Sometimes, during longer meetings, I write work poems. Here is today’s:

The brown-burnt taste of roast coffee
lingers on my tongue like the sharp spice
of woodsmoke from a wooded cottage,
the linger of boiled water and warmed kitchen
and sizzled bacon lending pleasure and verve
to swinging axe or driving plough — work!
toil transformed by fire, by the offering of
leaf limb trunk, bud pit bean
burnt to god Desire: a prayer to want our lot.
How abundantly answered! How daily
it is given to us to want to live—
how miraculously, how joyfully.
The things we burn are holy
rams placed in thickets—Abraham!
Take your hand from Isaac:
God himself has provided
the sacrifice.

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The World’s Most Successful Trade Show: this name, supplied by Mike G, helped me make peace with the Oscars this year. It is a trade show; the Oscars are not a critical body. That said, they’re a damn sight better than democracy, even if frequently, appallingly wrong. And, again, they are in fact a trade show, an attempt by the industry to promote itself and the values it esteems. All in all, I’m not sure they’re doing such a poor job. There are regularly seven to ten movies in a given year that I really love, and the Oscars are frequently the means of getting me to see the year’s best films, such as Entre les Murs (The Class), nominated for best Foreign Film, which I saw Saturday morning and deeply, deeply loved.

Andrew Sullivan is getting strangely dismissive about the enterprise. I can’t help but wonder: did he even see The Reader?

The Reader has been the subject of at least mild controversy. Ron Rosenbaum of Slate writes:

This is a film whose essential metaphorical thrust is to exculpate Nazi-era Germans from knowing complicity in the Final Solution. The fact that it was recently nominated for a best picture Oscar offers stunning proof that Hollywood seems to believe that if it’s a “Holocaust film,” it must be worthy of approbation, end of story. And so a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer and intimates that “ordinary Germans” were ignorant of the extermination until after the war, now stands a good chance of getting a golden statuette.

I’d like to zero in on one part of this statement: “…a film that asks us to empathize with an unrepentant mass murderer…” (italics mine). Many of Rosenbaum’s other claims are straightforwardly dispensible via remotely responsible textual analysis, but what are we to make of Rosenbaum’s emphasis on empathy? The strangest thing about The Reader is how many people insist on calling it redemptive, a phenomenon that I think is rooted in this idea of feeling for another human being.

We humans have many stories of redemption, but The Reader is not one of them. Not remotely. It is, however, undeniably full of the subject of empathy, of fellow-feeling. Kate Winslett’s Hanna Schmitz is clearly and unarguably guilty of the particular crime recounted in the film; not only does she not seek forgiveness for it, she willfully accepts the blame and punishment for a greater responsibility in the crime than she actually had. The story does not in any way ask us to forgive Schmitz, but it does challenge us to feel with her. This is, I believe, what most people believe redemption to be.

If you can feel with a person, you do not morally censure her. If you acknowledge a villain to be a human being, you deny her evil.

This is a troubling, Manichean view of evil, as if evil is a substance that is incommensurate with humanity and feeling. It places sympathy as the standard for good, a troubling enough assertion. What bothers me most, though, is the way it places evil so profoundly outside of our own experience. We are, by definition, in sympathy with ourselves: what does it mean that this formulation of good and evil makes it impossible to see our own actions as evil, to feel all the complexities of our own experience without the possibility of that result being ultimately wrong?

The Reader deals with these ideas more subtly, more truthfully, and wrestles with issues of cross-generational guilt that are too relevant to us as Americans and inheritors of the legacy of American-Indian genocide and African slavery. It is in no simple way just another Holocaust movie, nor is Winslett’s performance in it anything less than astonishing. She deserves to be taken seriously, as does the film.

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Having been asked by a friend to give some recommendations on which movies of Ingmar Bergman to see, I decided that 140 characters weren’t quite enough. I don’t want to be too wordy, though, a wont that often prevents me from actually posting the things I get started on writing (there’s about a dozen now), so I’ll constrain myself to two sentences about each. I don’t have Nate’s pith. To be clear, I’m only just working my way through Bergman and can speak only based on the few movies I’ve seen (unlike my wife, who despite her movie aversion these days, watched nearly the entire Bergman corpus in high school).

