Costanza Book Club

Full Draft Order

2009-08-20T21:44:00.020-05:00

Round One
1 Rob A Peterson
2 Andy M Turner
3 Karissa M Jones-Drew
4 Joe R Moss
5 Craig A Johnson
6 Tim M Forte
7 Sadie F Gore

Round Two

10 Sadie L Fitzgerald
11 Tim S Jackson
12 Craig W Welker
13 Joe P Manning
14 Karissa D Brees
15 Andy L Tomlinsom
16 Rob C Johnson

Round Three
17 Rob D Williams
18 Andy T Brady
19 Karissa S Smith
20 Joe C Johnson
21 Craig T Gonzalez
22 Tim G Jennings
23 Sadie B Westbrook

ROUND FOUR

26 Sadie R Wayne
27 Tim A Rodgers
28 Craig K Warner
29 Joe M Barber
30 Karissa B Jacobs
31 Andy M Colston
32 Rob R White

Round Five
33 Rob R Grant
34 Andy A Boldin
35 Karissa D Bowe
36 Joe T Owens
37 Craig Steeler Defense
38 Tim B Marshall
39 Sadie T Romo

Round Six
42 Sadie C Ochocinco
43 Tim T Houshmandzedah
44 Craig S Gostkowski
45 Joe A Gates
46 Karissa J Witten
47 Andy L Johnson
48 Rob G Olsen

Round Seven
49 Rob B Favre
50 Andy P Rivers
51 Karissa A Bryant
52 Joe B Berrian
53 Craig M Ryan
54 Tim D Clark
55 Sadie Minnesota D

Round Eight
58 Sadie C Portis
59 Tim L Evans
60 Craig C Cooley
61 Joe P Thomas
62 Karissa V Jackson
63 Andy T Holt
64 Rob R Bush

Round Nine
65 Rob V Shiancoe
66 Andy H Ward
67 Karissa S Slaton
68 Joe B Edwards
69 Craig W Parker
70 Tim Giants D
71 Sadie R Williams

Round Ten
74 Sadie R Brown
75 Tim K Smith
76 Craig F Jones
77 Joe J Addai
78 Karissa Ravens D
79 Andy L White
80 Rob D Driver

Round Eleven
81 Rob R Longwell
82 Andy Z Miller
83 Karissa J Stewart
84 Joe A Gonzalez
85 Craig M Lynch
86 Tim D Akers
87 Sadie O Daniels

Round Twelve
90 Sadie J Cutler
91 Tim D McNabb
92 Craig D Sproles
93 Joe D Jackson
94 Karissa R Bironas
95 Andy Charger D
96 Rob Packer D

Round Thirteen
97 Rob D McFadden
98 Andy A Vinatieri
99 Karissa K Winslow
100 Joe C Taylor
101 Craig Cowboy D
102 Tim S Holmes
103 Sadie P Harvin

Round Fourteen
106 Sadie E Royal
107 Tim K Boss
108 Craig B Roethlisberger
109 Joe M Schaub
110 Karissa J Delhomme
111 Andy H Nicks
112 Rob D Hester

Round Fifteen
113 Rob J Finley
114 Andy T Jones
115 Karissa K Walter
116 Joe M Crosby
117 Craig S Moss
118 Tim J Cotchery
119 Sadie D Ward

Round Sixteen
122 Sadie N Folk
123 Tim K Moreno
124 Craig T Ginn
125 Joe Titan D
126 Karissa Eagle D
127 Andy J Shockey
128 Rob C Benson

Total Roster Spots: 16
Starting Lineup Spots: QB, WR, WR, RB, TE, WR/TE, WR/RB, K, D/ST
Fractional Points: Yes
Negative Points: No

Passing Yards 50 yards per point
Passing Touchdowns 3
Rushing Yards 20 yards per point
Rushing Touchdowns 6
Reception Yards 20 yards per point
Reception Touchdowns 6
Return Touchdowns 6
2-Point Conversions 2
Offensive Fumble Return TD 6

Kickers
Field Goals 3
Point After Attempt Made 1

Defense/Special Teams
Sack 1
Interception 1
Fumble Recovery 1
Touchdown 6
Safety 4
Kickoff and Punt Return Touchdowns 6
Points Allowed 0 points 6
Points Allowed 1-6 points 4
Points Allowed 7-13 points 2

Summary of Cross Country Scoring

Each week, you are not competing in a head-t0-head matchup; you are competing against every team in the league.

It's very simple. The top-scoring team of the week beats every other team, and thus goes 7-0. The second-highest scoring team beat every team but one, and goes 6-1. Yada yada yada, all the way down to the lowest scoring team of the week, which goes 0-7.

#1: 7-0
#2: 6-1
#3: 5-2
#4: 4-3
#5: 3-4
#6: 2-5
# 7: 1-6
#8: 0-7

For the overall standings, we add up the wins and losses from each week, and the team with the most wins is the league champion. In the case of a tie, total points will be the tie-breaker.

This is a fair and extremely fun way to do the standings: if you want to know more about why, I've explained here, here, and here.

A note on the new blog

2009-06-09T22:48:00.003-05:00

For any readers interested in the content of this blog who don't want to sift through the inane and silly posts at the new blog, you may be interested in strictly following the "culture" label at "That's how we do it in the T.C." Here's the link. Whenever I write the sort of post that would have shown up at this blog, I'll label it "Culture," and it will show up under that specific URL. For example, a very brief post on how Falstaff reminds me of Jerry, Kramer, and George.

A new blogging adventure

2009-06-09T09:50:00.002-05:00

Life changes and blogging changes. I'm starting a new blog:

That's how we do it in the T.C.

Here is the blog's introduction.

At the new blog, I'll still make my attempts to discuss literature and ideas. But I don't want to compartmentalize my various interests into three different blogs anymore. The posts on literature and ideas will be mixed in with sports posts (cross-posted at Pacifist Viking), comments on advertisements, bad television, consumerism, parenthood, Twin Cities life, and other various topics that amuse me (and I hope not me alone). A lot of the posts will be short and inane (sort of like this one), and there may be a lot more brief links.

I'm still not quite sure what I'll be doing with this site; I've flirted with a few different ideas. I'll keep it up on the possibility I return to it (and I'll still use it to check the links I've got on the side). But I like fresh starts, and this new venture energizes me.

It's been fun, and it will stay fun at a new URL combined with a bunch of other funky stuff.

Underlying Axioms

2009-06-02T21:26:00.012-05:00

a contrapuntal essay

Several times since the Michael Vick dogfighting scandal emerged, a public figure has compared dog fighting to deer hunting, suggesting the two activities aren't that different. This comparison usually elicits mainstream outrage, as hunters (and others) talk about how different the two activities are. At my sports blog, I've sometimes expressed the belief that the two activities are similar, which sometimes elicits reasoned objections (and sometimes angry objections).

The reason I find the activities similar is because the same axiom underlies both activities: humans may use and kill animals for our own pleasure. Deer hunters can point out the differences between the acts (often focusing on the differing levels of suffering, pain, cruelty, and motive), but I'm stuck on the axiom. Once you accept the axiom that humans may use and kill animals for our own pleasure, if you separate deer hunting from dog fighting, you are arguing about degrees. And once you start acting on that axiom, you are also going to have excesses of degree following the same axiom.

The same problem is true for many types of violence, I suppose. Once you accept the axiom that war is sometimes justified and necessary, all it takes to wage the war you want to wage is to convince people that the particular war is justified and necessary. John Howard Yoder has pointed out that when other theologians speak generally negatively about warfare, there is a palpable sense of relief from the audience when the theologian acknowledges that sometimes, in very rare circumstances, because of exceptional circumstances, war is sometimes justified and necessary. Once you accept that premise, even if you try limit that justification/necessity with extremely specific rules, with a very narrow, specific, and limited application of Just War Theory, you're going to have people justifying war, and feeling they can do so within your own standards.

Sometimes ideological opponents recognize in each other the acceptance of differing axioms, and thus argue with the knowledge of irreconcilable differences. Sometimes ideological opponents argue about the degrees, ignoring or failing to understand the axioms. Either way, opponents often fail to understand how the other side can possibly see things so differently.

Is this discussion at all relevant in how we approach art and literature? Perhaps, though you may see this as a strain. When we come to respect, admire, even revere a particular artist, we may start to give him/her the benefit of the doubt. What if I watched Australia without the knowledge that Baz Luhrmann directed it? What if I watched Sour Grapes without the knowledge that Larry David made it? I doubt I would have patience with A Maggot if John Fowles weren't the author. But once I accept that an artist knows what he/she is up to, I'm willing to try and see what he/she is doing. It is a stretch, but once I've accepted the premise John Fowles is a great novelist, I'm willing to read any novel he writes as the work of a great novelist (I might ask my friend RK: could you ever dislike a Woody Allen movie even if you did?).

Perhaps less of a stretch is how readers might accept the axioms of a particular literary theory, then be able to always apply that theory to any work. It's a bit of a joke that if you read with Psychoanalytical Theory, everything becomes a phallic symbol. But if you accept any literary theory's axioms, you can start to see everything according to the axiom.

Just as significant to the discussion is the rejection of a particular literary theory. If you reject a particular theory (say, Queer Theory), convinced it has nothing relevant to offer you, you may never see anything that calls for it. If you refuse to see any homoeroticism between Ishmael and Queequeg, then of course you will not see it. If you reject an axiom, you may never see anything useful in it, and may never see a reason to apply it. I try to see something useful in almost any literary theory, while at the same time not adhering strictly to any one approach.

But that's for literature--as a vegetarian and pacifist, clearly I'm willing to embrace (or reject) an axiom that underlies and limits my behaviors and ethical decisions.

Well, contrapuntal, but shitty.

"Australia"

2009-05-31T22:44:00.002-05:00

Baz Luhrmann will never make an easy film. He's capable of incredible visual beauty on screen, and he won't hold back: he'll take courageous risks to show it. His films are all raging excess.

Australia has all the sincere sentimentality of the Red Curtain Trilogy, but little of the narrative playfulness and none of the humor. It has the musical power, but not the flair. I can't say I had ever wondered what would happen if the artist of Strictly Ballroom, Romeo + Juliet, and Moulin Rouge ever decided to do a Western, or an historical epic, or an action movie, or a war movie, but Luhrmann went ahead and did all of that at once. But there it is, that excess, part of what makes Luhrmann my favorite director. I admire the way the films of the Red Curtain trilogy spill over, not able to be contained by what they are. Australia doesn't spill over; it fully takes on the essence of what it is (or better, all the things it is). It is not as good as Luhrmann's other films, but I still admire the art.

Twin Cities Art (summer family tours)

2009-05-29T14:12:00.003-05:00

Spoonbridge and Cherry is always gorgeous in person, and the Minneapolis Sculpture Garden is a wonderful place to go for a walk with a family.

Stephen King: Experimentalist?

2009-05-27T21:55:00.004-05:00

I wonder if Stephen King will at some point get credit as an experimental novelist. In Desperation and The Regulators, King does something I've never seen before: he tells different but similar stories, in a different setting, but with the same characters (playing different roles with differing levels of significance) and a similar villain. Or perhaps he could be credited with bringing some literary innovations to popular fiction, as in the narrative form of From a Buick Eight, or the metafiction of the Dark Tower series.

King's prose has greatly improved throughout the course of his writing career, in my opinion, and more and more he's playing around with structure, narration, and style. King's writing may be more craft than art, but he is a master craftsman.

Twin Cities Museums (summer family tours)

2009-05-27T15:21:00.004-05:00

The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is obviously terrific, but I've really been digging the Target wing.

The Museum of Russian Art is small but terrific; I always recommend visiting.

not a post about my syllabi

2009-05-24T23:58:00.004-05:00

Creating a syllabus can be a lonely part of teaching. It requires intense engagement, requires focused creativity, and it often involves great excitement. Yet it's pretty much you and the syllabus here: if you try bothering to tell people about the little enthusiasms and frustrations, the progress and the choices, the difficult decisions and the joyful optimism, they'll be (rightfully) bored and uninterested.

Dramatic Performance

2009-05-21T00:24:00.007-05:00

Reading Luigi Pirandello's Six Characters in Search of an Author

All drama is metafiction, is the declarative statement I thought to make. Not that all drama is about drama, but that all drama is intensely self-aware, overtly and constantly aware of itself as performance. I've never read nor seen a play that wasn't knowingly performative, and am not sure I'd like to. Perhaps it is inevitable that drama has a long tradition of knowing gestures toward the audience.

But I'm not sure that makes drama particularly special. All literature is knowingly performative, in the writer's creative work as a performance to be viewed and in the reader's awareness of being performed to.

And then I'm not sure that makes literature particularly special. Everyday life is filled with performative acts (is telling a story a performance? When something interesting happens, do you think ahead to how you'll tell others about it?). Many careers are performative (teaching, as an obvious and personal example), as are many of the roles we take on in our lives. A religious service is usually a scripted performance (is it terribly surprising that drama was reborn in Europe through church plays?), as are the various rituals we use to mark moments of transitions (graduations, weddings).

Perhaps this leaves drama is the most artificial of life's performances, the most inauthentic. Or perhaps this makes drama, with its deep focus on performance itself, the premiere literary genre.

"Everything is permitted."

2009-05-16T16:42:00.013-05:00

a contrapuntal essay of speculations on a morality of "human dignity" based on conversations with my brother.

I mostly believe in this premise: If there is no God, then everything is permitted. It is not because without God there is no ultimate punishment/reward for our behavior (in which case morality would essentially be based on self-preservation); it is that if the universe and human existence exist strictly as a matter of hazard, then there is no inherent meaning in anything, and no inherent value in anything. We can assign meaning and value, of course (and do), but it would not exist inherently.

As a Christian, I believe each and every individual has inherent dignity, and must be treated as such. But why is it, then, that those with a primarily secular worldview (including atheists and agnostics) are more likely to share my beliefs on inherent human dignity than most Christian believers? On almost any social issue, I'm more likely to agree with a secular humanist than a Christian (such as, say, gay marriage). Particularly, on issues of violence (such as opposition to warfare, torture, capital punishment), my views are strongly connected to this belief in inherent human dignity. On these issues, secular humanists are more likely to share my views than Christians are.

What is going on? Am I actually a secular humanist who just also believes in God? It's possible, but I would like to propose another theory, not based on evidence but speculative possibility.

The beliefs that many have about human dignity (or, if you prefer, human rights) developed out of a Western cultural tradition that does include religious values. Of course this cultural tradition has not always given a fig about human dignity (slavery, oppression of women, etc.), but something in this tradition includes progress toward equal rights and human rights. Some of these values emerge from religious traditions. However, for many religious-minded people, these values come with the religion, but are not primary to the religion. For example, Christianity may come with values of nonviolence and compassion for the poor, but the primary concern of Christianity is personal salvation for the believer and God's ultimate plan of salvation for the world. Thus what matters to many Christians is the "ends," which may encourage a way of thinking that allows one to believe "The ends justify the means." It is partly that concern with the particular Christian ends allows one not to focus on the values/morals, because those are not the ends. But it is also a mental structure: thinking of the ends as a primary concern on a religious issue can make one think of the ends on other problems as the primary concern, and thus abhorrent means can be justified to achieve those ends.

So what happens if you are influenced from your environment--if you emerge from this cultural tradition--but leave behind the teleological framework? If a Christian worldview focuses on and endgame but has values that come with it, and you remove the belief in the endgame, you are left with the values.

This is my speculation: I share values with secular humanists because like them, I'm focused on the values, not the endgame.

But why, when it comes to values of "life," do many Christians (notably Catholics) make abortion the "trump" issue? Many will only vote for political candidates opposed to abortion, which does make them vote for candidates who may support the death penalty, support massive military spending, and oppose policies that might be justified from a Christian perspective (such as action on climate change, a demand of stewardship, or on economic justice, a major subject of Jesus' words). I do have a theory. I think that some forms of Christianity generally support the existing social order, the existing power structure. It is in the instincts of many of these voters to preserve the status quo, to resist change. They are lower c conservatives, and are inclined to support conservative candidates. Focusing on abortion as a life issue, and ignoring or diminishing other just as pressing life issues, allows them to justify voting for the candidates they want to vote for anyway--even candidates whose policies might be opposed to other Christian values.

Anyway, I think this is why I must call myself a Christian humanist. I am a Christian that primarily shares values with secular humanists.

(most of my contrapuntal essays don't start off intending to be that, but become something like that when I get writing and see tangents.)

In case you didn't know

2009-05-15T08:32:00.005-05:00

Glenn Greenwald is terrific.

downpour: caffeine and carbs

2009-05-14T01:04:00.004-05:00

for pouring down the schoolish-bookish things on my mind; not developed or interesting, but sort of necessary mental precipitation. The caffeine is still coursing around my body, after all.

Because that's what I need for end-of-the-year marathon grading: caffeine to keep my mind alert for mornings and late nights, and carbs to keep my body full so I can focus. And now it's done. I power through because I can't focus on much else but grading during this period (I twice left the oven on. TWICE! I'm so focused on grading that when I'm doing something else, I'm thinking about grading, and then I rush away from that something else to be able to return to grading. It's best for everybody if I just focus and finish so that I can move on--the obsessive-compulsive tendencies and all), and I'm big on fresh, new beginnings, which summer always offers.

Wise Structure

In my comp class, I made a change and assigned the difficult research paper as the penultimate assignment. This moved the intensely difficult grading a bit earlier in the semester, so that final grading was a lot smoother. But there was another surprising effect that may be more important. In the past I've assigned the most difficult paper last, and recently plagiarism has been a major problem. It has been a far smaller problem this semester. I surmise that the stress and time constraints at the very end of the semester make plagiarism on a difficult assignment more likely, and that moving the difficult assignment just a month earlier greatly reduces this temptation. I think I will keep this in mind when planning future courses.

Return of Health

In the last month and a half I've been far too lax on the mostly veganism (still eating loads of fruits and vegetables, just adding too much cheese and chocolate, too); the start of summer will find me returning to a mostly vegan lifestyle. I'll also get to return to a more consistent walking schedule; things have been a little too hectic lately (my wife had our second child two weeks ago), but now that the semester is over I should be able to take at least one arbitrary walk per day, and hopefully two to four.

Enthusiasm

Of course I'll take a few days off, but I am super excited to start preparing for next fall's classes. I'm remaking a gen ed lit course and a freshman comp course with new texts, and I'm really optimistic and energized about the process.

Summer Reading

I'll probably be reading a lot of poetry this summer; I'd want to for fun of course, but since I'm creating a new lit syllabus for fall, every poem I read could be a poem I teach, too. I also hope to read a lot of drama, non-fiction, and short stories, probably staying away from novels for a little while.

Work Space

Another task for summer is to create a good home work space. I grade papers on a card table, and carry other school materials around to wherever I am in the house. I want to get a desk and start organizing my materials so that I have a good, clean work space. A clean well-lighted place, if you will.

Ends and Means

2009-05-05T22:31:00.015-05:00

a contrapuntal essay

The problem of using "ends justify the means" logic to defend torture is that virtually every war criminal believes some threat is strong enough, or some perceived "good" important enough, that the atrocity committed is justified.

At Reason, Jim Henley shreds the utilitarian argument for torture (via The Edge of the American West, where dana does a good job exposing the "ticking timebomb" scenario as a fantasy for "thought experiments," not a real situation for the real world). Henley presents the familiar "you have a terrorist in custody who knows where a bomb is hidden, and many innocent lives are at stake" scenario. But Henley twists the hypothetical's rules:

"But you’re also sure this particular terrorist is a pervert! And he tells you that if you’ll rape your own child in front of him, he’ll tell you exactly where the bomb is and how to disarm it. And you’re sure that he will, because your intelligence is that good in exactly that way."

Henley then exposes

"the real misdirection of the ticking bomb scenario. It’s always presented as a 'What would you do?' dilemma, but in truth it has nothing to do with you. The proper question is: 'What should we allow officials embedded in the security bureaucracy to do with impunity? What shall we let their bosses order without legal repercussion?'"

I'm reminded of John Howard Yoder's What Would You Do?, where Yoder exposes some of the assumptions within the "If a violent person is attacking your family, wouldn't you use violence to stop him?" question? Conflating some of Yoder's ideas with some of my own, here are some assumptions inherent to that question.

