Felder's Forum

If Guido Taught Humanities 4

2009-05-22T13:45:00.001-07:00

I just got an email from one of the helpful people at IVC's EOPS office (they buy books for students who can't afford them). She noted that the bookstore listed some thirteen books for my Humanities 4/Culture Since 1700 course. Certainly, she said, this must be a mistake. Did you mean to have students select four of those books?

I don't know how she came up with the number "four," but I assured her that all thirteen books would be required. Granted, some of the books are relatively short (The Communist Manifesto, The Social Contract, Candide, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion) and some of them are collections of essays from which I'm only assigning selections (The Basic Writings of Immanuel Kant, Heidegger: Basic Writings, Simulacra and Simulations; and I'm only assigned some sections of Walden). But that still leaves some long books for them to read (On Photography, Mrs. Dalloway, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Gay Science, and The Myth of Sisyphus).

Listing them like that, especially when I remember that this is summer course, only lasting six weeks, does make me feel pretty evil.

I comfort myself by remembering a conversation I had with my predecessor/colleague here at IVC, Peter Morrison. We were discussing the ideal reading load for Humanities 3--Western Culture from 1100-1700--and without missing a beat he said, "about a book a week." I also comfort myself by remembering that summer school students need to do the same amount of work as students enrolled in a sixteen-week semester.

I also remind myself that covering three hundred years worth of literature, history, philosophy, and art is a pretty impossible task even if you are reading 500 books.

But there is more to it than that.

In Fellini's 8 1/2 Guido faces the same problem I face every time I send my book orders, for any class, to the bookstore. I can't decide which books to read, which films to watch, which artists to highlight. There are too many good choices. There are too many necessary choices. This is the same problem Guido faces in 8 1/2. Which film will he make? Which plot-line will he leave out? Which women will he keep in his life, his bed, his heart? In the end he keeps them all.

Trust me, I haven't come anywhere close to keeping "all" of the books, films, ideas I wanted to keep for this Hum 4 class. Still, I, like Guido, like every modern person, find myself oppressed by my options. I have too many choices most of the time. I can imagine that in past generations humanists could immediately point to this or that philosopher, author, artist as "essential" for a particular course. But aren't we too savvy for this kind of thing? Don't we all know, at some level, how ultimately contingent all (such?) choices are? Isn't this what Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sontag, and Baudrillard have shown us? Isn't responding to this what Camus, Woolf, and Kundera were trying to do? Of course, to understand that project, that project of engaging in/with "normal nihilism," we have to know something about the murderers of God Nietzsche describes in The Gay Science, so don't we at least have to read Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Marx, and Kant (et al)?

So, no, the students can't choose four out of the thirteen books I've assigned for the class. As it is, I've narrowed my choice to thirteen from five hundred.

I know, it's a lot, but I think it's going to be a really fun six weeks, and hopefully not just for me.

CCHA Talk on Nietzsche and Carrie Bradshaw

2006-11-11T11:36:00.000-08:00

First, some notes on my title. In my original draft for the proposal I had a question mark at the end of the title as if I were going to answer the question, is Carrie Bradshaw Nietzsche’s Superman? The question mark really fits the gist of what I want to say about Carrie Bradshaw, because I’m not sure Nietzsche would actually think of HBO’s fictional sex-columnist as the successor to humanity prophesied by his Zarathustra. In fact, I’m pretty sure he would NOT think of her in such grand terms. But there’s no question mark at the end of my presentation title because one of my colleagues suggested it made it seem like I was responding to a question lots of people were asking, but, of course, I’m responding to a question no one is asking. Still, I do hold up Carrie Bradshaw as at least a partial incarnation of Nietzsche’s ideals and I want to present her to you in that way.
In my “Introduction to Humanities” class we spend the first four or five weeks of the semester discussing ethics, but I try to do so in a way that would not duplicate the good work done in typical ethics classes in our philosophy department. Instead, we begin with Plato’s “Euthyphro” and then spend a few weeks with Nietzsche before watching Woody Allen’s film, “Crimes and Misdemeanors.” Certainly Nietzsche’s own oeuvre is vast enough on its own to keep some “Intro to Humanities” students busy for a few weeks, but I find that for most of my students, Nietzsche’s writings are among the most difficult texts they’ve ever read. (They are not much comforted when I tell them that as primary philosophical texts go, he’s not that hard. When compared to Hegel or Kant he seems downright fun.) To help them engage the text I sometimes assign Mark T. Conard’s article, “Thus Spake Bart.” (In The Simpsons and Philosophy, 2001)
In that article Conard wonders which Simpson would be a better model of virtue, Lisa, or Bart? He writes:

Now, while Nietzsche rejected and even laughed at the traditional ideal, the so-called "good person," the compassionate, religiously virtuous person, he forged something of his own ideal: the free spirit; the person who rejects traditional morality, traditional virtues; the person who embraces the chaos of the world and gives style to his character.

Could it be that from a Nietzschean perspective we've been admiring the wrong character? Might Lisa Simpson be part of what Nietzsche calls world-slandering weariness, decadence, slave morality, resentment? Sure, it's fun to be bad, but might there be something healthy and life-affirming, something philosophically important about it? Could Bart Simpson be, in the end, the Nietzschean ideal? (pp. 60-61)

Conard’s conclusion is “no,” Bart Simpson is not Nietzsche’s Superman because, for Conard at least,

the Nietzschean ideal culminates in the figure of the Übermensch, or overman, the being who has achieved this very difficult project of making an artwork out of his life, the self-creating being. Nehamas says: “Thus Spoke Zarathustra is constructed around the idea of creating one’s own self or, what Schacht says: “. . . the ‘overman’ is to be construed as a symbol of human life raised to the level of art. (p. 68)

Conard stresses that the Superman is not the same as master morality, or some kind of bullying brute, but “more the artist, the self-overcoming, self-creating individual, who forges new values, who makes an artwork out of his life.” Conard concludes that this is NOT Bart Simpson.
But does popular culture offer another model for this ideal, someone who is not a slave to some kind of “written-in-stone” ideal, but who is, instead, this kind of self-creating individual, who forges new values, who makes an artwork out of his life? I would suggest that there is such a figure: Carrie Bradshaw.
Sure, Carrie is not a perfect representation of Nietzsche’s ideal. She sometimes caves-in to self-doubt, compromises herself, and makes mistakes, but I don’t think that would cause Nietzsche to reject her—at least not from the category of “free spirit” (and he might actually agree that she is at least an intimation of the Übermensch)—because these qualities, these “failings” if you will, are, after all, what make her human. But even with these human weaknesses, Carrie does seem to embody some key aspects of the Nietzschean ideal.
First, she does not accept any values as “given,” but neither does she cave into nihilism. In fact, the whole structure of the show is built around her attempt to find, clarify, and construct her own set of values. In a typical episode, Carrie and her friends, Samantha, Charlotte, and Miranda, are confronted with various choices, dilemmas, and difficulties that send Carrie to her trusty Apple Notebook. She muses over the problems they are facing and then poses a question, usually a question of value. We then see her pursue this question throughout the rest of the episode until she finally reaches some kind of clarity, perspective, or value. She does not find, nor does she even seek, THE authority that could clarify her situation and provide her with a fixed, universal set of values. But this failure to engage in any kind of universally-binding authority never leads her to conclude that her world is devoid of meaning and value. On the contrary, she engages in Nietzsche’s anti-nihilism project, revaluing values by positing herself as the source of those values.
Second, we might think of her as a kind of Übermensch because she has style. In his notebooks Nietzsche wrote:
One thing is needful.-To "give style” to one's character-a great and rare art! It is practiced by those who survey all the strengths and weaknesses of their nature and then fit them into an artistic plan until every one of them appears as art and reason and even weaknesses delight the eye. . . In the end, when the work is finished, it becomes evident how the constraint of a single taste governed and formed everything large and small. Whether this taste was good or bad is less important than one might suppose, if only it was a single taste! (Will to Power, 371)

Carrie Bradshaw definitely has style . . . and taste. She “gives style” to her life and in the process creates values. Probably the thing I find most engaging about Sex and the City is that, in general, the characters do not “learn valuable lessons about life” and “discover deep moral values.” On the contrary, what they discover is their own sense of style and the importance of that style in giving one’s life meaning and purpose.
I admit it, Carrie Bradshaw is probably not the ideal being Zarathustra had in mind. She is, after all, human, all to human, struggling just like the rest of us. Still, I can’t help but wonder, in a world in which people cling tenaciously to the authoritative universal-values-granting institutions that have given birth to the culture wars—in other words, in a world in which values have become political, that is, without any personal value—could we all learn something from a free-spirited sex columnist who blows half her salary on a really nice pair of shoes?

[Clips are from “A Woman’s Right to Shoes” ]

Privileging the Bible

2006-11-05T14:27:00.000-08:00

One of the real challenges of teaching religion in an academic context is how to face those students who “privilege” the Bible above other texts. (It’s true, many, or most, Muslim students also privilege the Qur’an in this way, but they seem less strident about this, perhaps because as a religious minority in America they are more accustomed to the idea that not everyone values the Qur’an in the same way they do.)

Privileging the Bible in this way is understandable, but it is not appropriate in an academic context. In college, especially in the humanities, one of the things we are supposed to be doing is challenging just such privileging of texts (and challenging certain privileged readings of those texts).

But there is NO REASON to privilege the Bible in that way. There are literally thousands of religious texts around, hundreds of them in my office, and there is nothing special about the Bible. It is a product of human culture.

This doesn’t mean it is not valuable. It is. I read and think about it all the time. But I no longer accept the idea that is a “miraculous book” that contains any kind of direct message from God. What it does contain is a record of many people, over hundreds of years, wrestling with some of the most important issues people face.

When Christians try to defend this privileging of the Bible, they usually do so on the basis of three arguments: the Bible’s supposed inerrancy, fulfilled biblical prophecy, and some kind of personal authentication of the Bible’s message. While these strategies convince those who are determined to be convinced, they don’t convince anyone else.

The inerrancy argument is just wrong. The Bible has many errors of fact and history as well as contradictions. The “privilegers” defend this doctrine on a point-by-point case with elaborate, a-historical arguments that are ingenious, but ultimately unconvincing to most of us because they are so patently desperate, absurd, and even dishonest. (For example, see the problem of who killed Goliath explained by a "privileger" and by a "non-privileger."

The prophecy argument works in three areas: ancient prophecies of O.T. events that have been “fulfilled” in ancient history, prophecies fulfilled by the life of Jesus, and prophecies about the “end times” which we see being fulfilled today. None of these are convincing either.

The so-called fulfilled prophecies of the O.T. are ex eventu prophecies. In other words, these texts “predicted” events that had already happened. There are hundreds of ancient documents that do this. The only ones that people consider valid today are those found in the Bible. This is privileging. It would be like me producing a document I claimed to have written in 1995 that claimed, “the two towers in the great city of the apple will fall, yeah, they will fall in a day.” Nobody would believe that this text was produced supernaturally or after the events of 9/11/2001, nobody claims that for all the other ancient texts, yet Christians want a special privilege for the Bible. They take texts that are clearly cases of ex eventu prophecy and claim they are authentic.

Similarly, prophecies about Christ fulfilling O.T. prophecies are really examples of the gospel narratives being shaped in order to make the events of Christ life fit the prophecies. A an easy to understand example is the birth narratives. Matthew and Luke’s stories are completely different. They only agree on two points: Jesus was born in Bethlehem and grew up in Nazareth. Obviously, Jesus did grow up in Nazareth, but there is no evidence that he was born in Bethlehem. Instead, in order to “fulfill” the prophecy in Micah that seems to predict the Messiah will be born in Bethlehem, they invented stories (Matthew has Mary and Joseph living in Bethlehem but fleeing because of Herod’s death threats; Luke has Mary and Joseph living in Nazareth but moving traveling to Bethlehem to meet a Roman census requirement [otherwise unattested]).

The most absurd use of biblical prophecies is the attempt to demonstrate that the events we see depicted in our newspapers were predicted thousands of years ago in the Bible. I’ve been following this discussion for thirty years, and the referents for these “prophecies” changes every few years. Besides, it’s completely obvious that virtually every word of Revelation was intended to comment on events that were current in the late first century. Revelation is about the ancient Roman Empire. It has NOTHING to do with our current situation.

The final argument that is sometimes presented is that the Bible is self-authenticating. As you read it you “hear God speaking” through it to you. This seems to me like the only valid argument for the divine origin of the Bible, but because it is so subjective it does not allow one to privilege the Bible in the way Christians do. People hear truth, or Truth, or God, in lots of places and in lots of ways. While this feature of human engagement with the Bible is very important, it is not unique.

So, am I arguing that people should stop reading the Bible? No. Far from it. What I am arguing is that we should stop privileging it—exempting it from the normal critiques and methods of evaluation that are applied to other texts—and start taking it seriously. We are not taking the Bible seriously when we refuse to see it for what it is and attribute some magical quality to a text that is otherwise valuable as a record of the human quest for God and the human attempt to make sense out of our lives here.

Does Paz “work”?

2006-11-04T15:51:00.000-08:00

The other day, a student offered a very interesting objection to Paz’s Labyrinth of Solitude.

He asked, “what if you like being part of a particular group?”

I think his objection was meant to suggest that people “like” their associations with particular groups, probably because of the strong sense of identity we get from them.

No doubt this is true. In fact, as a matter of political strategy, one might conclude that Paz’s “strategy” is completely ineffective. You can’t construct a political movement out of a “universal” identity like the one suggested by Paz’s category “alone.” People join movements because of “interests” they believe they share with those movements, and it seems that Paz’s urge for us to unite with all humanity doesn’t take that into account. His definition of “community”—a place where I can see myself in the other—seems to work better the more narrowly defined the community.

However, this failure to create a more universal community out of the move into the “labyrinth of solitude” seems to be the only way to avoid the kind of conflict we are seeing in Iraq right now. The divisions between Sunni, Shiah, and Kurd would be resolved best if the members of those communities could see themselves as part of a single community—but this seems unlikely at the moment.

Furthermore, I would really like to see America return to a greater sense of community. Paz would ask us how we can hope to solve any of our problems if we can’t have a real dialogue about them. It is our insistence on “winning,” (as opposed to “solving”) that seems to be driving our current political crises. We are facing tough issues—issues related to the war, security, the economy, immigration, corporations, the environment, etc.—and it seems counterproductive to approach these issues with the desire to win one for our side, rather than with the desire to do the best we can for all of us.

Ahhh . . . Nietzsche

2006-11-01T22:32:00.000-08:00

Ahhhh . . . . Nietzsche. I really love that guy.

I’ve been really getting down on myself about the way I’ve been teaching my Hum 22 class. I haven’t been saying what I really think, and I’ve devoted to little time to real scholarship, and too much time to responding to uncritical, but loud, assertions. It seems that most of the students, and all of the more vocal students, are strident evangelicals. They seem to think that anyone who doesn’t agree with them is ignorant, or stupid, or evil. They seem to be quite Manichaean.

To be an evangelical Christian means that you believe the Bible is a miraculous book. You think it contains no errors of history or science, and contains no contradictions. To hold this view is to reject two hundred years of historical scholarship. It is to part ways with every major scholar in the world with the exception of those who are not free to pursue the truth because they teach at conservative Christian colleges and universities that require them to never deviate from the party line. To be an evangelical is also to reject the obvious evidence of the text itself—a text that contains a lot of interesting, compelling, and profitable discourse on the nature of our existence—evidence that clearly demonstrates, again and again, that the Bible is the product of human culture. Like literally thousands of other religious texts, it was created by human beings who were asking the same questions, in the same way, we are. It should have no special authority over any thinking person.

But, of course, evangelicals are thinking people. Many of them are quite intelligent. They just can’t face the thought that their safe, confined, well-organized world—a world that is really a system that exists only in their heads, and exists only to make them feel like they know THE truth of the universe—a universe completely devoid of mystery, and, therefore, from my point of view, a world devoid of God (yes, these evangelicals have killed God, I see God’s blood all over them)—and, because they know the truth of the universe they can go to bed every night, not only, in their words, “certain they will go to heaven when they die,” and convinced they are better than the rest of us (though, of course, they deny this is their attitude).

They honestly would rather see me, and you, and billions of other people burn in hell for eternity then find out there is no hell at all.

Just think about that.

What do evangelicals believe?

They believe:
• God created everything in the universe in six days. Most of them think this event occurred less than 10,000 years ago.
• There was literally a Garden of Eden (located between the Tigris and Euphrates River which, miraculously, still existed even after the [global] Flood) and in this Garden there were two trees: one of these trees was actually named “The Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil” and the other was actually named “The Tree of Life.” A talking serpent manages to trick Eve into eating some fruit form the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, and this leads to all the pain and suffering we now experience. They do not believe this is symbolic. They believe it is history.
• They believe that virtually every biologist on this planet is an idiot for believing that all of the biodiversity on this planet is the result of long, gradual, inefficient, but biologically explainable processes. Yes, according to evangelicals, those scientists are incredibly stupid to believe such nonsense, but it is perfectly reasonable for evangelicals to believe that the ancestors of every bird, animal, and person on this planet once lived together on a single boat (Noah’s Ark).
• They believe that God actually parted the Red Sea so that the Israelites could walk through it. (And that God sent ten plagues on Egypt, including turning the Nile River to blood and covering all of Egypt with frogs . . . literally.)
• They believe that the prophet Elijah did not die; instead, an actual chariot of fire came down from heaven and lifted him up to heaven.
• They believe a man actually lived in the belly of a big fish for three days . . . and then was regurgitated and survived.
• The believe that we are all surrounded by myriads of unseen spiritual beings—angels and demons—who can and do interfere in human affairs.
• They believe that sometime soon Jesus will come back to earth, at least as far as the atmosphere, and then they will be transported ,magically, up to meet Jesus in the air.
• They believe in the soon-coming “Great Tribulation”—a period of seven years when the human population (minus the already-raptured Christians) will suffer terribly. This is inevitable, from their point of view, and that explains why they don’t really worry about stopping devastating ecological or military disasters. If terrorists were to set off a nuclear bomb in New York City, they would see a silver-lining: this would mean that Jesus’ return would come soon.

But, of course, it’s okay that they believe all those things. What I find so soul-crushing is that they not only feel entitled to believe these bizarre things, they feel that those of us who don’t agree with all this nonsense, those of us who want some proof before we believe any of it, are evil, stupid, ignorant, etc.

I know all of this because I use to be one of them.

But it’s so frustrating. I want to engage them. I want to get them to consider things reasonably. But this would be to bang my head against a stone wall. So I swallow my words. I don’t tell them what I really think. (Besides, I can’t waste class time arguing points with people who are unable to believe anything different than what they already believe. They can’t believe otherwise. They really can’t help themselves.)

So, on the train home tonight I was very happy to turn to my faithful friend and guide, F.N., speaking through his most famous voice, that of Zarathustra:

“Do not be jealous, lover of truth, because of these inflexible and oppressive men! Truth has never yet clung to the arm of an inflexible man.

“Return to your security because of these abrupt men: only in the market-place is one assailed with Yes? Or No?

“The experience of all deep wells is slow: they must wait long until they know what has fallen into their depths.

“All great things occur away from glory and the market-place: the inventors of new values have always lived away from glory and the market-place.

“Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung by poisonous flies. Flee to where the raw, rough breeze blows!

“Flee into your solitude. You have lived too near the small and the pitiable men. Flree from their hidden vengeance! Towards you they are nothing but vengeance.

“No longer lift your arm against them! They are innumerable and it is not your fate to be a fly-swat.”

(Thus Spake Zarathustra, I. “Of the Flies of the Market-Place,” trans. Hollingdale.)

Click Here for an Example of Moderate Muslim Response

2006-02-15T12:05:00.000-08:00

Click on the title to this post to see an article about a website that represents the kind of moderate response to which I was referring in the previous post.

Cartoon Controversy

2006-02-14T22:45:00.000-08:00

Does the recent controversy over the "Muhammud cartoons" represent a collision of cultures? Maybe, but I suspect there is more to the story.

My undergraduate degree is in journalism, and I take the right of the press to function freely and without intimidation to be essential in a modern democracy. In this country, the mainistream press has been embarrassingly hypocritical in its coverage of the cartoon fiasco, almost every venue refusing to reproduce the cartoons out of "respect for the religious beliefs of others." This sense of respect did not, however, keep journalist (e.g. CNN's Wolf Blitzer) from displaying Islamic cartoons that disrespect Jews. Perhaps the more accurate reason for not displaying the Muslim cartoons comes under the "responsibility" excuse, which I take to mean "fear of reprisals."

The thought that fear, in this case, fear of violence, would silence journalist, sickens me. Part of living in a society with a free press is that you will find yourself, no matter who you are, ridiculed and disrespected by someone with a printing press, or t.v. transmitter, or . . . computer, but that is part of the price we pay for the right to criticize others--they may also criticize us.

But is this a sign of a conflict between two civilizations--Christian and Muslim, or . . . modern and, well . . . Muslim?

I don't think so. We might ask who is the main audience for all of the violence and outrage over the cartoons. I doubt that the audience is the (secular) West. Rather, it seems to me that the audience for these (violent) demonstrations was the Muslim world. As Reza Aslan has argued (in his book, No God but God), the Muslim world is in the midst of a "reformation" in which Muslims are struggling over the very issue of what it means to be Muslim. Aslan notes, for example, that the very day before the most recent London bombings, almost all of the top Muslim clerics in the world had issued fatwas condemning just such terrorist violence and the bombings in London occured not in the financial or tourist areas of London, but in neighborhoods populated by large groups of Muslim immigrants.

It seems to me that the extended circulation, debate, and protest over the cartoons has been a way of drawing Muslims around the world into a debate over the nature of Islam. It has presented a challenge to those Muslims--in fact, the vast majority of Muslims--who increasingly emphasize tolerance, personal ethics, and spirituality to reject western institutions. In this discourse the cartoons represent the irreverance of the west towards Islam and reinforce the idea that the west is hostile towards Muslims. I suspect the purpose of this rhetoric is more to critique tolerant Muslims than it is to engage "the West" in a meaninful way.

But the West is not alien to this problem. Remember the sixteenth century? Europe endured over a hundred years of intense religious controversy, violence, assassiantion, and, yes . . . terrorism. I believe Aslan is right: Islam is working through its own "reformation" right now.

If he is right, then the repeated attempts to frame this moment as a "clash of civilization" is to undermine the position of the vast majority of Muslims who advocate tolerance, respect the religious beliefs of others, and want to live in societies where dissent can be expressed. This is not a conflict between Christian and Muslim "civilizations." This is yet another chapter in the saga we call "modernity."

