tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-56876344801765207902024-02-07T05:08:03.903-06:00Supercurriculuma lapsed puritan, a few books, an ongoing comedy in a minor keyMartyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.comBlogger59125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-18520567703524765642015-12-29T08:33:00.002-06:002015-12-29T08:33:43.538-06:002015: Year in ReadingHere are the books I read in 2015. I'm happy to offer thoughts on any of these if you have any questions about them. Most of what's on this list I loved, although a handful of them I found deeply disappointing. (There are also a few I enjoyed but which left no lasting impression.) The last book I anticipate finishing in 2015 is Lucia Berlin's <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Manual-Cleaning-Women-Selected-Stories/dp/0374202397/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399595&sr=1-1&keywords=a+manual+for+cleaning+women">A Manual for Cleaning Women</a>, which is a remarkable book.<br />
<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/William-Giraldi-Hold-Dark-Novel/dp/B00N4H3C9W/ref=sr_1_3?ie=UTF8&qid=1451398183&sr=8-3&keywords=hold+the+dark+giraldi">Hold the Dark</a> - William Giraldi<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Year-Magical-Thinking-Joan-Didion/dp/1400078431/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398244&sr=1-1&keywords=the+year+of+magical+thinking">The Year of Magical Thinking</a> - Joan Didion<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Being-Mortal-Medicine-What-Matters/dp/0805095152/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398275&sr=1-1&keywords=being+mortal+gawande">Being Mortal</a> - Atul Gawande<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Immunity-Inoculation-Eula-Biss/dp/1555977200/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398298&sr=1-1&keywords=on+immunity">On Immunity</a> - Eula Biss<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Glimmerglass-Novel-Marly-Youmans/dp/0881464910/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398319&sr=1-1&keywords=glimmerglass">Glimmerglass</a> - Marly Youmans<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/This-Side-Brightness-Colum-McCann/dp/0312421974/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398341&sr=1-1&keywords=this+side+of+brightness">This Side of Brightness</a> - Colum McCann<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Remains-Day-Kazuo-Ishiguro/dp/0679731725/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398372&sr=1-1&keywords=the+remains+of+the+day">The Remains of the Day</a> - Kazuo Ishiguro<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Love-Affairs-Nathaniel-P-Novel/dp/1250050456/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398392&sr=1-1&keywords=the+love+affairs+of+nathaniel+p">The Love Affairs of Nathaniel P.</a> - Adelle Waldman<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Man-Profile-Joseph-Mitchell-Yorker/dp/0375508902/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398418&sr=1-1&keywords=man+in+profile+joseph+mitchell+of+the+new+yorker">Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of the New Yorker</a> - Thomas Kunkel<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hiroshima-John-Hersey/dp/0679721037/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398446&sr=1-1&keywords=hiroshima+hersey">Hiroshima</a> - John Hersey<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Violence-Harvest-Book-Hannah-Arendt/dp/0156695006/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398468&sr=1-1&keywords=on+violence+arendt">On Violence</a> - Hannah Arendt<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Spiritual-Friendship-Finding-Celibate-Christian/dp/1587433494/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398503&sr=1-1-fkmr0&keywords=spiritual+friendship+wes+hill">Spiritual Friendship</a> - Wesley Hill<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Herzog-Saul-Bellow/dp/B001GKRQ8M/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398526&sr=1-2&keywords=herzog+bellow">Herzog</a> - Saul Bellow<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Religion-Heretics-Douthat-published/dp/B00E29E72C/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398549&sr=1-2&keywords=bad+religion+douthat">Bad Religion</a> - Ross Douthat<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pilgrim-Tinker-Harper-Perennial-Classics/dp/0061233323/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398572&sr=1-1&keywords=pilgrim+at+tinker+creek">Pilgrim at Tinker Creek</a> - Annie Dillard<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Radiant-Truths-Essential-Dispatches-Confessions/dp/0300212682/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398599&sr=1-1&keywords=radiant+truths">Radiant Truths</a> - (Ed.) Jeff Sharlet<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Detectives-Roberto-Bolano/dp/1447202856/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398619&sr=1-2&keywords=the+savage+detectives">The