• Most St. John’s folks have seen The Magic Flute, and for a general introduction to a guy who used some crazy cinematic techniques to talk about some pretty esoteric topics, I think you can’t do much better than this (unless you don’t like good operas, in which case screw you). An unapologetically goofy presentation of Mozart’s pretty goofy opera shows us the humor and good nature of both artists.

Continue reading “Ingmar Bergman Movies Are Awesome” »

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In the slipstream of thoughtless thoughts:
The light of all that’s good, the light of all that’s true.
To the fringes, gladly, I walk unadorned,
With gods and their creations,
With filth and disease.
Porcelina, she waits for me there,
With seashell-hissing lullabies
And whispers fathomed deep inside my own
Hidden thoughts and alibis:
My secret thoughts come alive.

Without a care in this whole world,
Without a care in this life
It’s what you take that makes it right.

And in my mind I’m everyone,
In my mind I’m everyone of you.

Before I began attending my church—Ascension and St. Agnes—I couldn’t have given you a proper definition of the word liturgy. I had a vague sense of its high-churchiness, something I was both attracted to and repelled by. I was drawn to the beauty of churchly pomp, but hostile to the perception I had of its lack of authenticity, of its focus on form over substance.

Slowly, ASA began to redeem the notion of rite for me. Even the first Mass shook me with a particular, repeated phrase: Lord, I am not worthy that thou shouldst come under my roof, but speak the words only and my soul shall be healed. These words were directly before communion itself, acknowledging the insufficiency of our efforts and intentions in approaching the eternal mystery, making that infinite gap a part of the rite.

At the first church leadership retreat I attended, the facilitator, Father Martin Smith, talked about ritual in a way I’ll never forget. There are three tiers of religious experience, he said. In the first tier, we have the source: Truth, Good, and Beauty. In the second tier, religions attempt to point to, or recreate, the experiences of these first-order things. They try to point to truth with doctrine, to good with morality, and to beauty with ritual. The shadow side of this second tier, however, is the third: doctrine, severed from its proper orientation toward the first tier, becomes dogma; morality, severed from its proper orientation, becomes moralism; ritual, wrapped up in itself, becomes ritualism.

This articulation reconciled and redeemed much of religious practice for me: it articulated much of what repelled me about religion and connected it to things that are healthy and human. Rite, in particular, became a powerful word for me: the recreation of beauty, making a vast, abstract thing into activities, into dances and stories and songs and poems that can be performed and delighted in and lived in.

The Smashing Pumpkins are, for me, fundamentally liturgical: their songs are pathways to elevation, rites of transcendence that are filled with irrepressible insistence upon paradoxical combinations of the fleshly and the spiritual. I can describe the experience of seeing them in concert last year best by pointing you to my church’s Mass. Porcelina of the Vast Oceans is my last gospel.

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As someone who frequently goes about proclaiming movies ‘best’ and ‘worst’ of the year, decade, or century, I feel it’s an important public service to reveal exactly which movies I’ve actually seen in any given year. I saw all of these in the theater; though I see many movies at home, I tend not to rent recent films. My resolution for this year is to see more movies in the theater (nineteen or more) and to watch fewer movies that any reasonable person would know are going to be bad going in. This means, for instance, that I really need to not pay money for the new Star Trek movie. I’m not making promises on that one, though. The following movies are listed in order from worst to best.¹

