century perspective anyway; daily life has been a part of our literature for so long that it seems quaint and forced to make a point of it. So, the grand structure of Mimesis is relatively uninspiring [...]"

I would say that the grand structure of Mimesis, which is terrifyingly vast, is anything but uninspiring. But that's a minor detail. My main qualm with Lewis comes at the beginning of the article when he says:

Criticism is a conversation between critic and reader, to which the artist under consideration can neither add anything interesting nor take away anything useful. Writers' own remarks on the novel—Flaubert's letters, say, or Nabokov's Lectures on Literature—can occasionally be enlightening to anyone sitting down to write a book of his or her own, but studies by professors are entirely beside the point.

This sentence is odd because it seems that the rebuttal to the first sentence is unintentionally contained in the second sentence. Certainly Flaubert's letters or Nabokov's Lectures on Literature—and what of Auden's prose, perhaps the chief value of which is to illuminate his poetry—can add to the conversation. It is probably true that writers do not learn from critics (with the exception of Mimesis, perhaps), but I doubt that artists "under consideration can [not] add anything interesting" to criticism.

Lending Books

2008-03-15T10:38:00.000-07:00

The limiting factor in how much I read is not money—books are cheap, probably cheaper than they've ever been (though I wonder how long they will remain so with the advent of electronic reading technology). Rather, how much—and what—I read is limited by time. The job I have now forces me to read quite a bit, though the books are not always the ones that I would choose. I do not have much time for "free-reading," though. Which brings me to my point: I really don't like it when people foist books on me, when they say, "Why don't you borrow this?"

I currently have at least 5 books that people have lent me. I will probably read one of them. The truth is that I have a stack of books that I would like to read and a stack of books that I *have* to read. Finding time for another book is not really an option.

I have never, except in one case, had the heart to say no. This is in part because I'm terrible at saying no, and in part because I don't want to insult the other person's taste (your favorite book is not worth my time.)

Asking to borrow a book is another matter, but now I think I would rather just buy the book myself so that I can underline in it and make notes.

Looking over past writing

2008-02-13T17:56:00.000-08:00

To return to my writing—a year, two years, three years after the fact—is an odd experience. Occasionally, I feel a smug satisfaction of writing something so well. It's as if standing in a mirror admiring one's physique: very vain. More often than not, though, I am a bit embarrassed. I find a comma-splice here, a misplaced modifier there, and sometimes plainly horrid writing. Today I was re-reading an essay I wrote a year ago, trying to rewrite the ending in order to submit the essay as a writing sample for a job for which I'm applying. In the final page of the essay (on how I came to love poetry through reading Auden's "Musee des Beaux Arts") I found this section:

"Perhaps Stevens is right when he says that death is the mother of all beauty. But if so, it is in a different way than the woman in “Sunday Morning” thinks. Milosz shows us this when he says in an interview that, “every poetry is directed against death–against death of the individual, against the power of death” (64). Death fosters beauty, but only insofar as the beauty is directed against death. But poetry cannot be relegated to books on grief or anthologies of poems for those mourning the loss of a loved one, although some are only read in such contexts. (I am thinking of Auden’s “Stop all the Clocks” or as it is now called, “Funeral Blues.”) In fighting against death, poetry embraces life. The poet and the poem exist not only to give us comfort in the time of need, but also to confront us with hard truths, truths that can sometimes only be uttered in the words of poetry."

What strikes me now is that what I wrote was probably a bit heretical—or at the very least, very Calvinist (perhaps they're synonymous.) Saying that death is the mother of beauty, in that beauty is directed against death, leads to the idea that death is necessary for beauty. This is one step away from saying that God (or the True, if you like) needs death to exist or at least needs it to bring about certain ends. Which is heresy.

Should one go back and rewrite old essays? I don't know....I don't know that much about writing. I tend to want to leave them alone after a few months; they become mile-markers in my past, then. In this case I'm going to rewrite the ending, if only because the recipient of the submission happens to be an ecumenical journal that would notice the conclusions being drawn.

The Eucharist and Non-Baptized

2008-01-29T17:53:00.000-08:00

At a Vespers service on Sunday night, I stuck around for communion after the service had ended. I must admit that I was not delighted about the communion cups that the school uses or the Methodist pastor who was serving, but being forced to attend non-denominational free-Church/Presbyterian services had made me glad for any chance to take the Eucharist. I was a little uncomfortable that several avowedly non-Christian students had also hung around to take communion.