Savage Detectives</a> - Roberto Bolaño<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Angels-Novel-Denis-Johnson/dp/0060988827/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398638&sr=1-1&keywords=angels+denis+johnson">Angels</a> - Denis Johnson<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Paradox-Chesterton-Hugh-Kenner/dp/B0007DUPNW/ref=sr_1_1_twi_unk_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398662&sr=1-1&keywords=paradox+in+chesterton+kenner">Paradox in Chesterton</a> - Hugh Kenner<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Virtually-Normal-Andrew-Sullivan/dp/0679746145/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398685&sr=1-1&keywords=virtually+normal+sullivan">Virtually Normal</a> - Andrew Sullivan<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Saint-Augustine-Penguin-Lives-Biographies/dp/0143035983/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398707&sr=1-1&keywords=st+augustine+a+life+wills">St. Augustine: A Life</a> - Garry Wills<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Unapologetic-Everything-Christianity-Surprising-Emotional/dp/0062300466/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398726&sr=1-1&keywords=unapologetic+spufford">Unapologetic</a> - Francis Spufford<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Anxious-Age-Post-Protestant-Spirit-America/dp/0385518811/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398746&sr=1-1&keywords=an+anxious+age+bottum">An Anxious Age: The Post-Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of America</a> - Joseph Bottum<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/%C3%81gua-Viva-New-Directions-Paperbook/dp/0811219909/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398768&sr=1-1&keywords=agua+viva+lispector">Água Viva</a> - Clarice Lispector<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Living-Dead-Tomas-Transtromer/dp/1935635212/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398790&sr=1-1&keywords=for+the+living+and+the+dead+transtromer">For the Living and the Dead</a> - Tomas Tranströmer<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Karamazov-Everymans-Hardcover-Dostoevsky-Volokhonsky/dp/B00FF0HAYY/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398814&sr=1-2&keywords=the+brothers+karamazov+pevear+volokhonsky">The Brothers Karamazov</a> - Fyodor Dostoevsky<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/2666-Novel-Roberto-Bola%C3%B1o/dp/0312429215/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398835&sr=1-1&keywords=2666+bolano">2666</a> - Roberto Bolaño<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Pocket-Einstein-Brief-Guide-Life/dp/1845297547/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398857&sr=1-2&keywords=the+pocket+einstein+gribbin">The Pocket Einstein</a> - John and Mary Gribbin<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Excellent-Women-Barbara-Pym/dp/0452267307/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398881&sr=1-1&keywords=excellent+women+pym">Excellent Women</a> - Barbara Pym<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Novel-Biography-Michael-Schmidt/dp/0674724739/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398907&sr=1-1&keywords=the+novel+a+biography+schmidt">The Novel: A Biography</a> - Michael Schmidt<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Common-Ground-Justin-Trudeau/dp/0062376705/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398929&sr=1-1&keywords=common+ground+trudeau">Common Ground</a> - Justin Trudeau<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/York-Trilogy-Penguin-Classics-Deluxe/dp/0143039830/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398947&sr=1-1&keywords=auster+new+york+trilogy">The New York Trilogy</a> - Paul Auster<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Strength-Conviction-Tom-Mulcair/dp/1459732952/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398964&sr=1-1&keywords=strength+of+conviction">Strength of Conviction</a> - Tom Mulcair<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Brief-Interviews-Hideous-Foster-Wallace/dp/0316925195/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398980&sr=1-1&keywords=brief+interviews+with+hideous+men">Brief Interviews with Hideous Men</a> - David Foster Wallace<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Love-Undetectable-Notes-Friendship-Survival/dp/0679773150/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451398999&sr=1-1&keywords=love+undetectable">Love Undetectable: Notes on Friendship, Sex, and Survival</a> - Andrew Sullivan<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Citizen-American-Lyric-Claudia-Rankine/dp/1555976905/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399018&sr=1-1&keywords=citizen+rankine">Citizen: An American Lyric</a> - Claudia