• Indiana Jones: Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
  • Worst film of the year award goes to the soulless vacuum of a film that was spawned by George Lucas’s black hole of a heart.
• The Dark Knight
  • Incoherent, morally repugnant, ugly, and brutal. Watching people work themselves into ecstasies over the theory that playing the Joker had something to do with Heath Ledger’s untimely death is like finding out that all your friends like to torture squirrels.
• You Don’t Mess With the Zohan
  • Hard not to blame myself for even seeing this. Some of Sandler’s movies are fun, though, I swear!
• Synecdoche
  • Charlie Kaufman loses himself in an endless spiral of pointless self-awareness.
• Burn After Reading
  • Blunt, poorly acted, and cold.
• Hancock
  • There was a good idea at the genesis of this movie that lost itself in years and years of tortured production.
• Be Kind Rewind
  • Michel Gondry would be a better cinematographer or DP than he is a director. Started strong.
• Australia
  • Nothing’s worse for Baz Luhrman than a large budget.
• Miracle at St. Anna
  • Spike Lee’s angry roar of a WWII movie. Bitter and haphazard, but with parts in it too important and genuine to ignore.
• X-Files: I Want to Believe
  • Some great surprises in a movie that recaptures some of what made it an emotionally evocative show. Having rewatched seasons 1-7 of the show this year, I can say that it was of above-average quality in comparison to most episodes from season four or later.
• Iron Man
  • Formulaic—successfully so.
• Ne le dis à personne
  • Light thriller with a beautiful French actress. Can’t say that doesn’t help.
• Slumdog Millionaire
  • Imperfect but frequently fantastic film by Danny Boyle. His manic camera work and the stories of the kids at their youngest make the movie worthwhile. Not to mention the game show host!
• Doubt
  • Hardly an adaptation of an apparently beloved stage play. Amateurish directing, decent script, and fantastic acting.
• WALL*E
  • Perfectly executed story from Pixar with a wonderful, emotionally vibrant lead character. Overall moral is too insipid and, when paired with the merchandising of the movie’s characters, hypocritical, to stand tall with Pixar’s best.
• The Reader
  • Despite some weak points in the middle where the film can’t get past single-line exchanges, Kate Winslett is amazing as a character I’ll never, ever forget, and even so is almost upstaged by the fantastic actor with whom she is paired. Reviewers who think the point of this movie is to pity a Nazi guard missed the whole damn point.
• Gran Torino
  • Clint Eastwood makes a comedy. Eastwood’s few-takes philosophy plus unknown actors makes for a sometimes jarring experience, but the second time through much of the unevenness fades away. Tremendously entertaining.
• Milk
  • Just fantastic.
• Vicky Cristina Barcelona
  • Best film of the year. Woody Allen manages a subtle, fascinating emotional landscape of fully realized characters, each of whom changes in ways we don’t expect, leading to results that are wrenchingly familiar.

¹ There are a lot of personal, subjective factors involved in the ranking, I should confess.

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It’s a humbling experience to read my own writing. I find it frequently unsatisfying, hasty, and needlessly ornate. In this, it is accurately indicative of most of my thought. It’s harder to be embarrassed by my thought, however, as it is more easily propped up by illusion: I can think of myself as defined by the best of my thoughts, letting all of the shoddiness and error that goes along with them slip back into the stream of my consciousness like so many too-small rainbow trout. Writing is not a straightforward setting-to-paper of pre-existing thoughts, it’s a task of composition, of a different kind of thinking that is carefully and deliberately aggregate. I can have an experience, the germ of an idea about how to express it, and the imaginative emotion of having expressed that idea in writing all in a moment—this is what many people mean by “books written in their heads”—but it is an illusion, one that many people like myself rely on for propping up the high estimations we have of our own intelligence and creativity. Because of this, I’m trying not to give up on writing. My writing may be depressingly truth-telling in its revelation of my character, but it’s only vanity that makes truth-telling depressing. I’m grateful for the many of you that have read my writing for the years I’ve run Monadology, through both the good and the bad.

I’ve been looking back over my posts this year. I was surprised to remember that it all started with the Democratic Primaries; politics occupied my attention earlier and more fully than it ever has before. Though the relevance of the twists and turns of that season seem diminished in consequence, the aggregate result of it is no less important and marvelous now than it was then: Barack Obama secured the party nomination and then the presidency by adroitly winning over countless people, like me, not naturally inclined toward the Democratic party. And in the short time since his win, he has shown himself to be a measured, confident, cautious leader. I’m very grateful for him, honestly: I wouldn’t want to be President of the United States now for the world. I’m also grateful because I suspect that McCain wanted to be President, period. If he had to be President during a crisis like this one, so be it. Obama, though, has persuaded me that he actually wants this opportunity. As he told Jon Stewart, if you got into politics because you wanted to make a difference, now is the time to be President.

The big story of the year for me as a blogger is that despite having an unfocused, not-terribly-active blog, Andrew Sullivan linked to two (Comparing Abortion and Torture, Are Video Games Too Easy?) of my entries on the Daily Dish, one of the most highly trafficked political blogs in the world. It’s a rare (for me, unique) privilege to have a writer whom I admire as much as I do Sullivan read things that I’ve written and pay me the compliment of finding them interesting.