CBS Poll Says we Don't Believe Darwin

2006-02-11T22:34:00.001-08:00

According to a CBS poll, have of American do NOT believe that evolution is a valid theory. Does that mean that most of us don't live with the kind of intellectual crisis of "normal nihilism" that Nietzsche assumed characterized the modern world?

I think the opposite. It shows how frigtening Darwin's ideas still are. We have not yet found a way to live with all of our feelings and instincts and to face them. Instead, we find ourselves burdened by the emptiness. We cannot yet value our own place in the universe, and this cannot but make me wonder if we have yet to recover a real sense of value for the divine. If we really valued God, why would we fear to face our own place in God's universe?

Nietzsche vs. Religion

2006-02-09T17:56:00.000-08:00

“Authenticity, in religious practices or otherwise, offers no secure protection against the sense of loss that accompanies a recognition of the groundlessness of all one’s practices. Only average everydayness or inauthenticity could do that, and the one is doomed to be periodically shattered and the other is (presumably) not available to the smart folks like us who have now read Nietzsche and Heidegger.” --James C. Edwards. The Plain Sense of Things. p. 148.

I’m grading essays on Nietzsche’s use of the term “nihilism” in Beyond Good and Evil. Some of my students can’t seem to deal with the assignment at all because they are so blinded by the fear and rage they feel over Nietzsche’s apparent atheism. Some of my students aren’t enraged, but they still want to know if Nietzsche was an atheist.

It seems to me he probably was, but I don’t think his thought requires atheism. What it requires is an interrogation of, and thus, a possible rejection of our belief in God as ___________. For many of us belief in God, like a host of other beliefs, appears to us as a necessity. Without God, life would be meaningless, valueless, and devoid of moral judgment . . . at least that’s how many of us feel, so we cling to the belief despite all the evidence against that proposition.

Of course, there could be no evidence against the proposition “God exist” because the terms “God” and “existence” are so slippery, one might even say, “so devoid of content, that no logic or evidence could falsify such a claim (unless “incoherence” counts as an argument against such a proposition).
But Nietzsche, at least in Beyond Good and Evil, only asserts that most people have lost faith in the “discredited” God as “father,” “judge,” “rewarder,” etc. It seems to me that he is right about this. Many (all?) premodern people did see the world as essentially “just,” with God, or karma, or something punishing the evil and rewarding the good. (The sorority girl version of this dogma persists: “I believe everything happens for a reason.”) But in the modern world we doubt this. (We don’t assume that only bad people get cancer and only good people get rich.)

And yet . . . we cling to the notion of God as rewarder, or we push the rewards and punishments more securely into another (invisible) realm (either heaven/hell or some psychological state of satisfaction/torment), but in the end, Nietzsche would argue, this is wishful thinking and, worse, a denial of the importance of our lives here and now and a failure to analyze the cause of our psychological torments and satisfactions.
Worst of all, the modern believer is so thoroughly soaked in his own nihilism he must (violently) repudiate the differences he sees in others. The rewarder/judge he claims to see in God (but doesn’t really see because the modern religious person is biggest nihilist of all) must be made present through the actions of the “believer” himself who then goes on to judge and reward in God’s place, including judging and rewarding himself.

Time for Nietzsche . . . Again

2006-01-22T21:15:00.000-08:00

It’s that time of the semester—the time when I start teaching Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil to my Hum 1 students—and I start doubting my choice of texts. They find it difficult. They panic, despair, and become angry. I begin to wonder if it’s worth it.

From a pedagogical point of view I know I have a strong case. The course is supposed to introduce students to the Humanities, including philosophy, and I’m using Plato and Nietzsche as my choice for the two most influential philosophers of our tradition. Though my analytical-philosopher friends will be horrified, I think it’s the right choice. Both Nietzsche and Plato ask questions and teach us how to ask questions. Learning to read Nietzsche is to learn to look—really look—at the arguments, one might say, “pretences,” that compete for our hearts and minds.

Plus, I also feel like it’s worthwhile to expose my students to what is, arguably, the most dazzling mind they will ever encounter. So few of them are readers, and even the readers rarely read anything that pushes them so far as a book by Nietzsche.

My students may hate it, but I love it. I love (re-)reading his books. I know of no other philosopher with so much life, nerve, sympathy, and optimism. So . . . despite the worried, grumpy, even angry faces I will encounter tomorrow, I’ll be smiling.

Systems

2006-01-20T19:49:00.000-08:00

Ever since I started teaching college students I have faced a steady stream of earnest young people (who remind me of myself) seeking some kind of spiritual reality in their lives. They have rejected the religion of their family, but they want to find something else. But they can't. Even agnosticism doesn't seem to work. Lately, as I listen to these seeking students, it seems to me they are looking for a system. They find things in every religion that they like, but they also find things they can't accept. Could it be that there is no system?

Passage by Connie Willis (2001)

2005-10-30T20:27:00.000-08:00

I read this book at the suggestion of my friend, Clyde. He lent it to me about three years ago and it sat on my shelf until this week, when he asked for it back. So I spent every spare moment for the last two days reading this almost-600-page novel.

Though somewhat formulaic, this is incredibly intelligent and ultimately moving novel. It deals with death, from children with terminal disease to embalming practices, but its central concern is with Near-Death-Experiences (NDE’s), or, more precisely, with what NDE’s may tell us about the universal experience we will all participate in: death.

While I was expecting it to be a lot of sappy stuff about the “light at the end of the tunnel,” it turns out to be a far more convincing reading of the experience we will all face. The book seems intelligent in the way it deals frankly with NDE’s and neuroscience, giving us plenty of detail about both.

For me, the most powerful feature of the novel was the way the central character, Joanna Lander, experiences death as going down on/with the Titanic (the light at the end of her tunnel is the deck of the Titanic). The most chilling and abiding of those images comes as one of her old teachers explains how another character, a patient who dies in the ER at the hospital where Joanna works, speaks some cryptic words (and hear I’m going to spoil part of the plot) that suggest that he too was on the Titanic as he was dying. When she asks an old high school teacher what this means, he points out that the reason the Titanic holds such fascination for us, the reason we have produced so many books, films, and television specials on it, is because we all recognize it for what it is: an image of death. Alone on the ocean, confident in the ability of modern technology to forestall the inevitable, we hit something, we take on water, and we struggle as long as we can to keep the lights on, to keep playing music, only to sink, inevitably and out of reach of any help, we all sink, we sink to the bottom of the ocean. We die.

Though the book moves beyond this image to try to understand how NDE’s might be related to the chemistry of the brain at the time of death, it is the image of the Titanic, in fact, it is the notion of the possibility of images that unify for us the death experience, and the possibility that I will probably go through an experience myself, as my brain is dying, that resembles the sinking of the Titanic—the desperation, the “calls” for help, the attempt to “keep the lights on” as long as possible--that is haunting me.

Just a few years ago I had no worries about death. I had every confidence that I had it all figured out. Dying was nothing to fear. It was just stepping from one room into another, another room where I would walk streets of gold and be with all my loved ones forever. But now I am less sure. I hope for something. I hope for some Divine presence to spirit me, and those I love, into some other place, but, as Tolstoy said on his deathbed, when being urged to return to the (Orthodox) Church before it was “too late”: “even at one’s death, two plus two doesn’t equal six.”

So, last night I went to bed with Joanna on the sinking Titanic, and me, looking forward not to pearly gates, but to my own Titanic. I hardly slept. I’m exhausted.

It would be so nice to just believe the beautiful fairytales, but how does one believe something that doesn’t seem true? Jesus’ words, “My God, My God, Why have you forsaken me?” sound so much more real than any sermon I’ve ever heard on heaven.

Of course, at the end, Willis’ novel is just an imagining of what it is like to die (though a more compelling and realistic one than, say, Alice Sebold’s)—an imagining based on people’s last words, NDE’s, and neurobiology—nobody knows what it is really like, but we seem to know, when we see the Titanic, what it is we are seeing.

Coming Back

2005-08-20T00:10:00.000-07:00

After a long hiatus I'll be restarting this blog. I'm going to focus on reviews of books, films, exhibits, etc.

Look for a review of "The Big Lebowski" which I just saw, for the first time, last night.

“Ashlee Simpson, You are not Liz Phair”

2005-03-08T10:23:00.000-08:00

Sunday I was listening to Liz Phair songs, over and over and over again, when my iPod popped up “Extraordinary” and it suddenly occurred to me, “I bet Ashlee Simpson thinks she’s Liz Phair.” This is not an informed opinion. It’s based upon my stumbling on Ashlee’s reality show (is there such a thing?) on MTV (I assume) a year or two ago. She was whining about how her record producer wanted her to sound more like her sister and she was complaing, “I’m not my sister.”

“Agreed,” I thought, “and that’s not a bad thing.” But I couldn’t quite place who she though she was. She seemed to be implying that she was “rockin’ ” in a way her sister was not. When her song, “Pieces of Me” came out I could tell that she was (a) more rockin’ than her sister and (b) not really what I would think of as “rockin’” in a Janice Joplin, Pat Benatar, Courtney Love kind of way.

Then there was the whole “Saturday Night Live” lip-sync thing and the getting-boo’ed-at-the-Orange-Bowl thing, and Ashlee Simpson seemed like another marginally talented fad that would go away. I harbored no real resentment for her though, and, though I’m prone to be jealous of talent-less, dumb people who are successful, she hardly registered on my radar . . . that is until I listend to “Extraordinary” on Sunday.

When I heard that song, something clicked inside my head; I realized that this is what Ashlee Simpson thinks she sounds like, and Liz Phair is who Ashlee Simpson thinks she is. But, Ashlee Simpson, you are not Liz Phair. Even a song like “Extraordinary,” as much a hit as anything Liz Phair has done, so far surpasses Ashlee Simpson’s work (of which I, admittedly, know very litte) that you have to feel sad for her.

Never mind that Liz Phair has an actual body of work that includes immanently popular tunes like “Why Can’t I?” as well as some less popular favorites of mine like “Polyester Bride,” “What Makes You Happy,” “Never Said” and “Fuck and Run,” she can sing, and write, and phrase her songs in a way that sticks with you.

Consider “Extraordinary”—probably not her best work—a song that with a unique combination of humorous but penetrating lyrics paints, in the space of about 40 lines, a really moving portrait of a young woman’s unrequited yearnings for a man who can’t see her the way she sees herself. But Phair also brings a unique sense of phrasing and expression that makes me want to listen to the song over, and over, and over again.

And, Ashlee, she can sign.

Extraordinary
Liz Phair
(Liz Phair)

You think that I go home at night
Take off my clothes, turn out the lights
But I burn letters that I write
To you, to make you love me

Yeah, I drive naked through the park
And run the stop sign in the dark
Stand in the street, yell out my heart
To make, to make you love me

I am extraordinary, if you'd ever get to know me
I am extraordinary, I am just your ordinary
Average every day sane psycho
Supergoddess
Average every day sane psycho

You may not believe in me
But I believe in you
So I still take the trash out
Does that make me too normal for you?

So dig a little deeper, cause
You still don't get it yet
See me lickin' my lips, need a primitive fix
And I'll make, I'll make you love me

I am extraordinary, if you'd ever get to know me
I am extraordinary, I am just your ordinary
Average every day sane psycho
Supergoddess
Average every day sane psycho
Supergoddess

See me jump through hoops for you
You stand there watching me performing
What exactly do you do?
Have you ever thought it's you that's boring?
Who the hell are you?

I am extraordinary, if you'd ever get to know me
I am extraordinary, I am just your ordinary
Average every day sane psycho
Supergoddess
Average every day sane psycho

Average every day sane psycho
Supergoddess
Average every day sane psycho

Average every day sane psycho
Supergoddess
Average every day sane psycho

Average every day sane psycho

Bush's Preventative War Doctrine

2005-02-28T17:39:00.000-08:00

In Humanities Core Lecture Aaron James has been arguing that the Bush Doctrine is one of “preventative,” not “preemptive” war, the former being done when there is no manifestly immanent threat, the latter when there is one; the former being immoral and illegal, while the latter is permissible. I think this is a really useful distinction, but does it help us to determine the morality of Bush’s war in Iraq (and those to come in Syria and Iran)?

It seems the best argument against Bush’s “Preventative War Doctrine” is that it depends on U.S. exceptionalism. To allow everybody to engage in “preventative war” would be to recreate a Hobbesian “state of nature” on the international scale. We would all be compelled to see every inter-national relation as a site of potential conflict. But why should the U.S. be an exception? The only argument that would seem valid is to claim that as the “only remaining superpower” the U.S. has an obligation to act to prevent aggression and lawlessness.

This argument fits if the reason for the invasion of Iraq was to deprive a dangerous dictator of WMD’s, but it doesn’t work if the reason was to “liberate” the Iraqis from an oppressive region. The former rationale fits the U.S.’s (self-appointed!) role as enforcer of the world order, but the latter rationale does not. It represents an attempt to violate the sovereignty of another nation in order to install a regime that more resembles our own.

The truth is, I prefer the “liberation” rationale, even though I think it’s much harder to defend. The truth is, I don’t think we, or anyone else, was particularly threatened by a Saddam Hussein under U.N. sanctions. But I do think people were suffering under his brutality (though they may be suffering more now under our gentelness), and I hate brutality. I hate to see people tortured and brutalized, and no doubt this has something to do with my own experience with this first hand, and no, I don’t mean in Belgrade, I mean in the home I grew up in, so I hate to see people subjected to this kind of oppression. So, in 2003 I was outwardly opposed to the war, but inwardly hoping that it would turn out just the way the neo-cons were predicting--our soldiers greeted with flowers and cheers, elections soon to follow, and teenage girls playing soccer, studying Sylvia Plath, and wearing belly-shirts--but none of that happened.

Yes, I realize that creating democracy in the Middle-East may be an act of self-defense. If Iraq can become a real democracy, and if democracy can spread, then, yes, it might lead to a kindler, gentler world. But can we create that kindler gentler world by killing tens of thousands of people? Can we create that world by imposing our ideology, even if I do think it superior, on others? And even if, ten years from now we look back on the invasion and see it as a significant turning point when this kindler, gentler world was being born, will I be able to say we did the right thing?

Maybe I should, but I probably won’t, but not for the reasons my liberal colleagues give. They are people of principle. They will argue what they are arguing now: the ends don’t justify the means. But I am a not a person of principle; I am a person of raw emotion. The tens (hundreds?) of thousands of people killed will haunt me. Could their deaths have been avoided? That’s what I’ll still be thinking about ten years from now.

Ten years, or so, after the conflict in Bosnia that is what still haunts. So, though I know it’s inconsistent, though I urge restraint/inaction now, I thought we should have intervened then. I should intervened. I should have learned to fire a Kalashnikov and staked my life with the innocents in Sarajevo. But I didn’t. I was in seminary. I was worried about my own wife and children. I did nothing while tens of thousands of Bosnians were slaughtered. Sometimes I can still see their blood on my hands.

LOM Article on Coupland

2005-02-21T11:19:00.000-08:00

Here's the pretty lame short review I wrote for my church newsletter; but seriously, read Coupland.

Douglas Coupland is best known for giving my generation a label--characteristically ironic--describing us as a generation that “doesn’t have a name—an X generation—purposefully hiding itself.” In that first novel, Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture (1991), Coupland established himself, not only as one of my generation’s most defining voices, but as an important representative of one Gen. X’s most defining characteristics: the religionless spiritual quest.
He developed this idea much more explicitly in his 1994 book, Life After God, in which he describes my generation as the first generation to grow up “after God,” by which he means, we were the first (and. in retrospect, the last?) generation to grow up in a world in which God was not considered relevant. He claims, especially, I think, for those of us growing up in western North America, our life was “the life of children of the children of the pioneers—life after God—a life of earthly salvation on the edge of heaven.” But he has doubts about how ideal our life has really been. He suspects “there was a trade-off somewhere” and the “price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched” and he wonders “if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.” But then he says he must remind himself that “we have religious impulses—we must—and yet into what cracks do these impulses flow in a world without religion?”
One can read all of Coupland’s writing as a persistant exploration of these cracks, but his most explicit exploration of them to date is in his 2003 novel, Hey Nostradamus. Though I’m a die-hard Coupland fan, I’ve only recently read this remarkably sensitive exploration of religion, violence, and sorrow. In a historical situation in which religion seems to be dividing us more than ever, Coupland’s novel offers us more than clichéd pleas for tolerance. He gives us insight into the role religion plays in people’s lives, considering how it both helps and hinders personal transformation.
Early on, one of the characters announces Coupland’s theme: “to acknowledge God is to fully accept the sorrow of the human condition.” He pursues this theme as four very different characters reflect on their involvement in a Columbine-style-schoolhouse-massacre set in 1988. Using this violent episode as a launching pad, he attempts to understand how time and sorrow change all of us. But these changes do not occur in simplistic or stereotypical ways, and religion, though the driving force in these transformations, does not remain static, but changes with them.
Coupland’s hip, ironic, pulp-culture-laden voice is still present in this novel, so those of you put off by ubiquitous references to cultural artifacts like “twenty-ounce Aladdin souvenir plastic drinking cups” and similes that require an at-least-cursory familiarity with sit-coms, or who can’t seem to feel nostaligic for Windows 95 and Moebis strips, may be put off a little by his style. But I think most readers will find this is an easy, but engaging read.
Ultimately, I hope some of you will read it this month because Hey Nostradamus is a resurrection a story. Coupland quotes a prominent Christian resurrection text in the frontspiece: “Behold, I tell you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed . . .” (I Corinthians 15:51-52). It is this mystery of life and change in the face of death and sorrow that we pursue during the Easter season, and so I invite you to consider reading this novel and reflecting on how your own losses have opened up new insights into this mystery of human change.

Struggles in Humanities Core

2005-02-18T16:38:00.000-08:00

Okay, I know I haven't written in awhile, so I guess I'm writing this for myself, knowing nobody will read it.

I am so discouraged with my Humanities Core students right now. They are so worried about grades, but seem so little interested in learning. In my 2:00 section i have two students who consistantly sleep through discussion. They literally put their heads down on the desk and sleep. I've another have a dozen who stare off in the distance like they're mental patients. I don't know if they are bored, or angry, or what. Plus, when they are not sleeping they are complaining about their grades, even when they get "B's." Do they think everyone should get an "A?" There really are very view students who seem to really master the material, and that's okay, I understand, life is short, students are busy, and the course is challenging, but then why be so angry and bored? I'm trying to help them get what the texts and lectures are about, but they sit there sleepy, bored, and angry.

Of course, this could be my fault. If they're not learning, I'm not teaching. But I don't know how to be both interesting and helpful at the same time. They want to get good grades, so I tend to focus class on those things that will contribute to that, but then they don't pay attention, they don't talk, they don't do the reading, and at least a third of them don't go to lecture.

I'm also really frustrated because I don't think they treat their biology and chemistry teachers this way. I get the feeling they think science is real education and the humanities are something to be endured. This reminds me of something I read recently in Karen Armstrong's book, _The Battle for God_. In describing the condition of universities in Egypt in the 1970's she writes:

"The humanities, law, and the social sciences were known as 'garbage faculties,' and virtually written off. . . In this setting, the students were not trained to think creatively about the problems of humanity or of society. Instead, they were required to absorb information passively and soullessly. Their introduction to modern culture was chronically suuperficial, therefore, and left their religious beliefs and practices entirely untouched." (p. 1949)

I've got to think of a way to overcome this. I hope its not too late. I only have four weeks left in the quarter.

Lincoln, Hale, and Resistance

2005-01-10T17:03:00.000-08:00

I need to say a few things on this blog about Humanities Core in case any of my current students expect to get something out of this . . .

Our theme this year is “Associations and Disassociations.” This quarter we are focused on “Nation and Empire.” We’ve started by considering the way rhetoric created the nation we know as the United States of America. Brook Thomas has been arguing that Lincoln didn’t so much “save” the union, as create it through his rhetoric (and winning the Civil War).

Before 1860 people weren’t sure the U.S. was a nation. It seemed more like a confederation of states. People used plural verbs with the U.S. (i.e., “the United States are . . . ) because they couldn’t quite get their heads around the idea that the U.S. was a nation. It certainly wasn’t a nation in an ethnological sense, and people wondered to what extent it was really a nation in a political sense.

But Lincoln, in his inaugural addresses and in the "Gettysburg Address," was able to argue that the United States is (not “are”) a nation, a nation held together by “fraternal affections,” a shared memory of patriotic sacrifices, and, of course, the Constitution.

How fragile, though, this nation is. Can a nation really be created with rhetoric? And who is included in this nation? Who can join? Benedict Anderson’s groundbreaking work, Imagined Communities, argued that the nation-state, a modern phenomenon, is an imagined community. Laclau and Mouffe have argued for the “impossibility of society,” claiming that society is a “sutured reality” (in Lacan’s sense) that is discursively constructed. This leaves the identity of the community always open, always in need of suture, always fragile.

Then we explored this same theme through Everett Hale’s story, “The Man Without a Country.” I’d never read it before, but my Baby-Boomer colleagues got all wistful at the mention of the story, a story they been taught to love and then had learned to hate, condemning it has a mindless endorsement of the “my country, right or wrong” mentality.

The story certainly does seem to endorse that kind of sentimental patriotism, but Brook Thomas did a great job comparing that story to Lincoln’s ideas of the nation. On one level Lincoln’s conception seems superior, since for Lincoln our allegiance to our country is predicated on this nation’s commitment to liberty and equality. For Lincoln the U.S. is a nation “of the people, by the people, and for the people” and to rebel against that nation is to rebel against the people. But for Hale, there is a big difference between the “country” and the government, and this difference makes a space for resistance.

Last Spring, in a different Humanities Core sequence, I showed my students a documentary on the Weather Underground. I asked them if they thought it was ever appropriate for people to break the law (violently?) in a functioning democracy. They universally said no. They thought such resistance in a functioning democracy was just being a sore loser. But I’m not so sure.

Is it possible for a government elected by the people to be against the people and not for them? I wonder. All right, I suspect this current administration may be one such government.

(Coincidentally, while I type these words my iTunes just started playing U2’s cover of “Along the Wachtower.” Cool.)