Growing up in the Free Church and then a Southern Baptist Church, the Eucharist was merely symbolic. Anyone who professed a commitment to Christ could take it, regardless of baptism. When I started to attend and Anglican church, I was initially dismayed that, since I hadn't yet been baptized, I could not partake. In retrospect, though, I think the prerequisite of baptism acknowledges the worth of the Eucharist.

Was what these students did wrong, or, perhaps better put, not the best idea? Or was it something beautiful? I suppose it depends on one's view of the sacraments. For that reason I do not take the Eucharist in Catholic masses, though I have often wanted to.

Any ideas?

A poem

2008-01-18T10:35:00.000-08:00

Since my year of teaching began, I have all but stopped writing. Which is unfortunate, to say the least. I managed to bang out this poem for Wheaton's yearbook next year, though. It's modeled on Milosz's "Elegy for YZ"

"Elegy for Luke Anderson"

Dear Luke,

At your funeral, I stopped crying
To marvel that a coffin could
Contain so large a man.
You suffered under the weight of caring too much
And I was amazed that a burdened
Man could laugh so beautifully.

You did not question your lot:
The boys whom you tutored in a Chicago
Ghetto whose hallways smelled
Of stale urine—they had it worse.
Once you told me your dream:
To feel that you belonged,

To know that you could be
Someone—a dream postponed by then
For well-meaning discussions with
White-coated men about imbalances
In your bile. Unruly, melancholy,
Witty, brilliant, you threw off authority

Like a Bolshevik—but in love, Luke,
Always in love. To escape your beliefs
You flew South like a bird
At the first sign of frost. There,
In a baptism of rum, a letter you wrote me:
"Too tired to debunk my faith. Relief."

Now your death is for many just the painful reminder
That suffering must be acknowledged,
Like a drought that strikes a fertile valley–
The farmers would love to ignore the heat,
The three rainless months, but hear the crunch
Of burnt grass with each step.

But lives cannot be reduced to lessons,
Or three part sermons, or elegiac poems.
Pray for us now, that we might bless
The banal, rejoice in our stodgy suburban lives.
That we too will one day gather at His feet
And join the chorus of Mercy. Of love. Of relief.

College Withdrawal begins

2007-11-12T13:11:00.001-08:00

As I left for college and when I was in college, people would often tell me that college was the greatest time of their lives. Some would recollect fondly on the learning or the emotional growth. Others would grin as they described it with vagaries, though I could almost envision the keggers they were remembering silently. There was, of course, the occasional advice about "hooking up with a lot of girls" because college is the time for that. The people who suggested the latter hadn't actually been to college, now that I think about it.

Pessimist that I am, when I was in college I would often ask recent graduates if they missed college, trying to prepare for the inevitable fallout after college. “Yes...but I don’t miss the tests and papers,” was the common rejoinder. I would chuckle and nod. Yes, that must be nice.

But now I'm done with college....and I miss the papers and tests.

There was something inherently satisfying of trying very hard to achieve a goal and being evaluated based upon my labors. In high school, I would study very hard for the college board tests in order to get into good schools. In college, I would work hard for papers and tests...not because I necessarily wanted a good grade or wanted to get into a great graduate school, but because I wanted to learn the material. This is still true of my learning. But I also wanted the immediate satisfaction—or disappointment—of seeing my work evaluated. Of seeing the fruits of my labor.

I suppose this is why some people go to graduate school and never leave...

There is no longer someone standing over me with a carrot dangling from a stick, encouraging me to learn. Or perhaps there is. I want to maintain my dignity in front of my students, to know the material well enough to answer their questions. This is not so much of carrot in front of a stick as a man with a hickory stick threatening to beat me if I don’t learn and learn fast enough to present to the class I have in thirty minutes. I learn out of fear now.