As usual, however, the best writing on this blog has been by commenters. The eloquence and insight of the many visitors to the site is my favorite aspect of my blog, and the quality of the comments here has gone remarked on many times by others, particularly in the many blogged responses to the two posts of mine that got unexpected exposure. As such, I’d like to open up nominations for Comments of the Year. Every comment has an anchor icon right after the date and time it was posted that is a link to the permanent URL for that comment; if you can, please provide that link along with any quoted text in your comment. I will not be selecting a winner; the idea is to create a list of particularly notable and worthwhile comments. The purpose is just to have a chance to be reminded of some of the best thoughts and arguments that have been made here, and to give the nominated commenters the pleasure of knowing that their efforts are appreciated.

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A Johnny writes on her blog:

This is why it’s not enough to say we’re “being inclusive” by allowing homophobia to remain part of the national dialogue. Because as long as it’s perfectly socially acceptable for someone to say horrible things about gay people, to equate homosexuality with bestiality and pedophilia, there are those who will inevitably take the next step and think it’s perfectly socially acceptable to do violence against them.

I infer from the above that the author condemns bestiality and pedophilia. Am I to infer from the rest of her argument that the author feels that such condemnation leads inevitably to personal violence against people who commit pedophilia or bestiality and that, moreover, there’s nothing wrong with that? I suspect that the author believes, rather, in a system of law for dealing with wrongdoing, and that she believes there is a humane and just way to deal with pedophiles that does not involve personal violence in the streets. I suspect that she would vehemently condemn someone who beat to death a pedophile in the street while maintaining, at the same time, that this in no way compromised her stance against pedophilia. Aren’t people who believe homosexuality to be equivalent to other sexually immoral acts capable of a similar stance? Aren’t they capable of the belief that personal violence is wholly, unequivocally wrong, no matter whom it is directed toward?

Continue reading “The Freedom to Say Horrible Things” »

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This is the second part of a two-part entry. The first part is posted here.

One day, my wife brought home Virtually Normal, a book written by someone she said was a conservative and a Roman Catholic. The book purported to explain what the author saw as the four major camps of opposition to homosexuality, to explain their arguments, and to refute those arguments.

My response, though I would have hastened to deny it at the time, was very simple: assured that the book was somehow safe—the author shared my conservatism to some degree, and was speaking from a position of sympathy with religion—I began to read the book far less guardedly than I might have done otherwise. Though it shames me to admit it, I often need arguments to be made to me by friends, rather than enemies.

The author, Andrew Sullivan, described in frank terms his childhood experience of sexual self-discovery:

“I remember vividly—perhaps I was five or six—being seated in the back of a car with my second cousin, a tousle-headed, wide-grinned kid a few years older, and being suddenly, unwittingly entranced by him. It was a feeling I had never felt before, the first inkling of a yearning that was only to grow stronger as the years went by.”

Reading his passage, I remembered a pair of dreams I had when I was maybe nine or ten. The only details that stand out are that they involved princesses: I, in turn, was a hero, who was struggling terribly to rescue them from peril. When I woke up, I felt like my insides were tied in knots: I longed for those girls, to protect them and hold their hands and—possibly—to seal it all with a kiss.

This was something of a reversal for nine-year-old Nate. I had proudly led a playground war that very year against the girls of our class. I was our general: I made aluminum-foil badges to designate various ranks for the other boys. During recess the planned war was carried out—with the cooperation of the girls—though, as I remember, there was some confusion when the time finally came as to how, exactly, we were going to fight. (I think we settled on hurling kickballs at each other.) I proudly, haughtily detested girls, and would often declare to my mother that I would never be married to a woman. I said, once, to my mom, “I really like the show Saved By the Bell, but I hate all the stuff with girls! When I grow up, I’m going to make a show just like it, but only about boys.” She laughed and replied, “What, they’re all going to be homosexuals?”

I was mortified. I certainly couldn’t have articulated it, but I seem to myself now to have been enacting some kind of last-ditch battle against sexuality in unconscious reaction to my inevitable puberty. I hated it, I abhorred it, I wanted the universe expunged of it. I didn’t really know much about sex—I knew about sperm and ova years before I learned anything about genital contact—but, somehow, I was revolted by its very suggestion.

Continue reading “A Response to Milk: How My Beliefs About Homosexuality Changed My Life, Part 2 of 2” »

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This is part one of a two-part entry. The second part will be posted tomorrow is posted here.