"A Love Song for Bobby Long"

2005-01-04T17:49:00.000-08:00

This is a really good film. I just saw it yesterday and it blew me away. This film is based on the novel, Off Magazine Street, by R.E. Capps (Ronald Everett). I haven’t read the novel, but the film was wonderfully lyrical. It's set in New Orleans, but not the touristy New Orleans, but the New Orleans where the "invisible" people live. It's beautifully literary, with a gentle sensibility that pulls you into the emotional world of all the characters, even the "minor" ones.
The film stars John Travolta as “Bobby Long,” a washed-up alcoholic literature professor (he no longer teaches) who sort of self-destructing on screen. I was just discussing with my sister’s boyfriend how much of a loser we think Travolta is, or at least how much we think he should be writing a thank you note to Quentin Tarantino ever day, but Travolta was great in this film. He plays someone who is both charismatic and menacing at the same time, tough and tender. Thought the ending was a little over the top, I really liked the film.
Scarlett Johanssen was fabulous. She is really establishing herself as an actress with a lot of depth.
The film also stars Gabriel Macht, who was also incredible.
In other words, this is an actor’s film, but it was also very well-written and beautifully shot. This is definitely worth your $7.

I realize probably nobody is going to read this because I haven’t written in so long. I’ve been . . . gone . . . sick . . . unbelievably preoccupied and depressed. My good friend Dave’s mother died. I’ve got some kind of virus. I’ve been on an emotional roller coaster that I will probably not describe here. Instead, I will just say . . . I’m wrung out and sad and feeling as empty as I’ve ever felt.

I need to get back to some serious work now. UCI starts tomorrow, and I’m really not ready for this. The students all want to get “A’s” but very few of them are actually “A” students. What am I to do?

It’s been really rainy here in SoCal, which I love, but this means I can’t go surfing, which I probably shouldn’t do anyway, since I’m practically coughing up a lung every 90 seconds.

I’ll just say I also saw “Closer” a couple of weeks ago . . . and it is awesome. My friend, Susan, had already turned me on to Damien Rice, but if you haven’t listened to him, you have to listen to him.

I’ve also been reading Louise Gluck’s Vita Nova. She kills me. She really does. Well, I supposed I need to get home and get on with my evening, so this is all. I’ll just say that I’m back, and I’m going to try to ignore the voices of my harshest critics (and you know who you are) and just keep writing this blog and see where it takes me.

Tracks

2004-10-29T13:38:00.000-07:00

.

Smokey Robinson & The Miracles
"The Tracks Of My Tears"

People say I'm the life of the party
Because I tell a joke or two
Although I might be laughing loud and hearty
Deep inside I'm blue
So take a good look at my face
You'll see my smile looks out of place
If you look closer, it's easy to trace
The tracks of my tears..I need you, need you

Since you left me if you see me with another girl
Seeming like I'm having fun
Although she may be cute
She's just a substitute
Because you're the permanent one..
So take a good look at my face
You'll see my smile looks out of place
If you look closer, it's easy to trace
The tracks of my tears..
I need you, need you

Outside I'm masquerading
Inside my hope is fading
Just a clown oh yeah
Since you put me down
My smile is my make up
I wear since my break up with you..
So take a good look at my face
You'll see my smile looks out of place
If you look closer, it's easy to trace
The tracks of my tears

Feel or Panic or Let Peace Descend

2004-10-27T09:12:00.000-07:00

It's been awhile since I put anything on this blog. I've been really busy. I've seen like five or six films in the last week, most of them for work. I've grade 45 student essays . . . I hate giving grades. My honors students got their essays back. They really seemed to like me, but honors students always hate you after they get their grades (some of them got B's).

I haven't surfed much, mostly because of the storm conditions: poo-poo in the water from the run-off, small swell, and very choppy, so I thought I'd write about surfing a little. The following is an "ideas-draft" I did yestereday morning: just think of it as a little of my own "poo-poo" being put in the water.

Feel Panic Or . . .

Surfing is a dangerous sport, but for most of us, it’s not all that dangerous. It sometimes feels like it’s dangerous, but it’s mostly not dangerous. Yes, there are sharks, riptides, rocky bottoms, and angry locals, but, in general, we have to remember that we are in a liquid medium and not prone to being injured in the way a skater or motorcycle rider is. Usually, we are okay. Sometimes we feel like we’re dying, or as Gerry Lopez put it in “Step Into Liquid,” “maybe you die a little,” but we don’t die, not really.

But what of this dying a little? What is that about? I have a strange love-hate relationship with the “wipe-out” experience. I find myself thinking of “getting worked” with mixed feelings. When I have made a mistake, fallen, and now am being tossed around, held under, dragged, flung, rag-dolled by a wave, I often find it can be an incredibly sublime experience. In those moments when I am held under the water, clearly powerless, totally abandoned to fate, I feel a kind of peace descending on me.

Of course, that is the only option at that moment: let the peace descend, or feel panic. Every decent-sized wave offers the potential for this sort of existential experience, but there is no predicting, exactly, when it will come. You paddle into a wave, you hold up, or drive down the line trying to make a section, or even pull into a tube, and you find suddenly, that something has gone wrong. Even then, you don’t know if you will face the panic-peace moment, because it could be that everything will be okay; you will dive through to the bottom of the wave, and emerge out the back untouched, free, none the worse for your mistake.

So, when every feel-panic-or-let-peace-descend moment comes, it comes in a sudden realization—a realization that you no longer have any control over what is about to happen to you—a moment when you will choose whether or not to panic, or let what’s going to happen just happen. If you panic, you make things worse: you expend energy, and, more importantly, you expend oxygen, and you torture yourself trying to break free from something that will not let you go. This is a beginner’s mistake, to fight and struggle rather than to let go, and it makes the experience anything but sublime.

But the other option is to let go, and let peace descend. I heard one surfer describe as “tipping yourself back inside your head.” That’s what it feels like, you deliberately choose to let go, to tuck yourself, your mind, in some deep, dark, safe place while you ride out the event. You sort of go numb. You feel like you’re dead. You’re conscious, in a way that makes you aware only of your existence, DesCartes’ thinking man in the oven; there is no up or down, no right or wrong, no choices to make, you are pure being. It is something like the petit mort, except that you are actually alone, and somewhere, deep inside, you are aware of the real violence you are experiencing, and, no matter what, you do die a little.

Yet there is something liberating about all this. In those moments, those moments when I’m being tossed, and dragged, and shoved under shelves in the reef, those moments when I’m “tomb-stoning,” my surfboard sticking straight up through the surface of the waves like a tombstone, me tethered to it, twelve feet below the surface, being dragged by the force for the current, unable to move my arms, let alone surface for air, that I feel incredibly liberated. For those few moments nothing matters—not what kind of father and husband I am, not how many articles I’ve published, or how many dead languages I can read, or how eloquently I can speak, nothing at all—nothing--except how long I can hold my breath, and whether or not I can resist the urge to panic, and just let peace descend.

It is horrifyingly sublime.

This is not to say that I seek out this experience. On the contrary, I try, at all costs, that is, at all costs short of not surfing, to avoid it. It is unpleasant. It is terrifying. At Scotchman’s, where I like to surf on south swells, you get out of your car on a cliff above the beach. On a big day you can hear the surf’s thunder from the moment you get out of your car. I hear it, and I feel sick. I’m no hero. I’m no thrill-seeker.

When I go to the Surfline web-site and see a big storm in the South Pacific, and when they start predicting surfing in the eight, ten, or . . . range, I can’t sleep. I have nightmares about the next day’s swell. I think most surfers have dreams of such swells, but I admit it, I have nightmares. For all the sublimity of the experience, I don’t want to face the horror.
Still I do, because when you do make one of those waves—when you drop in on it, set your rail, and shoot down the line to safety—you feel an exhilaration, a sense of life, a sense of involvement, i.e., of being fully involved with your own existence, that doesn’t seem to have a rival.

How often have a I seen a surfer at the end of one of the terrifying rides shoot his/her arm into the air in what looks like a victory salute? But this is not the kind of exhilaration one gets from winning the Tour de France, or climbing Pike’s Peak, or scaling Half Dome. Those “victories” have an aura of conquest about them, but most surfers would say their exhilaration feels more like the joy of “survival,” and there is something sublime about that, too.
But that moment of exhilaration would not be possible, or at least would not be as intense, if we had not experienced our fair share feel-panic-or-let-peace-descend moments. It is those moments beneath the waves, those moments spent getting beat up, dragged, spun, and held down that make the moments of gliding safely to a wave’s shoulder seem that much more sublime.

I have not experienced many moments in life that I would describe as feel-panic-or-let-peace-descend. events This is probably due to the fact that I usually feel like there is at least one more thing I can do before I have to accept what will come. This probably explains why I experience so little peace in my one-land, non-surfing life. I’m always in a semi-panic mode, looking for one more thing I can do to avoid some kind of disaster, and, admittedly, most of these disasters are relatively minor.

I do remember that feeling, about four years ago, when my wife, Barbara, called me to meet her at the hospital. She was pregnant, just about to enter her third trimester, and she called me at work. I could hear the emotion in her voice, a sense of sadness and panic stuck in her throat, telling me that she had not felt the baby move for several days, and the doctor couldn’t find the heartbeat, so she had been sent to the hospital where they had better equipment. It only occurred to me later that day that the superior equipment was only part of the reason she was being sent to the hospital.

As I drove to meet her there, I was trying to make a deal with God, something which counts for “prayer” with most people, a sign that I had not yet reached a full-on feel-panic-or-let-peace-descend moment, hoping still for a miracle of sorts. My deal-making, I mean “prayer,” was a full-on sign that I was fighting, still leaning towards panic rather than peace. But as I stood beside Barbara, who was lying prone on an examination table while a technician performed an ultrasound, and as I stared at the screen, at a vague, lifeless little shape on the ultra-sound monitor, I realized that there was nothing I could do, this little image of death expressing everything we can really know about life, that ultimately we are not in control , and that in those moments all our advanced academic degrees, publications, clever observations, and sophisticated arguments mean nothing, there is only our existence in all its brutishness, and, in the midst of all my pain, pain for that little lifeless, mostly-unknown male child, pain for my wife, pain for myself, and maybe pain for us all, I knew, in the midst of, in spite of, and maybe because of that pain, a kind of horrifying peace.

2004-10-15T20:28:00.000-07:00

I’ve been too busy to write in this the last couple of days, but part of that busyness has been due to seeing movies:

“I [heart] Huckabees,’” didn’t really match my expectations. For one thing, the “existentialist” in the Existentialist Detective Agency seem more like New Age motivational speakers than the embodiment of the ideas of Sartre or Kierkegaard. This film was not so much an exposition of modern philosophy as an application of some of those ideas to modern problems. Still, I liked the film, mostly for the performances of the actors. Mark Wahlburg (spelling?) stole the film with his hilarious portrayal of a firefighter, suffering his own existential crisis which seems to have been caused by his concerns over our dependence on petroleum.

I also saw “Scary Movie 3” on DVD. Justin had rented it, and he Elly watched it a few nights ago. The film kept Elly from sleeping for two days, but Justin thought it was hilarious. He was right. I laughed out loud a bunch of times.

I’ve been reading short stories in the latest McSweeney’s, and Elaine Pagels’ The Origin of Satan. The Pagels book is mostly a retread of other things she's written. It's the same story she always tells: the "institutional" church villified and persecuted diverse voices. I think this may be the last book of hers I ever read. She just keeps saying the same things over and over again.

I surfed 2-4’ Scotchmans at sunset yesterday. Very fun. There were only four of us out, and it was great.

Thursday night I played softball. I went 2/3, a great catch robbing me of a homerun and hitting 1000 for the game. We won. I think we almost got in a fight, too. People have a hard time realizing that co-ed softball in Newport Beach is not all that important.

Friday morning I surfed 2-3’ high-tide surf at 30th Street. I always feel like such a bully when I surf there. People just seem to get out of my way. I can't help it that they all seem to be shoulder-hoppers.

A few things I think I’m learning . . .

I don’t need pressure to start working on a piece of writing; I need pressure (i.e., a deadline) to stop working.
I am tortured in a way clergy people are not. They have settled the big issues. They have confidence about those questions; I do not.
I don’t know what I want to do with my life. I suppose what I most want is to search for, and describe the truth, but I despair of finding the truth; but isn’t that despair a kind of truth?
In seminary I sensed that my fellow seminarians had come to school for “ammunition,” not for education.
Those guys that crashed those planes on 9/11 were supposed to be so fervently religious, but their God can’t do shit, that’s why they had to crash the planes for themselves; their God can't fight America for them. . . Oh, and Bush’s God can’t do shit either, that’s why he needs missiles, dirty political tricks, and Karl Rove. (See this month’s Vanity Fair article about how Bush, Rex Reed, and the Religious Right hypocrites trashed John McCain in South Carolina in 2000.) In other words, Bonhoeffer was right: the world has come of age, but some people don’t realize it yet. They continue to pretend God is doing things for them, but they end up just using God to justify all the nonsense (and evil) they want to do.
If Barbara Walters interviewed me, I’m sure she couldn’t make me cry. This isn’t because I never cry. I cry at movies, while reading, and even sometimes when I’m watching television. But I can’t imagine a subject Barbara would bring up that would make me cry. Does this mean I’ve had a pretty easy life? Probably.

Why do I like “Fight Club?”
Because I do know what a duvet is.
Because . . . “self-improvement is masturbation; now self-destruction . . . “
Because I too dream of staring down on overgrown freeways from atop abandoned crumbling skyscrapers.
“How’s that working for you . . . being clever I mean?”
Think about “Marla” at the testicular cancer support group.
“Soap, the hallmark of civilization.”
Helena Bonham Carter.

Cathing Up, Not fish

2004-10-12T22:25:00.000-07:00

9:42 p.m.
Okay. It’s been several days since I’ve written anything for my blog.

Last week I saw “Napolean Dynamite” with Justin. We both liked it, but not as much as my friend Susan. When I asked her why she liked it, here’s what she wrote:

I liked ND because it's pretty much the best movie, and ligers are pretty much my favorite mythological animals. And because Tina needs to eat the ham.

I don't know. It's one of those movies that is a nice little escape. And any guy who catches his girl a nice bass is gosh darn swell in my book.

Oh, and how can you NOT love the scene in which N lobs a grapefruti at his loser uncle? Or the one in which Kip runs over the Tupperware bowl and speeds off after fuming, "Dang it!" ?

Yes, Susan is, once again, so right, so perceptive, so brilliant. Napolean Dynomite, though painful at every step, is very funny.

Friday, after struggling most of the morning with a piece on religious fundamentalism, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and 9/11 (don’t ask), I realized that I haven’t done enough research yet. Plus, I spent a bunch of time doing random things for my church job, then I headed off to UCI to try to generate some discussion of Ann Van Sant’s arguments about King Lear. She essentially argues that King Lear dramatizes the difficulty both hierarchical structures and Christian virtues (viz. charity and forgiveness) have in keeping social groups together.

I then went home to get ready for a weekend camping and fishing trip at Lake Irvine. My dad had purchased the trip for Justin (my 12-year-old son) leaving me to accomplish the task. We only fished for about an hour Friday night . . . and caught nothing. We cooked spaghetti on the camp stove, built a fire, and then turned in around 11:00.

I woke about around 12:00 to a woman’s very loud moaning, sighing, and exclamations: “Oh my God, Oh my God, don’t stop, don’t stop.” They went three rounds like this, going and going until 1:30 a.m. The vatos locos on the other side of us kept yelling taunts at them, taunts that went unnoticed by the happy couple, a couple I suspect did not know each other that well, given the fact that they had sex three times in an hour and half, making love like people who may never do it again. I suppose they were happy, in that moment, that moment before she would begin to wonder if sleeping with that big goofball was a big mistake, that moment before the exciting, loud woman turned into the crazy psycho stalker, or, maybe I’m too cynical, just maybe, it was that moment before they realized that their passion was the beginning of something more lasting, more meaningful . . . though I doubt it.

We fished the next day from 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m., and never got a bite. We were chasing catfish with mackerel filets which we smeared with “stinky bait.” Justin managed to coat himself in the stinky bait, quite by accident, which made the ride home almost unbearable, but we never caught a thing. I felt disappointed for Justin. I remember what it was like to be twelve, to fish all day, and catch nothing. I could hear him praying under his breath, asking God to let him catch a fish, this boy’s prayer to catch a fish being one of life’s first hard theological lessons.

Sunday, church, Crop Walk (to raise money for hunger), then home to study John Locke.

Today, more Locke, teaching, reading, etc., and work on a short story that’s been rumbling around in my head. I’m setting it in Belgrade, dredging up memories of when I used to live there. I also got my copy of McSweeney’s, the entire issue of which is devoted to short fiction. I read Chris Adrian’s great story, “A Child’s Book of Sickness and Death,” about a young girl who has spent her whole life in and out of a children’s hospital. She’s back for another round of treatments at a moment when she is writing a children’s book about animals who suffer terribly. I know it sounds dreary, but it’s really not . . . well, maybe a bit dreary, but also very beautiful and funny.

Not going to take time to proofread . . . sorry.

"Speak what we feel . . ."

2004-10-06T01:05:00.000-07:00

I just spent a couple of hours re-reading sections (okay, most of) “King Lear.” I hope my students will have read it at least once.

This is such a great play, but so depressing. It presents a picture of a “tough world” that offers no justice, a world where power is everything and divine help an illusion. When Lear can no longer force his daughters to care for him, they desert him. When Cordelia lies, dead, at the end of the play, Lear laments, “Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,/And thou no breath at all? Thou’lt come no more,/Never, never, never, never, never!” (V.iii.304-06). This is so heartbreaking, yet universal for those who face the truth of death—the good do, sometimes, die young, much too young, and we wonder “why?” and we try to wrap our minds around that “never, never, never . . .” but we just can't.

Yet there is a kind of hopefulness in the play, too. Lear, exposed to the cruelty of the world, develops compassion. Cornwall’s cruelty is challenged by a brave servant, and an aged tenant overcomes his class antagonisms to help Gloucester find Edgar in the heath. And, of course, Cordelia remains the voice of love, forgiveness, and honesty. The play offers us the hope that we can bring love to life in our own acts of compassion.

It also presents us with a challenge, the challenge that closes the play when Edgar urges us to “Speak what we feel, not what we ought to say . . .” (V.iii.323). This is the challenge I’ve taken on myself. This is why I can’t be ordained as a minister in the church. This is at least one of the reasons why my whole career seems off track. I want to say what I feel, and not what I ought to say.

Of course, I don’t, not really. Instead of saying what I feel out loud, I write it down; I put words into the mouths of invented characters, I shroud what I feel in essays clothed with intellectual sophistication. Can we really live with other people if we say what we feel, and not what we ought to say? Yet, this is what I want to do: I want to say what I feel, and not what I ought . . .

What else did I do today?

Well, I got the big kids ready for school, then watched the little girls for a few minutes while my wife took a shower, then I went out to my garage and worked for a while on some memoir stuff (my only work space at home is in our garage). Then I went to church, after looking at Scotchman’s (flat). I tried to work at my office there for a couple of hours, answering email, contacting people at Y & R, trying to put out the fires that go along with my church job . . .

Then a couple of guys from the GAO called me about working for them. The job sounded pretty good. It includes travel, teamwork, chances to learn about new things, do research, write, and make a difference. It still probably ranks as a third or fourth career choice with me, but it beats being homeless.

I heard some demographer on “Marketplace” today. He described our demographic situation as a kind of hourglass: the baby-boomers represent a big group that is approaching retirement, and the twenty-somethings today represent another big bulge. Guess who’s fucked? That’s right: Gen X-ers. He was saying what we already know, the Baby Boomers will hold onto all the really good jobs until it’s too late for Gen X-ers to get them, but not so late that we won’t have to somehow think of a way to fund social security for them. Yes, I’m a whiney, bitter, Gen X cliché.

I said I would go surfing today, no matter how flat it was, and I did. I spent about 25 minutes carving up two-foot slop at 28th Street. Despite the horrible conditions, it was fun.

I watched/listened to several innings here and there of what amounted to a devastating defeat for the Angels, but tomorrow is another day, and Schilling won’t be pitching.

I watched the Vice-Presidential Debate. I can’t help it, but every time I see Dick Cheney I hear that Darth Vader theme music in my head.

I also had to watch the kids for a couple of hours while Barbara helped out with the schools’ book fair.

I was feeling pretty lonely today, but Shakespeare is a pretty good friend, and Neptune hardly ever lets me down when I give him a chance.

Antigone, Fathers & Sons, 50 First Dates

2004-10-04T22:57:00.000-07:00

Sorry it’s been so long since I’ve posted anything. I’ve been super busy and ultra-depressed: please keep sharp objects away from me (not kidding).

Part of the problem is how flat the surf has been lately. I’ve got to paddle out tomorrow, even if it's flat, or I’ll go completely crazy.

So . . . I won’t bother trying to catch you up . . . let’s start fresh with today.

I was busy working all day, but I feel like I got so little done. After getting the kids to school I spent about an hour and half checking my email, then brainstorming/researching what I should be working on this week. I’ve got to make contact with Young & Rubicam about getting a job there . . . advertising is not exactly my dream job, but I have to find a way to make living that doesn’t involve my working 90 hours/week. I figure if I could get a full-time ad job I’d at least be working with people I like, and I’d be doing something creative, and I’d be (hopefully) making real money, and I could still work on writing short stories, screenplays, and that elusive novel in my spare time. I’d planned to shoot off some calls to some contacts I have at Y&R during my office hours, but surprise, surprise, some students actually came to my office hours, so I spent the entire time discussing their essays with them.

They’re supposed to be writing on “the father-son relationship in Antigone.” Teaching writing is hard. I find myself wanting to take over their projects and just write them myself, but that wouldn’t be teaching, would it? I think I talked way too much, giving way too much advice, but I can’t help myself. I'm supposed to be more "Socratic," make them struggle more, but I keep jumping in with my ideas/suggestions. I had planned on spending about 25 minutes going over student theses in class today, and then dive into “King Lear,” but in both my sections I ended up spending the entire time working on their theses and then two more hours in my office tossing ideas around.

So, in a nutshell, I spent from 1-5 p.m. today discussing the relationship between Creon and Haemon. I couldn’t help but reflect on my own relationship with my father. He still goes to “Basic Youth Conflicts” seminars. BSY is an ultra-conservative fundamentalist Christian group that emphasizes patriarchy as God’s solution for every problem in the world. They teach that a man is the head of his household until he dies. In other words, I should still be checking in with my father about every decision I make. Conveniently his father his dead, so he doesn’t have to check in with him. All my failures seem to just underscore for my dad that my life is so fucked up because I have “removed myself from God’s protection” over my life, namely my father’s rule. Like Creon, any disagreement with my father has always been seen by him as a sign of pure disloyalty, ingratitude, and impiety. I'm sure he’s not surprised that I’m such a loser.