One assumption: Your violent defense will be successful. If a violent person (presumably armed) is attacking my family, why on earth would I assume that I could violently defend them? My attempt would likely fail, and quite possibly make things worse.

Another assumption: A violent defense is your only option. Could I consider sacrificing myself to save my family? Could I try mount a distraction to allow my family to escape? Could I try talking to the person?

Another assumption: This hypothetical can be used to justify a large-scale war. That's absurd. Even assuming you are using this hypothetical to justify a defensive war, the more accurate hypothetical would be "If a violent person were running through a crowd to try and hurt your family, would you throw a grenade into the crowd to stop the person?"

Literature offers exploration of ends and means, too.

In John Fowles' The Magus, Conchis is ordered by a Nazi to bludgeon a man to death; if he doesn't, a whole crowd of innocent people will be executed. As Conchis approaches the man, the man speaks the word "eleutheria," the Greek word for freedom. Conchis sees in this Nazi resister "every freedom, from the very worst to the very best." He sees that:

"I was the only person left in that square who had the freedom left to choose, and that the annunciation and defence of that freedom was more important than common sense, self-preservation, yes, than my own life, than the lives of the eighty hostages."

In The Magus, Fowles presents an existentialist dilemma: Conchis rejects utilitarian reasoning in order to assert his own "freedom."

I've written about utilitarianism in Graham Greene's The Quiet American before. Fowler finds Pyle's utilitarianism abhorrent. Pyle is willing to sacrifice many lives to his value of democracy; he sees these lives as acceptable "means" to achieve an "end." In order to stop Pyle, Fowler contributes to Pyle's death: in other words, Fowler is willing to view Pyle as an means, too. He weighs Pyle's life against the lives that Pyle would be responsible for taking in the future, and makes a utilitarian decision. Of course, the fact that Fowler and Pyle are rivals for the same woman complicates the simplicity of this decision.

Literature also offers us an example of the ethical way to respond to torture and following orders. In King Lear, while the sadistic Cornwall is poking out the eyes of Gloucester, one of his servants objects, trying to make his master stop. From his lowly position, this is an act of disobedience. But he sees an atrocity being committed, and attempts to intervene rather than be complicit. He is unable to help Gloucester, and he is killed for his troubles; perhaps, however, he saves his soul. And if I were ever to direct King Lear (I'd like to imagine the twists of chance and life that would lead that to happen, but I can't), I know how my production would have Gloucester appear during this scene:

image from Wikipedia

(This is closer to what I would like my contrapuntal writing to be. Instead of a unified, developed thesis, one idea leads to a somewhat related idea and so on, finding unexpected connections and not developing a point in a systematic direction, but exploring it in a flexible way. I'm not where I want to be with it, but I'm getting there).

Addendum

--this post grows out of a frustration with seeing "It works" used as a justification for torture, as if the effectiveness of great cruelty justifies great cruelty (or, if you prefer, you can replace "cruelty" with ILLEGAL ACTS). If you are trying to stop a window salesman from knocking on your door once a month, kicking him in the stomach is cruel (and illegal) regardless of whether "it works."

--perhaps I should explain: I would not use images of Abu Ghraib in a production of King Lear to try and make a political point (which would be both incoherent and obvious). It would be an aesthetic choice to connect with the audience. It would be an attempt to make the cruelty of the scene (and play) familiar to the audience, rather than distant.

Environmentalism and Religion: "the child is father of the man"

2009-05-01T22:50:00.008-05:00

a contrapuntal essay

"It is understandable that Luther could have found this preoccupation [with personal self-acceptance] in the apostolic message since it was his own question. [...] It was also perfectly natural for a John Wesley, a Kierkegaard, or today for an existentialist or a conservative evangelical reader to make the same assumption and find the same message--for all of these are in their variegated ways children of Luther, still asking the same question of personal guilt and righteousness."

--John Howard Yoder, The Politics of Jesus

In some strains of Christianity, you may find a human-centered chauvinist attitude toward the natural world. The thinking seems to go that since humans are the pinnacle of creation, the rest of the created world exists for whatever humans wish to use it for. There is, then, a divinely sanctioned human "dominion" over the rest of creation (this way of thinking may be opposed by the concept of "stewardship"--essentially the idea that God made all of creation for himself, and humans are caretakers. In this way of thinking, nature has transcendent purpose, and humans have a moral obligation to care for creation. I commend the concept of "stewardship" for finding in nature if not "inherent" value, then a value wholly separate from humankind's utilitarian use of it).

This religious human-centered attitude toward the environment actually eases into secular human-centered attitudes toward the environment (or do these secular views emerge from the religious thought?). In one business-friendly strain, what matters is human benefit, and if the environment is damaged for the economic interests of humans (or corporations, or governments), so be it--what matters is human use. Another strain can suggest that humans, as the most advanced species, have an inherent right to use the lower species for whatever purposes humans want. As Harold Herzog writes in "Human Morality and Animal Research: Confessions and Quandaries," "Research with animals is based on the premise that a 'superior' species has the right to breed, kidnap, or kill members of 'lesser' species for the advancement of knowledge."

I think it possible that these secular arguments about human use of nature (including animals) may develop from the same historical strain as Christianity's arguments about human use of nature (including animals). The child may be father to the man.

One might think that "Environmentalism" is an alternative, or a corrective, or in opposition to, a religious-based human-centered attitude toward the environment. But this is not always the case. It seems to me that some (I won't say many) environmentalists maintain human-centered chauvinist attitudes toward the natural world. Some environmentalists view the natural world as worth protecting and preserving--so that humans can continue to use it. What environmentalists? Environmentalists that eat meat.

If you claim to be an environmentalist but still think animals can be killed for your pleasure, then whom are you really trying to save the environment for? You're not trying to save the environment for the animals (you probably don't see inherent value in the animal, if you are willing to eat it for your pleasure). And you probably don't see inherent value in the natural world outside of human use. Environmentalism can maintain this chauvinism, can still see humankind in a power-relationship over the natural world. Secular environmentalists can still believe in human "dominion" over the rest of the natural world, can still see humans in a position of control, capable of using any part of the natural world (including animals) for our own purposes. It is worth preserving the environment, not for its inherent value, but for its value to humans.

The child is father of the man.

Carol Ann Duffy: poet laureate of Britain

2009-05-01T08:47:00.002-05:00

I adore Duffy's collection The World's Wife, and am pleased to see her receive such an honor.

(NY Times).

Poetry in Life

2009-04-29T20:16:00.003-05:00

The first lines of poetry I spoke to my new son were from William Wordsworth: "My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky."

How you know you are an English teacher nearing the end of a term

2009-04-26T17:09:00.003-05:00

When you stop grading papers in order to prep for class, and it feels like "taking a break."

downpour: blogging helps improve my teaching.

2009-04-24T16:37:00.006-05:00

If this blog is a journal of what I'm reading and thinking about, then that helps my teaching. With my comp students, I promote the value of informal prewriting exercises: forcing ourselves to work out our thoughts in writing certainly allows us to articulate our thoughts, but also allows us sharper clarity of thought. By making an effort to write about literature and ideas, I'm clarifying and articulating my own thoughts. Since a lot of my reading is for class, writing my thoughts certainly sharpens my teaching. Furthermore, in the past year I read The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Namesake for pleasure, not directly for academic work. I also blogged about some of my thoughts about reading these works. Now I'm planning on teaching them in a lit course next fall--suddenly the extended time not just reading these books, but thinking about them and writing about them, perhaps contributed to my decision to include them, and certainly helps me prepare to teach them.

But it's not just the writing on this blog that helps me, but the reading. I regularly check most of the links on the side. That means I'm constantly learning about what books people are reading, what people think about particular books, how people are experiencing reading, current issues in literature, current issues in academia, how other teachers are approaching their work, contemporary theoretical issues, contemporary academic topics, etc. etc. etc. Using these links as my regular reading list keeps me informed on subjects relevant to my teaching, as well as ideas that can be incorporated into my teaching.

Or is this what I try tell myself?

Marxist Reading

2009-04-22T08:41:00.007-05:00

In "Going Boom" at bookforum, Walter Benn Michaels has, I believe, some strong insights. My main problem with the essay is the assumption that it is the duty of literature (or literary criticism, or literary study, or simply reading) to explore and expose the problems of the free market. First, aren't there better areas of inquiry more suited to this project? Economics, Journalism, Political Science--it seems there are fields that would do a much better job with that project than writers of literature. Second, I'm skeptical that more novels like American Psycho or more television shows like The Wire are really going to foster anything like a revolution or reform of the free market system.

But it seems Michaels also views the primary concern of human beings as our material conditions, and thus what we read should reflect that concern. I think, given that much of our lives is devoted to those material conditions, that when we read we perhaps should devote our attention to "something else," whether that be pleasure, or spiritual fulfillment, or self-knowledge, or personal growth, or intellectual curiosity, or any of many, many human concerns that are not about the economic system. I might agree with Harold Bloom when he writes, "Do not attempt to improve your neighbor or your neighborhood by what or how you read. Self-improvement is a large enough project for your mind and spirit."

(via Dissent)

downpour: some things I'm teaching

2009-04-20T10:58:00.009-05:00

Avoiding Staleness

I'm very excited that next fall, I'll be including John Fowles' The French Lieutenant's Woman and Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake in my gen ed lit syllabus. I feel like including these novels makes the course my own. I'm also not assigning any books that feature poetry; instead, I'll be creating my own poetry reading list through digital attachments and online links. And I'm also changing texts for my comp class, again simply because I feel the old text was getting stale and dated. This certainly adds work to the summer, but I think it is well worth it. I want to be energized by what I teach, and think I'll do a better job teaching it if I am.

Milgram/Zimbardo

In "Obedience," Ian Parker writes "It's hard not to think of Stanley Milgram in another set of circumstances--to imagine the careers he did not have in films or in the theatre," and quotes from Milgram from a letter: "I should not be here, but in Greece shooting films under a Mediterranean sun, hopping about in a small boat from one Aegean isle to the next."

I find this remarkably unsurprising, and think the same thought could apply to Philip Zimbardo and his Stanford Prison Experiment (for some reason, in my imagination Zimbardo appears like the "impresario" artist at the end of The French Lieutenant's Woman). Parker and Zimbardo are psychologists that appear to view themselves as something like artists. And perhaps, from Freud on forward, it is psychology with an artistic bent that most frequently forces its way into the popular imagination.

On the Commodification of Peace

2009-04-18T21:37:00.002-05:00

At We Have Mixed Feelings About Sven Sundgaard, a mostly silly blog where I sometimes examine consumer life, I discuss the consumer fashion appeal of the Peace Symbol.

Torture

2009-04-18T20:44:00.009-05:00

Using "the end justifies the means" logic leads to an obvious problem. If you believe nefarious means can be justified by a desired end, then you would be willing to use nearly any means to achieve ends you deem very important, and you will use absolutely any means to achieve ends you deem absolutely necessary. But if you do so, the only thing that separates you (whom you consider good) from your enemy (whom you consider evil) is the desirability, nobility, morality, goodness of the ends. Horrible atrocities have been perpetrated by those that believed so strongly their ends were just/right/desirable that they were willing to kill to achieve those ends.

In history there have been those (such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi) who believed their moral superiority to their enemies must exist in the means, not just the ends. John Howard Yoder's understanding of Christ in The Politics of Jesus also suggests a leader (with social/political ends) who insisted on using a moral means.

Religion does not provide a clear direction. Too often religious motivations have led humans to murderous means to achieve the ends they view their religion demands. And sometimes it is religion that leads humans to recognize a moral demand, a "higher law," which extends beyond the desirability of the end that humans have in view. So religion can lead humans to treat other humans as "means" to be used for transcendent purposes, but religion can also insist on transcendent purposes which forbid certain evil means to achieve human ends.

There is little doubt that torture denies the dignity of the one being tortured. Torture insists that the tortured person is simply a means, a means to be used to achieve the torturer's end. The tortured person does not have inherent value; the value of the tortured person is only his/her value to the torturer. Humans distort, limit, and deny each others' inherent dignity all the time, but violence is perhaps the most intentional, outright, egregious denial.

"Trifles" as a metaphor for canon formation

2009-04-17T10:53:00.001-05:00

Those in power get to determine what matters, what is important, what is worth time and exploration, as well as what is less significant, not important, "trifling."

The Ethical Decisions of Imaginary Characters

2009-04-16T22:28:00.005-05:00

I'm not afraid to ask students whether the fictional characters we encounter do "the right thing." I do think sometimes this question can help us better understand the particular text. But I also don't think a literature class is an inappropriate setting to challenge students about ethics and values.

In Susan Glaspell's play "Trifles," two women cover up evidence that would help convict a murderer. I will ask: did the women do the right thing? At the end of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Chief Bromden kills (the lobotomized) McMurphy. Again I will ask: was Chief Bromden's action ethical? Certainly the contexts of both these works push a read toward a particular answer, but I still find the discussion engaging and fruitful. I think these may be the sort of questions students want to engage with; perhaps young adulthood is a time when people find themselves both open to exploring such questions and deeply invested in these questions.

Gratuitous Link

2009-04-16T08:25:00.002-05:00

Matt Richtel's "If Only Literature Could Be a Cellphone-Free Zone" in The New York Times.

I've thought the same thing while watching Seinfeld (just a decade later, some of their plots and situations would be wrapped up with a cell phone) and horror movies (since the essence of many horror scenes is isolation, writers may need to find a way to get rid of a character's cell phone: dying batteries, broken phones, locations without connection, etc.).

2,400 year old dirty jokes

2009-04-15T11:48:00.003-05:00

Here is my pattern for teaching Lysistrata:

1. Before the semester, make a syllabus including Lysistrata. It seems like a good idea at the time.

2. A few weeks before Lysistrata is scheduled, look at the syllabus and think "How are we supposed to talk about that?"

3. During the time that Lysistrata is scheduled, spend my free moments fretting up ways to get through class.

4. After we're finished with Lysistrata, and our coverage of it in class goes reasonably well (it usually does), think "Well, that went well: we actually raised some good, important issues that are extremely relevant to this class."

5. Lose all notes taken for this preparation, and forget everything that I did that seemed to work well.*

6. Prepare a lit syllabus for the next semester including Lysistrata: it seems like a good idea at the time.

*I'm working on eliminating this step.

Gratuitous Link

2009-04-15T08:44:00.002-05:00

Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson's The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food reviewed at The New York Times.

Torrential Downpour: scattered thoughts on pacifism and vegetarianism.

2009-04-12T18:52:00.008-05:00

Unpredictability of War

David Samuels' "Why Israel Will Bomb Iran: The rational argument for an attack" in Slate illustrates one of the problems of war. Samuels makes a lot of predictions about what would happen if Israel bombed Iran. Most of these results appear as positives. But almost any act of war can seem sensible when justifying it by predicted results (especially if the war proponent is the one predicting such results). But nearly every act of war brings about unforeseen, unpredictable results. It is the unpredicted results that are often longterm negative results of acts of war.

Orwell against Tolstoy
In James Wood's "A Fine Rage: George Orwell's revolutions" in The New Yorker (abstract), Wood recounts Orwell's opposition to Tolstoy. The matter seems to be about "soft power:"

"The distinction that really matters is not between violence and non-violence, but between having and not having the appetite for power." The example he appends is an interesting one: when a father threatens his son with "You'll get a thick ear if you do that again," coercion is palpable. But, Orwell writes, what of the mother who lovingly murmurs, "Now, darling, is it kind to Mummy to do that?" The mother wants to contaminate her son's brain. Tolstoy did not propose that "King Lear" be banned or censored, Orwell says; instead, when he wrote his polemic against Shakespeare, he tried to contaminate our pleasure in the play. For Orwell, "Creeds like pacifism and anarchism, which seem on the surface to imply a complete renunciation of power, rather encourage this habit of mind."

Surely the problem of Orwell's argument is obvious. In a free society, if Tolstoy tries to badger me into hating King Lear, I'm free to resist. In fact, I have two forms of "soft" resistance at my disposal: I can either argue against Tolstoy, or I can ignore him. But if Tolstoy starts punching and kicking me because I enjoy King Lear, that is another thing altogether. The key distinction is, in fact, between violence and non-violence.

Sanctity of Life
Today at the church I attended for Easter service, there was a prayer that included a desire to embrace a "culture of life," followed by some specifics, including concern for the unborn. And I wondered: if everybody in America that opposed abortion on the grounds of the sanctity of human life, also opposed war on the very same grounds, we might not have any more aggressive foreign wars. The same thought could probably extend to the death penalty.

That's the problem of this "culture of life" business--which life, in fact, is of concern? Opponents of abortion usually don't share the same political (or cultural?) affiliations with opponents of capital punishment or opponents of militarism/warfare (and I'll limit to a parenthetical the observation that in most contexts, when people argue over "life," the concern is limited, of course, to human life).

Paradigms of Thought: Animal Rights

When I read articles about animal rights, I consistently come across the word "suffering." It is apparent that for many animal rights advocates, "suffering" is the paradigm which grounds their beliefs. Many of the arguments against humans using animals for our benefit are framed around the animals' suffering (arguments for the animals' capacity to suffer, or arguments on the conditions which lead animals to suffer). It is certainly not the only paradigm (the question "do humans have a right to use animals?" is not dependent on animal suffering), but it is a significant one.

I must admit that the suffering paradigm does not ground my vegetarianism; for me the paradigm is personal moral integrity. It is not the suffering of animals that motivates me precisely. I attempt to avoid moral complicity in the deaths of animals. I've suggested in the past that it is the religious thrust of my mind that made me a vegetarian: it is a religious desire to live a compassionate life and a religious desire to preserve personal moral integrity (it is not with mock humility that I note my constant failure in both these areas).

I make these observations on paradigms of belief without intended judgment. These are some of the thoughts that arise when I ask myself why I am vegetarian and not vegan. It is possible that either paradigm will, at some point, push me toward a strict veganism. At the moment, however, they have not.

Moral Arguments on Meat

I have been thinking of developing a post with the sentence "I've never heard a good moral argument for eating meat." But I think I could take out the "good," and simply say "I've never heard a moral argument for eating meat." Certainly I've heard many "defenses" or "justifications" for animal consumption. But nobody can really raise the argument that consuming meat is a morally superior choice to abstaining from consuming meat. I come back to a rational claim: if you eat meat, you are choosing your own pleasure over the life of the animal. It is difficult to make this choice and still claim it as a moral choice.

And you should see how I hold a fork

2009-04-12T14:16:00.002-05:00

In The New York Times, Calvin Trillin speculates on whether he is "an uncultured oaf."

Imagining Lear

2009-04-08T22:22:00.002-05:00

While teaching King Lear, I find myself entirely immersed in it: reading it, talking about it, thinking about it, watching it. In my free, dreamy moments, Lear comes to mind. And I considered revisiting ideas about imaginary characters, about the human capacity to imagine that which isn't, about how non-existent characters are imagined by an author, re-imagined by a reader, and take on an authentic realness from the creativity of the human imagination.

And while thinking about how I imagine Lear, I recognize that the image I have of Lear is built out of various sources. But when I imagine Lear talking, the voice I often hear is that of my grandfather. And Lear's character and personality, his mannerisms and his emotions, are formed by my ideas of my grandpa.

And I think that the human capacity to imagine is nearly limitless, yet that imagination is built and perpetually fueled by already existent material.

Highlight of the Semester

2009-04-06T11:10:00.002-05:00

Once a semester I tend to write on here about what a moving, invigorating, emotional, and joyous experience it is to teach King Lear. I hope I never tire of teaching this play.

I do, after all, have a "stupid" tag

2009-04-03T11:57:00.003-05:00

I am very liberal; I know this because a Facebook quiz told me so. But when reading literature, my impulses are sometimes what might be called conservative: in respect for the Western canon and tradition, in a willingness to just go ahead and say a Shakespearean character is evil, in a desire for spiritual fulfillment or moral edification in literature. I don't know what this means.

Stupid Summer Project: The Statue

2009-03-31T00:01:00.002-05:00

Jerry: Kramer? Kramer? It's Jerry. Jerry! From next door. Nevermind where I am. Yes, Jerry Seinfeld!