Rankine<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mechanic-Muse-Hugh-Kenner/dp/0195041429/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399043&sr=1-1&keywords=the+mechanic+muse+kenner">The Mechanic Muse</a> - Hugh Kenner<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Eichmann-Jerusalem-Banality-Penguin-Classics/dp/0143039881/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399063&sr=1-1&keywords=eichmann+in+jerusalem">Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil</a> - Hannah Arendt<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Salvation-Sand-Mountain-Redemption-Appalachia/dp/0306818361/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399088&sr=1-1&keywords=salvation+on+sand+mountain+covington">Salvation on Sand Mountain: Snake Handling and Redemption in Southern Appalachia</a> - Dennis Covington<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mine-Eyes-Have-Seen-Glory/dp/0195300467/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399115&sr=1-2&keywords=mine+eyes+have+seen+the+glory+balmer">Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America</a> - Randall Balmer<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stories-Breece-DJ-Pancake/dp/0316715972/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399145&sr=1-1&keywords=breece+pancake">The Stories of Breece D'J Pancake</a> - Breece D'J Pancake<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Catholics-Loyola-Classics-Brian-Moore/dp/0829423338/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399165&sr=1-1&keywords=catholics+brian+moore">Catholics</a> - Brian Moore<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Missing-Women-News-Covering-Vancouvers/dp/1552663779/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399186&sr=1-1&keywords=missing+women%2C+missing+news">Missing Women, Missing News: Covering Crisis in Vancouver's Downtown Eastside</a> - David Hugill<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Between-World-Me-Ta-Nehisi-Coates/dp/0812993543/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399209&sr=1-1&keywords=between+the+world+and+me+coates">Between the World and Me</a> - Ta-Nehisi Coates<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Paul-Among-People-Reinterpreted-Reimagined/dp/0385522576/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399228&sr=1-1&keywords=paul+among+the+people+ruden">Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time</a> - Sarah Ruden<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Fire-Next-Time-James-Baldwin/dp/067974472X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399250&sr=1-1&keywords=the+fire+next+time+baldwin">The Fire Next Time</a> - James Baldwin<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/CivilWarLand-Bad-Decline-George-Saunders/dp/1573225797/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399269&sr=1-1&keywords=civilwarland+in+bad+decline">CivilWarLand in Bad Decline</a> - George Saunders (reread)<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Miss-Lonelyhearts-Nathanael-West/dp/0811220931/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399288&sr=1-1&keywords=miss+lonelyhearts">Miss Lonelyhearts</a> - Nathanael West<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Day-Locust-Nathanael-West/dp/1604443561/ref=sr_1_2_twi_kin_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399306&sr=1-2&keywords=the+day+of+the+locust">The Day of the Locust</a> - Nathanael West<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Invisible-Man-Ralph-Ellison/dp/0679732764/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399329&sr=1-1&keywords=invisible+man+by+ralph+ellison">Invisible Man</a> - Ralph Ellison<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Age-Crisis-Man-Thought-1933-1973/dp/069114639X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399350&sr=1-1&keywords=the+age+of+the+crisis+of+man">The Age of the Crisis of Man: Thought and Fiction in America, 1933-1973</a> - Mark Greif<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/After-Theory-Terry-Eagleton/dp/0465017746/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399369&sr=1-1&keywords=after+theory">After Theory</a> - Terry Eagleton ( reread)<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Snow-White-Donald-Barthelme/dp/0684824795/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399387&sr=1-1&keywords=snow+white+barthelme">Snow White</a> - Donald Barthelme<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Against-Interpretation-Essays-Susan-Sontag-ebook/dp/B00F8FOWIS/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399407&sr=1-1&keywords=against+interpretation+susan+sontag">Against Interpretation and Other Essays</a> - Susan Sontag<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Things-Fall-Apart-Chinua-Achebe/dp/0385474547/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399426&sr=1-1&keywords=things+fall+apart+achebe">Things Fall Apart</a> - Chinua Achebe<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Happiness-Ten-Years-n-1/dp/0865478228/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399448&sr=1-1&keywords=happiness+n%2B1">Happiness: Ten Years of n+1</a> - (Ed.) Keith Gessen, Mark Greif, Chad Harbach et al<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/MFA-NYC-Cultures-American-Fiction/dp/0865478139/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399465&sr=1-1&keywords=mfa+vs+nyc">MFA Vs. NYC: The Two Cultures of American Fiction</a> - (Ed.) Chad Harbach<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Illuminations-Essays-Reflections-Walter-Benjamin/dp/0805202412/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399485&sr=1-1&keywords=illuminations+benjamin">Illuminations</a> - Walter Benjamin<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Enigma-Anger-Essays-Sometimes-Deadly/dp/0787973106/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399507&sr=1-1&keywords=the+enigma+of+anger">The Enigma of Anger: Essays on a Sometimes Deadly Sin</a> - Garrett Keizer<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Complete-Cosmicomics-Italo-Calvino/dp/0544577876/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399527&sr=1-1&keywords=the+complete+cosmicomics">The Complete Cosmicomics</a> - Italo Calvino<br />
<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Amends-Novel-Eve-Tushnet/dp/1514603063/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1451399547&sr=1-1&keywords=amends+tushnet">Amends</a> - Eve Tushnet<br />
<br />Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-79970690951633842382015-11-10T10:19:00.002-06:002015-11-10T10:19:30.253-06:00Memories of Brett Foster<div class="MsoNormal">
Brett Foster taught the first class I took at Wheaton
College: ENG 215 – Classical and Early British Literature, a 9:15 AM class I
stumbled into between 9:15 and 9:22 AM on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays during
the fall of 2006. I remember writing a rakish poem about one of my roommates in
the style of Chaucer for an assignment. A couple days after we turned in our
poems, Brett read a few of them out loud, including mine. He praised my poem
until he reached the final couplet, at which point he criticized it for closing
with an awkward slant rhyme (“times”/”realized”) that basically torpedoed the
whole thing. I was elated. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
His classes were highly interactive. The students who learned
the most came prepared to throw themselves into roiling, expansive conversations.
I was not yet a good student in those days and my preparation for Brett’s class
was consistently lackluster, but I was struck by Brett’s love for his subject,
as clear and instructive to us as his obvious expertise. He offered both light
and heat: a way of seeing, but also a way of living.<span style="mso-spacerun: yes;"> </span><o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
I didn’t take another literature class at Wheaton, falling
instead into philosophy, but Brett always remembered my name and greeted me
whenever we passed one another in the hallway. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
We occasionally ran into each other at bookstores around
town. The Half-Price Books on Army Trail Road was a place we both favored for
its large selection. He was always eager to discuss recent finds with fellow
enthusiasts. I’ve seen few people demonstrate a joy as pure as his in the
discovery, collection, and endless reading of books.<o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
He was generous in introducing me to his peers and
colleagues and inviting me into conversations at Calvin’s Festival of Faith and
Writing in 2014. I attended a session of his, a panel on translation that also
included John Wilson and Sarah Ruden, and got to listen to Brett dish on
Dante’s jealous contemporaries. We talked afterwards for a few minutes. He
reveled in the cheeky insults of the forgotten poets and further exposited some
of the cultural and social rivalries that fueled their disputes. When he really
got going, he turned his head and looked past me, smiling and nodding as he
talked. I skimmed along the surface of what he said, peering down at him miles
below as he bounced from idea to idea with joy. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
In the spring of this year, I published an article about a
writer I love in a magazine I love, a magazine to which Brett has often
contributed. He emailed me after it was published to let me know that he
enjoyed the article and wanted to be kept apprised of my literary pursuits. It
was a short email: a small, good thing. It helped me to feel welcome—like I
belonged—and I don’t think I succeeded in articulating how much it meant to me
in the reply I sent him. <o:p></o:p></div>
<div class="MsoNormal">
<br /></div>
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I didn’t know Brett well, but what I do know of him I am
confident to say. He was a lovely, generous, and brilliant man; he cared for many
people and expressed his care for them in tangible and specific ways; he was an