However, if I were writing on the “father-son” relationship in Antigone I wouldn’t write on this kind of conflict; I would focus on Eros. The chorus has a really long speech in which they suggest that it is Eros that has ruined the relationship between Haemon and Creon. I think that’s right. Haemon loves (erow) Antigone, and even though Creon says his son can “find another field to plow,” Haemon’s passion for Antigone leads him to confront his father, and ultimately to kill himself. Eros is so dangerous, but without it would life be worth living? I think Plato was right: our only converse with God is through Eros.

What else did I do today? Well, I babysat the girls and we, at least Elly and I, watched “Fifty First Dates”—a film I rented by mistake; I meant to get “Coffee and Cigarettes,”—which turned out to be pretty good. Some of the individual scenes were really lame, but the overall idea—high concept all the way—worked really well, showing the power of love (agape & Eros) to change our world, to make it better by forcing to see, and be with, each other.

Oh, and I also went to a Humanities Core Lecture on “King Lear” (given by A. Van Sant). She had a pretty interesting thesis that fit really well with Antigone. She argued that the play “dramatizes” the way old, hierarchical modes of social organization—modes based on deference (and duty?)—can’t hold social organizations together.

Oh, and I spent some time reading Roorbach and thinking about characterization in memoir.

Oh, and I read a really challenging article by Jeff Gordon (on Project Greenlight Website). He pointed out that most screenplays fail because the Big Idea is no good. The writer needs to really know what is entertaining about their script and how this script “contributes in a fresh way to the movie-going experience.” I’m going to try to take this as a much needed kick-in-the-ass as I go through another rewrite of “Used Books,” but maybe I need to work more on another concept. I feel like the way I tell the story is “high concept,” but I rely too much on humorous dialogue to amp up the entertainment value, and you can’t show that entertainment in a logline.

Oh, and I bought “(Rock) Superstar” by Cypress Hill off I-Tunes today. Is it shallow that I love that song? I’ve listened to it like eight times today.

Finally, had Humanities Core Staff meeting today: nothing memorable.

Humanities Core Writing Diagonistic

2004-09-28T09:07:00.000-07:00

Each quarter I have to give my Humanities Core Students a writing diagnostic exercise. This quarter I gave them the question: “What was the worst movie you saw this summer? Briefly describe it and explain why it failed.” Here’s my response, produced in ten minutes (which is about all the time I gave them):

“Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow” was the worst movie I saw this summer. I went to see it at the insistence of my 12-year old son. He thought it was great, but he’s never seen a movie he doesn’t like. I, on the other hand, felt it was like watching paint dry.

“Sky Captain” is constructed with a retro-feel. It is made to look like a film produce in the 1930’s, and the story, props, and acting are meant to mimic 1930’s film-making, but the world of the film is not exactly the world of the 1930’s—an evil genius is trying to take over the world with an army of giant, flying robots, which, like everything else in this sepia-washed monstrosity, fit the aesthetics of the 1930’s, klunky, rivets exposed, steel just waiting to rust, they seem a good metaphor for the film itself.

The plot is so contrived that it’s hardly worth summarizing. As “Sky Captain” (Jude Law) and his newspaper reporter girlfriend, Polly (Gwynneth Paltrow) try to find the creator of these robots they wander the globe falling into one predicament after another, each apparently inserted into the story in a failed-attempt to create some “Indiana-Jones”-like suspense, but this film is neither suspenseful nor reminiscent of “Raiders of the Lost Ark.”

Though set in the 1930’s, the world we encounter there is not the world of the 1930’s per se, but the imaginary filmic world of 1930’s-Hollywood. This is certainly an original idea, but it’s not clear what the viewer is supposed to get out of this style of presentation.

To make matters worse, there’s no story here, just a stringing together of episodes that don’t seem to be building to any kind of dramatic conclusion. Yes, “Sky Captain” has plenty of back-story meant to give us real insight into the characters’ motivations, but it doesn’t work because this back-story comes to us by way of exposition rather than dramatic action. The characters are always explaining that they have this really important back-story involving an old romantic relationship between the lead characters (for example), but we only hear them talking about it, we don’t see how any of this exposition affects their real actions (except that Polly is the stereotypical reporter who’s after the story).

After the first twenty minutes of this film I kept looking at my watch. I couldn’t wait for it to be over, and this is a shock, since I usually find that any excuse to gaze at Gwennyth Paltrow will keep me glued to the screen (e.g., I can always watch “Great Expectations” one more time for that very reason). All this to say, all the original ideas, technological stunts, and beautiful and talent actors can’t save a film if it doesn’t have a good story.

Films I've Seen Recently

2004-09-03T17:33:00.000-07:00

“Garden State” (At University, Irvine)
This was the first movie I’d seen in over a month. We’d been on vacation, and then last week I was way too busy to go, and I think I had given up on really wanting to see any movies, since I had been feeling pretty hopeless about my own screenwriting career.

Still, I was kind of dreading seeing this film, assuming I would be jealous of Zach Braff, the writer, director, and star, since I would naturally be thinking that he would be making the film I wanted to make. I figured that I’d be angry that he’d gotten all the breaks just because he had been working is whole life to get into show business, and I’ve only been working on it for about a year. (I’ve just read a comment in Linda Segar’s book, Making a Great Writer Great. She says it takes most screenwriters five years of work to make their fast sale, even a small sale for a $1000 option.)

But I liked this film. In fact, it left me inspired to get back to work on my writing and try to think again about screenplays (and short stories, essays, memoirs, and novels).

This is the story of a young man’s journey back to his home in New Jersey. He’s been living in California, mostly morking as a waiter in a Vietnamese restaurant after concluding a job as a mentally handicapped quarterback in some kind of made for t.v. movie or series. He’s been on various medications to combat depression and mood swings since he was nine years old, and he decides to go off his meds for his homecoming, which was occasioned by his mother’s funeral.

In the course he learns valuable lessons about life, falls in love, and comes to terms with the demons of his past . . . blah, blah, blah, but I still felt touched by this film because of the careful and sensitive way Branff treats his characters and their setting, New Jersey.

As I said, I also felt inspired, reminded by this “small” picture of why I love movies and want to be a part of them: they bring together images, music, and the spoken words in ways that deeply touch us.

“Sex, Lies, and Videotape” (DVD)
I know everyone else has seen this already, but as a fundamentalist Christian I would not have seen a film with the word “sex” in the title, (though the Campus Crusade guys at NAU were awfully fond of watching Caddy-shack over and over again for that one scene . . . you know the one . . . and I’m told privately that “Fast Times and Ridgemont High” was similarly popular.

Well, anyway, now I’ve seen S,L, & V, and now I understand what all the fuss was about. This is a really compelling film, less about sex than it is about the power, or maybe I should say, “the hope,” we have that flawed and wounded people can heal each other.

Of course, there is a fairly frank treatment of sexual topics in the film, but it hardly seems provocative in the way “Fast Times and Ridgemont High” is. Rather, sex seems to be the vehicle through which we explore the emotions and relationships of the characters (rather Freudian), and that may be a rather useful tool.

As a bonus, I now get the thing about “one key” that everybody talks about, and lament the fact that I have a lot of keys.

“We Don’t Live Here Anymore.”
This is a great film. I haven’t heard any “Oscar buzz” about it yet, but every performance in the film deserves one. This is a great script, shot by a sensitive director, and wonderfully performed by four of our best actors (Laura Dern, Mark Ruffalo, Naomi Watt, and Peter Krause).

The film explores adultery in a sophisticated way that doesn’t try to scare you out of it in the way “Basic Instinct” did, but tries to explore how and why people choose to have affairs, and what the results of those affairs will be, emotionally, on those involved, and it does so without resorting to psychotic lovers who will boil your kid’s pet rabbit.

We can really see what motivates all the characters to cheat on their spouses, but we see most clearly through the eyes of Ruffalo’s character who really does seem like a baby when he pretentiously tells his wife that she can’t dare to offer insights into the “soul of man she doesn’t really know.” We get it, at that point in the film, that cheating on one’s spouse is as much a self-deception as it is a deception of the marriage partner, and most of our excuses can seem vain and pretentious when brought out into the light of day.

According to all the surveys I see, lots of people are out there having affairs. I have no experience of this personally, but I understand the impulse, and this film will haunt that impulse in me for a long time.

What Have I Been Reading?

2004-08-25T18:06:00.000-07:00

I’ve been reading my regular magazines: The New Yorker, The Believer, Surfer, and Vanity Fair. Lots of good fun and information, including some great Believer interviews with Slavoj Zizek and book reviews by Nick Hornby. I love the Vanity Fair stuff on Dubya, too.

Over vacation I took a break from serious reading. I read Douglas Coupland’s All Families are Psychotic. I must say, I’m a big fan of Coupland’s (and that’s one of the reasons I wanted to visit his hometown of Vancouver, B.C.), but I didn’t feel great about this novel. I loved Generation X and Life after God. I really liked Microserfs, Girlfriend in a Coma, and Polaroids from the Dead. All Families . . . has got some interesting characters and some compelling meditations on modern life, but I felt like the story was too tedious and bizarre. Plus, it seemed to contradict the title. If the story was to illustrate that all families are psychotic, I would have expected a more typical family than this one, whose ill-fate not only gave them an abusive father, but AIDS (three cases), Thalydomide poisoning, and kidnapping (not to mention an astronaut daughter and a son who worked for a reclusive European billionairre who seems to be omnipotent). Plus, the ending was really disappointing, all problems being resolved in the most bizarre ways.

I also read John Irving’s A Widow for One Year. I’ve already seen the film, “The Door in the Floor,” and this is a case where I liked the film better than the novel. Irving knows how to combine character and plot in ways that keep you turning the pages, but still I have to admit that I read the last one hundred pages out of duty more than out of engagement. This is a novel in which all the main characters are writers, a ploy which might have proven fatal to a less capable storyteller, but Irving pulls it off. What didn’t work for me was the way he had drawn his protagonist, Ruth Cole. Something about her didn’t quite ring true for me, and I tired of hearing the narrator repeatedly tell me that she had “wonderful breasts.” By contrast, I’m reading Thackeray’s Vanity Fair, and his Becky Sharp is a far more interesting and compelling protagonist (even if she is not “a hero”). (I know I should have read this novel by now, but remember, I’m a recovering evangelical who was discouraged from reading fiction as a child and young adult.)

I also read David Sedaris’ Dress Your Family in Corduroy and Firoozeh Dumas' Funny in Farsi. I love Sedaris. I’m jealous of Sedaris. I think I can do something like his work . . . if I’d just make the time. Dumas was funny, touching, and enlightening at times. It's an easy read, but gives you a real sense of her family's immigrant experience.

Where Have I Been?

2004-08-25T18:00:00.000-07:00

I’ve been away for a long, long time. The last two or three weeks in July I was feeling sick and broken down. I had terrible headaches and felt nauseous almost every day. I was just trying to make it to my vacation. I was popping Ibuprofin and Acetamenophin (sp?) like lifesavers, trying to keep myself from sinking under the emotional weight of the last five years—that feeling of failure dragging me down—and the general stress I feel about my life and the dread I feel at the church where I work.

Then, during our last church softball game, on the last Thursday of the month (which I'm now dreading again because this guy who thinks our coed softball team is the most important athletic contest of the year and yells at everyone all the time, is playing again), I broke my finger diving for a foul ball. This delayed our vacation for a couple of days (which we actually needed in order to really get packed) and put my hand in a splint, which I’m supposed to wear all the time, except when I’m showering. I can’t write, or even hold a pen, when I’m wearing it, so I haven’t been writing much.

Finally, on August 4, we rolled out of our driveway at around 6:30 a.m. and drove all the way to Mount Shasta. The next day we drove to Crater Lake where we spent a couple of hours, then on to the Columbia River Gorge/Hood River area (gorgeous, breathtaking, etc.). The next day we messed around in the Gorge for awhile then drove up to the Johnson’s Ridge Visitors Center on Mt. St. Helen's, and then up to Seattle, where we spent six nights and five days visiting with Barbara’s family and hanging out in the area. From there we went to Vancouver, B.C., where we spent two nights, and then to Victoria, where we spent two more nights, and then Port Angeles, where we spent another two nights and a couple of days exploring Olympic National Park. We then spent a night in Aberdeen, visiting one of Barbara’s cousins and doing some genealogical research (and getting a feel for Kurt Cobain’s hometown [where we both want to move, believe it or not]), and then we drove to Kelso, Washington to visit another of Barbara's cousins. Then we made a two-day dash for Irvine . . . and here I am.

I’m ignoring the doctor’s orders regarding keeping my splint on all the time. I’m taking it off to type, and this afternoon I took it off to go surfing twice in the last two days. The waves were smallish, but it hurt like a bitch to paddle. In the words of the orthopedic guy: it’s healing, but not healed.

The depression I feel over my job at the church is killing me again already, but I'm trying to stay away from there . . . it helps . . . at least to the extent that I out of sight can be out of mind. . .

Before Sunset

2004-07-18T13:05:00.000-07:00

(2004; Southcoast Village)
Written and directed by Richard Linklater.

This film is the sequel to the 1995 film, “Before Sunrise,” a film that most people either loved or hated. It was a sometimes-pretentious film about an American boy and a French girl who meet on a train and spend one night wandering the streets of Vienna together. They don’t even know the other’s last name, let alone key information like phone-numbers and addresses (this was before the widespread use of email), but they opt to meet each other six months hence, in Vienna, and see what happens. The first film ends without letting us know whether or not the couple followed through on their plans, leaving the viewer to decide if the ending will be romantic or cynical.

As the sequel, “Before Sunset” opens, Jesse is in Paris on a book tour promoting a novel he wrote based on the couple’s experience that one night. Guess who walks into the bookstore? That’s right, Celine (Julie Delpy), and the film unfolds in real time as we follow the couple through the streets of Paris.

Like the first film, but even more so, the film is, as every critic has noted, driven by conversation, but I would argue that it is also driven by body language and facial expression, and we see these two actors at their best, Hawke lending is nervous presence to what is, no matter how you look at it, an awkward situation, and Delpy explore the situation with a rich tableaux of facial expressions and gestures that help us understand how Jesse could fall in love with Celine in just one night, and remain in love with her for nine years, though he’s had no contact with her the entire time.

The first film worked for me, as Jesse explains in the first scene, because it made us believe in the power of meeting and connecting with another person. As I’ve gotten older, just as the characters have, and, just as those characters realize, I’ve come to realize that these kinds of connections with another person are far rarer than we would like to think. Sure there are lots of people I get along with, but very few with whom I have really connected.

This dynamic is what lends drama to “Before Sunset.”   Will these two former lovers, both of whom are in new relationships, one of whom is married with a four-year-old child, throw away those relationships to reestablish this one. Will Jesse stay in Paris to be with Celine? But what builds this drama is not some artificial plot device, but the real difficulty the two characters have in really coming to say what they really think and feel. They flirt, and joke, and dance around the topic, but they find, as most of us it do, that it is both dangerous and difficult to say what you really feel. So the question becomes, will they put into words what we all know is in their hearts, and this question takes priority over the more obviously cinematic question, will they put into action what we know they feel in their hearts?

I found myself loving this film, and though some critics panned some of the dialogue as failed attempts at profundity, I was attracted to this because it is exactly how people talk who do feel some kind of connection to each other, so connected that the ideas pour out of them without letting them fully form. This quality, along with its exploration of the theme of the “roads not taken,” made it a quiet, but rich pleasure for my Thursday afternoon.   It’s a film that, like the first installment, will stick with me for a long time.

Sarah Laughs

2004-07-18T12:59:00.000-07:00

This homily was presented at Saint Michael & All Angels Episcopal Church, Corona Del Mar, July 18, 2004. Somebody asked me to post it.

Four years ago when I was assigned to preach on this set of texts, I focused on the Gospel reading, describing the importance of engaging in spiritually-renewing activities. But this time around I found myself drawn more to the first lesson.   In particular, I was drawn to Sarah and her laughter. To really understand this story you need to read the whole Abraham-Sarah saga in Genesis, but I’ll just tell you that most of the drama revolves around Abraham and Sarah’s desire to have a child. This desire was especially important to Abraham because God had promised to make a “great nation” out of his descendants, but his wife, Sarah, remained childless . . . for decades. The desire to have a child was especially important for Sarah because, aside from her own maternal urges, in her world, a childless woman was an object of shame and pity.
            Our lesson for today picks up the story at a point when Sarah is well past menopause and still childless. Three men come to visit Abraham. He doesn’t know who they are, but the reader is told that they somehow represent God. In the course of their visit they reveal that Sarah, in spite of her advanced age, will, indeed, give birth to a son. Meanwhile, Sarah, excluded from this conversation because she is woman, is listening at the door. When she hears the men tell Abraham that she will become pregnant, she laughs to herself. God asks Abraham why she laughed, and, in the verses that follow our reading, Abraham asks Sarah why she laughed. “I didn’t laugh,” she says. “Yes, you did,” Abraham tells her, and that’s how the story ends: without Sarah explaining her laughter.
            So I have the same question God and Abraham had: Sarah, why did you laugh? It’s possible she’s just laughing at the three visitors who think post-menopausal women can get pregnant, but I don’t think so. As she laughs she asks a question, “will I have pleasure” and I think she means the pleasure of actually having a child, “i.e., will I have, at this stage of my life, after so many decades of trying and trying, even in the prime of my reproductive life, and failing, will I have that joy, that fulfillment now?” I think she laughs at the absurdity of this hope, a hope that is absurd because it flies in face of reality.
            I think this is what I would call the “laughter of despair.” This is when we laugh at something absurd, but something for which we still harbor some shred of hope. Often people say that despair is the opposite of hope—that it is the total absence of hope—but if that is true, despair is, I think, haunted by hope. We hope for something, but we do the math and realize that it’s not going to happen, and sometimes we respond to this juxtaposition of hope and despair with humor.
            I think some of the best examples of this kind of desperate humor are generated by Chicago Cubs fans. They know that no matter how good the team is playing during the season, they will never win the World Series. So they joke about it. For example:

When arguing for the installation of lights at Wrigley Field, Illinois State Representative John F. Dunn quipped, "Noise pollution can't be that much of a problem [at Wrigley Field]. There's nothing to cheer about."

Or consider Bill Buckner’s comment on the Cubs: “There's nothing wrong with this team that more pitching, more fielding and more hitting couldn't help."

Or consider the Chicago deejay who announced that "The Cubs were taking batting practice, and the pitching machine threw a no-hitter."

Or Joe Garagiola’s glass-half-full perspective: He said, "One thing you learn as a Cubs fan: When you bought your ticket, you could bank on seeing the bottom of the ninth."

Or the joke:
Q: Did you hear about the new Cubs’ soup?A: You take two sips and then you choke.

Or the story about a wicked Chicago man who died and went to the place all wicked people go. The Devil decided to shove him in a room and cranked the heat and humidity up.The man smiled. When the Evil One asked why the man was smiling he said: "Just like Chicago in Spring"So the Most Evil One cranked up the heat and humidity more. The man removed his coat, smiled, and said:"Just like Chicago in Summer"This time the Destroyer of Beauty cranked the heat and humidity to maximum.The man removed his shirt and tie and said"Just like Chicago in August"The Devil then got an idea. He shut off the heat and turned on the air conditioning. The room froze in seconds. Ice was everywhere. Polar bears hid in dens because it was so cold. Satan, confident he had finally won, peaked in the man's room only to find the man cheering, partying frantically, and shouting:...."The Cubs won the World Series...The Cubs won the World Series..."