Kramer: Just make love to that wall, pervert.

Comment: The early season episodes really get at the tragicomic destiny of George Costanza. He finds an object that will redeem a mistake from his past, loses the object, gains it back after an ordeal, only to see it break in the stupidest way possible.

This episode features a common motif of the show: the conflicting self-interest of friends. When one character stands to benefit from an event which hurts another character, they argue about what should be done.

But truthfully, I've seen this episode too many times to receive any particular pleasure from it now, and will try to avoid it in the future.

art to the marrow

2009-03-30T22:27:00.010-05:00

a contrapuntal essay

If literature is just for pleasure, I don't need it: I can seek better pleasures elsewhere.

If literature is just for the appreciation of beauty, I don't need it: the world is full of great beauty uncreated by man or woman, and I can appreciate that.

If literature is just for the exploration of ideas, I don't need it: ideas don't require literature for exploration (and there is, after all, plenty of nonfiction to read).

This is not to say that literature doesn't offer pleasure, appreciation of beauty, exploration of ideas. It does offer those things to me, but that alone might be insufficient for literature's dominant place in my life. So why do I read literature?

For language. All poetry is ultimately "about" words, about language itself. Literature offers language in ways creative and energizing (aside: I'm just beginning to learn Italian, and finding the joys and challenges of immersing into a new language). And for stories. Centuries of human history (I think of Homer. I think of fairy tales) speak to the human desire for entertainment through narrative. But still for something else.

I sometimes tire of a detached, analytical critique of the aesthetic. I sometimes tire of the way we often talk about literature. For what I want literature to offer me can't quite be approached on those terms.

I want literature that reaches to my sinews, to my very marrow. I want literature to reach me in the depths of my soul, and to touch the heart of how and why I live. I want it to teach me, but to teach me not just intellectually, morally, but spiritually, passionately. I want to feel the literature in my very being, for it to grasp onto the core of a lived life.

This is not a common experience, and sometimes it is not felt immediately. It is not all literature which reaches me so strongly. King Lear does. My body and soul leap with energy when I encounter King Lear, or even when I simply talk about King Lear. King Lear has told me something I can barely put into my own words, that I can only encounter in the play and hope others can too. Dostoevsky, too, touches me with rare depth. Weeks, months, years later, the characters and images from Dostoevsky's great novels continue to haunt me, to call to me in moments both quiet and loud. Since reading Demons, a certain image of those two characters who had gone to America will enter my mind. I don't even remember their names or personalities, but I see them laying and suffering in a small dark room, and I see them later living in the same building but simply not talking to each other, because of what they shared. Why, from that entire book, is that the image that clings to me? I cannot say. Since reading The Idiot, I feel all the darkened places where Rogozhin and Prince Myshkin meet. Their meetings may work at an intellectual level, but I don't think those darkened places: I feel them. Some lines of Wordsworth's poetry cling to me and periodically emerge. Perhaps Wordsworth was my "first poet," and thus will always be there for me to measure all other poetry against.

I demand much from literature, and though I rarely find what I demand, I don't know whether I've found it until much time is passed. Wordsworth's language cries to me still. Shakespeare and Dostoevsky make demands of me, requiring me to examine and re-examine myself. And I need them to. I seek in literature the very stuff of life.

This essay is, a bit abashedly, Romantic. I offer no program of reading, no literary theory, nothing useful to understanding or appreciating literature. In fact I am writing about that which (for me) transcends such ways of thinking and reading. I don't wish to cheapen what reading literature can and has offered me. It demands the romanticized language I'm using: reading literature has been a spiritual guide to my soul.

Synecdoche, New York

2009-03-30T08:28:00.004-05:00

Synecdoche, New York reminded me of things. In its casual acceptance of the absurd, it reminds me of Mulholland Dr. In its story of the confused conflation between the artist's life and his work, it reminds me of Moulin Rouge!. In its willful and playful abandonment of realism, it reminds me of both those films.

But to say these films remind me of each other is not to deny their intense uniqueness. Charlie Kaufman, David Lynch, and Baz Luhrmann are each Auteurs worthy of the label, their works always recognizably original and creative.

torrential downpour

2009-03-27T11:12:00.011-05:00

Internet Culture

Given that I've never sent a text message and joined Facebook about three weeks ago, I had assumed my students were much more technologically aware than I am. However, today I found out a large majority of my students have never heard of Twitter, LOLcats, or Rickrolling. Since I read a lot online, I apparently keep up with things better than they do--even things some in the media tell me they are experts about. But certainly there is an internet culture, about which those "in the know" are casually familiar, and those on the outside have never even heard of.

Moving away from novels

Once I finish Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, I'm off novels for a while. I'll be reading drama, non-fiction, and poetry. This novel makes me not want to read novels. Maybe that could be a blurb on future editions: "This novel makes me not want to read novels." But I have a lot of non-fiction I want to read, and I enjoy reading drama a lot, so it's a fine thing.

Mostly Vegan

It was about a year ago I went mostly vegan with the intent of doing it for a year. A year later I'm 59 pounds lighter than I was. I will mostly maintain my current lifestyle, but I'll allow for more exceptions. Possibly many more exceptions.

The Club

It was about three years ago I started this blog, which I'd mostly call a colossal failure that I continue to work on. But apparently late March is a time when I do lasting things, so it's a good time for swearing off novels for a while.

The Stupid Thing I Believe

I sort of believe that if there is no God, then "everything is permitted." It's not that there aren't foundations of morality away from religion; it's that if the universe is random and nothing has inherent meaning, if death is the end of individual existence and there is no afterlife, then those foundations are built on nothing, and it doesn't matter if you follow them. I think I only sort of believe this. My feelings for my son make me think maybe I don't believe this.

It can't be a treat to be married to me

I shared much of the above thought with my wife this morning, about ten minutes after I woke up and while she was brushing her teeth.

Sergius in _Arms and the Man_

2009-03-26T20:36:00.002-05:00

When reading Bernard Shaw's Arms and the Man, one might respond negatively to Sergius. He does, after all, attempt to cheat on his fiancee, he's demeaning and domineering (even to the point of violence) to the servant Louka, and he comes of as a hypocrite.

But I sort of like Sergius. Rather than calling him hypocritical, I see him as conflicted over ideals like "Honor," "Nobility," and "Heroism," under great pressure to maintain an image that he doesn't quite believe in. But more than that, I just think he's funny. He's a cad, but an amusing, harmless sort of cad. His seduction of Louka is hilarious--he attempts to kiss and grope his fiancee's maid, and when she responds by speaking disrespectfully to him and about Raina, he lectures her about the honorable behavior of a "gentleman" and the proper behavior of a maid. Louka's response is classic:

"It's so hard to know what a gentleman considers right. I thought from your trying to kiss me that you had given up being so particular."

It's not that I necessarily find Sergius sympathetic (though it is possible to do so--he is wrestling with the same doubts about stated ideals as Raina). It's just that I find him amusing, not the least bit detestable. If I read the play hating Sergius, I might not be able to laugh at him.

Compositional Radical

2009-03-25T14:55:00.002-05:00

Today I told students not to be afraid to include new ideas in the conclusion. If I had told them not to be afraid to stand on the ceiling, they'd have been no less shocked.

Perhaps other college composition teachers share this experience. Many students have been taught rules on writing throughout their education, then get to college and find teachers telling them it is OK to break those very rules. I don't think I'm a radical on composition theory (I'm almost certainly not), but when I tell students it is OK to use the word "I" in a paper, they look at me like I am telling them cats have wings.

I don't want to be a sprig on a barrel organ

2009-03-25T12:21:00.001-05:00

At Salon, Gordy Slack talks to Alva Noe about "why you are not your brain."

King Lear on TV

2009-03-24T18:53:00.004-05:00

See Ian McKellen as King Lear in PBS's Great Performances on Wednesday night.

"And, everyone keeps calling me 'S'"

2009-03-23T18:40:00.001-05:00

It's the little details that make this a masterpiece. From The Onion:

Prague's Franz Kafka International Named World's Most Alienating Airport

Stupid Summer Project: The Stranded

2009-03-22T17:03:00.003-05:00

Elaine: Have you noticed, people don't use straws as much as they used to for some reason.

George: One of the guys in my cell threw a piece of gum at him.

Jerry: Oh, we all hated him.

Comment: Jerry's "Oh, Kramer, uh-huh" can be used to understand a lot of silliness.

Julia Louis-Dreyfuss is really funny; I even watch The New Adventures of Old Christine, but then I'm a sitcom rube.

Torrential Downpour

2009-03-21T13:28:00.018-05:00

Animal Rights and “Righteousness:” further exploration on reason and faith in the secular
Another bit not intended as a developed argument, but an attempted articulation of swirling thoughts. This is why I write (even for a little read blog): working out ideas in writing helps me feel more grounded.

In an earlier exploration of Animal Rights, I suggested that even in this secular argument, it is irrational leaps of faith that guide thought and action (I don’t see a good rational argument that animals should be regarded as equal to humans, though I’m also not sure there’s a rational argument that humans are superior and can thus use animals in any way we see fit). I think the residue of religious sensibilities in this secular argument run deeper than that. From reading the writing of some vegans, vegetarians, and animal rights activists, I get the sense there is a belief in and desire for a secular version of “Righteousness,” an inner purity that separates one from the impure.

For Gary Francione, the demarcation for purity runs between vegans and everybody else; to be vegan is to be “pure,” and to consume any animal products at all puts you on the other side of the purity line (Francione: "There is no morally significant difference between meat and dairy [...] There is as much (if not more) suffering in a glass of milk as in a pound of steak "). I obviously think there is a morally significant difference, and I would put that line between meat eaters and vegetarians: I see a fundamental difference between consuming the flesh of killed animals, and not consuming the flesh of killed animals. On the issue of animal treatment in this society, I think vegetarians and vegans share more in common than vegetarians and meat eaters. But maybe that sentence itself betrays the fallacy of such a "line" of fundamental separation; the better graphic symbol is probably a set of intersecting circles.

I recognize a religious desire for Righteousness in my own vegetarianism; it is more about avoiding complicity than bringing about change (and thus if I ever do go completely vegan, it will be because my own conscience demands it, not a desire to fulfill somebody else's standard of moral purity), though I doubt other vegans and vegetarians have the same view. But the desire for inner Righteousness, an inner purity, is not exclusively religious and drives many secular conflicts. Republicans and Democrats sometimes seem to demand "ideological purity" from their members on particular issues (notably abortion). Whenever we ask a question like "Is So-And-So racist/sexist/anythingist?" we're assuming a line of demarcation between the pure and the impure (and perhaps implicitly overshadowing unconscious assumptions of racism/sexism/anythingism, and of institutional racism/sexism/anythingism). Again, I see the residues of religious issues in secular arguments.

Links
Review of The Face on Your Plate: The Truth About Food, by Jeffrey Moussaieff Masson (LA Times).

Christopher Hitchens on Karl Marx today (The Atlantic).

Eric Margolis on war in Afghanistan (Common Dreams).

I generally don't like audience interaction/participation in theater; I've got the weird feeling the actors are treating me like a rube and they think they're better than me (The Onion).

The logic of militarism

2009-03-19T20:47:00.007-05:00

I'm pulling this quote from Andrew Sullivan out of context, but I think it is worth it:

"It's also important to note that war crimes happen in every war - and that the way to judge a society is how it handles such things."

Follow the logic here: since war crimes are an inevitable part of war, the way to judge a society is on how it treats war crimes when it chooses to go to war.

I think to reach this conclusion over the inevitability of war crimes is insane (or, if you prefer, highlights intrinsic acceptance of militarism). To me, the inevitability of war crimes in war calls into question the effectiveness and morality of warfare, and suggests the way to judge a society might be how much of its resources it devotes to warfare, the efforts it takes to avoid war, and how and why it chooses to go to war. To a pacifist, Sullivan's statement is a bit like saying that if you let your kids throw rocks at passing cars, they'll inevitably hit a few pedestrians, but what matters is that you tell them to avoid hitting pedestrians, and punish them if they do.

But if you accept (or support) warfare, and you accept that warfare inevitably leads to war crimes, you're left with the conclusion that what matters is how the society treats the inevitable war crimes. When you've accepted a culture of militarism, you don't reach the conclusion that war itself is the problem.

John Updike's poetry

2009-03-18T15:06:00.003-05:00

The March 16th edition of The New Yorker contains some really great poetry by John Updike. The poems on dying are elegant, thoughtful, moving.

Addendum
See also Nicolaus Mills' "John Updike's Goodbye" in Dissent.

"Be like me a little" (or, does Oskar let the right one in?)

2009-03-17T22:50:00.015-05:00

Spoilers and all.

Let the Right One In plays on the vampire tradition that the vampire must be invited into a home, and the motif of meetings at doorways and windows repeats throughout the film. However, I believe that letting the right one in refers to an internal conflict--to badly oversimplify, to "let the right one in" is to resist the evil within oneself.

Let's take a brief gloss at some key images and moments throughout the movie that might support this understanding.

--one of the first images we see is the distorted reflection of Oskar as he looks out the window. He is in the process of practicing to murder some school bullies (he is also doing such practice the first time Eli appears to him, further supporting this interpretation). Given that he collects news stories about murderers, it is fair to believe we are watching a killer develop.

--Eli tells Oskar that he must fight back against the bullies.

--Oskar does fight back, hitting the lead bully in the ear with a stick. After doing so, his face has a look of ecstatic pleasure.

--When Oskar first comes into Eli's apartment (and learns for certain she is a vampire), he is touching her hand through the glass on her door. She keeps moving her hand around, and he keeps following to try keep covering it).

--Eli tells Oskar that she is like him: he has murderous desires. She tells him that he must repress these--she kills because she has too (her consumption of blood is usually portrayed as an animalistic compulsion). She tells Oskar to "be like me a little."

--Eli offers Oskar some money--he disgustedly rejects it, knowing it comes from her victims.

--After Oskar saves Eli (not entirely intentionally helping her to kill her potential killer), Eli thanks him and leaves, and again we see the the image of Oskar's reflection through the window as he touches the glass. At this point it is difficult not to see the parallel--Oskar touching the hand of his reflection in the glass, Oskar touching Eli's hand through the glass. She is, in some ways, a reflection of himself.

--What follows is the most frightening scene in the film: an even more dangerous bully joins the earlier gang of bullies, and Oskar is seriously threatened. He is not in a position to fight back, and he passively acquiesces to the violent threat. He is saved by Eli, and their eyes meet and they smile at one another.

--The final scene (Oskar on a train, signaling Morse code through a box that may contain Eli) suggests Oskar is Eli's new mortal servant.

After developing this interpretation, I'm still left with a lingering question: did Oskar "let the right one in"?

He did not violently defend himself--yet he was in no position to do so. But Eli's rescue was extremely violent, and if he now works as her mortal servant, we know he will likely be asked to perform rather nefarious deeds (we've already seen Eli's previous mortal servant committing murders and disposing of bodies). But maybe letting in the violent side is, within the film, the "right one." Or maybe letting the right one in refers to Eli's choice of Oskar.

I'm posting this fresh, without tainting my ideas with the ideas of others; I'll now check out some reviews and see what other angles have been taken.

Update
Reading Manohla Dargis' NY Times review, I recall that Eli kisses Oskar while there is still blood on her lips. Dargis points out that "Eli seizes on Oskar immediately, slipping her hand under his, writing him notes, becoming his protector, baring her fangs."

Other reviews: Roger Ebert, Carina Chocano , Angela Kaelin, Ben Kenber (who writes, "Of course, there will be more moralizing over what Eli has done and how Oskar should (in the eyes of many) respond to it." Perhaps that's what I'm doing, though interpreting the movie as an internal conflict isn't exactly "moralizing," and at any rate Eli seems to offer moral advice to Oskar), Jonathan Kiefer, Roger Moore

Literary Studies and the Humanities (or, it's all interdisciplinary)

2009-03-17T14:21:00.017-05:00

a contrapuntal essay

Teaching in the Humanities, I find that there is nothing I read that isn't potentially relevant--even concretely useful--to my profession. Reading John Howard Yoder's The Politics of Jesus (second edition) suggests to me that debates within literary criticism also exist within theology.

There is the larger issue of the relevance of historical understanding of the contemporary context around the texts. Yoder does cite historical context of the gospel writers' words ("historical and literary-critical grounds" (42)), and this seems proper for a historical (and theological) understanding of the work (as aside: while the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America's "seminaries and colleges generally teach a form of historical-critical method of biblical analysis, an approach that, broadly speaking, seeks to understand the scriptures and the process of canon formation with reference to historical and social context," the Lutheran Church--Missouri Synod "teaches Biblical inerrancy, the teaching that Bible is inspired by God and is without error. For this reason, they reject much--if not all--of modern liberal scholarship"). I think a scholarly, critical understanding of historical context for biblical texts is enlightening for our understanding.

I'm not, however, convinced this historical understanding is necessary for literary criticism, by which I mean criticism of artistic works like fiction, drama, and poetry. Historical context may enlighten an understanding of a given work, but it may also be distracting from understanding a particular work, taking attention away from the text itself and to extra-textual information about the author and his/her society and times. For example, I think of Romeo and Juliet not as a great love story, but as a story of civil war and family rivalry--the feud between the Capulets and the Montagues dominates the text, really, and the relationship and destruction of Romeo and Juliet are problems inherent to the family feud. Perhaps I could follow the path historically (Shakespeare living and writing during the reign of Elizabeth Tudor, the Tudor dynasty being the one that came out of and ended a long period of English civil war, etc. etc.). Perhaps that historical and political understanding influenced Shakespeare (in fact, I think it probably did). But if I start following the path of history back to the War of the Roses, I've moved away from Romeo and Juliet, and there is plenty within Romeo and Juliet to encounter on its own (I'm a defender of the play: I think if Shakespeare had written nothing but this play, it alone would be a masterpiece to justify Shakespeare's place as a titan of English poetry).

Here are some passages from Yoder's book that are relevant to literary criticism, and my own views.

"Hans Conzelmann [...] likewise argues that although it is part of the scholar's task to seek to evaluate his documents and reconstruct the events behind them, the first interest of the student of any text must be what the author of the text means to say" (4).

I think this claim depends on the reason the "scholar" is reading. For an historian or theologian reading a text, an understanding of intent is useful if not necessary. But for reading literature, I mostly reject the necessity of authorial intent. I certainly don't think my first "interest" as a "student of any text" is the author's intent; my first interest as a (let's try the term on) "literary critic" is to engage with the text. If I move away from the text itself to an attempt to understand the author's intent, then I am not interpreting the text as it is, but the text as it may have been intended to be. But perhaps a "reader" of literature is not the same thing as a "scholar" as Conzelmann or Yoder would define it.

"What it means that every reader of a text has and owns a specific perspective, as over against seeking or claiming some kind of quasi-neutral 'objectivity,' is itself part of the continuing debate among scholars about proper method" (14).

I certainly embrace subjectivity over objectivity in literary studies, and this is much easier in literary studies than in other fields. Biblical exegesis is a lot like literary criticism--it engages in close attention to the text to understand it. But theology has consequences--that literary interpretation of the biblical text is used to support or create theological positions. What are the consequences of subjective interpretations of literature? No negative ones that I can perceive. If person A has a vastly different understanding of King Lear from person B, that hardly matters to person C--it's doubtful either person A or person B will use their differing interpretations of King Lear to set up a system of belief for person C. It's just fine that in reading literature, we don't attempt a "quasi-neutral 'objectivity," and it doesn't matter that there is no such thing. We are free to engage with the texts as individuals, and our subjective understandings mostly lack consequence.

"The prerequisite for appropriate reading of any text is the reader's empathy or congeniality with the intention and genre of the text. We do not ask someone hostile to the discipline of mathematics to read a mathematics text expertly. To read a text of the genre gospel under the a priori assumption that there could be no such thing as 'good news' (whether as a true message or as a genre) would be no more fitting" (14-15).

I'm not certain this is true. I suppose in some sense it is: if Person A believes novels are a waste of time and shouldn't be bothered with, I probably needn't read Person A's review of Moby Dick. But a reader lacking "empathy or congeniality" for a field may find important critical insights while engaging with the text. Marx was certainly hostile to capitalism, but that doesn't mean he didn't find keen insights into how capitalism works. I'd be interested in reading a hostile outsider's critique of texts from fields like Economics, or Psychology--that critique might bring with it useful insights.