encouraging and patient teacher; he was a beautiful poet. I thank God for him. <o:p></o:p></div>
Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-79476799146103382842015-09-08T16:19:00.000-05:002015-09-08T16:19:03.040-05:00A Holy Relics CompendiumOnce upon a time, I wrote a weekly-ish column that was all about evangelical Christian cultural ephemera. I was very pleased with a number of the pieces, but my interests have led me away from the column for the time being, and I don't think I'm going to be able to bring it back in any regular form.<br />
<br />
I would very much like to turn these pieces into a book someday, complete with beautiful photographs of small-town churches and the things one finds in them. I want to write a handful of final pieces in this vein, ones that I've been saving up, wherein I swing for the fences and try to muster all my powers to say something meaningful and interesting about the most central and common features of evangelical life. The book would be very pretty. A coffee-table book, maybe. I'd hope that it would be a gift for Christians looking for interesting things to say and think about their way of life at our peculiar point in history.<br />
<br />
Till I can get someone interested in such a book, however, I'm left with the pieces I did write. They're all available online still, but haven't been easy to access from a central location. That's what this post is for.<br />
<br />
Below, you can find links to all of the published installments of Holy Relics. I hope you enjoy these. I've also included links to guest pieces that friends wrote for the column in its last days; one of them is a good-natured parody by a very talented fellow writer for the site. I *loved* writing this column, and hopefully have many more pieces to write in this vein. When I get them published, I'll put up links to them on this page.<br />
<br />
Thanks for your encouragement and support with this little project. Anyway, here're the links, arranged chronologically:<br />
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<b>Holy Relics</b><br />
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<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-testamints/">Testamints</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-microphone-headset/">The Pastor's Microphone Headset</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-youth-group-anti-onanism-game-plan/">A Youth Group Anti-Onanism Game Plan</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-christian-stand-comedy-special/">A Christian Stand-Up Comedy Special </a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-church-basement-coffee/">Church Basement Coffee</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-offering-plate/">The Offering Plate </a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-the-christian-flag/">The Christian Flag</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-christian-email-sign-offs/">Christian Email Sign-Offs</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-youth-group-lock-flashlight/">A Youth Group Lock-In Flashlight</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-the-church-pew/">The Church Pew</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-plan-salvation-bead-bracelet/">A Plan of Salvation Bead Bracelet</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-plastic-communion-cup/">A Plastic Communion Cup </a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-ichthus-car-sticker/">An Ichthus Car Sticker</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-connection-card/">A Connection Card</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-box-tissues/">A Box of Tissues</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-a-church-softball-league-softball/">A Church Softball League Softball</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-brand-parody-t-shirt/">A Brand Parody T-Shirt</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-wooden-pulpit/">The Wooden Pulpit</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-super-3d-noahs-ark/">Super 3D Noah's Ark </a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-focus-family-movie-review/">A Focus on the Family Movie Review</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-church-bulletin/">The Church Bulletin</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-a-church-van/">A Church Van </a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-tv-guardian/">TV Guardian </a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-hymnal-part-1/">The Hymnal, Part 1</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-the-hymnal-part-2/">The Hymnal, Part 2</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-acoustic-guitar/">The Acoustic Guitar</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-rocking-chair/">A Rocking Chair</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-crockpot/">A Crockpot </a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-christmas-eve-candle/">A Christmas Eve Candle</a><br />