            Cubs humor is a good example of this humor of despair.   They laugh instead of crying because, in spite of everything, they still hope, and it is their hope, a hope that seems so contrary to reality, that makes them laugh. So today thousands of Cubs fans are doing the post-All-star game break math and they are hoping and despairing at the same time. The Cubs are seven games back, but I know thousands of Cubs fans are “doing the math” and thinking “wild card” or, “if they just . . .,” and they are hoping one thing in the silence of their hearts, but with their mouths their despair is mocking that hope in the form of Chicago Cubs jokes.
            So, the laugh of despair is that little chuckle at the disjunction between your hope and your calculations. In fact, I remember having just such an experience of despair while literally “doing the math.” Since I had done well in math in high school, and performed well on the S.A.T., I was told I could enroll in Calculus my freshman year. It was my first semester in college and I was really surprised to find out that not only did they not take attendance in college, they didn’t make me do the homework in my math class either. The teacher assigned the homework, but the answers were all in the back of the book, and we didn’t have to turn it in. I thought, “I’m pretty good at math, it’s basically just logic, right?”   So my attendance at class was not particularly regular, and neither was my homework. So on the day of the first exam I showed up and read the first question: “A perfectly graded funnel, eight inches in diameter at the top, and a half inch in diameter at the base is draining a liquid. It took eleven seconds for the level in the funnel to drain one inch. How long will it take for the funnel to drain completely?”
            Now, I didn’t think that this sort of problem was the kind of thing you could figure out. I thought if you really wanted to know how long it took a funnel to drain, you would just have to time it and see. I had no idea how to solve the problem, but when I read the question, I laughed. I laughed because I suddenly realized that my hopes of “just figuring things” out in this class were not going to work. It was a laugh of despair. In this case “doing the math” meant realizing that I was not going to be able to do the math, so I laughed to myself the laugh of despair.
            A few days ago I heard this same laugh from a friend. He has been struggling with depression and he was describing the medication he’s taking now. He told me that he thought, over all, the medication’s effects were positive, “but,” he said, “I guess, to be honest, what this medication may ultimately do is help me be satisfied with a life of complacency,” and then he laughed.
            I think this little laugh, was the laugh of despair. You see, he’s thinking of leaving his wife for another woman. “I’ve been doing the moral algebra,” he told me, “but I haven’t been able to solve the equation.” He’s trying to make this equation, a moral equation, balance. On one side of the equation is his wife, a warm, attractive, fun woman who still loves her husband. One the other side is the other woman, a woman for whom he feels great passion, a woman who engages him intellectually and makes him feel alive and hopeful, a woman who holds out the promise of greater happiness and fulfillment. But is it right, in hopes of achieving some greater joy or fulfillment for himself, to hurt his wife, a woman who has done nothing wrong? This is how he tries to explain it to me. He’s doing the math, but it doesn’t add up. So, later, when tells me about his medication, he laughs at the thought that he could really be happy in his marriage, believing that staying with his wife is somehow tantamount to choosing complacency, a life of quiet desperation, and he fears this new medication will provide him with a false sense of contentment. The real equation is, for him, with his own mortality. With the thirty or forty years he has left, will he live a life hopeless complacency, or will he pursue the passion he’s longing for with this other woman? You see, he’s lost faith; he no longer believes his marriage can ever make him truly happy. But his laugh, that laugh of despair, suggests to me that some kind of hope still haunts him. I think maybe, deep down, he still wishes he could be happy with his wife, though he despairs of it, so he laughs at his own hope for genuine happiness in his marriage and blames this hope on his new medication.
            As hopeless as the Cubs can be, and as overwhelming as that Calculus problem seemed to me, they are nothing compared to these kinds of calculations, the calculations we make when we are in total despair. It is when we are in these kinds of situations—the periods of great hopelessness—that “doing the math” becomes a very high-stakes endeavor. Probably all of us have had these periods in our lives. We do the math, make the calculations, and try to balance the equations, but the realities seem to offer no possibility for the kind of joy and fulfillment we are longing for, and hope suddenly seems absurd.
            I wish there was someone wiser standing up here today. I wish there was someone standing up here who could tell you how to confront this despair, but I find myself at somewhat of a loss. Still, I think the author of Genesis does, through Sarah’s story, offer us a way of thinking about our own despair. If you read all of Sarah’s story, you find that at one point in her life, her despair drove her to take action. Since she couldn’t have a baby, she decided that Abraham should have a child with her maidservant, Hagar, and this was thousands of years before the era of artificial insemination. Without going into all the details, you can read them for yourselves, this turned out to be a disaster. In a nutshell, Sarah’s desperate act did not bring her the joy and fulfillment she was hoping for; it only brought more pain. This is what I think Genesis says to my friend who’s thinking of leaving his wife: desperate laughter is one thing—an expression of this mixture of hope and despair--but desperate actions are another and they rarely bring us what we are longing for.   I think that is what Genesis says to my friend: act from hope, not from despair.
            But maybe you are skeptical about the wisdom of Genesis, because it took a real miracle to fulfill Sarah’s hopes, and maybe you don’t think you can expect, or even hope for something like that, so, then what can Sarah’s story say to you in your moment of despair?
            Well, I suppose what I might say is that when Sarah laughed at her own desperate hope she didn’t know that the thing she longed for most was only a year away. I don’t know that I can promise you a miracle will always give you the thing you want, in fact, I’m pretty sure you can’t count on that, but what I’m learning, or at least trying to learn, is that life is a process full of possibilities, and as it unfolds, the future brings with it great surprises, not only surprises in our circumstances, but surprises in ourselves. We realize that the thing we longed for maybe wasn’t the thing we really wanted after all, and that ease, comfort, and constant fulfillment are not what make our lives beautiful, but beauty comes in the most unexpected ways, sometimes it even comes when our wishes go unfulfilled, when our desires are not met, and when our plans do not work out.
            My wife, Barbara, and I have not experienced the kinds of fertility problems Abraham and Sarah faced. If I put toothpaste on Barbara’s toothbrush for her, she gets pregnant. When we got married, Barbara and I planned to have two, or at the most, three children. So, a year and a half ago, when I sat on the edge of my bed staring at a little blue strip on a home pregnancy test, I laughed. I laughed because I realized that our family had just outgrown everything. Nothing fit anymore: not our house, not our car, not our budget. We did the math and realized that having four children didn’t make sense at all.
            Annie was not what we had planned or hoped for, but she came anyway, and today I can’t imagine my life being complete without her. Every morning I wake up to see a smiling face hovering inches above mine, and every evening when I walk through the front door I find her scampering to greet me, and I realize I love her in a way that no equation could calculate. Yes, and I admit this now with a certain sense of shame, that staring at that blue strip a year and a half ago I laughed with despair at my situation, but now, thinking of Annie, my heart is full of only hope and joy.
            That’s what Sarah’s story teaches me. It teaches me that the laugh of despair can become, in time, a laugh of joy. When Sarah’s son was born, they named him “Isaac,” a name that means something like, “God smiles,” or maybe even “God laughs,” because, from God’s perspective, there is no difference between the laugh of despair and the laugh of joy, the only difference between them being one of time and perspective. In other words, just because our despair makes a mockery of our hopes, that doesn’t mean we should lose all faith. Sometimes the very thing we are really longing for is already on the way.   Life is a process full of endless possibilities for beauty, and for the person of faith our union with God, and God’s union with us, allows us to see the ghost of hope haunting even the most despairing moments of our lives, and seeing that hopeful ghost makes us, and God, laugh.

2004-07-08T14:30:00.000-07:00

Film Review: “King Arthur” (2004; Theaters, wide release)

This is a big Hollywood movie. There is plenty of action to augment a well-paced story that propels the viewer towards a climatic battle scene where the good guys (Arthur, his knights, and the Britons) taken on the bad guys (the Saxons). It secures Keira Knightley’s future as real big-time movie star, as she shows that her talent, beauty, and charm are more than enough to fill up an epic screen.

The film tries to blend legend and history with a good dose of modern sensibilities. It is based on the theory that Arthur was really a Roman, or half-Roman, half-Briton knight, who led a group of Sarmatian knights at the beckon call of Rome. When Rome is forced to withdraw from Britain in the fifth-century, Arthur must decide whether or not to stay and cast his lot in with the Britons, who are now threatened with a merciless Saxon invasion, or return to Rome and enjoy glory and luxury. You can guess what he chooses to do.

But the film also recast the story as a modern tale of freedom and political autonomy. Rome, the Church, and the Saxons represent a threat to British freedom, and Arthur must champion an almost-Rousseanean ideal of social contract and individual autonomy. Knightley, as Guinevere, storms around seducing Arthur, more as a political subject than as a man, using both her sex appeal and political rhetoric to urge him to say. Hard is it may be to believe, her words seem to have more effect than her looks.

In the course of telling the story, Pelagius, the fifth-century theologian who lent his name to an enduring soteriology that emphasizes freewill and has been, by most brands of Christianity, considered heresy, becomes a kind of unseen ideological hero. Arthur’s only moral tie to Rome is through Pelagius, whose doctrine of free-will promises, for Arthur, to reshape the Roman Empire into a more egalitarian and peaceful society. However, when Arthur finds out that Pelagius has been excommunicated and executed as a heretic, he gives up on Rome. This is an interesting take on Pelagius (though not a novel one), and I like the way the film attempts to think through political implications of various theological perspectives, though I suspect the average viewer will miss this entirely.

All said and done, this is a fun summer movie with an interesting take on the Arthur legend. Beyond the allusions to Pelagius, there’s not much to chew on here as the notions of freedom and equality seem anachronistic and simplistic, but you will find yourself cheering for Arthur and enjoying Keira Knightley in some of the most interesting costumes she’s ever worn . . . sure beats her soccer uniform anyway.

2004-07-06T16:14:00.001-07:00

Film Review: “101 Reykjavik” (2000; On DVD)
This is a small film which tries to take on a big idea: the problem of human existence. The theme is set up in the first moments of the film when the main character, Hlynure, declares: “I’ll be dead after I die and I was dead before I was born. Life is a break from death.” If you missed the point, a caption flashes, in English, Cary Leibowitz’s compact observation: “U can’t B dead all the time.”

The film pursues this theme by tracing the life of Hlynure, a young man who still lives at home with his mother, refuses to get a job, and spends most of his time drinking, watching television, and engaging in meaningless (for him) sex. His routine is meant to show us a man reduced to a very primitive level. In Iceland, the state’s social network takes care of him from the cradle to the grave. Abandoned by his alcoholic father, Hlynure was supported by child support until he was sixteen, unemployment after that, and, when he’s old, the old-age pension will take care of him. He fails to see any reason to get a job or pursue anything more meaningful than watching pornography. He sleeps, eats, masturbates, and drinks.

But the women in his life seem to have other ideas. In fact, in this film it is the women who seem to be all about the work of civilization (contra Freud for women were the enemies of civilization). Hlynure describes a girl he’s had sex with as a woman “living alone in a three-bedroom flat that she’s trying to fill.” When the woman announces that she is pregnant, Hlynure refuse to be involved with the pregnancy at all, protesting that he wore condom, and, presumably, should not be held responsible for his progeny.

Things are complicated when his mother invites her Flamenco-dancing friend, Lola (Victoria Abril), to spend Christmas with them. Hlynure obsesses over Lola, and, one night, while his mother is away visiting relatives, he sleeps with her. When his mother returns from the trip she comes “out of the closet” and tells Hlynure that she is not only a lesbian, she and Lola are in love.

While Hlynure debates whether or not he should tell his mother about Lola’s infidelity, he discovers that Lola his pregnant. While Hlynure’s mother knew that Lola was going to seduce someone with the aim of getting pregnant, she is apparently unaware that Hlynure is the father.

Hlynure then broods over the absurdity that he is to be the father of his stepfather’s (i.e. Lola’s) child who will also be his brother, i.e., his mother’s (adoptive) son. His only reaction seems to be greater and greater despair, but in the end he finds a place for himself, in his mother’s home, but now with a job and a purpose: to help care for his son/brother.

So the idea seems to be that the purpose of life is to perpetuate more life, and in this film only women seem to be aware of that. At one point Hlynure complains that the local night club is just a “waiting room for the venereal disease clinic,” a place that his “haunted by the ghosts” of aborted fetuses.

The film is certainly not a philosophical tour de force, leaving us, apparently with the idea that the only purpose in life is to perpetuate life, but if the life we perpetuate is equally meaningless, what is the point of perpetuating it?

To this end, I find my summer reading project—the works of Alfred North Whitehead—to be a refreshing alternative. For Whitehead there really does seem to be a meaning to life, though this meaning is not circumscribed by any particular teleology, found in his notion of enjoyment. Experience, and the enjoyment of experience, is the meaning of life, and Hlynure’s aimless activity throughout the film represents a kind of truncated experience, truncated because truncates it, denying himself opportunities for maximizing enjoyment by seeing the way is activities are related to all the events in the universe.

Still, this small film is beautiful in its own way, wonderfully paced, and, though this is not its aim, gives the viewer a wonderful slice of life in Reykjavik.

2004-07-06T16:14:00.000-07:00

2004-07-06T12:27:00.000-07:00

Books: Reading Lolita in Tehran and The Handmaid’s Tale.
Last week I finished reading Azar Nafisi’s, Reading Lolita in Tehran, her memoir about a book club she started in Iran during the 1980’s and 90’s. She describes the Islamic revolution that took place there and reflects on how these events affected life in Iran, especially for women and intellectuals. As she does so, she also offers a reading of some of her favorite authors: Nabokov, James, Bellows, and Austen.

But this book is also a reflection on the role of fiction in the human quest for freedom. As these women suffered under the harsh and intrusive rule of the Ayatollah Khomenei, they found, in novels, a way to explore the reality around them, a reality they discovered was largely “fictional” itself, dreamed up by some imam whose vision needed to be forced on everyone else.

I was particularly drawn to her readings of Nabokov and Austen. Her understanding of Lolita is very similar to mine. Nafisi, like me, admires Nabokov’s ability to create space for Lolita in the story—to allow us to see how Humbert’s actions are affecting her—while still maintaining Humbert’s perspective. In Nabokov’s novel, Humbert imagines that his vision for Lolita will be hers. Any resistance on her part is a sign that she is spoiled, but her “cooperation” with him is, as Nabokov’s Humbert (inadvertently) points out, the result of her not having anywhere else to go. This is the problem confronting Nafisi and her students. Under the Islamic Republic they have nowhere else to go and they are subjected to a philosopher king’s utopian vision which they don't share.

This reminded me of another book I recently read, Margaret Atwood’s, The Handmaid’s Tale. The parallels between Atwood’s dystopian vision and the Islamic Revolution are obvious and seemingly deliberate. But in Atwood’s novel it is the Christian right that creates this oppressive regime. Governed by the Bible, feeling threatened by enemies, and overwhelmed by some kind of ecological disaster, the Christian regime veils, silences, and excludes its women from public space, forcing some of them to become “handmaid’s” to male rulers who need to procreate. They model their program on the example of the Hebrew Patriarchs who used handmaidens to increase their reproductive capacities. (But they fail to note the way the text of Genesis depicts this practice as disastrous.) Interestingly, in this world women are denied the right to read, the very venue that gave some measure of empowerment to Nafisi and her students.

Unfortunately, envisioning a world in which the Christian right has taken over the United States and subjected its citizens, especially its women, to this kind of oppression is no longer hard to imagine. I found myself gripped with fear as I read this novel--fear for myself, my daughters, my wife, and my students, more than fear for the central character--as I can easily imagine that this world is one that Bush, Ashcroft, and Ridge would like to create.

I know this sounds alarmists to most people, but I’m genuinely afraid. If Bush wins the election in November, and it seems likely that he will, I fear for our country. No longer worried about facing reelection, what adventures will they embark upon next? What civil rights will they destroy in the name of safety? What speech will they censor in the name of our children? What dissent will they squash in the name of patriotism? Which countries will they bomb in name of human rights? All their talk of freedom and human rights is undermined by their unabashed support of Saudi Arabia. These people are evil, and if they get control of this country for another four years, I worry about what will happen to us.

But, as I said, I’m also attracted to Nafisi’s reading of Austen. Some people describe Austen as frivolous and apolitical, but Nafisi discovered that her novels are political, if one can see, in them, an attempt to point to the daily cruelties of life and to find, in them, a way to respond. It would have been easy for this group of Muslim women to blame all their problems on the Islamic regime, but, in Austen, Nafisi and her students found an exposition of the daily and personal cruelties that we foist on each other.

Lately, I’ve been feeling that this is exactly what life in Irvine is like. This is part of what I hate about my life right now. In my neighborhood (University Park and Village Park), a bunch overbearing (and overweight) women dominate life. They make enormous dramas out of tiny problems. They are always complaining, one might say, “bitching,” about each other. These big crises are always over the smallest things. Last week I watched a group of eight of these women engage in a heated conversation for half an hour over the fact that there were stacks of soda cans in the swimming team shed. One group, the concession stand group, felt they had a right to put them there. Another group, the “boosters,” resented the cans and said they were in the way of the swim coaches. One would think the easy thing to do would be to move the fucking cans to one side, but this could not be accomplished without bitter insults, malicious accusations, and heated debate. I suspect these people don’t want to face the fact that they are dying, and pretty fast, too, considering how much cheesecake they eat, and how little exercise they get, so they make their lives seem bigger by blowing everything out of proportion.

They do not read, except for Harry Potter, and they do not engage in any serious thought, except for cliché’s about religion being good for you and the need to support our president in this time of war, but they yack endlessly and mindlessly about their petty nonsense day and night.

How did I end up living in this shithole? I never wanted to be here. I never wanted to be living this life. I pictured myself, my wife, and my kids fraternizing with artists, poets, and musicians. I pictured Barbara painting (she’s very talented, though she doesn’t think so), spinning pots, and raising money for Green Peace, not engaged in PTA politics, filling our house with kitsch, and putting up with maliciousness of all these flabby yentas. I pictured my kids reading Lewis Carroll, not watching “Fifth Wheel.” I pictured a house with simple furnishings and lots of books, not cramped with toys the kids never play with and piles and piles of junk mail. I pictured us having friends who have actually read Nabokov and Atwood, not people who drone on endlessly about lawns, bathroom tiling, and sheetrock.

But here I am, in my own dystopia, waiting for November when Dubya, Cheney, and Aschcroft can really stick it to us. The fictional life of Irvine has become too painful for me. I’m glad I have David Foster Wallace’s 1088 page novel, Infinite Jest, waiting for me at home.

2004-06-25T18:03:00.000-07:00

Surfing Update:

I've surfed the last couple of days at Scotchmans. Thursday 3-5' with plus sets; Friday 1-3'. Both days I took out the 7'7" Becker. Surfed okay. Lots of good rights and lefts. I had a good conversation with Dan. He seems to know what I'm going through.

Gary Fischer is the perfect man. He succinctly stated his philosophy of life to me a couple of days ago: "Every day is a celebration." He's at Scotchman's everyday, surfing whatever Neptune gives him. Oh, and he cuts his own hair with the dog clippers.

2004-06-25T18:02:00.000-07:00

Fahrenheit 911
Forget “The Passion” and “Spider Man 2,” this is the most important film you will see this year. Sadly, it will also be more polarizing than persuasive, due, in part, to what makes the film entertaining, Michael Moore’s snide sensibility.

As I watched the film I tried to find an argument, some sort of conclusion that would tie together all the images and claims that were flashing in front of me. On one level, Moore’s thesis is obvious: Bush must go. This claim is made explicit in a letter a young serviceman wrote to his mother shortly before he was KIA in Iraq. (He wrote that we needed to vote “that fool,” i.e., Dubya, out.) But there are a number of ways this argument could be made, so I was left wondering what principle was organizing the particular set of images presented in the film. The answer came at the end of the film when Moore quoted an extended passage from George Orwell’s 1984. Hearing that text the film came together for me. Moore is arguing that George W. Bush’s administration is Orwellian. In fact, they almost seem to be intentionally using Orwell’s novel as their playbook.

But, of course, they are not taking their directions of Orwell’s novel. If I were to point to a weakness in this film, it would be Moore’s tendency to simplify. In his story, everyone in the Whitehouse is driven by money. I suspect he is mostly right, but Bush, Cheney, et al are far more complex than that, and so is the war in Iraq, the “war” on terrorism, and the U.S. economy. For example, I have no doubts that the Bush-Cheney profiteering is tinged with a kind of patriotism, buoyed by their belief that they know what is best for us, and for the world, even if, in the end, their utopia seems dystopic to me, what’s good for big business is good for America, maybe even the world. But of course, my optimistic view of Bush is now grounded in any real evidence, but rather in my inability to believe that real people, Americans, elected officials, could, so cynically, hijack the country and murder thousands of Iraqis just to line their already-too-full pockets. I could be wrong. No doubt there were many people just like me living in Germany in 1938, and they were wrong, just as I may be today.

But the film does a lot to bolster its surface-level claim: Bush must go. I believe this wholeheartedly, and I’m no ideologically-driven liberal. In fact, I’m no ideologue at all. I’m the only person I know who voted both for Ronald Reagan and Ralph Nader. I’m the only person I know who voted for George H.W. Bush—twice—but would vote for anyone but Dubya. Truth be told, I hate both the political parties. I don’t think the Democrats can “save” us, and I resent a lot of their proposals. But, and here I repeat, Dubya must go.

After the 2000 “election,” and I now use that term loosely, I wasn’t particularly upset that Bush won. I figured it was a toss-up between having to listen to Gore’s condescending lectures for four years, ot to Bush’s moronic stuttering, and so, we got “President Dumberer,” but who cares? But, after 9-11, it became apparent to me that (a) we could not afford to have an imbecile in the White House, and (b) Bush, Cheney, Ashcroft, Rumsfeld and company were going to use this event to . . . well, to steal our freedoms, line their pockets, and destroy the lower classes in this country.

Come to think of it, I guess Moore wasn’t simplifying after all.

2004-06-23T17:49:00.000-07:00

Film Review: “Saved!” and “Last Tango in Paris”
On the surface it wouldn’t seem like these two films would have much in common. One, “Saved!,” is a portrayal of life in a Christian High School; the other, “Last Tango in Paris,” explores an affair between a 20-year-old French woman and a forty-five-year-old American who engage in anonymous sex in the middle of Paris. But they both have a lot in common, including the fact that I find myself defending both of them against their detractors.

Obviously, they both explore our relationship to our own sexuality. In “Last Tango in Paris” Paul (Marlon Brando) and Jeanne (Maria Schneider) act, almost instantly, on their sexual attraction, which they explore in an almost-empty apartment over several days as Paul waits for his wife’s funeral and Jeanne waits for her wedding. The film was banned in Italy when it was first released in 1972, and received in a “X” rating in many regions. Today, the uncut version is branded as NC-17, but, if you came to this film, as I did, in the new millennium, the rating will seem odd. It’s not nearly as explicit as is a film like “American Pie” or “Road Trip,” but it is more powerfully sexual because of it refusal to fall into conventional ways of depicting sex on film. In true pornography, the sex acts are “real” but simulated. I mean, who, besides Paris Hilton, makes love in such a staged manner? In “Last Tango in Paris” the sex is simulated, but “real.” There is no romantic music in the background, no fading to black on a slow-burning candle, and no awkward scenes of a vibrating night-stand. Instead, we see two people groping and grabbing and . . . well, and having sex. The approach is summed up in the famous scene where Jeanne, sitting nude, facing a nude Paul, suggests, “try to come without touching.” They can’t, and that is the point. We need to touch each other, and we get the sense that sex for Paul and Jeanne is not about trying to fit some idealized, we might say, “cinematic” image of sex, it is not about procreation, and it is, I think, definitely not about trying to depict love by portraying physical intimacy. Whatever sex does for Paul and Jeanne it does not translate to us. We can’t come without touching.

In “Saved!” the notion that Christians are sexaphobic hardly needs stating. The film does, however, provide us with a twist on this theme. Mary (Jena Malone) attempts to use sex, in this case heterosexual sex, to “cure” her boyfriend, Dean (Chad Faust), by sleeping with him. This one sex act fulfills its biological imperative, leaving Mary pregnant and alone as Dean is shipped off to Mercy-House for “de-gayification.” But the more interesting relationship develops between Mary’s mother, Lillian, portrayed by one of the most sincerely sexual actresses of our generation, Mary Louise-Parker, and Pastor Skip (Martin Donovan), who is also the school principal. Skip and his wife are separated, but he refuses to get divorced, because that is not “part of God’s plan,” and Lillian is a widow, who obviously longs for something more from Skip. They refuse to pursue a physical relationship, denying what they both want, because their Christian convictions deny them this. But, eventually, they relent, and Skip feels this disqualifies both Lillian and him from adequately caring for the pregnant, and obviously sinful, Mary. I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Skip. His marriage has failed, but his convictions condemn him to be alone, and though he is falling in love with Lillian, he can’t touch her, and he “can’t come without touching.”

But these films also explore the ways in which love not only makes us blind, it makes us believe that our hopes for those we love must be their hopes, and in the process we end up squashing them. In “Saved!,” Mary puts this succinctly: “If God’s wants us all to be the same, why did he make us all different?” A simple observation, but one missed by most religious fundamentalists. Similarly, the non-religious Tom (Jean-Pierre Leaud) in “Last Tango” is “in love” with Jeanne, and he’s making a film about her. It’s not hard to figure out why Jeanne needs Paul when Tom is, before our very eyes, trying to turn the object of his love, Jeanne, into his own (in this case, cinematic) creation. Tom follows Jeanne around, interviews her, and asks her all the right questions, but we get the sense that this process reveals less to us about Jeanne than does the anonymous space created for her by Paul. Sure, we realize that Paul is motivated by his intense pain. We know this from the opening scene where we see him screaming at the train. But there is an honesty to this neediness that Tom does not bring to their relationship.