In reading Yoder's The Politics of Jesus, I've found passages that could directly be applied to and debated within literary studies. But as a reader and teacher, I hardly need such explicit connections to make my reading relevant to my teaching. I often find much of my pleasurable reading coming up during discussion, during lecture, in teaching composition and in teaching literature. I don't always know that what I've read will come up, but then during class, it suddenly springs to my mind, and organically fits into what we are up to. The reading from my "personal" life is never entirely separated from my professional life--but then, my professional life is not entirely separate from personal life, either. My sense is that English teachers tend to love reading on a personal level, and go into the profession because of that love.

On Reading and Influence

2009-03-15T13:48:00.005-05:00

There are interesting posts going up everywhere on the most influential writers to particular individuals (see To Delight and to Instruct, Not of General Interest, and So Many Books). It is an interesting topic. I certainly know what people, what classes, what experiences have formed me; before sharing what writers have influenced me by their writing (and my reading) alone, I need to reflect seriously.

When I think of writers who have influenced me, I take quite seriously the meaning of "influence." To claim that somebody I have never met but have read had an impact, I am suggesting that the writer affected my understanding of myself, humanity, or the world, even to the point of altering my behavior. I am saying I wouldn't interpret reality the way I do if I didn't encounter this writer, and that it is possibly my actions have been influenced by this writer.

I'm surprised to say that as a reader of poetry, no poet has had such an influence. My favorite poets (Wordsworth, Shelley, Milton, Hughes, Harrison, Duffy) have not actually changed me (other than making me love poetry). And there are several writers that did influence me at one time, but whose influence has, I think, waned. Stephen King, Sinclair Lewis, Ernest Hemingway, Alexandre Dumas, Jean-Paul Sartre--at one point they did color the way I viewed myself and the world I lived in, and I can even recall moments when I behaved the way I did because of these writers. But I don't know that any of these writers are responsible for how I currently live and think (though I cannot discount that their influence has left a permanent imprint).

And that leaves the writers who permanently formed me, who who still linger with me, who still have the power to influence how I interpret events, interact with people, and consider my identity.

The writers of the four gospels. I know that nothing I ever read will impact me the way reading the Bible on my own as a teenager impacted me. The gospels provided the metaphors by which I view the world, bolstered my liberal politics, taught me to seek God, taught me to seek a meaningful life, showed me how to behave in the world. It is the Jesus I encountered alone in these four stories that profoundly influenced me.

The writer of the book of Ecclesiastes. And nothing taught me the futility of existence, the randomness of the universe, the emptiness of life, the unimportance of the earthly world, quite like this book.

Henry David Thoreau. "Life Without Principle" still informs my view of work and how I spend my time.

Martin Luther. I read Luther during a formative time of life, though I cannot say for certain whether it was Luther's writing or Luther's biographers (Roland Bainton in particular) that taught me. It is not just Luther's understanding of Christianity that affected me; learning about Luther's life (particularly from my history teacher, John Buschen, and from Luther's biographer Erik Erikson) helped me to understand myself.

John Fowles. I still feel The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman frequently. Not least of all, Fowles taught me about Hazard, about random chance in our lives. He taught me much, much more, including how to read.

John Howard Yoder. Yoder is the writer that permanently grounded my pacifism in Christ.

William Shakespeare. For one work: King Lear. It is one thing to try express nihilistic ideas; it is another altogether to experience Lear. To read Lear is to immerse oneself into a cosmos, one of vast open space vulnerable beneath the large indifferent heavens. It is not to think so much as to feel intuitively. Oh, it makes me think, certainly. But the better thoughts it provides me are not articulated in words, but in images, in emotions, in tones. To even explain how I feel King Lear cheapens it; what Lear immerses me into cannot be put into any other than Shakespeare's own words.

Fyodor Dostoevsky. Among the influences specified here, there is obviously a powerful influence of Christianity. But so too is there a powerful influence of existential, atheistic, nihilistic doubt and disbelief. It is Dostoevsky who occupies, in my mind, that realm that is not in between these extremes, but is both at the same time.

Writing and Audience

2009-03-13T11:56:00.002-05:00

Intended Audience obviously has a great impact on writing form and style. I write regularly at three different blogs, and have a very different conception of who may be reading each. I don't simply write a brief essay on a topic, then post the essay wherever the content fits; I have a very different tone and style at each blog.

Consideration for audience can be a challenge in a composition course; students, I think, tend to see themselves writing for the teacher. That's why (inspired by my brother) I'm now asking students to read their in-class informal writings aloud. It is not that I want to intimidate them (although some are obviously frightened by the prospect), nor that I want them to learn how to read aloud (though they may). It is that I don't want students to think they are only writing for me. Knowing that they may be reading their responses aloud, they may write differently. They may gain a better sense of public identity as a writer. That seems important to how we use language.

I'm hoping students engage more deeply with their writing (particularly tone, style, form) when they are "performing" not exclusively for a teacher, but for each other.

Rejecting Militarism

2009-03-10T23:45:00.004-05:00

Peter King writes about Larry Fitzgerald's USO tour to Iraq:

"In every stop on the four-player tour [...] of U.S. military bases in Iraq, the playoff hero told the crowd some version of this: 'Thank you. If it wasn't for you doing what you do, I wouldn't be able to do what I do. I just want you to know how much I appreciate all the sacrifices you're making -- and I'm not alone.''"

I know many people believe this: that the U.S. military occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan are necessary for Larry Fitzgerald to make millions of dollars catching passes. But I see it as a non sequitur that perpetuates a militaristic culture that glorifies war. This is why I can't share in Nathan Schneider's hope that

"There must be a way to honor such sacrifices as war brings out in people while abhorring the pointless insanity that occasioned it, abhorring it so completely that it can never possibly happen again."

I think this sort of mythology (that soldiers occupying a foreign nation make our necessary lifestyles possible--a belief many hold as a secure article of faith, one that is difficult to refute, yet also difficult to prove) contributes to a culture that sees warfare as necessary and honorable. The conventional wisdom that we are able to live our lives as we do because of soldiers grants a necessity to warfare that I do not accept. I want to reject militarism at all levels.

Teaching, Literature, and Ideas

2009-03-04T20:14:00.004-06:00

From Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find:"

“Jesus was the only One that ever raised the dead,” The Misfit continued, “and He shouldn’t have done it. He thrown everything off balance. If He did what He said, then it’s nothing for you to do but throw away everything and follow Him, and if He didn’t, then it’s nothing for you to do but enjoy the few minutes you got left the best way you can--by killing somebody or burning down his house or doing some other meanness to him. No pleasure but meanness,”

I usually start discussion of this story with this passage, and allow the conversation to branch away from the story itself into a broader discussion of ideas. What is the Misfit saying? That he sees religion as an all or nothing proposition, and that if there is no God, there is no basis for morality. This can lead to a discussion of Pascal's wager, Dostoevsky's "Everything is permitted," and a whole host of philosophical and theological subjects. I can ask if students consider religious belief an all or nothing proposition, or what it means to be somewhere in between. At one point I ask students, what prevents you from killing other people? Or more specifically, if there is no afterlife, what prevents you from killing other people? I'm interested to hear students' arguments about where morality might be grounded, about what grounds human actions.

I typically focus class discussion on the text (this semester, I'm finding students really respond to "character," expressing like or dislike for these imaginary characters, and offering insightful comments on fictional characters' minds and actions). But for a brief period, discussion is not focused on the text, but on the thoughts this text can inspire. I hope students are reflecting on what grounds their lives. That certainly doesn't mean I'm preaching (for what it's worth, after this discussion I doubt students could confidently know whether I'm an adamant believer or a staunch atheist), and I try to leave the discussion open. But I don't think it is wrong during a literature course to ask questions that probe students' assumptions and values, to ask them to share their ideas and consider their own lives.

Torrential Downpour

2009-03-03T15:03:00.008-06:00

This blog is about "life in ideas." Sometimes that means attempting to write serious and developed analysis and commentary; often it is an informal diary of my own life in reading and ideas. I prefer to write the former, but find I still need the latter. I'll try to alert you when it is the latter, so you know what posts to skip.

Books and Reading
I was recently telling my wife how amazed I was at the ability of any novel, even a bad one, to entirely suck me into its world. While I'm reading a novel, I can visualize so much of it in detail. She pointed out that I'm a visual person, and that others do not necessarily read that way. And indeed, that's true: others may not visualize events of fiction clearly. Individuals' minds operate in very different ways--again suggesting to me that a solitary, objective method of reading is neither possible nor desirable.

I have so much unread fiction and drama around my house, it seems unnecessary to buy more such books until I put a bigger dent in what I have now (with exception: I still buy fiction and drama for professional use). But there is plenty of poetry and non-fiction out there that I'm still going to buy.

I have come to detest looking at my Riverside Anthology of Literature. I've taught from it for so long, and so next semester I'm giving it up. I'll teach short stories from an anthology exclusively devoted to short stories, and make my own poetry unit out of handouts, links, and attachments. It will be fun to choose utterly whatever poetry I wish.

I assigned Flannery O'Connor's "A Good Man is Hard to Find" for this week, but didn't want to drag that detestably bulky Riverside Anthology of Literature home to read it. I left it in my office, assuming I had an anthology at home with the story in it. I did--an anthology of 50 Short Story Masterpieces. Now, I don't read a lot of short stories. When I read fiction, I prefer to get sucked into a novel's world, and I also read a fair amount of drama, poetry, and non-fiction. But opening up this book and looking at the table of contents, I suddenly have a desire to just sit with this book and read short stories for a while. It's something like serendipity.

rambing, undeveloped thoughts on reason, belief, animals, and rights
This is not intended as a developed argument, but an attempt to articulate some swirling thoughts I've been having.

I've become convinced that it is wrong to kill animals for our uses. I have not, however, become convinced that it is wrong to use animals for any human uses (but I can be convinced: I obviously made the transition from meat-eater to vegetarian over an idea, and a commitment to living according to convictions. If I am convinced, I would go vegan instead of mostly vegan). I became a vegetarian by reason: when learning about the intelligence of animals, I decided the animals' lives are worth more than the pleasure I could derive from eating them. But I haven't been compelled by the same reason to suggest that it is always wrong for humans to use animals.

Part of this is a matter of "faith." For what reason do we believe human beings have rights? Perhaps because a state grants human beings rights. Perhaps because a creator endowed all human beings with inherent dignity. But there is no act of reason that convinces me that human beings have rights--reason could just as easily lead me to an existential nihilism in which "everything is permitted" and nothing has any inherent value (see Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamozov for exploration of "everything is permitted," or for that matter Flannery O'Connor's Misfit). As it happens, I do believe all human beings are imbued with dignity--because of my religious belief. And it is my commitment to pacifism and vegetarianism that has led me to move away from existentialism--away from the belief that we should create our own meaning, and toward the belief in absolute moral principles.

It is not by reason that I am led to the belief that all human beings have "dignity" or, if you prefer, "value." And so by reason I am also not compelled to assign animals an inherent "value." Again, this is because by reason alone, I might be led to believe there is no inherent value in anything, and that "everything is permitted." If it is a self-evident truth that human beings have rights, that self-evident truth is a leap of faith. It is a belief that human beings have rights, dignity, value. So too is it a leap of faith to claim animals have rights, dignity, value.

Now, as it happens I do not believe that "everything is permitted," I do believe that human beings have inherent dignity and rights, and I do believe that animals have inherent dignity and should not be slaughtered for our purposes. And though I would consider myself an "animal rights" advocate, I am a little uncomfortable with the term. What "rights" does an animal have? Well, a right to live. A right to freedom? Perhaps--and if I can be convinced by reason that an animals has that right inherently, I would become vegan (well, I'm already "mostly vegan"--I eat cheese sometimes, but most days I am completely vegan. And I like that better).

What is my rambling getting at? Not, I hope, merely my own justification for eating cheese sometimes. It is that there is a tension between reason and belief even for the most secular of arguments. I think there is a tension between reason and belief in discussion of animal rights. Right now, I'm living in that tension.

Blushing

2009-03-02T18:14:00.003-06:00

Why did I not realize that the witticism "A hard man is good to find" is sexual in nature until about an hour after I quoted it to a class? I had envisioned a "hard man" being a tough, rugged fellow that drinks a lot. And why did the students not just start laughing at me? And why did I attribute this quote to Oscar Wilde, when apparently it was said by Mae West?

As my wife said, I've had quite a day.

Going to the zone. The Twilight Zone.

2009-02-26T20:22:00.008-06:00

I really enjoy the hour long episodes of The Twilight Zone. Certainly they are slow: they lack the punch of the better half hour episodes. But the longer format allows for deeper exploration of theme.

"He's Alive" features Dennis Hopper playing a would-be fascist with convincing emotional vulnerability. It ends with a haunting and eloquent image: a moving shadow of Adolf Hitler, as Rod Serling talks about the spirit of Hitler being kept alive wherever there is prejudice, hatred and bigotry. He is alive, Serling tells us, because we keep him alive.

"Valley of the Shadow" is really interesting. A reporter stumbles upon a ubiquitous creepy small town to find they have the power to manipulate matter, a power that could end disease and hunger. They must keep it a secret, however, until the world is ready to live in peace. Great scientific discoveries, the mayor tells the reporter, have been used for violence and destruction--this scientific knowledge too could destroy the world. The reporter and the mayor are able to have intriguing conversations about ends and means. If the townspeople would justify killing the reporter as an evil means to a good end, are they any better than the warmongering world outside Peaceful Valley? The town withholds the scientific knowledge that could be used for evil, but withholding the science also means letting people in the world suffer and die--are the townspeople, too, weighing means and ends? The episode features explicit and implicit exploration of peace and of freedom.

Many of the half-hour episodes feature rather ham-fisted theme; the longer format allows for deeper reflection, and even for something The Twilight Zone isn't known for: subtlety.

Torrential Downpour

2009-02-23T08:41:00.015-06:00

Art in our lives
Spoonbridge with Cherry will temporarily be without its cherry (MPR).

I feel a vested interest in this work of art, not just because it is a Twin Cities icon. It is in front of Spoonbridge with Cherry that I proposed to my wife. It is with art I marked a momentous and memorable occasions.

In comp class today we're discussing David Guterson's "Enclosed. Encyclopedic. Endured. One Week in the Mall of America." Guterson mentions a mass wedding and a Christian worship service at the MOA. There's something tacky and trivializing about that, I (and several students) thought. Malls are crass and commercial places, not a place for a significant, life-changing ritual, and the materialistic consumption makes it an awkward place for religious worship.

But art feels sacred. In some ways art exists to bring meaning to our lives, and thus it is with art we may seek to mark meaningful occasions.

Lit Syllabus Overhaul

It started with Sharon Olds poetry: reading one student's negative reaction to Olds' poetry made me think "You know, why do I teach Olds' poetry? I don't have any special affection for this. Is it just because I've always taught it and I keep leaving it in the syllabus?" I considered dropping Olds from future semesters--but then discussion went well. Her poetry does provide us chances to discuss serious matters of poetry (for example, "The Victims" allows us to consider a duel meaning of the word "take/took," which allows us to illustrate how consciously we must read words in a poem). So I will keep Olds in the future.

And then I considered a scene in A Gathering of Old Men that reminds me of a scene from One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. The men talk back to Mapes, and when he thinks he can stare them down in fear, they look back at him directly; and the men laugh at Big Nurse, and when she darts her eyes around to meet theirs, they still giggle. And I thought that on a gloss, these novels are similar: a group of men have lived in fear for a long time, but come together as a community to stand up to old authority figures. Do I need to teach both novels? But then of course that's a brief gloss--these novels are vastly different in narrative form and style, as well as specific subject matter. They are unique works that can both be taught.

I questioned changes to the syllabus over these specific works, even though my conclusion was these works don't need to be removed. Yet the questioning process has led me to consider a major reworking of my general lit class reading list.

For example, I've never taught a single work by my two favorite novelists, John Fowles and Fyodor Dostoevsky. Dostoevsky's masterpieces are too long to justify teaching in this course (exposure to variety is an objective), and I'm not sure if I'd want to teach any of his shorter works--but Notes from the Underground is definitely a possibility. I'll take another look at Fowles' The Ebony Tower to see if there are shorter works worth including--or I might just start teaching The French Lieutenant's Woman. Really, The French Lieutenant's Woman offers so many directions for discussion, it might just be perfect for the course.

See why I blog? I talk myself into teaching my favorite books.

It's stupid, but it's my life.
At We Have Mixed Feelings About Sven Sundgaard, I discussed some ways for parents to maintain a sense of culture during the time when raising small children dominates time and limits options.

The Ending in "A Gathering of Old Men"

2009-02-19T22:03:00.015-06:00

Aesthetically, I think Ernest Gaines' A Gathering of Old Men would better end with the penultimate chapter:

"But we had all gathered around Charlie. Mathu had knelt down 'side him and raised his head out of the dust. They had really got him. Right in the belly. He laid there like a big old bear looking up at us. He was trying to say something, but it never came out. He kept on looking at us, but after a while you could tell he wasn't seeing us no more. I leaned over and touched him, hoping that some of that stuff he had found back there in the swamps might rub off on me. After I touched him, the rest of the men did the same. Then the women, even Candy. Then Glo told her grandchildren they must touch him, too."

But while the final chapter seems to be but a tying up of loose ends, it actually works thematically. It is here we see reconciliation, a movement toward healing. The novel includes many anecdotes showing how the legal system was a major part of the racial oppression and injustice of the past; in the final chapter, we see the law treating the black men fairly (in this case justice means amnesty). Gil sits with his family in court, Salt and Pepper play together and win, Mathu is able to leave without Candy, and we end with a conciliatory image, with Candy holding Lou Dimes' hand (a similar image ends Paradise Lost, also a moment of hope at the end of a dark period).

At the end Lou Dimes, a peripheral character that primarily operates as a narrator, becomes important. Earlier in the novel, when Mapes uses violence, Dimes says "I didn't like what was going on either, but I knew that had I interfered, Mapes would have knocked hell out of me and thrown me in the back of his car." Lou Dimes disapproves, but he passively allows violence and racial injustice to occur (this and other forms of passivity are addressed throughout the novel). But in the end, Lou Dimes is not allowed to be passive:

"You're in charge. Raise your right hand. You do swear--"
"Like hell," Lou said.
"You're still in charge," Mapes said. "Now, don't bother me anymore tonight."
"What am I supposed to do?" Lou asked him.
"You figure that out," Mapes said. "Just leave me alone."

The old way is past. People like Lou Dimes, formerly neutral non-participants, must work toward a new way of doing things.

But Reader-response is necessary here. It is likely as a reader I find Lou Dimes significant because his social role is close to my own (the teacher in the bar is certainly closer). In my social role, I have rarely had active individual part on any side of racial injustice or the fight for progress toward equality. I've read, taught, talked, listened, discussed, thought, and as an individual strived to treat all people with equal dignity. But I have mostly been a non-participant, a passive citicizen, and I recognize my social role in coming to the novel. Other readers of different ages, races, and gender will find greater meaning in other characters. Certainly geographic location matters too: I suspect a southerner reads the book differently than a northerner (and more specifically, a Louisianian will read the text differently than a Minnesotan). We bring ourselves to the text, including our values (when reading Coetzee's Elizabeth Costello, isn't a vegetarian going to respond differently than a meat-eater?), and we needn't deny that (and it is why in literary study I prefer plurality to objectivity). The text offers me a moral meaning that it won't offer to everybody--and rather than deny that, I prefer to recognize my subjective history and concerns that may direct my focus while reading.

Thomas More in "The Tudors"

2009-02-18T11:02:00.002-06:00

Halfway through its second season, The Tudors loses one of its more interesting characters, Thomas More. More is complexly written and subtly played by Jeremy Northam--I'll miss him.