<br />
<b>Guest Pieces</b><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-full-armor-god-playset/">The Full Armor of God (Playset)</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/TheAlanNoble">Alan Noble</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-missionary-map/">The Missionary Map</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/d_l_mayfield">D.L. Mayfield</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-welcome-card/">The Welcome Card</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/markgalli">Mark Galli</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-campfire/">The Campfire</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/keepthemuse">Connor Joel Park</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-choir-robe/">The Choir Robe</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/s_d_kelly">S.D. Kelly</a><br />
<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/lol-relics-janky-carpet-sweeper-screwed-wheel-everybody-hates/">The Janky Carpet Sweeper with the Screwed-up Wheel that Everybody Hates</a> by <a href="https://twitter.com/luketharrington">Luke T. Harrington</a><br />
<br />Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-90991789410718938362015-04-26T14:14:00.002-05:002015-04-26T14:25:07.403-05:00March/April Writing Recap In case you're interested, here are links to two recent pieces of mine that I'd love for you to read.<br />
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<a href="http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/firstthoughts/2015/03/germanwings-and-evil">Germanwings and Evil</a> is a meditation on the recent Germanwings tragedy and the privative nature of evil. It's short—a tangential riff on Terry Eagleton ended up getting cut during revisions—and much more direct than most of the stuff I write. It's also my first contribution to First Things' First Thoughts blog. Hopefully it will not be the last. </div>
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<a href="http://www.booksandculture.com/articles/2015/mayjun/whos-afraid-of-shirley-jackson.html">Who's Afraid of Shirley Jackson?</a> is an article I worked on for quite a while, and I'm fairly pleased with the results. It can be found online via the link above, and you can also read it in the May/June print issue of Books & Culture. The piece traces a Freudian theme through Jackson's novels. If you've never read her or are only familiar with her legendary short story "The Lottery," I hope to convince you to pick up one of her longer pieces of fiction. They're dark, funny, and elegantly written. </div>
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Currently I'm also working on a review of Atul Gawande's excellent book <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Being-Mortal-Medicine-What-Matters/dp/0805095152">Being Mortal</a>,</i> and should soon be posting a link to a review of William Giraldi's beautiful and propulsive thriller <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Hold-Dark-Novel-William-Giraldi/dp/0871406675/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1430074173&sr=1-1&keywords=hold+the+dark">Hold the Dark</a></i>. When those go up, I'll try to remember to post the links here.<br />
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Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-83106049395990027722015-01-04T16:39:00.000-06:002015-12-29T08:34:54.361-06:002014: Year in ReadingUnsorted, uncategorized, un-reflected upon, here's a list (as complete as my memory can make it out) of books I read in 2014, as well as books I'm currently reading and intend to finish. I have a lot to finish. If you want a snap opinion or recommendation for any of these, let me know!<br />
<br />
Read:<br />
<br />
Shirley Jackson - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0143107038/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_dp_ss_1?pf_rd_p=1944687682&pf_rd_s=lpo-top-stripe-1&pf_rd_t=201&pf_rd_i=0317277278&pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_r=03W1JPJ7NM7TXNHPF90R">The Bird's Nest</a><br />
—<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Haunting-Hill-House-Penguin-Classics/dp/0143039989/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420409402&sr=1-1&keywords=the+haunting+of+hill+house">The Haunting of Hill House</a><br />
—<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Always-Castle-Penguin-Classics-Edition/dp/0143039970/ref=pd_bxgy_b_img_y">We Have Always Lived in the Castle</a><br />
—<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sundial-Penguin-Classics-Shirley-Jackson/dp/0143107062/ref=pd_sim_b_6?ie=UTF8&refRID=0FYWRDXDSS8JSMB774C8">The Sundial</a><br />
James Baldwin - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Another-Country-James-Baldwin/dp/0679744711/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420409463&sr=1-1&keywords=james+baldwin+another+country">Another Country</a><br />