This is what I found in evangelical Christianity. I found a lover who only wanted the best for me. I found a lover who was genuinely interested in me, but this interest was part of larger project of conversion, converting me into a “good Christian,” and “Saved!” is, essentially, peopled with “good Christians.” Satirizing the hypocrisy of this goodness is where all the humor comes from. If you’ve seen Mandy Moore or Jena Malone out promoting the film, you’ve seen the exorcism scene where Moore’s character, Hilary Faye, shouts at Mary, “I am full of love” as she throws a Bible at Mary. There’s also the line where the two skeptics, Roland (Macaulay Culkin) and Cassandra (Eva Amurri), spot Mary coming out of Planned Parenthood. When Cassandra claims there’s only one reason a Christian girl would be near Planned Parenthood, Roland responds, “planting a pipe-bomb?” But there is more for those of us who have spent our lives in this culture. There is Pastor Skip’s attempt to be relevant, “Are you kids down with G-O-D?” and Lillian’s snug Christian bubble (she wants to be Christian Interior Decorator of the Year), and the classes, the chapels, the worship band, the shallow piety, all rang true for me.

Of course, other people who also know this subculture as well as I do, disagree. My sister was not much impressed with this film. Neither was my friend, Susan, who suspected, contrary to fact, that the writer was clearly “not an insider.” But I thought the the film’s evangelical world was nicely drawn. For twenty years of my life, I was Hilary Faye! Almost every youth worker I know IS Pastor Skip. I enjoyed the satire. It was delicious.

But there’s another more serious criticism leveled against the film by evangelicals. Todd Hertz, film reviewer for Christianity Today, complained that the film didn’t show any loving evangelical Christians. I disagree. Hilary Faye is a loving evangelical Christian. She sacrifices a lot of time and energy to try to help others. She organizes a prayer meeting to pray for Dean’s de-gayification. She labors over and over again to convert Cassandra to Christianity, and isn’t that what she should do if she believes Cassandra is bound for hell? I respect Todd Hertz, but if he met Hilary Faye, or me, or someone like us, we would be the loving evangelical Christians he claims the film is missing.

This is the problem: evangelicalism is loving. Why do you think they spend all that money and time trying to convert people? They are saving souls from hell. Why do you think they spend so much time, effort, and cash on things like Promise Keepers and Second-Chance Virginity (both lampooned in “Saved!”)? It is because they do love people. They love people more than most liberal Christians I know. But they love from a place of absolute rightness and righteousness. I know Mr. Hertz, you’ll claim you don’t have all the answers . . . but you do, don’t you? Truth be told, I think most of your answers seem right to me, too. The problem is that your absolute rightness gives you the right to love us all into being “good Christians.” No wonder so many of us have wandered off to crummy apartments with strangers. Don’t you realize you can’t make us come without touching us, really, truly touching us?

2004-06-23T14:29:00.000-07:00

Surfing Update. Scotchman's, 4-6' with plus sets. Best I've surfed in weeks. I took out the 7'7" Becker so I could put it to this little posse of thrashers that paddled out right before I did. Rights and lefts held up until the tide started to rise, then it started heaving on the inside. Toward the end of my session, I took every right on the head.

It was good to finally feel like I wasn't surfing like crap, even if it was on a 7 foot board. I was going to celebrate getting my grades done, but . . . well, I guess that counts. I want to take myself out to lunch at Thaifoon, but I feel pathetic eating alone there.

There are no movies that I really want to see right now. Dodge Ball? Ugghhh. Maybe it's better than it looks. Stepford Wives was flat. I guess it was supposed to be a dark comedy, but it wasn't that dark or funny, and are we really in the exact same place as we were in the 1950's? The ending, not to give anything away, maybe addresses this problem by suggesting that we long for the safer era of the 1950's, but I don't long for that at all. I dream of Tyler Durden's world.

Oh well.

2004-06-22T22:59:00.000-07:00

Grades In . . . Lights Out
I finally got my grades in. It was really hard to get the research papers graded. I could tell that a lot of my students had put a lot of effort into the research, but the problem is always to find something—something original—to say.

Unfortunately, I’m in the same boat. I’ve been having such a hard time finding time to write these days. I essentially decided I would take a week or so off while I tried to get some grading done. Luckily I had just finished the first draft of my latest screenplay (attempt), so I didn’t have to leave in the middle of the story, but I feel really bad about going so long without any real writing. I haven’t done any morning pages. Not much in this blog. I didn’t even do my Love of Mike Article for this month. I’m just out of ideas.

So I have the same problem as so many of my students: lots of information, but nothing to say. I need to spend time with my computer in order to keep my voice going. If I’m ever going to change my life, writing is the only way I can do it. It seems clear to me now that I will never get a tenure-track job, and teaching, and reading, and writing, is really all I’m good at. Unfortunately, I have no way to make a living at this. I’ve read a couple of books on freelance copy-writing, but I don’t have time to build a business like that. Maybe, I can get to it this summer, but is that the best way to spend my time? Short stories, memoirs, even “literary-journalism,’ doesn’t really pay well. Screenplays pay, but it’s really hard to get anyone to read your work, and even if they do, to get someone to put up the enormous amount of cash to buy a screenplay and get it into production makes it a really, really tough market. Or should it be all academic writing—a couple of articles, some book reviews—in one last-ditch effort to get one of those plum $35k/year jobs?

Our rector was also looking for something to say. I had a longish conversation with him today about my suicidal blog entry. He wants so much to help, but I’m so beyond help. Everyone at Saint Michael’s is so supportive, but I don’t feel like they know me, after all, I’m never really myself there, I’m always trying to figure out what kind of person I need to be to function in my various roles. I’m certainly never what you would call, “relaxed,” except, maybe, when I’m “preaching,” because then, in that space, I’m trying hard to be authentic, and so the “real” me comes out.

Ironically, I’m more myself with my students at UCI than at church. This is ironic, because I always claim that teaching is a performance, and yet, I don’t perform when I’m in the classroom, I feel more like I’m just putting myself out there. I’m not sure why I do this with my students. In part, they draw me out. There is something so beautiful about their youth, energy, and optimism that attract me. But they also have a kind of aloof cynicism that appeals to me. They are so open to everything. They are still trying to figure things out, and they still seem to believe in the importance of figuring things out. And that is where I am, both in the classroom, and the pulpit, somebody trying to figure things out. That is when I feel most myself.

Of course, I also share with them a sense of irony. The WWII generation doesn’t share it with me. I wore my “Free Wynona (Ryder)” T-shirt to the men’s breakfast last week. They didn’t get it. “Why do you care so much about freeing a shoplifter?” Baby-boomers get the joke, but they aren’t ironic, either. They are earnest. I think I don’t relate t o a lot of my peers at the university because, thought they are Gen-Xers, they have adopted/emulated our professor’s sincerity: “Oh, my observations on Baudelaire are going to change the world!” So irony is missed on them, too. I can forgive this lack of irony in the WWII’ers, because it seems so good natured in them, but in the boomers, whether Clinton or Dubya, it seems repulsive. They all know just what everyone else should be doing and thinking, and they never tire of telling us about that time they marched in Tuscaloosa, or D.C., or Berkeley. “Good job, Boomers, your world has really turned out great.”

But my students, most of them, aren’t really there. Sure, they mimic their professors’ liberal self-righteous outrage, but, like me, I think, their outrage is personal, not political. They . . . we. . . personalize the world’s problems. The plight of the Palestinians seems less import than the plight of our friends, some of whom are Palestinians.

I am a cliché in this regard. I’m completely without principles. I’m the only person I know who voted for Ronald Reagan and Ralph Nader. I voted for George H.W. Bush-twice—but when it comes to “Dubya,” I’m “anyone but . . .” I’d like to see Rush Limbaugh and Michael Moore face-off . . . in a pie-eating contest, or hot-dogs, as long as their mouths are full. Neither one of them ever seems to run out of things to say.

2004-06-18T15:10:00.000-07:00

My Suicide . . . Then and Now.

I was feeling so low last night that even though I still had a pile of research papers to finish grading I to go surfing. So I did; for about 45 minutes. I went to Scotchman’s, 1-3ft. and bumpy on a tide that was a bit too high for such a weak swell. Still, it was fun. Sammy was there, freaking me out with his fish-breath and long whiskers. I think he lifts that fin out of the water on purpose, pretending he’s a shark. It was good. I managed to connect a few all the way to the shore, but I had to go before I really got all the demons exorcised, and they are still with me.

That morning our Men’s Breakfast Group at church finished our discussion of Viktor Frankl’s Modern Man’s Search for Meaning. We were discussing Frankl’s Logotherapy, and I revealed a bit too much about myself and my current trauma. One of the men asked if I was “suicidal.” I brushed this off, protesting that I could never do that to my kids.

But, of course, I am suicidal. But I’ve been suicidal before, and I’m still here, more evidence of my inability to see a project through to its conclusion.

I was “really” suicidal when I was seventeen. I was filled with self-loathing and I thought about killing myself almost every day. I would sit in the bathroom with a knife in my hand wondering if I could just slit my wrists and see what would happen. But then, as now, concerns over the effect this would have on others prompted me to stay alive. This seems different than what some suicide-attempters tell me—that they believe everyone would be better off without them—so perhaps, even then, I was unusual.

That self-loathing, and those suicidal tendencies seem like they could be treated with the kind of psychology Freud and Adler proposed. As Frankl characterizes their approaches, Freud and Adler seek the etiology of a neurosis, and seek, by uncovering it, to help the patient overcome it. When I was seventeen I loathed myself because I felt my father loathed me. I felt my religious leaders loathed me. I adopted their perspective of me and chose to join them in hating me. It was the hopelessness of ever being able to live up to those expectations that drove me to want to kill myself.

But now my suicidal tendencies are different. Clearly, the most central emotion in my life is self-hatred. I hate myself. I want to harm myself. At least two dozen times a day I feel like, and visualize, taking a red-hot poker and jamming it through my eye. In my imagination I sink it into my brain which melts and flows out my ears and nose. This is my most real, my most visceral, and my most abiding desire. And I do think about killing myself. I think about it every day. I’ve been thinking about it every day for at least two years—ever since I decided to pursue ordination—and I suspect I will think about it every day as long as I’m working in a church. But now, unlike when I was seventeen, I know that I will not do it. I love my children and I know killing myself would harm them so much that I could never bring myself to do it.

And here the differences between my teen-suicide obsession and my current self-destructive fantasies become more pronounced. If I didn’t have children, I wouldn’t kill myself, because then I could just escape my life. I could quite my job at the church and resume living the kind of life I want to live. I could start doing the things I want to do. I could read poetry again. I could read magazines again. I could listen to music again. I could go camping and hiking and swimming with my kids again . . . oh wait, I don’t have kids in this fantasy. But I can’t do any of those things any more. I have ruined my life, and that is why I think about ending it every day.

Don’t misunderstand me. It is not my kids which motivate my despair; it’s my job, my situation, my identity, that motivates it. If I could leave my job, I wouldn’t be so depressed, but because I have all these kids, I can’t leave my job.

When I worked construction we talked about having some “fuck-you money” stowed away. Fuck-you money is money you keep so that if the boss, or the landlord, or the neighbors get to be too much, you can say, “fuck you” and take off. I have money in the bank, but not nearly enough for a man with four kids to be able to say “fuck you” to anyone, so I swallow it all. I say as little as possible. I choke on my words. I suppress all my feelings.

I also hate myself in a different way now. When I was seventeen I hated myself because I believed I was hate-able. But now I hate myself because I believe in my potential and worth, and I believe I have betrayed all that. Instead of taking a low-paying, but career-building job at the University of Nevada, I took the job at Saint Michael & All Angels and ruined my career. What’s worse, this was clearly an act of self-betrayal, even at the time. When they first offered me the job, even the thought of saying, “yes” to Saint Michael’s made stomach wind up in knots. I knew, my stomach knew, that I was not the right person for the job. I knew, from my experience working in churches, that this kind of job would kill me. I knew it, but for a more comfortable salary—a salary no longer even that comfortable—I betrayed myself, my career, my desires, and my ambitions. I ruined my life.

I certainly wasted it. I wasted all the time, effort, and money I (actually, my wife and I) had put into my education. Nine years of graduate school flushed down the toilet. Now, five years later, no university will touch me. I’m the fucking idiot who’s finished his dissertation five years ago and has, in the words of one of my former teachers, “been teaching Sunday School” for five years. Nobody wants me, and they are right not to want me. I have not kept up with my field the way I should have, and I have published very little. Plus, and I don’t know if anybody can tell, but I am getting stupider and stupider with every month. I’ve been working at Saint Michael & All Angles for sixty months now, and if I’ve just lost one I.Q. point per month, imagine how stupid I am now.

And I continue to betray myself. Since my friend, and assistant, Sam left, I am not myself around anyone. I cannot be myself. I am not even sure who or what that self would be anymore. I don’t do anything that I find interesting or meaningful. I just go through the motions.

I know, all jobs have a down side, and most are rather boring, and believe me, I have had plenty of them, but they are not like this. When you work for a church you are not just doing a job, you are being a person. Yes, in this day and age, you are seen as a service-provider, but you are never just evaluated on the service you provide, you are always forced to be a certain kind of person. Plus, you have to take this job home with you. You have to fret and worry about it.

Besides, do I have to justify the feeling in my stomach? I’m not exaggerating. I feel nauseous every time I drive towards the church. Saturdays are horrible, even worse than Sundays. I wake up Saturday morning feeling ill. I feel like I’m being smothered. By 8:00 p.m. Saturday night I can hardly breathe. Sunday is coming. Sunday is descending on me like some flesh-eating virus.

My “supporters” wonder why I can’t just get ordained and be happy with this work, but I don’t see any of them lining up. The thought of being an ordained minister makes me want to scream. Sometimes I do scream when I think about it, when I’m alone, when I’m where nobody will hear, I scream, and scream. Driving to my seminary class last fall I would scream in the car. I would scream on the way there, and scream on the way home. Does anybody care that this is not the kind of person I want to be? Does anybody care? Apparently not. This is the only job for which I can find employment, the one job that disgusts me the most.

It’s not just the complainers. Saint Michael’s has few of them. Barbara thinks this is all about some vile woman who called me up and chewed me out last Sunday, but it’s not. I know this particular woman is vile, and I evaluate her comments as coming from a vile person. No, it’s not the people. THE PEOPLE AND SAINT MICHAEL & ALL ANGLES ARE WONDERFUL.

No, it’s that I hate everything I do. I don’t feel like the church is really benefiting from me. I don’t feel good about them paying for it. Sure I work hard, but nothing I do there makes any real difference. Yet, if I quit, I won’t be able to pay my rent, and then I’d really hate myself for betraying my family.

So I betray myself.

Now, I’ll tell you a really sick secret. I can tell you, because you are not reading this. Nobody would read such a long blog entry if it wasn’t full of either sex, or right-wing diatribes. Still, I write it here instead of in my journal, because it is possible that it might be read, even though it won't, and so, somehow, this makes it feel like a prayer. Here it goes. . .

Wednesday night, after another soul-crushing (only for me) church event—a dinner for the children’s choir (maybe I’ll tell you later why it was so soul-crushing for me)—I was really filled with self-hatred, images of hot pokers plunging into my skull filled my imagination. My solution? I pulled an exacto-knife out and a lighter, and “sterilized” the blade. Then I made several, seven to be exact, incisions in my left forearm. The pain, the blood, brought me some real relief. Yes, I know, cutting yourself is so adolescent-girl-interrupted-chic . . . a total cliché, but . . .it worked! It not only helped my emotional intensity level drop enough so that I could grade some papers and get some sleep, it sustained me through most of Thursday. My arm hurt all day yesterday, and I didn’t feel like bashing my face in with a brick until about 4:00 p.m.

And now you know why, by 5:00 p.m. yesterday, I just had to go surfing, even in such crummy conditions.

2004-06-16T16:31:00.000-07:00

Top Ten Movies (as of today)

1. The Hours
2. Fight Club
3. 8 ½
4. 12 Monkeys
5. American Beauty
6. Blade Runner
7. Breakfast Club
8. Singles
9. Crimes and Misdemeanors
10. Last Tango in Paris

2004-06-08T09:42:00.000-07:00

When I was Ronald Reagan

I remember when I was Ronald Reagan. It was October, 1980, the beginning of my senior year in high school. We were staging a mock political debate and election. I was assigned the part of Ronald Reagan; my friend Amy was Jimmy Carter. We each spent a week reviewing press clippings and speeches, trying to get our candidate’s message down, and then we were featured in a special school assembly: a mock presidential debate.

Amy had studied hard. She had familiarized herself with all the complexities of energy policy, the Middle-East peace process, the nature of the new regime in Iran, plans for the emergence of a stronger European Union, and possible reforms in education. I found that I was mostly mastering slogans about smaller government, lower taxes, and the evils of communism.

On the day of the actual debate I spouted my, or rather Reagan’s, slogans, and Amy patiently attempted to engage in a substantive discussion of the issues. The problem was that every time I spouted one of my optimistic slogans, the rowdy crowd of teenagers cheered wildly, while Amy’s more substantive arguments were greeted with either silence or jeers.

I felt sorry Amy, who was, I could clearly see, almost reduced to tears by the other kids’ reaction to her points, and I felt a little guilty at how easily I had won over the crowd. But I could understand my classmates’ feelings. We had grown up watching our planes bomb jungles in Southeast Asia, and our older siblings and cousins throw rocks at police. We had helped our parents push their cars through gasoline lines. Like Amy Carter, we had worried about what seemed like an inevitable nuclear war and unlike the Baby-Boomers, we now knew hiding under our desks in the likely event of a nuclear attack would be useless. We had watched Olympic athletes murdered just because they were Jewish, and another group of athletes denied the right to compete because our politicians wanted to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. We had seen our embassy in Tehran fall to what seemed like a group of maniacs . . . and, of course, there was disco, but I digress.

With all this going on, it was hard not to love this grandfatherly candidate, so unlike our worried parents, who promised that he, no, we, could make things better. Of course, I couldn’t vote in the 1980 election, but I could in 1984, and I voted, with enthusiasm, for Ronald Reagan.

But that was the last time I ever felt good when casting a vote for president. In 2000 I voted for Nader, but that was clearly a “who-cares?” vote, and this year I will join the ranks of the “anyone-but” crowd. But in 1980, politics seemed so different. We had two candidates with clear differences, but who were clearly sincere. You got the sense that neither candidate was carefully, we might even say, “cynically,” choosing their words to gain political advantage. Faced with an energy crisis and grave political problems in the Middle-East, President Carter told us to turn our thermostats down and put on a sweater. What could be more sincere than that? And Ronald Reagan’s optimism seemed similarly genuine and heartfelt; he believed in America.

Since 1984 my political views have changed drastically, and typical of many Gen-X-ers, my cynicism toward, and detachment from the political process has grown. But this week, remembering Ronald Reagan, I felt a new sensation: nostalgia. I longed to hear a political message I could believe. I wondered if it’s just me that’s changed, or if somehow the heart has gone completely out of politics. I was nostalgic for an optimistic message that seemed to be genuinely aimed at buoying my spirit rather than just shoring up some politician’s political base. I was even nostalgic for a politician who would dare to tell me that if I’m cold, I should put on sweater before wasting fuel. But I guess I was mostly nostalgic for that grandfatherly voice that could always make me believe that we could, if we only we would, make things better.

2004-06-01T17:53:00.000-07:00

Surfing Update:

Sunday, May 30th, Lowers. 4-6 ft. with some plus sets. Used the 6'10" hybrid. There was a bump on the water, but clearly this was the funnest day I've had in a long time. The crowd wasn't that heavy for Trestles, but it was heavy enough that I didn't get every wave I wanted. Still, I always feel great when I surf there. Nothing like perfect, long rights to make you feel like a world-class schredder.

Tuesday, June 1, Scotchman's. Weak 1-3ft. S. and 2-3 W. Used the 6'10" hybrid. Lots of paddling for pretty small waves, but lots of fun on the low tide rollers. West was a tease, jacking on the boil, but backing off 'til the beach. The south was inconsistent, but fun when a set would roll in.

2004-05-25T14:26:00.000-07:00

Some of you asked about the homily I presented at Heather and Mark O'Malley-Malovos' wedding.

Here it is:
Mark and Heather selected Saint Paul’s famous exposition on love as one of their readings for today. The thesis of that passage is fairly obvious: when you really get down to it, all that’s left after we get past all the fighting, striving, and posing, is faith, hope, and love, and of those three, the greatest is love.

This is what I like about weddings. They give us all a chance to think about what really keeps the world going. It’s not the stock-markets, or political agendas, or technological innovations that make the world a livable place; it’s faith, hope, and love. Here, this evening, whether you’re single, married, or divorced, whether your single looking to get married, or married looking to get single, or divorced vowing never to marry again, or happily married, or happily single, you can see that what brings us here today is a celebration of faith, hope, and love.

Mark and Heather are committing their lives to each other today because they have faith. Marriage is an affirmation of the fact that for all the evil and struggle in the world, there is a goodness that pervades it. Marriage affirms that we are part of the great Mystery of life and that we are all part of an unbounded network of relationships that brings life and joy to this planet. Religious people call this Mystery, “God,” and see in this unbounded network of relationships God’s hand at work. So Mark and Heather’s vows today remind us all that we have faith: faith in ourselves, in our families, in our friends, and in God.

At weddings we also celebrate hope. Life is hard, but here, today, for this moment, celebrating with Mark and Heather, we are reminded of hope. Marriage vows remind us of the contingency of life: “in sickness and health,” “for richer or poorer,” and the very vague, but comprehensive, “for better or worse.” But in spite of all these contingencies, in beautiful defiance of life’s precarious nature, Mark and Heather are pledging themselves to each other, until death parts them. Weddings are truly moments of pure hope.

But, of course, weddings are also about love. The text Mark and Heather chose doesn’t emphasize the passionate, erotic side of love as much as it emphasizes its devoted, sacrificial side. It emphasizes that side of love that is patient, kind, gentle, and forgiving. It tells us that what sustains us in life, through all of its challenges and changes, is love. This is why it’s the most important of these three virtues. Love hopes all things, believes all things, and endures all things. The greatest thing in all the world is love.