Thomas More is shown to be a man of scrupulous conscience, a thoughtful man of principle and conviction. In season two, that is mostly sympathetic--he is willing to die rather than betray his own conscience with an oath he doesn't believe. But we might also recall the first season to see the other side of scrupulous devotion to conviction. Certainly More is willing to sacrifice himself to his principles. But when given the power, he was also willing to sacrifice others to his principles. He says in the second season his own conscience will not allow him to say the oath, though he does not comment on the conscience of others. Yet as Chancellor, he executed Protestants--not because he was forced to, but by his own choice of policy. Is there a difference between the principled Protestants that died under More's condemnation, and the principled Catholic More that dies under the royal condemnation? I'm not sure there is, but at no point does More explicitly suggest he's considered this connection.

And what is More's role to martyrdom? When he resigns from office, he tells the king he will never speak out publicly against him, will always be loyal to him, and just wishes to retire from public life. He tells his family he doesn't willingly seek martyrdom. Indeed, he doesn't chase after a death--it is only when the king chases him down to insist on the oath that More willingly submits to death. And yet...I can't help but feeling that even if More did not willingly pursue martyrdom, he willingly invited it. He took no effort to avoid his death. I don't blame him for skipping the coronation. But might he have gone into chosen exile, fleeing England? Did he really have to go visit Catherine? If he didn't publicly condemn the king and bring death too him, he quietly waited in expectation.

Without More, the show will still be interesting. I particularly enjoy Peter O'Toole's portrayal of Pope Paul III--his very speech is oily, slithery, always seeming to slide and slip. There are stacks upon stacks of ruthless characters, but still some ambiguous and complex ones, too. But I'll miss Thomas More.

Henry IV, Part One

2009-02-14T09:29:00.006-06:00

What joys does this play offer an actor? The personal and political relationships are complex, subtle--there are infinite ways to play most of these characters. The shades of meaning, the ambiguity of purpose--so many of the characters offer the chance for original interpretation (particularly if the actor shows some bravery--most of the characters could be played dully, too). The language is evocative: most of the characters are capable of creative imagery, clever turns of speech. Falstaff did not meet my expectations in print, but alive on stage, he must be something altogether new.

My favorite passage:

Glendower: I cannot blame him. At my nativity

The front of heaven was full of fiery shapes

Of burning cressets, and at my birth

The frame and huge foundation of the earth

Shaked like a coward.

Hotspur: Why, so it would have done at the same season if your mother's cat had but kittened, though yourself had never been born.

Glendower: I say the earth did shake when I was born.

A close second:

Falstaff: 'Tis not due yet: I would be loath to pay him before his day. What need I be so forward with him that calls not on me? Well, 'tis no matter; honor pricks me on. Yea, but how if honor prick me off when I come on? How then? Can honor set to a leg? Or an arm? No. Or take away the grief of a wound? No. Honor hath no skill in surgery then? No. What is honor? A word. What is in that word honor? What is honor? Air--a trim reckoning! Who hath it? He that died a Wednesday. Doth he feel it? No. Doth he hear it? No. 'Tis insensible then? Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? No. Why? Detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I'll none of it. Honor is a mere scutcheon--and so ends my catechism.

John Donne's "Divine Meditation 9"

2009-02-12T22:49:00.007-06:00

In this poem, the poet challenges religious doctrine, challenges human culpability for sin, and then simply accuses God of being unmerciful, before unsatisfactorily dropping the questions in humility and repenting of sins.

It begins:

If poisonous minerals, and if that tree,

Whose fruit threw death on else immortal us,

If lecherous goats, if serpents envious

Cannot be damned; alas, why should I be?

The doctrine on original sin holds that after the fall, all of creation was corrupted--the sin of humankind brought death into creation for all. Yet only humans in earthly creation are subject to eternal punishment. The poet questions this: there are harmful, bad, "evil" elements in nature that are not subject to the threat of damnation. The poet's challenge may go further: instead of humankind's sin bringing death to nature, perhaps nature (in the form of the tree) is responsible for bringing death to humans.

But inherent in this challenge is an evasion of responsibility. The poet thrusts the blame for the fall on the tree and its fruit. In the Genesis story, Adam also tries to evade responsibility, answering God, "The woman whom thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of the tree, and I did eat." Adam shifts blame to Eve, and to God. Eve's response is much simpler: "The serpent beguiled me, and I did eat." It's still an evasion (blaming the serpent), but takes more responsibility than Adam (Milton handles this beautifully in Paradise Lost, giving Adam a lengthy speech, and giving Eve her simple sentence).

The next challenge springs from the first:

Why should intent or reason, born in me,

Make sins, else equal, in me more heinous?

The poet answers the previous question: the reason humans must bear responsibility for their "sins" (while rocks, plants, and animals bear no responsibility) is because of reason and intent. Animals can't reason, thus can't sin--their actions lack intent.

The poet asks why reason and intent should make human actions damnable as opposed to the actions of rocks, plants, and animals, but I think today the challenge goes further. I can't help but think of two 19th century titans.

Darwin rips apart the distinct separation between humans and animals--we are a part of nature, subject to and emergent from the same evolutionary forces of the rest of nature. Even our reason is but an evolutionary development. Like every other living thing in nature, we struggle for survival. So if we are not created fundamentally different from other parts of nature, why are we held accountable in a way other parts of nature are not?

And in Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky rips to shreds the idea that humans behave according to reason, suggesting it is irrational desires that have motivated human behavior all through history. If humans are irrational, then what is the "reason" that would hold humans accountable for sin? We behave according to all sorts of unreasonableness, sometimes against our own interests. Why, then, sin?

Finally, the poet questions God's mercy:

And mercy being easy, and glorious

To God, in his stern wrath, why threatens he?

If God is loving and merciful, then why does he threaten humans with damnation? Couldn't he just show mercy? Can't he--and wouldn't he want to--forgive humans without requirement? It is a common--and powerful--question about the nature of the Christian God.

In the Petrarchan structure of this poem, the octet sets out the problem. The poet asks three questions about God that come down to this: why is there hell at all? The problem is posed: how will the sestet resolve the problem?

But who am I, that dare dispute with thee

O God?

What? The poet sets out serious challenges to Christian doctrine on damnation, calls into question the threat faced by humans, even directly challenges God's mercy...and then backs off in humility?

This means, of course, that the questions he raised in the octet are unresolved. Even if he is now abandoning the questions, recognizing the superiority of God over himself, he's still leaving the questions. The reader is left with them, deliberately unanswered--because there are no satisfactory answers.

The rest of the poem breaks off into conventionality:

Oh! of thine only worthy blood,

And my tears, make a heavenly lethean flood,

And drown in it my sin's black memory;

That thou remember them, some claim as debt,

I think it mercy, if thou wilt forget.

I find this mostly forgettable, except perhaps the last line. The word "mercy" will call to mind the use of "mercy" in lines 7-8. The poet asks God for the mercy that God supposedly has but doesn't seem to show. Does the last plea for mercy subtly continue the challenge? Perhaps.

What one is left with in this poem are the three questions in the octet. I can't think the humble rejection of the questions in line 9 is entirely sincere; the questions have serious theological consequences, and are difficult to leave behind in a conventional show of humility and repentance. The poem asks major theological questions about sin and damnation. But perhaps the ideas are even more fundamental: the poem asks questions about humankind's place in the cosmos and about the nature of God.

Stupid Summer Project: The Apartment

2009-02-11T21:33:00.002-06:00

Kramer: Jerry, you don't have five thousand dollars you can lend her?

Kramer: Well, then what did you loan her the five thousand dollars for?

Comment: George Costanza is cursed. Hated by God, the universe will always conspire to ruin him. Not a tragic ruin--that would at least allow him his dignity. No, for him it is a comic ruin, a cursed clown, plaything of the cosmos (as flies to wanton boys, so is George to the gods). OF COURSE when he wears a wedding ring to a party as "a sociological experiment" several desirable women find him attractive but must turn from him, because it is too bad he's married. Of course. Once again, I take Costanza's comic disaster personally--his indignity is my indignity, his comic suffering is mine. George Costanza is spun together out of Charlie Brown and Biff Loman. He is the apotheosis of the gifted liar (his wife is an entomologist?), yet doomed to ineffectual failure. He is you. He is me.

Nonviolence: humans and animals

2009-02-11T12:12:00.011-06:00

Gary Francione, a vegan arguing against violence:

"throughout history, we have engaged and continue to engage in violent actions that we have sought to justify as an undesirable means to a desirable end. Anyone who has ever used violence claims to regret having to resort to it, but argues that some desirable goal supposedly justified its use."

[...]
"Violence treats others as means to ends rather than as ends in themselves. When we engage in violence against others—whether they are human or nonhuman—we ignore their inherent value. We treat them only as things that have no value except that which we decide to give them."

[...]
"Animal exploitation is pervasive in our society. This is the case because we think that the ends (the supposed benefits we derive from animal use) justifies the means (imposing suffering and death on billions of nonhumans every year), and because we treat animals exclusively as commodities and ignore their inherent value."

I hear echoes of John Howard Yoder. Though the arguments come from a different place (Francione as an animal rights advocate, Yoder as a Christian theologian), Yoder also rejects logic which justifies horrible means to achieve imagined ends. Yoder, too, insists upon the individual's inherent dignity, and criticizes war advocates that view human beings as means to be used (or destroyed). And I think Francione rightly extends the logic of pacifism to treatment of animals (and applies the logic of veganism to other human behavior):

"in my view, the animal rights position is the ultimate rejection of violence. It is the ultimate affirmation of peace. I see the animal rights movement as the logical progression of the peace movement..."

Reading Jhumpa Lahiri's " The Namesake"

2009-02-08T14:02:00.017-06:00

Narration

Jhumpa Lahiri narrates The Namesake in present tense, a form I don't care for in longer fiction (I find it unnatural to tell a long story as if it is currently happening, even as I realize that people often slip into this tense when telling stories of past events). Occasionally the narration will switch to past tense, letting the reader in on some past events of a particular character, events which helped lead to this present tense moment. In the final page of the book, Lahiri switches to future tense (though the final two sentences are present tense). I don't care for the present tense, but Lahiri is in control of it, writing it well and making the tense-switches smoothly. The tense is thematically important. To put a narrative in past tense is to already give it meaning, to provide its context and significance--to write in the present tense it to describe a "now" that is not already fixed in time, that is not already defined. The future tense suits the ending: Gogol has an open, unfixed future, sitting with an opened book, yet that book is a central symbol of his coming to terms with his past.

The third person narration shifts perspective--usually it enters the perspective of Gogol/Nikhil, occasionally sharing the perspective of Ashima (there is a deep connection between the lives of Gogol and Ashima--one could argue that Ashima is as much the protagonist of the novel as Gogol), at least once entering the perspective of Ashoke. In one chapter the perspective shifts to Moushumi, Gogol's/Nikhil's wife. This is the only chapter in which the third person narration refers to Gogol/Nikhil as "Nikhil"; in all other chapters, the third person narrator calls him "Gogol" (including narration of Gogol's/Nikhil's perspective, and including sections when every other character calls him Nikhil). As issues surrounding his name are central to the novel, the narrative choice to consistently call him Gogol (except for one chapter about Gogol's wife, whose relationship to him is tied up in a confused relationship to her own past, and for which reason she perhaps doesn't truly know him) is obviously significant. Even if he wishes to move beyond the name "Gogol," the third person narrative suggests he is still essentially, inherently, Gogol. However, in the final two paragraphs (which switch to future tense until the last two sentences, and which describe the inevitable moment of Gogol finally reading "The Overcoat"), the third person narrator describes him only in pronoun form. Perhaps here even the narrator is willing to leave his future identity open.

The narrative includes some conventional forms to structure events. There is foreshadowing (the death of Ashima's father forshadowing the death of Gogol's and Sonia's father, Gogol's affair with a married woman foreshadowing Moushumi's affair), and there is the motif of trains for transition (several life-altering events occur on or in relation to trains). But I actually find the text subtle. Some of the conflicts of The Namesake are common to literature about children of immigrants (tensions of identity, new and old traditions, etc.), but these themes are handled in a quiet, inobvious way. Many of these conflicts are implicit to Gogol's romantic relationships, underlying them rather than being pronounced by them.

Food

Lahiri describes the food characters prepare and eat in specific detail. No matter what I do, I cannot read descriptions of preparing or eating food without thinking as a vegetarian. It may simply be an extension of life into reading--as a (mostly vegan) vegetarian, I must be consciously aware of all the food I ever eat. That heightened awareness of food is hard to set aside when I turn to a book. Perhaps worse, I find myself taking note of whether and how much fruit and vegetables the characters are eating. This is stupid and absurd, yet again, it is an extension of my own life habits into my reading.

Reminds me of

Zadie Smith's White Teeth, Lan Samantha Chang's Hunger, Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, David Mura's Where the Body Meets Memory

Reading(s)

2009-02-04T21:30:00.008-06:00

a contrapuntal essay

One reason I enjoy teaching literature is because students' insights provide me new ways of thinking about particular works of literature. I've taught Death of a Salesman every semester I've taught a literature course; while I can't say I have a total handle of the play, I would say I feel intimately familiar with the Loman family. Today's discussion focused on the characters, and we discussed Biff, and students brought up whether he is running away from his family, is this justified, etc.

One student suggested that what Biff was doing was quite understandable. He's procrastinating. Under the intense pressures and expectations of his family, he simply escapes, putting off being anything in life. This provided me a new way of thinking about Biff. Perhaps he is not, as George Costanza says, the biggest loser in the history of American literature. Perhaps Biff is simply in moratorium.

Moratorium is a concept developed by Erik Erikson, referring to a period in adolescence or young adulthood when the individual puts off important decisions, escapes from a life of consequences, and enters a period of waiting. When the individual is still searching for his or her identity, moratorium offers a break from serious decisions in life and a chance to find that identity. In Young Man Luther, Erikson suggests that Luther's decision to enter a monastary was his moratorium: he was not ready to become what his father wanted him to become, so he did the only thing he could do to escape being forced into that role.

Willy Loman lived in an idealized world, and he inflated Biff's sense of self and his place in the world. When Biff saw that the ideals were a facade, he escaped. He became a drifter, going westward, roaming about doing nothing in particular, avoiding permanence and serious responsibility. Yet perhaps this state of drifting is simply Biff's extended--but temporary--moratorium, one from which he will eventually return. He may not be a drifter forever, for by the end of the play, he has found himself. At Willy's funeral, Biff is able to honestly say to a still deluded Happy, "I know who I am, kid." Does that mean he's finally recognized that he's a loser, a drifter, a nobody that amounts to nothing? Or does it mean that now that he has achieved self-understanding, self-recognition, he is ready to honestly engage with the world, to leave his moratorium? While I've always thought the former, I suddenly think it is possible it is the latter. Having abandoned Willy's idealized dream, he can now emerge to an authentic life.

In my composition class, we are currently reading several variants of the Cinderella story, as well as various essays about Cinderella. In "'Cinderella' and the Loss of Father-Love," Jacqueline Schectman seems to evoke moratorium to explain "Ashputtle":

"Three times Cinderella ventures out to dance, and three times runs away, to hide once more among the ashes by the hearth. This retreat until the time is right, until the world feels safe enough for love, is part of the connection to the earth Cinderella demonstrates throughout this tale. There is safety in her dirty rags, and she'll hide in them until her doubts and fears release her into life."

And this, too, makes sense to me. One can easily interpret Cinderella's life in ashes as a moratorium, a hiding from the world, a time to find herself before entering a world of consequences.

Now I find myself using psychological theory to understand literature. And yet just a few days ago, I found myself using New Criticism to understand literature in the classroom. Am I so fickle? Well, no--I haven't shifted from New Criticism to Psychoanalytic Criticism. I've used either theory when I found it useful. And frankly, that's how I've always used Literary Theory. I don't typically devote myself to one theoretical approach to literature, but I'm willing to take a la carte from any school of theory where it may suit my purposes. Choosing a particular approach, I think, would be limiting, would close me off from all possibilities in a work of literature. And yet to ignore these theories altogether would also close me off. If I approach a work openly, with awareness of theoretical approaches but limited to none, I can willingly explore the work with multiple perspectives in the same moment. I still want to focus primarily (if not exclusively) on the text itself, and I would want my personal reaction to be a direct engagement with the text. But to understand that text, I don't close myself off to many ways of thinking.

My experiences discussing literature with students illustrates for me the purpose of literary study and literary criticism. Embracing subjectivity and diversity does not require embracing relativism--I don't think all ways of reading are equal. But I don't think the purpose of literature courses is to train all students to read in a uniform, proper way, and I don't think the purpose of literary criticism is to reach a single, correct reading of a work (it's funny how that "proper" reading method is always the way the particular advocate of that method happens to read, and thus the "correct" reading also happens to be the speaker's reading). What I find is that a plurality of voices, a diversity of individuals approaching the text on its own merits, but reading it in their own ways and for their own purposes, provides a wide variety of insights to the text. I don't know that there is a single reading of Biff Loman, but I know that my different students' readings of Biff Loman help me to understand Biff Loman. I don't need to find the reading, and I don't even necessarily need to cling to a reading; what I want is to be aware of multiple readings. And often these readings can coexist within my mind at the same time, not demanding that I reject one for the other.

Reading at the Unconscious

2009-02-04T21:02:00.006-06:00

In "'Cinderella': a Story of Sibling Rivalry and Oedipal Conflicts," Bruno Bettelheim writes:

"When a story corresponds to how the child feels deep down--as no realistic narrative is likely to do--it attains an emotional quality of 'truth' for the child."

Does this statement apply only to children hearing fairy tales, or is it possible that this statement could apply to adults at some level?

(just a note: for a variety of reasons, I've decided to start blogging here under my real name. But somehow I still want to keep some distance between my blogging and my teaching, so when I write about the classroom, I'll still probably blog as PV).

New Criticism in the Classroom

2009-02-02T11:01:00.008-06:00

Today in class I told students to forget authorship, to ignore the name at the top of the page. And that's when I realized that in the classroom, I'm something of a New Critic.

I generally provide little to no biographical information about the author, focusing on the text itself. I like a Reader-response approach, but what I want students responding to is the text alone (and their experience with it). I don't want students to worry too much about the author's identity or biography (with some exceptions). In some cases, if students ask questions about the author, I can provide them nothing because I know nothing (other than that they write in English, and perhaps a general idea of when they wrote). I do provide some cultural and historical material, but only when it is directly relevant to the text itself.

The specific context today was Robert Frost's "Home Burial." While teaching this poem, I often talk about ways of dealing with death: the different ways individuals handle grief, the rituals we construct surrounding death, etc. A student raised the issue of gender roles in the poem, and I'm open to that exploration (though in this poem, I didn't want gender roles to define the different ways the husband and wife grieve). But for some reason when it was pointed out that the poet was a man and could be slanting perspectives of the characters (which is true), I found this a tremendous distraction from the text itself. The wife in the poem has lengthy stretches of straight dialogue where she is able to express what she thinks and feels. If we get hung up on discussing how a male author constructed those words for her, then we aren't taking the words of the text on their own merits, and I don't think we're reading the poem well.

I don't think I can formally call what we do in my literature classes New Criticism: I'm far too willing to bring up extra-textural material if I think it offers insights into the text (or if I think the text offers insight into extra-textural material). But in my decision to forgo authorial biography almost entirely, and my insistence that students respond to what they see in the text itself, I'm certainly incorporating the ideas of New Criticism into the classroom.

Dostoevsky and Belief

2009-01-30T11:16:00.009-06:00

"Show an affirming flame."

--W.H. Auden, "September 1, 1939"

In Dostoevsky's great novels, religious belief is elusive. Certainly Crime and Punishment contains a story of Christian suffering and redemption, and Demons lampoons the nihilistic radicals. But I can hardly see The Idiot as an affirmation of Christian faith--it is a book consumed with doubt (more strongly, loss or absence of faith. I think of Rogozhin and Myshkin, in the dark, discussing belief in God, looking at Holbein's painting, facing each other as contrasting rivals, being ruined in the end). Notes from the Underground and The Adolescent defy religious definition, and his masterpiece among masterpieces, The Brothers Karamozov, seems an affirmation of Christian faith, but contains within it such diverse and strong characters and ideas of the opposite that again, religious belief is elusive.