In my role as a teacher, I expect to see a few small progressions in students. Perhaps a student will learn to craft a thesis. If I’m lucky, a student may see the value in history. Yet I will never see most of the results of my current labors. In fifteen years, a former student might think of me vaguely when he remembers to put a comma before a coordinating conjunction. But the immediate satisfaction—what often keeps me going—is gone. I want to be rewarded, and I wanted to know that there is an end to my labors and an end to my trying to read and write obsessively during my free time (emphasize “trying”). I want to take all the knowledge that my curiosity has led me to accrue and synthesize it into a greater work. I have hopes of writing a novel and publishing poetry and essays...but there is no guarantee. Though they pale in comparison, school tests and essays provided a guaranteed reader and conversation partner—even if only one. I have listeners now....but they don't really listen. They stare mindlessly at the screen and take notes or talk in the background, surreptitiously texting on their cell phones.

How I lost my iTunes Store Virginity

2007-10-28T07:00:00.001-07:00

Since it’s inception, I have resisted purchasing songs from the iTunes music store. This is in part because I like owning CDs. The main advantage of CDs is the ability to read the liner notes in their original form. I’m not interested in having the conversation of whether reading from a computer screen is comparable or preferable from reading from a book. It is not. Despite this product. For a more detailed investigation of reading on computers, you can read parts of this. But I’m getting off topic....CDs also provide a sort of insurance policy. I can load it onto my hard drive and still have the original disc in case my hard drive crashes—or if I want to bring it into someone’s car. Yes, yes, you can burn CDs from computers, I know. And truth be told, I have tended to rip CDs from friends, so I suppose I can’t claim that I prefer CDs over MP3s. I don’t want to risk being compared to one of those atavistic hipster bastards that still listens to vinyl despite the fact that vinyl was mostly fazed out before his birth. But I was determined that I was not going to pay for an MP3.

This changed two weeks ago when Radiohead released their brilliant new album, In Rainbows. If you don’t already know, the band decided to circumvent iTunes and sell the album from its website. However, not only was the band selling the album itself, it let the customer set the price. I like Radiohead’s music and wanted to support the band’s new venture, so I put aside my qualms, told myself I was being hip, and purchased the mp3-cd. (Since you’ll want to know: I paid around seven dollars. You can blame my cheapness on a poor paying job or the combination of my Midwestern-Småland-Jewish background. The ultimate in miserly genes.) The downloading was easy, and because I’m a guilt-ridden person, I found I enjoyed obtaining the MP3s legitimately. This was the first step to what happened last night.

The second step was downloading Wes Anderson’s short film, Hotel Chevalier from the iTunes Store, where it was being offered for free. To download the film, I had to create a username, which included surrendering my credit card information to the Itunes store for future purchases.

Yesterday morning, before my first parent-teacher conferences, I found myself reading RSS feeds in an effort to put off getting ready for the coming day. I came across an article about an English guy making his own fan-commercial for Apple, which then saw the video on You Tube and decided to purchase it: Apple Fan's Homemade Ad Goes from YouTube to Boob Tube. I watched his video. Then I watched it again. And again. And again. I wasn’t watching for the slick footage of the iPod Touch, though. What had me glued to my computer with only twenty minutes to shower, get dressed, and get to parent teacher conferences was the song, “Music is my hot, hot sex,” by a Brazilian Group, CSS.

The song was in my head all day as I talked to twenty sets of parents. The phrases which I no doubt repeated dozens of times—“The big problem is an attention to detail,” and “vocabulary quizzes are killing the grade,”—were layered over the commercial’s opening guitar riff. After conferences were over, I was determined to hear the song again.

Now normally I would turn to my Swedish friends at the Pirates Bay, but the crazy filter here at the school would most certainly block the site. I don’t even want to try. After being blocked from Twitter, Facebook, The Best of Craig’s list, Vanity Fair, MySpace (I linked CSS on good faith), and seemingly every art site that I would like to visit, a piracy block would almost certainly lead to a direct confrontation with the IT guy.

So I caved in and went to the iTunes store. It was only 99 cents, I reasoned (I didn’t want to by the whole album, which I have a hunch is terrible). I experienced a momentary lapse of determination when I forgot my password, but Apple quickly sent a link to reset it. So I took a sip of the cheap port I was drinking, the after-conference celebration, and purchased the song.

Now here I am the morning after. Though I’ve listened to the song many, many times, I’m not proud of purchasing it. It’s not a great song. Rather, a tawdry version of Le Tigre, a band I find more annoying than anything. The song’s playcount sits at 11. It will probably climb no higher than 20 before never being played again. In the meantime, I’m going downstairs to make some coffee and listen to Bob Dylan, a prayer of repentance.