So, Mark and Heather, here is the part of the wedding ceremony where I’m supposed to give a “charge” to the bride and groom. I’m supposed to give you some advice, maybe even, secrets, that will guide you to a happy and healthy marriage. But marriage, because it is, perhaps, the deepest of human relationships, is also, perhaps, the most complicated.

I was thinking about all of this on Monday, the day before my thirteenth wedding anniversary. I came home late that night and found my wife already asleep in bed. I popped open a beer and sat next to her, my gaze tracing those familiar, yet somehow still-strange curves and lines of her body, and I wondered what it had meant for me to become, in the words of today’s second reading, “one flesh” with this woman. I realized that when I first took my wedding vows, thirteen years ago, I really had no idea what I was doing, but I was full of faith, hope and love, and that was more than enough to get me up the aisle. When we made those vows we didn’t know what would lie ahead—the dreams we would sacrifice, the financial challenges we would confront, and the sickness and death we would face together—and we still don’t know what lies ahead, but, watching her lying there--her chest rising and falling, her legs curled up underneath her, this woman who had grown closer to me than I would have thought humanly possible just thirteen years ago—I realized that I had found love.

But I don’t think I’ve learned any secrets or techniques that can lead to a happy, healthy marriage. What I have learned is that every day we are given dozens of choices, and everything, and I do mean everything, depends on making the same choice you are making today: the choice to love, the choice to hope, the choice to have faith in another and the choice to be faithful, the choice to say, “as long as I breathe, no matter what you are going through, you will never be alone.” So all I have to say about marriage, or about life for that matter, is that choosing love is all we can do.

This week a lot of important people did a lot of important things: they bought new homes, found new jobs, and set off on dream vacations. Fortunes were risked, corporate mergers negotiated, wars waged and peace plans proposed. People tried to get ten minutes with Donald Trump, to pitch a screenplay to Harvey Weinstein, and to find new treatments for cancer. But, Mark and Heather, nothing anyone did this week was more important than what you are doing here this evening: choosing to love, because when it’s all said and done, when every empire has fallen, every stock-market crashed, and every masterpiece faded, all that will remain will be faith, hope, and love, and the greatest of these is, without a doubt, love.

2004-05-24T23:21:00.000-07:00

Is a Cigar Just a Cigar?
Today I told my Humanities Core students my secret to idea-generating success: smoking cheap cigars. What I didn’t tell them is that it’s been long time since I’ve smoked a cigar, and I take this lengthy hiatus from stench and social rejection to be symptomatic of a deeper loss of spirit.

This would strike my Plymouth Brethren forbearers as quite odd. Smoking was the second worst thing they could imagine a person doing. Drinking, of course, would be the worst. Having sex would, of course, be the third worst. To smoke a cigarette would be tantamount to admitting that you were not one of God’s elect; i.e., that you were going straight to hell. (You can see this attitude in the story about Bob Jones, founder of Bob Jones University, who, after returning from a trip to England where he had met with C.S. Lewis, supposedly quipped, “well, he drinks and smokes, but I guess he’s a Christian.) So how did those foul things find their way to my lips, the same lips that praised Jesus and kissed my mother?

I was introduced to cigars while a student at Northern Arizona University. No, my fraternity brothers did not get me started on the brown-wrappered chimneys. I went to college in the 80’s when cocaine and casual sex were the rage in all the fraternities and there was no time for cigars, what with all the cocaine-snorting Tri-Delts running around.

I was introduced to cigars by my Campus Crusade for Christ brothers. “Garship,” they called it: a term formed by combining elements of “cigar” and “fellowship.” Apparently, all the Campus Crusade guys in the southwestern states regularly smoked cigars when they got together. This was revealed to me only in my senior year when I was rooming with Dave, our single Campus Crusade staff guy who happened to be from Colorado, home of Garship. Dave and I were living in a “mobile home” by the railroad tracks and we decided to host a “Men’s Night” for the guys in our local Campus Crusade group. This night would feature poker, played for beans, literally, and Garship. NO GIRLS ALLOWED.

I’ll have to admit this really tested my limits. I was now breaking two of the most important rules of my religion. Want to know what was fourth on the list of horrible, terrible, soul-damning sins in my family? You guessed it: card-playing. The worst whipping of my childhood was savagely delivered to me after I agreed to play Old Maid with some kids from school.

It was brutal, but that whipping saved my soul, at least until I got to college and got involved with those Campus Crusade “liberals” and started smoking and playing cards. But I couldn’t resist them. No, I don’t mean the cards and the cigars. I couldn’t resist those guys. They were change-the-world-go-hard-or-go-home-fun-loving-but-Bible-thumping-men. They still believed in God above, the Devil below, Heaven waiting for us and Hell waiting for them--you know, all the important stuff--but they also embraced life.

That was just the transition I needed. And you know what? I liked cigars. I liked them. The sharp, but somehow sweet taste, the smoke stinging your nose, throat, and eyes, and that subtle little buzz, all combine to make it an experience like no other. I was smoking cigars way before it was hip. I was doing it when it was disgusting—i.e., before the Governor of California had special cigar-smoking area on the patio outside his office—and I’ll still do it after the fashion fades (completely).

And I think Brecht was right: smoking does improve concentration. But cigars, because you can’t, or at least shouldn’t, chain smoke them, and because they don’t have the same addictive properties as cigarettes, seem a little safer, at least if you only smoke a ten or so a year. (You can mock me when I get throat cancer.) Smoking cigars helped me relax and think those thoughts you usually can’t think because you’re running around, or the radio is on, or the project has to be done yesterday.

Even after I got married, and my wife told me she would not kiss me if she could taste any tobacco in my mouth, I would still smoke at least two cigars a year: one the day before my birthday and the other when visiting my friend, Dave Stephens (not the Campus Crusade guy). I would smoke one on my birthday as a kind of reflective ritual. I would go off by myself and smoke a stogy, and think about where the last year has taken me. (I gave this up five years ago because my life has become so thoroughly depressing that I can’t bear to think about it. Socrates, with his unexamined life thing, was full of shit. I’m guessing he never had to examine a life as crappy as mine.)

My friend Dave and I, whom I would meet in Phoenix every year around Christmastime, would go off and smoke a cigar together as a kind of bonding ritual—probably an-at-some-level-at-least-misogynistic ritual. But this came to an end when his wife, an otherwise charming woman, but kibosh on it (for religious, not feminist reasons).

So now I’m on my own and I haven’t been smoking cigars much at all. It’s been two years since I’ve smoked one, but I bought a pack of cheap--and I do mean cheap and nasty--Swisher Sweets Perfectos a few days ago. Why now?

Well, first of all, I think I’ve reached that point in my marriage where I realize most of the good sex is behind me. Oh, my wife still loves me, but we’ve got four kids, two of which are in diapers, and one of those is nursing, and, well, there is not a lot of energy for Daddy right now. Plus, let’s face it, I’m not the sexy guy she married. I’m balding, a bit swollen, and, well, a loser. I’m not conquering any worlds. I will not be famous, or get an endowed chair, or change the world. My confidence has been replaced by self-loathing, and, apparently, that’s not sexy. So why not smoke a cigar? At least I can enjoy some rich symbolic (phallic) displacement . . . you know, make myself feel like a man again.

But I don’t plan on letting myself go completely, do I? I don’t think so. I’ll still try to dress decently . . . most of the time. And I’m not going to get fat. I couldn’t stand that. I can’t stand the way all my neighbors just let those bellies of theirs grow and grow. I mean they don’t even seem to care that they can rest their beers on their stomachs. I don’t think that’s why they’re called beer-bellies.

No, the Perfectos in my dresser are not a sign of my further deterioration. No, but their long absence from my life may be a symptom of the shallow state of my soul. I’ve been working so hard these last five years. I work all the time. All the poetry, song, and silence have been forced out of my life. (Do you know how hard it is to make $90,000 every year when you have no talent, skills, or abilities? No? Well take my word for it: it’s pretty fucking hard.) I need to find my groove. I need to find my soul again, and I think a cigar might help.

Here’s my plan. In about ten minutes I will go in and watch an episode of “Sex and the City” with my wife. (We love that show.) When it’s over, I will kiss her “goodnight” with my clean, tobacco-free mouth, and I’ll go outside with my nasty stogy in one hand, and a beer, an ultra-light beer (a Michelob, apparently the “Queen of Carbs” to Budweiser), in the other, and Sylvia Plath under my arm, and I with each puff I will try to draw in a bit of my soul back inside my body.

2004-05-06T14:15:00.000-07:00

Surfer Diary:

11:00 a.m. 2-4 footers at Scotchman's. Lots of fun. A small, active, but relatively friendly crowd. The sun was out, the waves were clean, and the water is warming up.

Superfun. My kind of day . . . no need to risk my life.

2004-05-05T16:23:00.000-07:00

Surfer Diary:

8:00 a.m. Scotchman's-- lots of sloppy 2-3 footers with some 4-6 ft sets rolling in. I forgot to grab a new leash, so lots of perfect duck-diving required today. The wind was putting a lot of texture on the waves, but it wasn't blown out. I spent twenty-minutes doing laps on three-footers, going right and left, until I decided to wait for a real set.

Sitting there waiting my mind kept flashing images of those sharks they've been spotting off of Will Rogers State Beach. I comfort myself with the thought that the sharks probably hate bumping into the reef just as much as I do and so they probably stay well outside, if not in the channel, at least on the deeper parts of the shelf.

A "real" set comes in and I paddle for the horizon. I scratch my way over three head-high waves and then turn around for the fourth . . . I wimp out and pull back at the last minute . . . I suck.

Then I sit on my board and scan the horizon. A ten-foot fountain of spray breaks the surface just thirty yards from me. I watch as two humpback whales lumber past me. I've never been this close to them before. This also seems to trouble my thesis about the reef protecting me from those eight-foot gentlemen in gray-flannel suits. A big tail breaks the surface. It doesn't even look real. Pretty cool.

2004-05-04T12:30:00.000-07:00

Why Do I Support Howard Stern?
Protecting Howard Stern’s right to interview strippers and discuss flatulence may not seem like an important political project, but it is. The Bush Administration's attempt to fine and otherwise harass Stern constitutes a serious threat to our democracy.

First of all, it is impossible to give a clear definition of “indecency.” We can provide lists of “dirty” words (a rather lame and provincial solution that just leads broadcasters to say “f” and “c-sucker” and to partially “bleep” words in songs), but that doesn’t seem to satisfy the Speech Police. They claim to want to restrict all “indecent” speech, but I defy them to clarify their position in a way that would censor Howard Stern while still allowing for a free-exchange of ideas on topics related to health, sex, and relationships.

Besides, why should we censor Howard Stern? The argument is that we need to protect children, but isn’t that the job of parents? Furthermore, do we really need to protect children from public speech? Michael Powell wants to protect them from words (or in Stern’s case, words and sound effects), but do we really need to protect children from speech, or should we give them the critical skills they need to analyze, evaluate, and respond to what they hear, including the dribble, half-truths, and all-out lies for which the Bush Administration itself is now famous? As a parent, I choose to monitor what my children view on television and listen to on the radio, but I also choose to engage them in serious discussions about what they see and hear. Janet Jackson’s so-called “wardrobe malfunction” gave me an opportunity to discuss with my two oldest children (ages 8 & 11) the role of nudity in artistic expression. (They’ve also seen this same issue discussed in a very good episode on “The Simpsons.”)

But the central issue in Stern’s case is that we can never know the real reason why the FCC is persecuting him. There is no doubt that the pursuit of Stern represents an example of selective enforcement. Not only are our public airways filled with Stern imitators, but many radio and television programs (on PBS, Oprah, Nightline, etc.) are “guilty” of the same infractions for which Stern is being fined. This tends to bolster his claim (see www.howardstern.com) that he was fired from six Clear-Channel stations because he withdrew his support for President Bush and began voicing his support for Kerry (eventually). Stern claims Clear Channel President Lowry Mays’ close relationship with George W. Bush was behind the decision, and I think he's right.

Certainly a media organization has the right to fire its talent . . . for any reason, but the problem is that we cannot know why Stern was fired. If he was fired because of his political views, might Stern's political views also explain Michael Powell’s decision to pursue Stern and ignore other offenders (like Oprah)? Perhaps, and that is the problem. The vague nature of “indecency” definitions, the selective enforcement of these vague policies, and the chilling effect of the fines levied by the FCC (and proposed by new legislation) represent a serious challenge to free speech.

Sure, Stern is a comic and he may seem frivolous, but these days, the only mainstream media opposition to the Bush administration is coming from comedians. If we begin targeting them for indecency we will be silencing an important voice of dissent. This is waht the Bush Administration wants--to silence dissent--and their persecution of Stern illustrates the disturbing totalitarian impulse of this regime. One of the first acts of the Nazis was to purge the country of “degenerate art.” This was a first step on their journey to silence dissent. If “indecent media” is silenced by the Bush Administration, where will their second step take them?

2004-05-04T11:52:00.000-07:00

Surfer Journal: 8:00 a.m. Surfed Scotchman's. Lot's of 2-3 ft. with occassional 4+ set. The high tide made the set waves jack on the inside.

My leash broke on the first set-wave of the day, leaving me with a long soupy swim. Other than that . . . lots of high-tide, quick-footed fun.

2004-04-18T14:27:00.000-07:00

Easter Vigil 2001. (I told some people I would put this on the blog. I hope it still "holds up.")
As someone who did not grow up in the Episcopal Church, I can tell you that the Easter Vigil is the high point of my year. The splendor and grandeur of this service never fail to thrill me. Each year we move, in relatively short order, through all the experiences and emotions of life—from doubt to faith, from fear to courage, from sorrow to joy, and from death to life. At the center of all this movement is the Christian hope—a hope that is grounded in the resurrection of Jesus. So central is this hope to us that many critics of Christianity have attributed it to wishful thinking. My initial response to this critique is to try to provide some sort of intellectual response to it, but I have decided not to do that this evening.
Instead, I want to consider how the resurrection gives hope to our lives by reflecting on how it has given hope to my life this last year. Though I have only been an Episcopalian for a few years, I can already sense the way the Easter Vigil marks time for me. I can remember all my Easter Vigils spent moving from darkness to light in the company of other believers and doubters, and in the presence of God’s spirit moving in us and through us. I think I am beginning to sense how this Easter Vigil liturgy has helped me make sense out of my life and its events over the past year, and I think I am beginning to see how it gives substance to my hopes.
When I think about this last year in my life, I have several vivid images which come from the experiences of Good Friday and Holy Saturday—i.e. images of death, loss, and absence—images that weren’t there for me a year ago. In many ways, this last year of my life has been, in one way or another, about loss, death, absence, and so I’ve come to the Easter Vigil tonight wondering how the Easter experience can speak to all of that, and I’m hoping it will somehow speak to some of you.
The first such experience I could share tonight comes from my five-year old daughter, Elly. In our family we’ve adopted several domesticated rats this year. Our lease doesn’t permit us to have dogs, but my daughter loves animals and has been wanting a pet really badly, and the science teacher at the kids’ school raises rats. She raises them as food for the snakes in the science lab, and so, though I wouldn’t really consider myself a rodent-lover, I was pleased that we could rescue some of these creatures from the snakes. Not long after we got our first rats, Elly’s rat, whom she had named Snowball, began to seem a little sick. One night, as we put the kids to bed, Barbara and I could see that Snowball’s life was numbered in hours and not days, and we kept our own Vigil that night.
We didn’t have to wait long before Snowball had stopped breathing. We put the little white rat in a box and braced ourselves for the morning. As I told Elly about Snowball’s demise I could see all the darker feelings we’ve worked through tonight flash across her face—fear, sorrow, anger, and doubt. After she verified for herself that Snowball was indeed gone, I told her that we could bury her pet in the back yard. I dug a hole and we placed the rat in the hole, and then, using a bevy of bricks we constructed a small ziggurat, which remains just outside my bedroom window.
I asked Elly if she wanted to say a prayer or anything and I was quite surprised to hear that she, having no training, was neither eulogizing nor praying to God, but was speaking directly to Snowball. Her “prayer” was simple: she simply said “Snowball I love you. I miss you. I hope you like it in this hole.” In her little prayer was a profound expression of both presence and absence. She knew that Snowball’s body was in a hole and that she would never again be able to play with her small furry friend, but by speaking directly to Snowball she was speaking directly to the rat’s presence. Though only a rat was involved, I think Elly expressed the feeling we all have when we lose someone we love—a terribly feeling of absence combined with an almost haunting feeling of presence.
A second image that I think has helped me explore the meaning of the resurrection comes from the beach here in Newport. Last May 21st, not long after our last Easter Vigil, I was trying to get in a little surfing before our 9:00 a.m. Sunday Bible Study. I was surfing just south of the 28th Street jetty and I was parked by the pier. As I was walking along the beach towards my car I suddenly ran into a single long-stemmed rose stuck into the sand at the edge of the water. When I saw it I stopped and got my bearings. When I realized I was at 22nd Street I instantly knew why the Rose was there. Two days earlier a young man from Santa Ana, 17-year-old Armando Briseno had drowned at this very spot. He had come with friends and was enjoying a warm day when a rip current which everyone who surfs that spot knows well, pulled him out to sea were he died.
Since I’ve started surfing I’ve often found myself imagining what it would be like to lose a loved-one in this way. Last year four young people drowned at our beach, and as I heard each story I considered the horror the families must have gone through. They had gone to the beach for a day of fun and sun. Perhaps they saw their loved-one just a few seconds before they disappeared—and then, at least here Newport Beach, those who drown do tend to actually disappear. Not only are there rip currents pulling people out to sea, there are often strong currents up and down the coast dragging people, living and dead, hundreds of yards up and down shore. Last Sunday, after our morning worship, I went surfing. I paddled out just north of the 56th Street Jetty, and I when got out about 40 minutes later, despite all my efforts to resist the current, I was 36th Street.
I imagine that’s how it is. One minute someone you love is playing in knee-deep water, and then they’re gone. There is no ambulance ride to the hospital. Sometimes there is no body at all. Twice in the last year I’ve been surfing as I watched life-guards in a scarab 100 yards from shore somberly search the shelf for a drowning victim. The family and friends must simply pack their things, get in their car, and drive home. I’ve imagined how incredibly sharp the sense of absence must be for those who lose a loved-one this way.
But, by the time I ran across that single rose planted in the early dawn hours on the shore at 22nd Street, Armando Briseno’s body had already been recovered. What sense of presence did this beautiful, fragrant, but ephemeral monument mark when there was not even a body in this place, but only the hungry emptiness of a by-then-calm sea? I don’t know. Perhaps someone who loved Armando Briseno sensed that because his last living moments had been spent in that spot, something of his presence still lingered. Was it a mother, a girlfriend, a brother who came to the beach that morning and quietly planted that red, thorny marker? I don’t know, but I think that rose was planted to express a sense of lingering presence in the midst of absence—a sense that life does somehow conquer death—that something of Armando Briseno was both lost and found at the spot.
I’ve had many other moments like this in the last year, but let me just briefly share one more, very personal image of this confluence of absence and presence. As most of you know, this last year Barbara and I lost a child early in the third trimester of Barbara’s pregnancy. For us, this child had lived only in the realm of hopes—his was a life which came to us only through clothes and furniture purchased in anticipation, and, of course, through tiny movements sometimes slightly distending my wife’s swelling belly—distensions which only vaguely hinted at the person inside. Only after he was already gone could we hold his little body, marvel at the perfect fingers and toes, and stare into the sweetness of his little face. His ashes are buried in our memorial garden here at St. Michael’s—a garden I can stare into from my office every day. Sometimes I will speak to Christian, reminding him that we have not forgotten him. Maybe I’m also reminding myself that life, all life, no matter how small, or short, is precious. I think I’m also reminding myself that though my typical paternal hopes have had to be forsaken, I cling to the hope that there is a life beyond this one, a life that conquers death. There is, in the midst of Christian David Felder’s absence, a lingering sense of his presence, even though his presence was, for me, almost exclusively a sense of hopeful absence.
When we celebrate the Easter Vigil we explore this feeling of presence and absence which always seems to accompany death. The two women in today’s gospel, both named Mary, who went to the Tomb that first morning, were moving through the dawn with precisely that experience of presence and absence. They did not know what you and I know. They did not know the tomb was empty and Jesus had risen. They were going, in the words of this evening’s gospel, “to see the tomb.” But instead of seeing the tomb, they saw an angel, an angel announcing that “Jesus the crucified” was risen.
Since their experience of absence was probably the same as ours, it would be tempting to see in their experience of presence as the same as ours. But I think theirs was different. Their encounter with Jesus’ presence caused them to react in an amazing way. They fell down, grabbed his feet, and worshipped. This might seem like an obvious response to us, but I think it was actually rather extraordinary. Remember, these two Mary’s were nice Jewish girls, committed to monotheism and antagonistic to the idea of worshipping anything or anyone except the invisible God. But, when confronted with the risen Jesus, their only response was to worship him. If we stop to think about it, our acts of worship tonight are also extraordinary. On this night, we, like them, fall down and worship god revealed to us, not in the vastness of the cosmos, nor in the beauty of creation, nor in the elegance of philosophical claims about uncaused causes, or even in mystical spiritual notions, but we worship god as revealed to us in the crucified Jesus, now raised to life. We find here, in this place, the living presence of Jesus. Here tonight, with all that we’ve been doing this hour, isn’t that how our hearts want to respond?. Don’t we want to fall down and worship god, as a god who came close to us, who became human, suffered and died with us, and thereby conquered death? We may have heard and believed the theological claim that God is love, but in worshipping god revealed in Jesus we find out what love really is, and thus begin to really know and love god, and when we begin to love god, knowing, because of Jesus, that god loves us, we begin to worship in a new and deeper way.
As I worship the living Jesus, his resurrection life gives substance to my hope for a resurrection life for me, and you, and all those we love who have died. I know this sounds like it’s just wishful thinking, and maybe it is, but I think it’s the kind of wishful thinking Frederick Buechner speaks of. He says that Christianity is “mainly wishful thinking. Even the part about Judgment and Hell reflects the wish that somewhere the score is being kept. Dreams are wishful thinking. Children playing at being grown-up is wishful thinking. Interplanetary travel is wishful thinking. Sometimes wishing is the wings the truth comes true on. Sometimes the truth is what sets us wishing for it.”
I think this is right. I think our wishful yearning for the presence of those who are now absent has come to us from the truth of Jesus’ presence in the midst of his absence. The truth we have celebrated, and I hope entered into a bit tonight, is the truth that caused my five-year old to pray to a deceased rodent, that planted that rose on the beach, and that makes me speak out my office door into an “empty” garden. I’m not going to try tonight to explain how that truth can be found, but I think we, like those two Mary’s in the gospel, have come to the right place find it. We are exploring the truth that sets our hearts wishing at the only place we know to go—worshipping at the nail-pierced feet of the risen Jesus.