I might describe Dostoevsky's novels as a vacillation between belief and unbelief, but that's not quite accurate. They seem to hold belief and unbelief at the same time, in the same moment, in the same mind. But at any rate, the tension of belief and unbelief is the substance of Dostoevsky's novels, his characters, perhaps his own soul.

And that may be why I'm drawn to him, why I consider him my master. I could describe myself as a believer who has always intensely doubted, or as a non-believer that has never actually given up believing. I find that in Dostoevsky; I find it in the characters that haunt his novels.

I think perhaps the image of the seed in The Brothers Karamozov is significant. His novels seem wracked with unbelief, but contain within them a seed of belief, a tiny affirmation. They show an affirming flame, but a tiny one, a flame that barely keeps out the overwhelming darkness.

The benefits of discomfort while teaching

2009-01-28T12:22:00.002-06:00

I'm teaching an ITV course this semester, meaning there are students at another location that communicate via television screens and microphones, as well as students in the classroom. In the first two days, I've noticed this dynamic requires me to be much more on edge, much more alert. It's not easy to get comfortable teaching in this environment.

But is this a bad thing? Perhaps if I teach from a heightened alertness instead of a calm comfort, I'll do a better job teaching. I'll be sharper, and the educational experience for the students will be better.

After all, lecture is much more comfortable than discussion. When lecturing, one can get into familiar speaking patterns and cover familiar material. In discussion, a facilitating teacher has to be more flexible, innovative, thinking quickly about student comments and trying to help a student-driven discussion move in positive directions. Because one can't plan out all features of a discussion, a teacher has to be on edge. This is true whether students are very responsive (you must be sharp in allowing all students to share ideas and sharp in helping bring those ideas together in a useful way), or whether students are not responsive at all (for then you must figure out way to get responses, or ways to usefully manage the time despite unresponsiveness). And for the classes I teach (composition and literature), discussion is much preferred to lecture.

Again, this alertness is a good thing. That's not to say it is bad teaching to get comfortable and familiar with your material and and the way you address that material. But when discussing literature, I think the class is better for the students because I'm not comfortable. When I'm edgy and alert, I'm giving students more chances to provide their own insights, and I'm sharper at finding new and creative insights based on the discussion.

A Very Brief Defense of Anthropomorphism

2009-01-27T08:50:00.006-06:00

Science has shown us that animals are intelligent beings (many species of animals experience emotions, have relationships and social structures, some studies even find animals displaying imagination and deceit).

But the specific intelligence of animals may be difficult to express to humans. So when childrens' books or movies give animals human characteristics, they are merely translating the animal's mental, emotional, and social worlds into human terms. Anthropomorphism can be seen as a translation of animal characteristics, not an artificial application of human characteristics onto animals.

Marc Bekoff makes a similar defense of anthropomorphism in Animals Matter. Responding to Wittgenstein's claim that "If a lion could talk, we would not understand him," Bekoff writes

"In order to talk about the world of animals, we have to use whatever language we speak. So, when we want to describe what an animal may be feeling, we tend to use the same words that we would choose to describe our own human feelings or intentions" (38-39).

I think the benefits of anthropomorphism extend into childrens' literature, television, and film.

Torrential Downpour

2009-01-26T17:02:00.013-06:00

Teaching fear: rational or irrational?

I usually focus very well during class, but if I'm reading something aloud, and its the third time in the day I'm teaching the same section, and especially if I'm reading aloud something I've written, I admit that my mind sometimes wanders as I repeat the words on the page.

Afterward I'm always terrified: I was standing in front of the class saying words I was not conscious of saying. What if instead of reading the words, I said whatever it is my mind wanders to? What if I said something wildly inappropriate (if my mind wandered to a dirty joke I saw in a movie or TV show the night before, or hell, if I thought of a Philip Roth novel)?

This has never happened--I always apparently do an accurate job reading the text even if my mind is not focused (I do work with the written word for a living, after all). But on the rare times this happens, I'm always relieved when students ask me questions after class (I assume that if I said something crazy, they wouldn't ask me about basic class things like everything is normal).

Is this a rational or irrational fear? I should probably just make sure to focus my mind on the text I'm reading.

Present Tense in The Namesake
I usually find fiction written in the present tense irritating, phony. There's something natural about telling a story in the past tense, something empty and artificial about telling a story about right now.

In Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake, though, I am seeing the present tense as a considered and effective aesthetic choice. I'm not far into the book, but so far it takes place entirely in America--at least in the present tense. There is a past tense narration for one anecdote from Ashima's life in India, and a past tense narration for one longer anecdonte from Ashoke's life in India. The form suggests theme: life in India was past, life in America is now. There are few sentences that refer to the Ganguli family in India in the present tense (in one significant passage, the family prepares to take a trip to India, but the narration stops just as the plane leaves Boston and flies over the Atlantic).

But I'm not far into the book, and I have other ideas to flesh out later when I'm finished.

Winter
I feel like I live in two countries, so vastly different is the lifestyle of winter and summer in the upper midwest. The different clothing, the available leisure activities, the necessary chores, the very background of the world is so fundamentally different. The college semester spans these two countries, Fall Semester beginning in heat and ending in cold, Spring Semester beginning in cold and ending in heat.

Books

Most of my family's books are piled haphazardly, cramped for space. I set up a bookshelf in the living room so I could look at beautiful books and be happy. My display choices are on the bottom, my wife's choices on top (if you care, clicking the photo should show an enlarged image).

Nonviolence and Peaceful Disposition

2009-01-24T09:01:00.003-06:00

"but all these Vs: against! against! against!

--Tony Harrison, "v."

When striving for a nonviolent treatment of people and animals, it is too easy to argue with anger and hostility. Discussion of violence against humans often takes place in political argument, which splits into a contentious side-against-side debate without movement. This is doubly true regarding animals: if you are arguing for nonviolence against animals, not only are you are in conflict with the vast majority of the culture, but you are fighting with people over very real, personal, day-to-day values and behavior.

I find myself wanting to avoid this contentiousness. I want to strive for nonviolence, but I also want to strive for internal peacefulness and a peaceful relationship with other people. To argue against warfare and against killing of animals, it is rather too easy to be angry and contentious, rather difficult to find that internal peacefulness and a peaceful way to communicate with fellow people.

I argue about other topics. I argue about sports, but try to do so in an analytical manner, addressing the available data. And I argue about literature (though that, too, can get too close to contentious argument over deeply held values).

The hostility in discussion over nonviolence (against humans and animals) sometimes makes me want withdraw, to immerse myself into poetry, or into religion. But does a peaceful disposition require one to leave the real striving to others? Is quietude an abandonment of the effort against violence?

I hope not. It is impossible to be entirely non-confrontational on these subjects--to say it is wrong to kill animals is a confrontation. But I find myself wishing to have discussions based on reason, using rational argument to avoid contentiousness, avoiding insult or inflammatory language. I hope to strive for nonviolent treatment of people and animals, but to treat opponents with dignity and to still seek an inner peacefulness.

Auden

2009-01-23T16:48:00.004-06:00

"September 1, 1939" is a very beautiful poem, the sort that defies the need for explication. The tone is subdued, restrained, yet strewn with big, capital-letter Concepts. The word choice and the syntax work--the sentences suggest something mundane, but with awareness of something large, dark, significant happening above and around. There are passages of staggeringly simple beauty, just the sort one wants to share without comment:

"Lest we should see where we are,

Lost in a haunted wood,

Children afraid of the night

Who have never been happy or good."

The final lines evokes a familiar theme: in a broken world losing meaning and hope, is there some small way to hold dignity?:

"May I, composed like them

Of Eros and of dust,

Beleaguered by the same

Negation and despair,

Show an affirming flame."

It seems to me a line to take with me wherever, whenever, whatever:

Show an affirming flame.

Group Membership

2009-01-22T13:07:00.007-06:00

Jean-Paul Sartre turned down the Nobel Prize for Literature in part because "He stated that a writer's accepting such an honour would be to associate his personal commitments with the awarding institution." As an existentialist, Sartre was staunchly individual. Furthermore, as a philosopher and artist, he may have had keener reasons to keep his own work separate from the commitments of an institution--associating himself with an institution may have tainted his independent artistic and philosophical commitments.

Does the same standard apply to any individual joining a group? Though an advocate for animal rights, I have refrained from personally joining any animal rights or animal welfare organization. PETA stands for and fights for many things I stand for, but I've often taken issue with PETA's focus and methods (I think self-promotional publicity is a close second to animal welfare in their list of priorities). Should I support a group that mostly fights for what I believe in, but which often does things I don't support? I finally did decide to join the group.

Of course, I knew they would do things that would make me embarrassed to be a part of it. As Jim Rome said on the radio today, they're over the top, and that's why you don't want them on your bad side. It's also a point my wife has made: PETA is a pushy, persistent organization--they get shit done because they're so bothersome.

But PETA, regarding Michael Vick, let it go. If you don't want to do PSAs with him or support his entry back to the NFL, fine. But brain scans and psychological tests? The man committed a crime and has spent time in prison for the crime. You should let him move on. If you don't think Vick is a good role model, that's fine: don't cheer for him. But professional football is about adults playing a game for our entertainment, not about athletes being role models to children about kindness toward animals.

This sort of inanity embarrasses me. There are all sorts of serious problems in the way animals are treated in this country--trying to prevent Michael Vick from continuing his football career, and making blatant publicity grabs with inflammatory language and demands for psychological tests, does little to help those animals.

I'm again reminded of Les Miserables. Javert cannot accept Valjean's redemption and reformation, insisting that there is something inherently criminal in Valjean's nature that cannot be changed and demands punishment. When PETA requests brain scans and psychological testing to find out if Vick is a "psychopath," they dehumanize him. They want proof he's even "mentally capable of remorse." Ingrid Newkirk, do you really want to play the role of Javert?

See
"PETA Withdraws PSA offer to Vick" (Sports Illustrated).
"Is Michael Vick a Clinically Diagnosed Psychopath or a Reformed Dogfighter?" (PETA)
PETA's letter to the NFL (PDF).

The Merchant of Venice

2009-01-20T21:15:00.030-06:00

A Reader-response tour through Shakespeare's plays continues.

In acts four and five, I found myself more riveted to the text than I can ever recall being while reading Shakespeare.

If the world is a stage, what matter is the role we choose to play.

Antonio: I hold the world but as the world, Gratiano,

A stage, where every man must play a part,

And mine a sad one.

Gratiano: Let me play the fool, (I.i. 80-83)

Though the world as stage is a common expression in Shakespeare, this particular passage uniquely hits me. The emphasis is on the characters acting their roles--and if the world is a stage, we the players must consider our roles upon it.

I have a recurring dream in which I am an actor, but while on stage I struggle to remember my lines, my blocking, the scene I'm in, even the play I'm in. I sometimes think this dream is where I play out my tension in life, where I may feel like I am acting a part, and I fear that soon an audience will discover that I really don't know what I'm doing. And I'm also a recovering existentialist, so I do find this focus on the roles we choose to play interesting. So there are reasons a passage like this draws me.

But it also makes me think about the importance of character in drama. In fiction or poetry, there are many elements of the work that can be ascendant. But in performed drama, character must be ascendant--it is the actors upon the stage which must command our attention. If 20th century dramatists like Beckett, Pinter, or Stoppard worked toward abolishing the traditional conventions of drama, perhaps their greatest challenge was smashing consistent characters.

Shylock

Is any racism in the play offset by the playwright's giving to Shylock this, as poignant a passage as any in Shakespeare?

"I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?" (III.i)

I have trouble believing it was an anti-Semite that wrote these lines. Furthermore, when Shylock is accused of cruelty, he counters the accusation by referencing the cruelty of the Christian world. In Act 3, scene 1:

"And if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction."

And in Act 4, scene 1, lines 90-100:

"Duke: How shalt thou hope for mercy, rend'ring none?

Shylock: What judgment shall I dread, doing no wrong?

You have among you many a purchased slave,

Which, like your asses and your dogs and your mules,

You use in abject and in slavish parts,

Because you bought them. Shall I say to you,

'Let them be free, marry them to your heirs!

Why sweat they under burdens? Let their beds

Be made as soft as yours, and let their palates

Be seasoned with such viands'? You will answer,

'The slaves are ours.'"

Appearances and Disguise

In Act 3, scene 2, Bassanio has a lengthy speech on distrusting appearances, and later in the play Portia and Nerissa disguise themselves as men. I've noted before that the disconnect between appearance and reality is a common theme in literature and in my lit course. It goes further: in the composition class I teach this semester, our first unit is on Fairy Tales with an emphasis on Cinderella. A common theme we find in Fairy Tales is deceit, disguise, and the importance of distrusting appearances. This is theme is runs deep--it is old and ubiquitous, appearing in stories from many ages and told for many audiences.

Antonio's Nonresistance

I often read books on religious pacifism (notably works by Yoder and Tolstoy) which emphasize the Christian command not to return evil with evil, to respond to threat of violence with internal and external peace. Antonio's words as he prepares to face his own violent death strike me as an expression in the Christian pacifist vein:

"I do oppose

My patience to his fury, and am armed

To suffer with a quietness of spirit

The very tyranny and rage of his." (IV.i.11-14)

Mercy and Justice

I might also here reference one of the firmest lessons I took from the religion of my youth--because you are forgiven your sins, you must forgive others their sins against you. Says a disguised Portia:

"Though justice be thy plea, consider this,

That, in the course of justice, none of us

Should see salvation. We do pray for mercy,

And that same prayer doth teach us all to render

The deeds of mercy." (IV.i.203-207)

Jesus tells a parable about a servant being forgiven a large debt, then demanding immediate payment from another servant for a small debt; when the master who forgave the large debt hears about that, he gets angry and punishes the servant. This theme is shown in the treatment (or is it cheating?) of Shylock--he cruelly withheld mercy, and is thus treated with no mercy. Yet I see a contradiction. Isn't it a form of "justice" to withhold mercy from Shylock because he withheld mercy? And didn't Portia just tout mercy over justice? To follow the standard Portia asked of Shylock, they should now mercifully forgive Shylock, letting him go on his way without punishing him. Though the Duke and Antonio grant him some leniency, they still do punish Shylock (pretty severely, I would think). Shylock gets his "just" reward because he demanded justice instead of mercy--and the very people who asked him to show mercy are not now willing to show him terribly much mercy at all.

The theme of mercy gets a more light-hearted treatment in Act 5, when Portia and Nerissa forgive their husbands for giving away their rings.

Sprigs on a Barrel Organ

Dostoevsky's underground man insists on irrational motivations driving human behavior, and that furthermore, these irrational drives are directly tied to free will. Here's what Shylock has to say:

"Some men there are love not a gaping pig,

Some that are mad if they behold a cat,

And others, when the bagpipe sings i' th' nose,

Cannot contain their urine; for affection,

Master of passion, sways it to the mood

Of what it likes or loathes. Now for your answer:

As there is no firm reason to be rend'red

Why he cannot abide a gaping pig,

Why he a harmless necessary cat,

Why he a woolen bagpipe, but of force

Must yield to such inevitable shame

As to offend, himself being offended,

So can I give no reason, nor I will not." (IV.i.48-60)

This passage perhaps makes us sprigs on a barrel organ: though we don't know the psychological reasons we loathe certain things, nonetheless we do, and are compelled beyond our will to respond in certain ways to those things we loathe. It is not a free unreason--there are many schools of psychology that could try take us beyond "there is no firm reason."

Pleasure and Art

2009-01-19T21:32:00.008-06:00

I would call the movie Mamma Mia! "objectively awful." I think that if you don't love ABBA, love musicals, or (possibly) like romantic comedies, then there is precisely zero chance you won't hate this movie.

But here's the thing: there are people who love ABBA, there are people who love musicals, and there are people that (possibly) like romantic comedies. So you might enjoy this movie.

I continue to assert reading as an individual activity--finding aesthetic pleasure is an intensely individual, personal, subjective experience. We can discuss objective merits of a work of literature, and certainly it is not in our individual control what books make it into our hands. But whether and to what extent we receive pleasure from a book will be dependent on subjective factors. And what we read, how we read, what sorts of things we focus on when we read, what we look for when we read, what elements of a work we enjoy, what features of writing we devote our attention to, is individual.

Break Reading

2009-01-16T14:22:00.003-06:00

One of my reading deficiencies is American fiction of the past 60 years. I used winter break to do a little catching up, reading Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and Don DeLillo's White Noise. Though I enjoyed both novels (and I want to read more Roth), I don't have a special comment to make on either (though I will note that reading DeLillo after Roth made me appreciate how "natural" a writer Roth is. DeLillo's sentences often read like those of a 20th century craftsman of fiction, Roth's never so--though this may be attributed to the narrative form of Portnoy's Complaint. I might also note that White Noise made me reflect on the level to which I fear death. Though Christian, I don't have a convicted faith in God or afterlife. I fear death enough to do what I can to extend life, hence my vegan care for my bodily health. And I do think about death every day--quite literally, probably many times a day if I focused on it. But in a relative sense, I don't think my fear of death is terribly strong. Has this parenthetical gone far enough?). But each novel evoked things in my mind, frequently other books but occasionally events. Here are some of the things each work made me think about.

Portnoy's Complaint

Roth's own Sabbath's Theater and Operation Shylock, Fowles' Daniel Martin

White Noise

Camus' The Plague, Stephen King's The Stand and Dreamcatcher, Dostoevsky's Demons, A.E. Housman's "To An Athlete, Dying Young," Tony Harrison's "v." September 11th, Hurricane Katrina

The Lingering Nature of Television

2009-01-14T14:27:00.002-06:00

On this blog, I've sometimes argued for the merits of television as an artistic medium equal to film. But as a quality medium, television suffers from one major problem: the goal of self-perpetuation. Conflicts are not allowed to resolve themselves in a natural, organic way, and characters' lives and plot lines are often extended in an artificial manner. This is not true of all television (cable dramas and truly episodic sitcoms often escape this problem), but many shows draw out storylines in an open-ended way (for the series' run itself is open-ended). This is particularly noticeable with romance between characters: sexual tensions must remain tense, and unexpressed love must remain unexpressed, for as long as possible.

Teaching Lit

2009-01-07T00:04:00.009-06:00

In the course of refining a general education literature syllabus, I've noticed a few common themes that repeat in the works I include. These recurring issues have mostly been unintentional.

Some of these common threads make sense. We read a lot about parent-child conflicts, and I suppose that is as close to a universal theme as you'll find--generational tension abounds in the history of Western literature.

Another common theme is "Ideal versus Reality." I do have a theory on why so many works involve some exploration of a fantasy, image, or ideal conflicting with reality. Fiction is fake, phony, not real. When devoting energy to making up stories, to telling of things that never happened, the writer may become keenly aware of the tension between fantasy and reality (or may feel driven to work out this tension in art). Many writers confront the fakery of fiction directly with metafiction, but even those that don't feel that tension, and so that conflict of an image against reality recurs in literature.

But one unintended subject I always find is insanity ("The Yellow Wallpaper," The Bluest Eye, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, King Lear, Death of a Salesman, Equus). I still don't have a coherent theory on why I fill the course with books about madness. Is it my own esoteric selection process? Or is insanity a very common subject of literature? And to either of those questions, why?

Aestheticism: art as entertainment?

2009-01-06T00:45:00.003-06:00

Let me start by admitting that I'm doubtful a distinction between art and entertainment is anything other than arbitrary. But a question came to me while lying in bed unable to sleep.

Does "art for art"s sake" turn art into entertainment? More specifically, if literature exists for no sake other than itself, and if literature can teach us about nothing but itself, then how does it differ from other forms of entertainment (say, a derivative sitcom, or a board game)? It is a different pleasure, but is it a fundamentally different type of pleasure?

Certainly there is a difference in the act of creation, but I'm considering this question as a reader, not a writer. When I choose what to do with my time, if I read a book rather than watch a derivative sitcom, or play a board game, how is the reading different than those other activities?

I certainly think something different occurs when I choose to read a work of literature over other forms of entertainment. But then, I have some quirky (perhaps mystical) beliefs about literature's purposes and possibilities.

One might go further to seek the differences between reading a novel instead of other types of (non-fiction) writing (what is fundamentally different between reading, say, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint or Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther?). I'd ask that not to say there is no difference, but to know what those differences are (and to seek what similarities in the reading experience there may be).