I have a rather vivid memory of being about eight or nine years old and talking with my dad in my parents’ bedroom. He said, “One of the things that makes God saddest is when people of the same sex marry each other.” Golly, I thought. I didn’t even realize that was a thing. He explained that in some places, people are so far from the truth that men want to marry men and women want to marry women. It didn’t take much to sell the claim to me that something was wrong with gay marriage. The idea seemed crazy, and just the thought of two guys in tuxedos at the front of the church or two women in dresses seemed impossible. Not bad or laughable or anything else like that, but just inconceivable, like trying to imagine myself in two places at the same time.

I’m not positive, by the way, that Dad said “makes God saddest”. He may have said “one of the things God hates most”, but it’s hard to believe he could have said something that strikes me now as so viscerally horrible. I can’t remember Dad demonstrating actual hateful feelings for anyone, honestly, which is one of the reasons I always felt like people were missing the boat when they accused people who believed homosexuality to be immoral of hate. Dad used hate only to talk about sin, and the emotional posture he lived was similar to the one that I, therefore, imputed to God: one of grief about the awful things done by people he loved. That was, after all, very frequently his attitude toward me. If I’d thrown a tantrum and stormed to my room he’d come in and make peace with me before I went to sleep. “God says never to let the sun go down on our anger,” he’d always say. As such, my childhood image of homosexuals was of particularly strayed children grieving God in exactly the way I grieved my parents on a daily basis.

In fifth grade (this would have been 1991), a friend told me a joke: “You know, I’m in favor of gays in the military. Put them on the front lines!” That was, I thought, pretty damn funny. So funny, in fact, that I reused the joke several years later when I was in junior high. I told it to my best friend, Patrick N————. I don’t remember telling it, honestly, but he remembered me telling it. He told me so, several years ago. He came out of the closet as a gay man to a few people after high school, but not to me until a couple years after that. It’s painful for me to imagine the reality of all those years he had those words of mine ringing in his ears.

I watched Gus Van Sant’s Milk on Saturday, urged on by Andrew Sullivan’s moving response to the film. I spent much of the movie in a sort of creative euphoria, as my body tingled with the pleasure of dancing neurons making new connections and reorganizing old ones with effortless grace. I felt plastic, as if much of my calcified self were suddenly liquid again, like dried-out clay brought to new life and purpose with splashes of water on a potter’s wheel. I wanted to write, to talk, to let words flow out in response what I was witnessing.

This essay is an attempt to respond to that experience.

Continue reading “A Response to Milk: How My Beliefs About Homosexuality Changed My Life, Part 1 of 2” »

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I had to point to this article once I’d read it. Apparently, Vancouver’s made a Hamsterdam amid its urban boom, and the results are similar to how David Simon predicted it: the problems haven’t gotten better, but at least they haven’t gotten worse. Drug use is the same; crime is slightly up; dirty needles are still on the streets. Like Hamsterdam, all Vancouver’s drug legalization appears to do is make the ugly problem of addiction more concentrated and more visible. It’s more visible because it’s a plain item on the city’s budget (“Heroin and Shooting Den for Junkies - $3,000,000”) instead of a disparate and underreported amount under a bunch of other items, itself further obfuscated by the revenue side (“Seized Assets from Drug Dealers - $7,242,211”). More concentrated appears to have been happening anyway, but no junkie’s going to turn down free heroin, and the article implies that the imported junkies account for the rise in property crime. I had my doubts about the state providing drugs to users, and I’m grateful to Canada for being so reliably goofy as to jump all the way to the other extreme from America.

Reading the article was a little tough for other reasons, though. Its desire to rely on scientific research and the unstated premise concerning addiction’s medical nature were hard to stomach after having read Theodore Dalrymple’s* Romancing Opiates, which pretty well lays out how calling addiction to heroin a disease is at best a false analogy. Withdrawal from opiates isn’t that hard, and certainly isn’t life threatening, in contrast to, say, alcohol. Using heroin isn’t catching or amenable to medical intervention. Instead, he argues, and I’ve been pretty well convinced by him, that addiction to heroin (and, I add, to most things) is at root an ethical problem, not a medical one. That is, the choices people make (e.g. starting and continuing to use heroin) are the main problem, not the substances they choose to use.**

Continue reading “Waste People” »

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