2004-04-13T15:23:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on my Puritan Upbringing and the Salem Witch Trials.

This week in Humanities Core we are discussing the role of Puritan Theology in the Salem Witchcraft Trials of 1692.

I was raised in a Christian community that very self-consciously thought of themselves as the modern-day Puritans. They are sometimes referred to as the “Plymouth Brethren,” so-called because they claimed to have the same theology, worship, and communal organization as those who settled in Plymouth in 1620. Garrison Keillor, who was raised in a similar group, calls them the “Sanctified Brethren.” It’s hard to label them because they refuse to label themselves. The claim all labels and denominations are human inventions, even “corruptions,” of the community Christ aimed to create, and so all denominations are, to some degree, heretical, according to them.

Still, they do share some common characteristics. They have no ordained clergy (unlike the New England Puritans), often insist on women wearing veils on their head during worship, and celebrate the “Lord’s Supper” every week around a simple ritual that consists of Scripture reading, “spontaneous” prayer, and singing (without musical accompaniment), all led by the male-members of the group. Women sit in silence (except to sing).

I grew up in the Puritan environment, perched on the very edge of hell, sensing the infernal demons waiting under my bed, ready to snatch me and drag me away. Even as a child of four or five years of age I would spend every night sobbing in my bed praying for God to have mercy on me and accept me. Then, every day, I was assured of the comforts of God’s grace and the certainties of his love, but reminded that these benefits were experienced only by the elect.

While I had doubts about my place, as an individual, within the community of the elect, I had no doubts that my religious community was the “elect.” The logic was that the smaller the group, the more likely they are to contain the true believers, the chosen ones, because “narrow was the gate” that led to eternal life, but “broad was the road and wide the gate” that led to destruction. Our failure to win a more substantial following was further proof of our election.

But, as an individual, you could never really know that you were chosen. I mean, we believed that we were saved by grace through faith, but how was one to know they had faith, true, saving faith? The only possible proof was in the “fruit” of a holy life, but we could never be sure. I strove to live the holiest life possible, subjecting even my every thought to divine scrutiny in hopes that I could see this fruit.

But, on the other hand (and here we may differ from seventeenth-century Puritans), we were always told that since we were saved by grace, through faith, and not by works, we could, theoretically, know that we were saved. Those who think salvation is based on “works,” or on “being good,” were doomed to insecurity because you could never know that you had done enough. We, on the other hand, knew it was impossible to ever “do enough” to merit God’s favor and forgiveness, that was a matter of grace . . . and faith—saving faith—and there was the rub. How could you know that you had that kind of “saving faith?”

Instead of “knowing” I had that kind of faith, I tended to assume that other people had it, and they knew they had it, which made my doubts all-the-more troubling. We believed in “the Rapture,” which meant that we believed that near the end of time Jesus would come and “snatch” the elect out of this world, leaving the rest of us behind. Many times growing up I would find myself alone in our house and immediately be thrown into a panic, thinking I had been “left behind.”

But this insecurity seems to have a mirroring power that works quite effectively on the communal level, even for those individuals, like me, who were plagued by doubts about our own, personal salvation. Our election as a community was always seen in contrast to the non-elect around us. The easiest target was the Roman Catholic Church. They were our exact opposite in most respects mirroring our simplicity of worship with complex rituals and ornate liturgical practices. Reading Revelation, we interpreted the Roman Catholic Church as the “Whore of Babylon, drunk on the blood of the saints.” Revelation’s “Babylon” is clearly a veiled reference to Rome, and the Roman Church, with all of its money and wealth seemed to be the spitting image of Revelation’s harlot.

But this Manichean mirroring extended to all areas of life. God loved the Dallas Cowboys, but hated the Oakland Raiders. God loved the United States, but hated the “evil empire” of the Soviet Union. God created men to lead, and women to follow. God loved hymns, but the Devil loved Rock-and-Roll. God was a Republican, and . . . Ted Kennedy was a Democrat.

So this week, re-reading Puritan theological texts and thinking about the Salem Witch Trials is like visiting my childhood. In fact, I can remember my mother telling me that what happened at Salem was a good thing. “Maybe some false people were accused,” she told me, “but witches are real, and I’m sure they burned (sic) real witches.”

Does a doctrine of election require a doctrine of the Devil? I suspect it requires something like that. To look in the mirror and see an angel staring back I must, at times, look into the crowd and see a diabolical image mocking my angelic pretensions. If I am “straight,” the mocking face might be gay. If I am Protestant, it might be Catholic. If I am male, it might be female.

Since the notion of election, no matter what its guise, seems to require the demonization of the other, perhaps this is the greatest enemy of civilization and the challenge we most need to overcome.

2004-04-10T22:27:00.000-07:00

Thoughts on Lolita

I grew up in an environment in which fiction was not much read. Sure, I was exposed to the usual Dr. Seuss fare normally given to beginning readers, but even in my earliest acquaintance with books, I was given biographies, histories, and, of course, Bible stories. I did go through one phase, lasting two years, which, because our television broke and my father refused to replace the devilish device, involved my reading every Hardy Boys and Tom Swift novel ever written. In high school, we hardly did any serious reading, and at home my nightstand featured Ironside’s Bible commentaries.

I was not exposed to Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita. The subject matter would have been unmentionable, and the novel itself considered obscene. As I grew older, and increasingly more open-minded, one might even say, “liberal,” I never really wanted to read the book because it sounded “sick”—filled with perverted fantasies about middle-aged men having sex with pubescent girls—and I was increasingly aware of the degree to which young girls, many more than I would have thought, suffer some kind of sexual exploitation before reaching adulthood. My loyalties to the woman who had suffered such exploitations made the novel seem completely unappealing.

But, because I wanted to read Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran, I picked up a copy of Lolita a couple of weeks ago, and, at the age of forty—a contemporary of Nabokov’s narrator—I dove into the novel, finishing it on Holy Saturday after grabbing snatches of it between Palm Sunday services, scheduling acolytes, and writing two homilies.

What first grabbed me was the remarkably expressive prose that carefully observed not only “Humbert Humbert’s” unstable and demented psychological state, but the most mundane, but life-giving details of everyday suburban life. Nabokov manages to draw the reader into the situation and mind set of the narrator without ever making him truly sympathetic. We see that he is a selfish, obsessive creep who seems to be unable, or unwilling, to respond appropriately to the young girl in his charge.

But the book is also driven by a compelling plot. I’ve never heard this novel described this way, but Nabokov creates so much tension, and foreshadows so deftly, that Lolita becomes a real page turner. I could not put it down.

Is this book obscene? No. A friend of mine asked me, when I was only through the first part, if I would “be honest” and admit that it was kind of a “turn on.” She had not read the novel, but she assumed that Nabokov must be working in the familiarly pornographic realm and that the novel plays to some kind of twisted, but, ubiquitous male fantasy. But it does not. The reader hoping for a salacious narrative will be sorely disappointed by Lolita.

Furthermore, the narrator gives us plenty of chances to glimpse the destructiveness of Humbert’s behavior. Following his first sexual encounter with Dolores he says she suddenly seems like a “ghost.” Throughout we see glimpses of her pain. At one point she tells him, “He broke my heart . . . you broke my life.” Then there is the heart-rending thirty-second chapter of part two in which the narrator confesses that there was more than ample evidence of the deep pain Dolores was experiencing.

This is a novel that will stick with me for a long time. I’m haunted by the revelation, in the “forward,” that Mrs. Richard F. Schiller “died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas Day 1952, in Gray Star, a settlement in the remotest Northwest.” H.H. had hoped Mrs. Schiller would have a boy, but instead she gives birth to a dead girl, a symbol of the living death men continue to inflict on young girls.

It is this dead girl that will haunt me. She haunts me because I have seen her sisters. I see them all around me. They are women whose uncles, fathers, brothers, neighbors, clergymen, and stepfathers have broken their lives. With all of these wounded women walking around, I wonder where their persecutors are. Do I recognize them when I see them? Who are these demons that walk among us? Can we tell who they are, or do we only see the ghosts they make—ghosts that are all, in a way, the same ghost--the ghost of Lolita?

2004-04-05T17:05:00.000-07:00

Hunting Witches: Humanities Core Spring Quarter, Here we go again.
I think this is the most interesting quarter of Humanities Core. In this quarter we explore the relationship between invisible principles and the visible order—the vary heart of what we do in the humanities.

Today Michael Clark introduced his thesis: “Society is regulated by connecting the visible characteristics of Order to the invisible principles of Law.”

I may have garbled this a bit when I tried to discuss it with my students, but hopefully they got the idea: societies construct a visible order based upon certain (assumed to be correct) invisible principles/laws. In a way, this reminds us of both Plato and Cicero. Both men tried to construct an order grounded in some kind of “reasonable” set of principles. For Cicero, these principles are found in nature. Only nature is authoritative and accessible enough to provide societies with a reasonable basis for order. Plato’s schema is harder to see because his schema relies on the rulers being philosophers who contemplate the divine/ideal realm. But both recognize that this order cannot be arbitrary. Similarly, the Enlightenment discourse on rights presupposed a rational basis for the social contract. The Rights of Man and Citizen is meant to be a (written) expression of some principles, which, to the authors of the Declaration of Independence are “self evident.”

But is establishing this “invisible” basis for our visible order so easy? It seems to me it is not. Students in Humanities Core tend to dismiss the Puritans (and McCarthy) as fanatical, failing to understand the “rational” basis of their beliefs. It seems to me this is a trick we all play on ourselves. The other guy is always irrational, but we are always rational. Our beliefs are correct, grounded in reason, or God, or nature, but the other’s beliefs are irrational, godless, and unnatural.

In addition to Clark’s thesis, I hope students were able to follow his comparison between Miller and Hansen. For Miller the problem is repression. If people could be free they would be better off. For Hansen, the problem is people need regulation (though in the case of Salem there may have been problems with the system of regulation). In Clockwork Orange (the film) the society Kubrick depicts has lost its ability to connect the visible order with invisible laws, and therefore must resort to sheer coercion to enforce that order.

Does our society have a common set of values and principles upon which we can base its order? If so, what basis do we have for accepting that order (especially in the absence of God, reason, or nature to endorse it)?

2004-04-05T17:02:00.000-07:00

Was my Passion Sunday Homily Heretical? (delivered 4/4/04 at Saint Michael & All Angels Episcopal Church, Corona Del Mar, CA)

Maybe. Maybe I should say it was probably heretical. I definitely deviated from what has been the orthodox position on the death of Jesus.

Why did I decide to become a heretic? A number of thoughtful people, many of whom attend church regularly, have been questioning the way Christians interpret the death of Jesus. I’ve been listening to their questions, concerns, and complaints, which have only grown louder with the release of Mel Gibson’s The Passion, and I had them in mind as I sat down to write my homily. After wrestling with their question, I think I have to agree with them: Christian theology struggles to create a meaningful interpretation of the death of Jesus that doesn’t become nonsensical, self-contradicting, or sinister.

Christians could have chosen to construct their narrative of Jesus’ death entirely within the “martyrdom” meta-narrative. They could have been satisfied to depict Jesus as a martyr, but, for the most part, they chose to go a step further and describe Jesus death in terms of the “sacrifice” meta-narrative. Clearly this image of “sacrifice” is central to Christian theology. We call that table in front of the church “an altar,” and we frequently even use the word “sacrifice” to describe both Jesus’ death and the Eucharist. In my homily I never questioned the use of the “sacrifice” metaphor to read Jesus’ death, but I did question the way Christians, especially twentieth-century Christians, have understood this sacrificial image.

Not satisfied to leave the notion of Jesus as sacrifice in front of us, some Christians have tried to read the sacrificial narrative in juridical terms. In this reading, Jesus’ death becomes the place where God’s justice and love meet. God is just, and therefore can’t excuse sin, but God is also loving, and therefore doesn’t want to punish us for our sins. Therefore, God becomes human and, in a sense, punishes himself by punishing Jesus, thus finding the perfect compromise that satisfies both his (sic) justice and love. The other reading uses an economic language to understand the sacrificial narrative of Jesus’ death. In this reading, we owed a debt (or a “fine” if you want to link it with the juridical reading) to God because of our sin. We couldn’t pay this debt, so Jesus paid it for us. His suffering literally pays for our sins.

While both of these readings can find their roots in the New Testament Epistles (especially Romans, Hebrews, and I John), the logic of these readings is a bit troubling. What kind of justice would be satisfied by punishing an innocent victim? Is sin really part of an economy, and if so, how do we know that love, by itself, can’t overcome this debt without requiring suffering? Did what the Romans did to Jesus really “equal” the suffering necessary to atone for the sins of the whole world? Some respond to this question by saying that since Jesus was “one hundred percent God and one hundred percent man” the divine side of him, being infinite, was able to experience infinite suffering while on the cross. Some suggest this infinite suffering actually took place when “darkness covered the earth” and was expressed by Jesus’ cry “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?”—both signs, according to this reading, that God had turned his back on Jesus who was, as an infinite being, experiencing both all of human sin and the eternal torments of every person who ever lived (or of all the elect if you are a Calvinist) during those hours on the cross. But, if this is true, why did God need to get the Romans involved? Also, this requires God to “create” a human person to torture and kill while he is punishing the “divine” Jesus with all the torments of hell. Is that just? Does that violate the unity of Christ? If Jesus is infinite, wouldn’t a paper-cut, or a “pinch” be experienced infinitely, so why all the flogging, beating, and nailing?

I could go on, but I won’t. A lot of smart people—people smarter than I—have been aware of these problems for almost 1800 years, but they have felt satisfied with their understanding of this sacrifice. I’m not sure I’m one of those people any longer.

So instead of trying to explain the “sacrificial” nature of Jesus’ death in juridical or economical terms, I decided to let it just “sit there.” Having done that, I read Rene Girard’s book Violence and the Sacred, and concluded that Girard was right: sacrifice does not seem to be about expiation, but about deflecting violence onto an innocent victim. By this reading, it is not God who requires Jesus to suffer, but us. It is our violent impulse(s) which requires blood and sacrifice (cf. with the Cain and Abel story). Thus, I affirm God’s love and justice, but by suggesting that God condemns (as opposed to planning and executing) what happened to Jesus.

Now, I’ve developed much of this out of my recent fascination with Process Philosophy. According to this reading, all suffering is incarnational, since God is always right with us in the midst of all of our experience. Still, it might be that Jesus’ suffering may represent a unique example of human-divine suffering as the realization of a universally redemptive possibility. Jesus becomes the innocent (sacrificial) victim par excellence, demonstrating both God’s union with humanity and God’s condemnation of our destructive, mimetic impulses.

Is this heresy? Probably, but I am concerned with how we can still “think” Christianity today, and I suspect the juridical and economic atonement discourses may be losing their grip on us because they require us to read God’s abuse of Jesus as loving (even with an incarnational reading) and they propose a rather strange account of “justice” (requiring justice to be served by punishing an innocent victim—something straightforward sacrificial reading avoids). Perhaps it’s time to find new language. I think I may have found this new language in the unlikeliest of places, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but I’ll write more on that later.

2004-04-04T15:36:00.000-07:00

Love of Mike Article, Saint Michael & All Angels Episcopal Church, Corona Del Mar, April 2004

Which is more important in a marriage, passion or commitment? These ideals are often set up as competing, not complementary values, in part because we tend to see life as a series of compromises in which we sacrifice our greatest desires in order to achieve more reasonable goals. We stopped playing in that rock band so we could go to law school. We gave up our dream of living in SoHo so our kids could live in the suburbs. And often, we are told, marriage is an inevitable passion-killer, forcing us to cast aside those longing glances, passionate kisses, and evenings devoted to aromatic bath-tubs and romantic candles in favor of harried discussions over crammed calendars, pecks on the cheek, and evenings devoted to children’s science-fair projects.

The author of Genesis, a book we’ve been studying in our Adult Sunday School Class, struggled with the same issues and explored them through Jacob’s relationship with his two wives, Rachel and Leah. Jacob fell in love with Rachel the first time he saw her. He was so desperate to marry her that he worked seven years for her father in order to be granted her hand. His passion for her was so intense that the seven years “seemed like only a few days because of the love he had for her.” (29:20) Yet his father-in-law played a trick on him, and, probably using veils and the darkness of night, married Jacob to his older daughter Leah, instead of Rachel. The text describes Rachel in terms of her effect on the eyes: she was beautiful. But the text describes Leah in terms of the capacity of her eyes. (Though the meaning of the Hebrew word is unclear, it suggests that Leah had “tender eyes,” possibly meaning she was perceptive and perhaps empathetic.) So, because he was a bigamist, Jacob was able to live out this conflict between passion and commitment literally, married to two women, one known for her beautiful appearance, and one known for the beauty of her inner self. One marriage relationship is driven by passion, the other by commitment.

The key to the story is their wedding night, when, in the darkness and intimacy of the moment, Jacob, who had loved Rachel for seven years, could not tell the difference between the two sisters. This seems to imply that the pleasures promised by passion do not always live up to our expectations. Beautiful people can sometimes be as selfish, cold, or impassive in the dark as they are in the light, and apparently, Rachel’s beauty, so obvious in the light, was of no use to her on her wedding night when her less attractive sister, Leah, could easily her take her place and Jacob was none-the-wiser. This forces us to rethink through our response to the passion-commitment issue. I think Genesis argues that while passion can create incredible expectations in us, only commitment can help us find fulfillment.

Fortunately, in our culture, we choose our mates, and often we can combine passion and commitment in wonderful ways. Last night I came home at 10:30 p.m. and found no candles burning, no incense wafting, and no bubbly aromatic bathtub waiting. Instead, I found a baseball bat left in the hallway . . . again, a garbage can full of dirty-diapers, and a house full of sleeping loved-ones. I changed for bed, brushed my teeth, and read an article in this week’s New Yorker about glamorous designer Miuccia Prada, listening to the gentle but heavy breathing of both my wife and baby--a tiny percussion duet—creating the perfect music for my mood. When my eyes grew heavy I turned off the light and rolled over, “spooning” my wife. She responded with a semi-conscious groan which I interpreted to mean, “welcome home, I love you,” and she nestled her back against my chest and quickly sank back into her R.E.M. sleep. This was not the passionate dream of marriage I imagined as a younger man—a dream filled with chocolate-covered strawberries, champagne, and lingerie—but it was more than I could have hoped for—the comforting intimacy of knowing I am loved and needed—and that was enough.

2004-03-30T14:15:00.000-08:00

I'm just finishing up Winter Quarter, 2004. I'd have to say this was the worst quarter I've ever had as a college teacher. At this point I'm not sure what the problem was, but I have a few thoughts.

First, it seems to me that the material was a little stale . . . at least for me. This is the third year I've taught this cycle of Humanities Core, and the fifth year in a row I've taught J. Lupton's Odyssey. So maybe I just wasn't able to get up enough energy for these topics again. However, I also felt like my students didn't bring a lot of energy to the sessions either. Of course, this is part of undergraduate teaching, especially in a public university, so that probably shouldn't make such a big difference, but I just felt the life being sucked out of me every time I walked into the classroom. Some of them looked like they wanted to murder me. I seriously thought I should wear a bullet-proof vest to class. Still, my motto is “if they’re not learning, I’m not teaching,” so I really don’t feel like I did enough to make the material exciting for the students, maybe because I was too busy and stressed out to feel much excitement for it myself. Teaching at UCI it’s essential for the teacher to just fill the room with energy, but I felt overwhelmed every time I stepped into that black hole and I could never get them really going.

I also think I was reluctant to really drive home what was most interesting to me about the material we’ve been covering. While I understand that many of the comparisons we make between current issues and historical events are both misleading and facile, I think I should have done more to make those connections obvious. For example, the fact that the French Revolution’s discourse on human rights failed to bring real equality for women or slaves seems worth reviewing. To what extent is our own “liberal discourse” blind to the inequalities its “discourse of equality” creates?

Furthermore, while I admit that Robespierre is not Barry Goldwater, doesn’t Robespierre’s rationalization of terror in the name of republican virtue serve as a cautionary tale to all the “true believers” out there, whether they be liberals or conservatives? Doesn’t the Patriot Act remind us of the way both the Directory and the National Socialists seized power? And doesn’t the latest indecency legislation working its way through Congress in the wake of the Janet Jackson affair smack of Nazi cultural restrictions? But I failed to really drive home these points, both because I worry about “preaching” to my already-jaded students, and I get the impression most of them are only concerned with what is going to be on the test.

And if they are only concerned with what is going to be on the test, should every discussion session be a “study session?” Should I be going beyond what is covered in lecture knowing that will just increase the amount of material that could potentially be on the test? If I only review what was discussed in lecture, then why would students still need to go to lecture? My philosophy of teaching is based on the assumption that knowledge is constructed and the primary purpose of the discussion is to aid students in the construction of knowledge, helping them pull together what they have read and heard in order to form their own coherent picture of the subject. But this quarter I didn’t see much knowledge under construction. Why was that?

Part of the problem is grades. I feel like I’m more a representative of the registrar’s office than a teacher. The tenuous nature of my appointment at UCI, especially in this era of budget cuts, means that students’ evaluations may make the difference between my family having health-care next year or not. Knowing this, I felt my self awfully burdened by student demands for higher grades. I would say that easily half of my students think they are “A” students, but, at least on the essays, only about ten percent are actually “A” students, and this quarter I felt like two of my clearly-“A” students did really try very hard and so they ended up with “B’s.” All of this added up to a lot of angry students.

But a friend of mine told me that there are usually three kinds of students: those who are gifted but not teachable, those who are teachable but not gifted, and those who are both gifted and teachable. I think I’ve spent too much time worrying about the vocal, cranky, whining, hateful minority who are gifted but unteachable. They didn’t want to talk about The Odyssey, or the French Revolution, or the rise of National Socialism, because they thought they already knew everything they needed to know. Because they are convinced that they are brilliant writers, they don’t want to work on their writing skills and are uninterested in real improvement. They assume if there are any problems with their writing, these problems are minor, and if I fail to give them an “A” it must be because I am vindictive, stupid, or unreasonably harsh.

So, in a few days I will start a new quarter resolved to ignore the cranky, bitter few who think they are brilliant, and perhaps they are, but who have no interest in really learning, and I will focus instead on the teachable. I’ve got a feeling that most of my students fall into that category, and they are the reason I am here.