But these may be stupid questions, mere garbage caused by the late hour.

I recommend

2009-01-05T19:09:00.007-06:00

Hamlet 2. I laughed and laughed. Big Steve Coogan fan.

The Tudors

2008-12-23T21:29:00.002-06:00

The strength of the show is in the nuanced portrayals of important characters. Thomas More shows the razor thin line between the thoughtful, principled man of conscience, and the cold ideological executioner. Catherine of Aragon is all suffering dignity, until those rare moments she shows a sharp cunning. It is the subtlety of some of these characters that draws me to the show.

Henry VIII is all ego, rage, and frustrated sexuality, but after antiheroes like Tony Soprano and Al Swearengen, he's rather predictable and just a bit uninteresting. But like a lot of cable television series, it is the season one finale that really sucks me into the show.

"Lisa the Vegetarian"

2008-12-19T14:36:00.002-06:00

You don't usually expect to see such a thoughtful episode of a mainstream television show, but this episode of The Simpsons manages to:

--show the moral progression of a vegetarian.
--show the difficulties of being a vegetarian in a meat-eating society.
--savagely mock that meat-eating society.
--end with a message the vegetarians should show tolerance and respect for others, influencing people without badgering them.

It's the sort of episode I can show my kids, an episode not with a trite TV lesson, but an actual lesson.

Richard III

2008-12-15T12:15:00.004-06:00

It is a play that largely belongs to the angry, mourning women lamenting their losses at the hands of Richard. It seems filled with the motif of time periods. It may be a compromised work; today we don't care for our writers to create their works with concern for the political powers (but then, much of Western civilization's paintings are tainted by power and money too, right?). A few issues stand out to me.

Obsession with the Shadow Self: Self-Love and Self-Hate

In Richard's first speech, he laments the boredom of the current time period; he'll have nothing to do

"Unless to spy my own shadow in the sun

And descant on my own deformity" (I.ii.26-27)

An odd line, I thought, but probably just a chance for Shakespeare to dig at his villain's (and the current dynastic family's villain's) physical flaws. But then another line resonated in a similar vein:

"Shine out, fair sun, till I have bought a glass

That I may see my shadow as I pass" (I.ii.262-263).

Suddenly we have a pattern. Richard twice invokes a desire to examine his own shadow. Once he muses on examining his own shadow to pass the time, and shortly after discusses examining his shadow through a mirror (taking himself a step away from the actual shadow). A contrast: the sun, his shadow. The sun representing, perhaps, God, King, Goodness, the shadow representing all of Richard's flaws.

But Richard is going to perform many dark deeds throughout the play. This focus on his own shadow (not himself or his deformity, but the shadow of his deformity) on one hand shows a fixation on his own evil. But on the other hand, it shows a desire to distance himself from this evil. He doesn't want to look at himself; he only wants to look at his own shadow. After that, he doesn't even want to look at his shadow; he wants to examine his shadow through a mirror as he walks away from it.

I think this becomes interesting when Richard wakes on the day of the battle, after ghosts have cursed him to despair and death in the night:

"What do I fear? Myself? There's none else by.

Richard loves Richard: that is, I am I.

Is there a murderer here? No. Yes, I am.

Then fly. What, from myself? Great reason why!

Lest I revenge. What, myself upon myself?

Alack, I love myself. Wherefore? For any good

That I myself have done unto myself?

O no! Alas, I rather hate myself

For hateful deeds committed by myself.

I am a villain. Yet I lie, I am not.

Fool, of thyself speak well. Fool, do not flatter" (V.iii.183-193)

If there was ever a better written expression for the conflicted self, self-hatred and self-love combined into a self-fear, I haven't read it. Certainly, shortly after Richard bucks himself up for war by denying his conscience:

"Let not our babbling dreams affright our souls;

Conscience is but a word cowards use,

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe;

Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law!" (V.iii.309-312)

But is that conflicted self that lingers with me--objectively illustrated by a desire to examine one's shadow, an act requiring both self-love and self-hate.

Justifying War

We see the Tudor hero Richmond and the Tudor villain Richard inspire their troops with different justifications for war. Both are familiar.

Good Richmond buoys the troops by claiming they fight for God.

"God and our good cause fight upon our side" (V.iii.241)

"One that hath ever been God's enemy

Then if you fight against God's enemy,

God will in justice ward you as his soldiers" (V.iii.253-255)

"Then in the name of God and all these rights,

Advance your standards, draw your willing swords" (V.iii.263-265)

Written at a time when belief in the divine right of kings was a foundational principle for government, there is sincerity here. Still, Richmond is making a power play: he's waging a war to remove another king and place the crown on his own head. He claims, of course, that he fights on God's side, but he's certainly not an objective student of God's will ("God insists I wage a war to make myself King" is hardly convincing). But then, many killers and warmongers justify their murders and wars by claiming God is on their side. it is often that in a war, the religious on each side calls on God to justify its own cause.

Evil Richard calls for war by demonizing the enemy and by calling on fears of what will happen if they don't fight and win.

"A sort of vagabonds, rascals, and runaways,

A scum of Britains and base lackey peasants,

Whom their o'ercloyed country vomits forth

To desperate ventures and assured destruction.

You sleeping safe, they bring you unrest;

You having lands, and blest with beauteous wives

They would distrain the one, distain the other." (V.iii.317-323)

"Shall these enjoy our lands? Lie with our wives?

Ravish our daughters?" (V.iii.337-338)

Richard dehumanizes the enemy, and calls upon fears of what this monstrous enemy will do to the good people's peaceful homes. They, then, become just warriors: they are merely defending peace by waging war. Earlier, Richmond makes a similar claim:

"To reap the harvest of perpetual peace

by this one bloody trial of sharp war" (V.iii.15-16)

Of course, perpetual war can be justified by these claims.

Syntax and Ambiguity

"Now is the winter of our discontent" (I.i.1)

In isolation, the wonderful first line has clear meaning: the bad time is now. But that line is part of a clause:

"Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this sun of York" (I.i.1-2)

This clause also has a clear meaning: the bad time is now over.

The beauty of the syntax also finds meaning in the speaker. For Richard, the "glorious summer" is his own "winter of [...] discontent:" he's not happy. And as the play is about to detail Richard's rise to power, it is also going to detail England's "winter of our discontent" which is, in Richard's time, occurring now. The play is the winter of discontent, even if the clause means the winter of discontent (which includes a long civil war) is over.

The syntax is genius.

The Joker (2)

2008-12-12T08:46:00.008-06:00

The Joker in The Dark Knight reminds me of Dostoevsky's underground man in Notes from the Underground. The underground man declares that sometimes one wants two and two to equal five, that a person can take pleasure even in a toothache. He asserts that humans don't behave according to reason, that our behaviors and our motivations are often irrational. And the Joker wants chaos, anarchy, anything but a plan. He seems to take pleasure in his own pain, and he takes pleasure in the entirely irrational.

But it's more than that: at an aesthetic level, Heath Ledger's twitchiness seems to me a physical representation of the underground man's writing style. The sharp bursts, the halting movements, the dark laughter, the sneering, the cynicism in the stare, in the comedy. It's all unexpected exploding, chasing down tangents, a bitter mockery.

II.

Then there are the political overtones, which were not perhaps so ham-fisted as they seemed to me (waiting months to see the movie and thus hearing others talk about it). Briefly, the film tells us this: Terrorists are illogical and lack motivations; they only want destruction. The only way to defeat them is to sink to their level, and thus all the excesses of the war on terror are justified, including torture, illegal spying, and lying to the public.

To fit this theme, nothing is truly known about the Joker's past and background--he has no origin story (he keeps lying about his scars). His motivations are not practical (he burns a giant wad of cash) but based on a psychotic love of disaster, destruction, anarchy, and chaos. He makes demands and targets defenseless civilians and institutions (like hospitals). He also achieves his ends by not valuing his own life; he regularly behaves with suicidal recklessness, daring death.

III.

I'll be rewatching the Michael Keaton Batman soon to re-appreciate Jack Nicholson's Joker. I realize I probably haven't seen the movie in over a decade; however, I watched it so many times when I was a kid that several lines and images are still ingrained in my memory.

As I've been reflecting on Nicholson's Joker, I've thought how at the end, he becomes something more like Ledger's Joker. Throughout the film he's a clever, scheming, smooth-talking Joker. But in the big tower scene, he becomes completely unhinged in a very hilarious way. He starts pulling out silly gags when Batman beats on him (like putting on glasses and asking whether Batman would really hit a man with glasses). He laughs maniacally as he hangs on the verge of death. He becomes a silly, giggly, irrational mess: his voice and his facial expressions are all over the place: unpredictable, unexpected, chaotic.

addendum: I just rewatched Batman; sadly for my tainted memory, the late '80s were not exactly a zenith for film-making.

Nicholson's Joker is goofier throughout than I remembered: he's always laughing, giggling, cackling. He's frequently doing silly gags, and his outbursts are always unpredictable. But something distinguishes him from Ledger's Joker: rhythm. Nicholson is often dancing about the screen, clownishly prancing to music (he frequently brings music with him). There's a rhythmic performance to his movements, whereas Ledger's movements are herky-jerky, unbalanced, twittery. Though while the music and dancing in Batman give the Joker a greater sense of control, it also somehow foils or grounds the Joker's erratic behavior. It's controlled mayhem.

Playing the Joker

2008-12-10T23:08:00.011-06:00

I've learned that being a parent means you still get to watch all the movies, you just have to wait about six months.

I was extremely excited to see The Dark Knight for one reason: Heath Ledger playing the Joker. I love to watch Jack Nicholson, and appreciated his Joker in Batman, and I loved Heath Ledger in Brokeback Mountain (the film left me in uncontrolled, sobbing, hide-in-the-bathroom tears). So after months of know people were raving about Ledger's performance (while taking deliberate care not to read about why they were raving), I spent much of the movie just waiting for the Joker's scenes (in Slings & Arrows, Geoffrey Tennant tells the young actor playing Hamlet that it's all about the soliloquies: it's what people are there to see, and if he can nail those, the dialogue is easy. And indeed, it was just before a soliloquy that the critic in the audience grins and readies his pen). So if I say the Joker's scenes stole the movie, that may be a slanted perspective (or it may be the white, purple, red, and green contrasted so much with the black and orange that dominated the rest of the film).

I think both Ledger and Nicholson played the part with restraint, but a very different type of restraint. Nicholson's Joker is cool, smooth, his movements controlled. Ledger's Joker is twitchy. A twitchy restrained chaos: head hunched and twisted, hands in motion, halting spasms, a voice almost whiny even as it is both comical and frightening. Both played a character that could make any movements at any moment, that could perform any sort of chaotic, irrational, senseless action--but that for the most part didn't. Ledger's Joker is more unhinged. I don't know which I enjoyed more--Ledger's Joker is a little more fun, but Nicholson's Joker is...well...Nicholson. I don't know--I should probably rewatch Batman before commenting more.

There's just a chance that neither was actually as good as Cesar Romero. The problem for Romero is that he was a Joker stuck in a Gotham just as colorful and silly as him, a foil to a campy Batman. Imagine taking Romero's Joker out of the campy Gotham, and sticking him in Tim Burton's Batman or Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight. Romero's Joker would have been the real chaotic contrast to Michael Keaton's or Christian Bale's Batman.

Acting and the Creative Act

2008-12-07T23:15:00.018-06:00

A contrapuntal essay

In "The Existential Clown" in The Atlantic, James Parker writes about actor Jim Carrey as an artist, whose films show a consistency of vision:

"Jim Carrey will loom large in our shattered posterity, I believe, because his filmography amounts to a uniquely sustained engagement with the problem of the self."

I might take this in a few different directions. In emails with my friend Rob (a writer and proponent of Auteur Theory) we have discussed whether an actor can really be an auteur, who really controls the vision of a film or films, who should, differences in stage and film, that sort of thing. But there are other directions, including artistic intent. If Carrey did not play roles in these films as part of a larger artistic vision, if indeed his primary goal is to make people laugh and he doesn't bother with anything remotely approaching "a uniquely sustained engagement with the problem of the self," then can his filmography really amount to this? Can we the viewers (or just Parker) examine the ouevre for its results, without bothering with the intentions of the comic actor? Or maybe we could look about and find other actors who, in their acting alone separate from writing or directing, show a consistency of character, theme, explorative subject (John Wayne comes to mind). Or we could be more subjective: are there certain actors you follow in the same way you might follow a writer, a director, a musician? Does having a "favorite actor" mean quite the same thing as having a "favorite writer"? And how is it different?

I like all these lines of inquiry, but I'm interested in reflecting on acting as a creative act. When I speak of a Shakespearean production, I would tend to refer to "Actor A's Character" rather than "Director B's Play" (for example, to me this is "Gibson's Hamlet," not "Zeffirelli's Hamlet"). It is the actor who interprets and creates the character. If I see a film or stage version, it is not the choices of the director I will relish, but the choices of the actor. Of course the actor is not independent: he/she relies on the initial creation of character and words by Shakespeare, as well as the vision and support of a director. But what artist can work in isolation with total freedom from interference or influence? A writer does not invent the language he/she works in, even if he/she invents his/her own version of it.

But let's move to television. David Chase created The Sopranos, but I think it was really Tony Gandolfini who created Tony Soprano. Certainly Chase invented him, but it was Gandolfini who gave him life, who gave him shape, who thrusts Tony Soprano into my consciousness. Gandolfini is a creative agent. Gandolfini is the artist who passed a character from the realm of imagination into...well, my imagination (when I started watching the DVDs I did have dreams about him). Could another actor have done so? Maybe. Maybe not. But I want to credit the actor for making the character what he is, and I do believe it is the actor as creative agent that reached me.

That's not to say that's always the case. Larry David is probably more responsible than Jason Alexander for the genius of George Costanza, but Michael Richards is largely the creator of Kramer.

And maybe we get back to the old problem of Jack Nicholson's Randle Patrick McMurphy against Ken Kesey's Randle Patrick McMurphy. They're not quite the same McMurphy, are they? I don't think Milos Forman made a different McMurphy. And while I can have serious discussion about the differences between the film and novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, I cannot really articulate why Nicholson's portrayal of McMurphy is not quite the McMurphy of the book. I can only say that Nicholson is a great actor, an artist, a dominant presence that makes a character his own. Simply by having Nicholas play McMurphy, McMurphy becomes something other than what he was in the text (of course, right? He's an aesthetic creation, and so that aesthetic in words on a page is different than an actor on a screen. That's not what I want to address here; I'm still asserting that Nicholson created a character).

So maybe I'm only thinking of the brilliant actors here (but, in the same way proponents of Auteur Theory mainly think of the brilliant directors). What of the average actors? What of the lousy actors?

But let me raise a problem (and suggest this whole line of inquiry is either pointless or impossible). I love the film The Aviator for its portrayal of character; I thought Leonardo DiCaprio was brilliant (I'm rather interested in OCD). One scene in particular lingers with me: Hughes is in a restroom, and he doesn't want to touch the door to get out, so he quietly waits until somebody else enters the restroom so that he can leave without touching the door.

The scene is wonderful: I recall the quiet and the focus. But whom do I really credit for the scene? Actor Leonardo DiCaprio, director Martin Scorcese, or writer John Logan? And this may also get at why I can't quite accept Auteur Theory. I think it likely the scene worked so well because actor, director, writer, and even a host of others contributing to the creation of the scene made it work. A singular, controlling vision? That doesn't matter; what matters is the resulting scene, a scene with many contributors to its brilliance (though perhaps Auteur Theory is a way to understand an ouevre, not a particular film or a particular scene).

I'm interested in the ways that an actor creates. I'm interested in the way an actor can be an artist. I'm interested in why different people watch things and what they're looking for when they watch. And I'm interested in how we talk about these things.

Let me finish by noting that in some ways, the subject of acting and the theater haunts my dreams. I have recurring dreams (nightmares, I suppose) about somehow making a mistake and ruining a stage show. In particular, I sometimes dream that I'm in a play, and perhaps I don't know my lines, perhaps I don't know the blocking, or often it's more serious: I don't know what character I'm playing, or I don't even know what play I'm in. In my dreams, I often find myself on stage in front of people with other performers, not knowing what I'm supposed to be doing and aware that I'm ruining everything. Please, try that on Freud.

(These contrapuntal essays are taking a distinct shape toward a) rambling directionlessly and b) asking a bunch of questions I'm not bothering to answer (I really hate the latter trend in my writing and will work toward toning it down). What I'm finding in these essays, however, is that it is not the result that makes it contrapuntal, but my mindset whiile writing. I'm willing to ramble and raise questions and lose focus. It's a method, a way of thinking, and thus the writing and thinking goes where I don't expect when I begin)

The first stanza of "v."

2008-12-05T13:24:00.005-06:00

"Next millennium you'll have to search quite hard

to find my slab behind the family dead,

butcher, publican, and baker, now me, bard

adding poetry to their beef, beer, and bread."

Tony Harrison's "v." contains 112 four line stanzas. When I come back to the poem, I'm struck by how succinctly the first stanza reveals the major subjects of the rest of the long poem.

One of the elements of the poem is the pit underneath the cemetery, a "rabblement of bone and rot,/ shored slack, crushed shale, smashed prop." This pit is a part of the discussion of the process of nature making "coal, that began, with no man here at all,/as 300 million-year-old plant debris." It is in the creation of this coal that the "v." represents victory "For vast, slow, coal-creating forces that hew the body's seams to get the soul." The useless dead bodies, through hundreds of millions of years, are turned into something useful (in fact, coal is warming the poet's home at the end of the poem). It is a long process, requiring time. And the first line of the poem subtly puts us into the the mindset of long periods of times with the reference to "millennium."

The poem is partly about the poet's relationship with his family, which is also about his relationship to class. And so his "slab behind the family dead" puts us into that context. The poet will share memories of his father, and wrestle internally with his class and the relationship of poetry to class.

The sounds in the next two lines are harsh but alliterative; they share similar sounds, but they share harsh beginnings and endings that require distinct pronunciations. The key words in the third line are the job titles (and job titles, we find, are listed on the gravestones in the cemetery): butcher, publican, baker, bard. the fourth line features nouns that are produced by those workers described in line three: poetry, beef, beer, and bread. It's also worth noting the simple words beef, beer, and bread also seem to connote the food for working class people: simple, hearty, affordable. Beer has class associations, and beef and bread are food provided for us by a "butcher" or a "baker."

And it's hard not to see the strong contrast between "poetry" and "beef, beer, and bread." The sounds themselves are different: three single-syllable words, beginning with "b" and also ending with a consonant, against "poetry." The different sounds remind us in the major difference: beef, beer, and bread are tangible and useful. They provide something for people. We can consume them. What's poetry to that? Hollow and empty. "Poetry" can sound grand, but when you set poetry next to "beef, beer, and bread," it becomes nothingness both of sound and content.

And Harrison seems to recognize that; after all, later the skinhead voice tells him "it's not poetry we need in this class war." Poetry is ultimately ineffectual. The poem is partly about class and material conditions, about poverty and social place. The beef, beer, and bread can provide something concrete and useful; poetry is air. So in the first stanza, "now me, bard/adding poetry" to those useful consumables, comes off as sort of silly, frivolous. But "poet" will be the label on Harrison's gravestone.

Perhaps we as readers don't see the deprecation there. After all, would a poet minimize the use of poetry within a poem? And would we as readers, obviously seeing some value in poetry since we are reading it, perhaps consider poetry loftier, nobler, more meaningful than the rougher, more common "beef, beer, and bread"? Maybe. But the material conditions of poetry are emphasized in the poem's final line, where Harrison's epitaph tells viewer that if they want to seek where poetry comes from, they should "find the beef, the beer, the bread, then look behind." This last stanza again reminds us of the pit under the graveyard (evoking the process of turning decay into something useful), and then tells us the poetry comes from those tangible products, those useful edibles, food and drink.

It is, then, lines three and four of the poem that really bring us our subject. Harrison names job titles (mostly working class job titles, put into the context of time and death), and then identifies the tangible material "stuff" produced by those doing the jobs (the nouns are, in my opinion, critical, as they require us to focus on the material "stuff"). But most importantly, he immediately places the role of poetry into this discussion. The poem explores the relationship of language and class (the skinhead's shouting would not be the same without the cursing), but more specifically the relationship of poetry to class, to social change, to our real lives. Harrison tells the skinhead voice that he writes poetry to give the lower class "a hearing," to "give some higher meaning to your scrawl." The skinhead not only points out that such an effort really gives nothing to those people, but is not even in the language of those people ("Can't you speak/the language that yer mam spoke"). They talk about the cursing, Harrison telling the voice his mother didn't talk like him, and the voice responding "She didn't understand yer fucking 'art'!/She thought yer fucking poetry obscene!"

The poem is about other things: the versus, the united, and all that. But central is poetry, language, class. Harrison doesn't suggest there is a simply relationship here, but he is, at any rate, exploring that relationship, and he shows us this from the first stanza.

favorite poetry (without comment)

2008-12-05T08:53:00.002-06:00

My three favorite poems are John Milton's Paradise Lost, Tony Harrison's "v.", and Sylvia Plath's "Daddy." My favorite poetry collections are Ted Hughes' Crow and Carol Ann Duffy's The World's Wife.

Meat and the Environment

2008-12-03T09:39:00.001-06:00

See Ben Adler's "Are Cows Worse Than Cars?" in The American Prospect.

Imagination and Art

2008-12-01T10:35:00.004-06:00

In an interview in the Star Tribune, Gregory Maguire says of his Oz,

"It is so real in my imagination that I could go Google Oz with it just like Google Earth. I can zone in to any little corner and find something fascinating. The place feels so real, with its own history and population, its peculiar strains of beliefs and imagination and social progress. It's the vehicle that has allowed me to open up the most far-seeing apparatus of my imagination."

I too have the ability to conceive in my imagination entirely new worlds. Since childhood I've imagined vivid, detailed worlds, thriving in my mind, rich with imaginative, created reality. My obsessive-compulsiveness also leads me to imagine all sorts of scenarios occurring in my life, all sorts of situations, all sorts of fantasies, hopeful or frightening or tedious. In my mind, all sorts of events and places and people have existed, created but not real.

And I don't assume I'm special in this way: I think many, if not most, if not all, of us are capable of creating worlds in our minds. Of imagining that which is not with rich detail.

What I lack, and what most people lack, is the aesthetic ability to express my created worlds to others. I may be able to convey what I imagine, but not with eloquence or beauty or real art. I cannot express it well in fiction or poetry, nor do I have much ability with visual art. I don't believe I have aesthetic ability (though maybe someday I will find it, I don't know). I can create worlds in my mind, but I cannot artfully give my world to you.

And this is what separates a writer's imagination from a non-writer's imagination (I imagine). It is not the ability to create, but the ability to aesthetically express that creation to others.

(And in my opinion, anyway, Gregory Maguire does have that ability to aesthetically express his created world).

Reading Questions

2008-11-22T08:34:00.003-06:00

Is there a difference between why children read and why adults read?

Is there a difference between why adolescents read and why adults read?

If so, what are some differences?

Should there be a difference between why children/adolescents read and why adults read?

Why do you read? Why did you read as a child? As an adolescent? Are those reasons different? How do you feel about those differences?

If you're interested, I really enjoyed Caitlin Flanigan's exploration "What Girls Want" in The Atlantic, but I'm really curious about these questions in general.

Arrested Development movie?

2008-11-21T09:53:00.005-06:00

Oh my goodness. A film version of the greatest sitcom in television history? Is it really happening? America needs the magic of G.O.B. Bluth, now more than ever.

I've also thought that Larry David, Jerry Seinfeld, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Jason Alexander, and Michael Richards should get together to make one more episode of Seinfeld. Why not? Just one more half-hour episode, they can air it once, and it will be a ratings bonanza. I bet they could do something really funny. But then Curb Your Enthusiasm is the perfect consequence of Seinfeld, and we still keeping getting more Curb, so I shouldn't complain.

You know, there are a lot of TV series that inspire great passionate devotion in a small number of people, but not enough people to keep the show on the air. I've always thought the producers should continue the stories in book form. If there are die-hard fans of Miracles, or Jericho, or even Wonderfalls, or Deadwood, or Freaks and Geeks, would some of those die-hard fans buy books telling the continuing story? The sci-fi/fantasy type series that get cancelled might just make a good chunk of money in book form.

Zeitgeist, Literature, Science

2008-11-19T08:48:00.016-06:00

A contrapuntal essay

In "The Relevance of Animal Experimentation to Roman Catholic Ethical Methodology," James Gaffney discusses the medieval church view (most prominantly expressed by Thomas Aquinas) that cruelty to animals was not inherently sinful, but that cruely to animals could lead one to a cruel disposition and cruelty toward humans. Gaffney writes

"Shakespeare reminds us that such ideas were current later in the Renaissance. thus, in Cymbeline, the queen's plan to test slow and painful poisons on 'such creatures as we count not worth the hanging--but none human' elicits from her physician the admonition that 'your highness shall from this practice but make hard your heart.'"

One doesn't have to look hard to find the ideas current at a time working their way into works of literature (and I'm reminded of John Fowles' suggestion that bad novels tell us more about the time period they were written in than good novels). Sometimes this is in mere passing, though sometimes writers particularly focus on exploring the ideas of the time. Mikhail Bakhtin writes that

"As an artist, Dostoevsky did not create his ideas in the same way philosophers or scholars create theirs--he created images of ideas found, heard, sometimes divined by him in reality itself, that is, ideas already living or entering life as idea-forces. Dostoevsky possessed an extraordinary gift for hearing the dialogue of his epoch [...] He heard both the loud, recognized, reigning voices of the epoch, that is, the reigning dominant ideas (official and unofficial), as well as voices still weak, ideas not yet fully emerged, latent ideas heard as yet by no one but himself, ideas that were just beginning to ripen, embryos of future worldviews."

And indeed, in Dostoevsky's great novels, he seems to tweak out the consequences of the religious and political thoughts and movements of his era.

I actually think it is primarily new scientific theories, new discoveries, and technological advancements that lead to a zeitgeist, a worldview common to a culture of a place and time. It is also political and economic events, but it is often new scientific insight that advances people to new ideas, new ways of seeing the world. Think of the giant shifts in thought after Columbus's trip to America. Think of the astronomical discoveries about the earth's place in the universe. Of human forays into outer space. Of life at the cellular level. Of how the printing press, railroads, flight, telephone, television, internet change us.

I also think of Darwin, and more broadly the new geological and biological ideas of the 19th century. Isn't reaction to such new ideas central to Victorian thought (or do I only think this because I've read The French Lieutenant's Woman too many times)? Which naturally brings me to Alfred Lord Tennyson. In In Memoriam A.H.H., Tennyson expresses his anxiety over the new scientific theories on geology and biology. He does not "invent" these ideas. I also doubt he was the first or only Victorian to react to Lyell in the way that he did. But you can read Tennyson's poetry if you want to explore the Victorian zeitgeist, if you want to see how Victorians responded to the scientific insight at the time. It's not the only reaction, but it is a prominent reaction. In Memoriam A.H.H. is perhaps an expression through poetry of the spirit of the time.

As I said, it is scientific insight, whether it be theory, discovery, or advancement, that moves the zeitgeist. But sometimes in literature these ideas are exposed or explored. Literature may articulate the consequences of an idea.

Ideology and Crisis

2008-11-16T10:12:00.007-06:00

A contrapuntal essay

In John Howard Yoder's What Would You Do?, several pacifist thinkers provide answers to the "What would you do if a violent person were attacking your family" question. Most of the responses focus on Christian pacifism, including Dale Aukerman's. Aukerman suggests that if one accepts Christ as Lord, then one accepts Christ as Lord in crisis situations too: faith in Christ and devotion to Christ's commands should not be abandoned in a crisis moment when one isn't sure they will work:

"Perhaps a Christian says, 'If my wife or child were about to be killed, I'd certainly try to kill the guy to prevent that.' The person is really saying, 'I couldn't have Jesus as Lord of my life in that situation; I couldn't allow myself to be limited in such a way." That would-be disciple is deciding beforehand to go opposite from the way of Christ and, in that manner of thinking, has already turned from Christ." (79-80)

I recall this passage while reading Matthew Rothschild's "Bush Sells Free Market as Cure-All, Despite Crash." Rothschild quotes George W. Bush saying

"I'm a market-oriented guy, but not when I'm faced with the prospect of a global meltdown."

According to Rothschild, Bush noted the market interventions the government had taken to address the financial crisis, then went on to praise the wonders and glories of the free market system. John McCain did something similar during the election campaign:

"In an interview with Tom Brokaw last month, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., was asked to reconcile his criticism of 'socialism' with his advocacy f a $700 billion bailout package [...] 'I'm a fundamentally strong conservative,' Mccain claimed. 'But when we're in a crisis of this nature, that's when government has to help.'" (Matthew Casner)

Bush praises the wonders of the free market, and McCain demonizes the specter of socialism. In a moment of crisis, they are willing to abandon in practice the free market and apply government intervention. But then they still want to praise the free market and demonize socialism. Though their faith in the free market is challenged by the crisis, and they are unwilling to practice their faith to deal with the crisis, they still wish to uphold their faith.

I suppose we could take this in a couple of directions. One direction would be an "anti-ideology" direction: in practice we should be pragmatic and do what seems to work best, not cling to an ideology. Another direction would be "perfect ideology": if we claim an ideology, we should find an ideology that we are willing to stand by in good times and in bad times.

There is relevance in sports here too. I play football video games. If I get down within five yards of the goal line, my playcalling is dependent on the situation. If I'm in control of the game, I'll likely call some passes inside the five: it's more fun, it's a little more creative, and it can boost the stats of my quarterback and pass catchers. But if I'm in a close game, in an important situation, I don't fool around with that: I'm calling a bunch of runs up the middle and making sure I get that touchdown.

And in real world sports, coaches that stick to their system no matter what, that aren't willing or able to adapt their system for the abilities of the players on the team, for the schemes of the opponent, etc., get criticized. In football the goal is to win the game. If you believe that the best way to play football is run more than you throw, and the defense puts eight, nine, ten guys in the box to stop the run, it's stupid to just keep trying to run the ball up the middle again and again and again if you are capable of throwing it.

But that's football, with a clear goal and clear options, and significantly, no ethical consideration. But there is a moral element to a nation's economy. Sure the goal (prosperity) allows for multiple means of achievement, and various amoral ideas on how to achieve it. But how far will that prosperity be spread out? How will the poor in the nation be provided for? What standards of equality, of fairness, of protection for people will there be? As Rothschild points out,

"you can't have social justice and human dignity with mass unemployment, rampant foreclosures, high rates of poverty and food insecurity, and a health care system that leaves almost 50 million people uninsured."

Now back to the "What would you do?" question. There are many ways to address it, and I don't have to do that here: I'll simply recommend Yoder's book if you're interested in some Christian pacifist approaches to the question (though not all arguments against violence in the book are religious). But as we're on politics, let me make a very important point about the "What would you do?" question: the situation does not parallel or justify war. The question that parallels war might be "would you throw a grenade into a crowd of people to stop the one violent person in the crowd?" War is different: it doesn't resist just the "evildoers," but hurts many innocent people as well. See Tom Englehardt:

"In Afghanistan, a U.S. Air Force strike wiped out about 40 people in a wedding party. This represented at least the sixth wedding party eradicated by American air power in Afghanistan and Iraq since December 2001."

Or see Howard Zinn:

"Would we approve a police chief, who, knowing there was a vicious criminal somewhere in a neighborhood, ordered that the neighborhood be bombed? There was soon a civilian death toll in Afghanistan of over 3,000--exceeding the number of deaths on 9/11. Afghans were driven from their homes, turned into wandering refugees."

However we respond to the "What would you do?" question, we cannot assume that the answer implies a justification for mass warfare. I think if you are going to argue in favor of a war, you must do so in this language:

"Will the civilian deaths, violent atrocities, and humanitarian disasters that are bound to result from this war be justified by the ends of this war (which we assume will be achieved, even if we do not know that they will)?"

And if you still answer yes, you may find yourself sounding a bit like Pyle in The Quiet American:

"They were only war casualties. [...] It was a pity, but you can't always hit your target. Anyway they died in the right cause. [...] In a way you could say they died for democracy."

I'm whole now.

2008-11-12T23:05:00.001-06:00

Seeing Wicked on stage was like a Dionysian ecstacy.

Barack Obama

2008-11-08T11:11:00.001-06:00

Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s "In Our Lifetime"

Michael Eric Dyson's "Race, post race"

What I'm reading

2008-11-03T09:08:00.003-06:00

Fall semester always feels like rushed chaos (things I'm devoting my time to: fatherhood, the work that comes with an academic term, football, an election), and in between the madness, I find my pleasurable reading leaning toward drama and non-fiction. Lately I've been reading religious perspectives on pacifism (What Would You Do? by John Howard Yoder and others) and animal rights (Animal Sacrifices: Religious Perspectives on the Use of Animals in Science, edited by Tom Regan). The way I often respond to the world, including political events, is with thoughts of pacifism and animal rights. As such, I want to ground these thoughts in the existing thought on the subjects. And it is pleasure: these are the things I want to spend my time thinking about.

Content/Form

2008-10-24T17:31:00.004-05:00

Martin Esslin in "New Form in the Theatre":

"So most forms may be, and should be, smashed. What we must remember, however, is that the new forms that take their place will also, inevitably, present new and different contents. It is a fallacy to think that there is a division between what is said and how it is said; ultimately form is content and content is form--"

Imaginary Characters, and the Imagination

2008-10-22T17:17:00.018-05:00

A contrapuntal essay

A character in a work of fiction is not real. That character is words on a page, existing only in the imagination of the author and the imagination of the reader.

Of course! And more importantly: so what? Does being imaginary make the character any less "real," and if so, why does that matter?

I'm not entirely sure in my mind there's a major distinction between real characters and imagined characters. When I was in college, there was a history teacher I (and many of my fellow students) adored. We discussed everything he said, speculated about his life away from college, tried to understand him and make meaning of him. He was a real human being, but for us, he was largely imagined. He did and said things for us to make sense of (but then so does a fictional character). But it's not just a mythic hero professor I imagine. My wife and I know each other deeply, but I also recognize that what we know is the character we've each imagined and invented in each other. The distinction between real and imaginary, within an individual's mind, is pretty hazy: even our politics are partly fueled by imaginary people. I oppose war in part because of the human suffering caused by war. While war does lead to real suffering for real human beings, for me these human beings are largely imagined. I don't know their names or details. But I can imagine them, and I wish to oppose what leads to their suffering. But this would move us away from a discussion of imaginary characters to a discussion of imaginary abstractions...so let's not stray too far.

And then there's drama. An actor's job is to look at those words on a page and "create" a character from those words, to perform a character, to bring a character to life aesthetically. And that means actors interpret characters, make choices about characters, try to understand what a character is feeling, how a character is motivated. The character is still imaginary, of course, but for the actor the character can't just be "words on a page." The actor sees the character as something else. Not quite fixed, for when the actor performs he or she is inventing a character just as the author invents a character. Well, not "just as." But Jack Nicholson created a Randle Patrick McMurphy--it wasn't just Ken Kesey. But developing a character for the stage requires some recognition that the imagined character is...something anyway. If not real, a complex, developed entity.

And why would we want to trash imagination anyway? Perhaps I'm too formed by the Romantic poets I've encountered: imagination as conceived by Wordsworth, by Shelley, by Keats, by Goethe, this is not imagination to be dismissed. Imagination has power; at the level of the imagined, great things happen. There is learning and growth. There is spiritual renewal. There is hard-earned truth.

History again challenges a clear distinction between the real and imagined. I've read three different biographies of Martin Luther, by Bainton, Erikson, and Oberman. Martin Luther was a historical individual, who did actual things, said actual things, believed actual things. But Bainton, Erikson, and Oberman each "invented" a Martin Luther. They interpreted Luther's words, Luther's actions, and other historians' writings on Luther, and they imagined their own Luther, then did their best to convey that imagined Luther (or, if you prefer, did their best to show their imagined Luther was the historical Luther). My conception of Luther, the character of Luther looming about in my mind, may not be fundamentally different in nature than my conception of fictional characters like Prince Myshkin, Ivan Karamozov, Sarah Woodruff, Nicholas Urfe. These are characters I try to understand with the available evidence before me. That evidence may be history, or it may be fictional "text," but there it is and my mind creates the character. Napoleon. Thomas Jefferson. OK... Don Quixote. The Wife of Bath. Hamlet. These characters belong to each of us in our imaginations. Whether real or fictional, these characters are "imaginary," and mean something, stand for something.

The fact that we sometimes compare fictional characters to real life characters shows there is something tenuous in the distinction. Today I thought about how at the end of Hamlet, Fortinbras can only talk in the language of war, can only conceive of honor and merit in war, and I thought, "That's like John McCain." And King Lear is like my grandfather. And on and on.

Why do we read as children? What happens to us as we read when we're children? And do our imagined worlds of childhood really abandon us? When we're little children we read and hear stories. Stories. Our imaginations are set afire, and we fall in love with stories, for the characters, for the events, for the plots. At some point, we become adults, and we start to call our stories fiction, and we might forget that they are stories. But what of the pleasure we got from stories? Can't we keep that pleasure? Do we need to abandon that?

And for that matter, what were earlier humans doing when they listened to The Iliad, The Odyssey? When they heard those stories, were they examining art? Or did they allow their imaginations to envision Odysseus, Achilles, Athena? I don't think those early listeners of perhaps the greatest literature of Western Civilization dismissed those characters as constructs, as aesthetic choices. I think they considered those characters characters. Maybe real, maybe not. But I picture enraptured Greeks sitting around a fire hearing the exploits of Odysseus, loving the poetry, loving the story, but really picturing a character they knew named Odysseus.

Do you envision characters? I do. In my reading experience, they are more than words I decipher. My imagination turns them into beings with form. The physical form isn't always distinct, but they still have form. Perhaps even simply moral form.

I've come a long way here, asking more questions than I've answered. And I can only speak for myself as a reader, what my mind does while reading. I do encounter these made up characters. They don't exist, yet an author and I work together to construct them. They become "real" in my mind. I know they are not, but that doesn't matter to me. For some of those characters stay in my imagination, lingering. Their presence makes me aware of myself. They judge me, they prod me, they inspire me. I go about my life, and they are there, always ready to remind me of something I ought not forget, always willing to teach me something. They are nothing, they have no existence--yet I cannot escape them. That's imagination.

On Contrapuntal Blogging

2008-10-22T13:54:00.006-05:00

I came to "content" blogging through sports. My models for writing blogs were sports blogs, and my own sports blog is still where I put in the most work (and get the most readers). When I started Costanza Book Club, it was because I still had ideas I wanted to express about books and ideas. This was meant to be a place to unload some ideas, start some discussions, provide some links to things of a literary nature. I had never read another blog about literature before starting writing here, so I largely used my experience sports-blogging as a model of tone (which is why I don't think I've ever reached the level of formality and focus I see on some of the better lit blogs).

But I also started this blog with the explicit intent of writing contrapuntally. It is a style of writing that was encouraged by one of my grad school professors, Don Ringnalda (sadly, he recently died of cancer). Broadly speaking, this means writing with a willingness to jump around, to make unexpected connections, to explore different subjects around a central theme in a very free way. It is a form of writing that can bring about unique insights.

Blogging is a good medium for contrapuntal writing, in my opinion: the free form and the personal nature encourage it. Mention of a book I'm reading can lead to comparisons with other books, a connection to a theory, a TV show, a film, a relevant current event, or my own peculiar religious, social, political, or ethical ideas. It's not meant to be rambling or broad--it's meant to be an open exploration, following the threads where they may go.

Even as I tried this in earlier blog posts, I don't think I was always terribly successful. I don't find in my archives great models of contrapuntal writing. There's an openness to making connections, a willingness to follow a thought in peculiar ways, but I think I can do better.

So, in general dissatisfaction with this blog, I'm going to recommit to writing contrapuntally here. I hope it provides me with more satistfaction in my writing, and provides a challenge to my writing and thinking. Maybe it will make the blog more interesting, maybe not. But it will provide my blogging here with more purpose.