Christopher Beha - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Arts-Entertainments-Novel-Christopher-Beha/dp/006232246X/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420409485&sr=8-1&keywords=christopher+beha+arts+and+entertainment">Arts & Entertainments</a><br />
Kyle Minor - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Praying-Drunk-Kyle-Minor/dp/1936747634/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1420409509&sr=8-1&keywords=kyle+minor+praying+drunk">Praying Drunk</a> (<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/2014-christ-pop-culture-25-15-11/">my blurb</a>)<br />
Leslie Jamison - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Empathy-Exams-Essays-Leslie-Jamison/dp/1555976719/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420409540&sr=1-1&keywords=leslie+jamison+the+empathy+exams">The Empathy Exams</a><br />
H.P. Lovecraft - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/At-Mountains-Madness-H-Lovecraft/dp/1495227553/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420409566&sr=1-1&keywords=lovecraft+at+the+mountains+of+madness">At the Mountains of Madness</a><br />
Paul Elie - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Life-You-Save-May-Your/dp/0374529213/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420409610&sr=1-1&keywords=elie+the+life+you+save">The Life You Save May Be Your Own</a><br />
Shusaku Endo - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Silence-Shusaku-Endo/dp/0800871863/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420409631&sr=1-1&keywords=shusaku+endo">Silence</a><br />
George Saunders - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Tenth-December-Stories-George-Saunders/dp/0812984250/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420409654&sr=1-1&keywords=tenth+of+december">Tenth of December </a><br />
—<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Persuasion-Nation-George-Saunders/dp/159448242X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420409674&sr=1-1&keywords=in+persuasion+nation">In Persuasion Nation</a><br />
Marilynne Robinson - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/When-Was-Child-Read-Books/dp/1250024056/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420409722&sr=1-1&keywords=when+I+was+a+child+I+read+books">When I Was a Child, I Read Books</a><br />
David Foster Wallace - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Both-Flesh-David-Foster-Wallace/dp/0316182389/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420409744&sr=1-1&keywords=both+flesh+and+not+david+foster+wallace">Both Flesh and Not</a><br />
Christian Wiman - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Once-West-Poems-Christian-Wiman/dp/0374227012/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420409766&sr=1-1&keywords=once+in+the+west+christian+wiman">Once in the West</a> (poems)<br />
Penelope Fitzgerald - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Human-Voices-Penelope-Fitzgerald/dp/039595617X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420409787&sr=1-1&keywords=penelope+fitzgerald+human+voices">Human Voices</a><br />
Mary Szybist - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Incarnadine-Poems-Mary-Szybist/dp/1555976352/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420409807&sr=1-1&keywords=mary+szybist+incarnadine">Incarnadine</a> (poems)<br />
John Darnielle - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Wolf-White-Van-John-Darnielle/dp/0374292086/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420409860&sr=1-1&keywords=john+darnielle+wolf+in+white+van">Wolf in White Van</a> (<a href="http://www.curatormagazine.com/martyn-wendell-jones/review-wolf-in-white-van/">my review</a>)<br />
Ernest Hemingway - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Moveable-Feast-The-Restored-Edition/dp/143918271X">A Moveable Feast</a><br />
Denis Johnson - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Jesus-Son-Stories-Denis-Johnson/dp/031242874X/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420409984&sr=1-1&keywords=jesus%27+son">Jesus' Son</a> (reread)<br />
Christian Wiman - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/My-Bright-Abyss-Meditation-Believer/dp/0374534373/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410013&sr=1-1&keywords=my+bright+abyss">My Bright Abyss</a> (reread)<br />
Michael Chabon - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Legends-Chabon-Michael-McSweeneys-Hardcover/dp/B00DWWNRB2/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410033&sr=1-2&keywords=maps+and+legends+chabon">Maps & Legends</a><br />
Joseph Mitchell - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Ears-Are-Bent-Joseph-Mitchell/dp/0375726306/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410055&sr=1-1&keywords=my+ears+are+bent">My Ears Are Bent</a><br />
—<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Joe-Goulds-Secret-Joseph-Mitchell/dp/0375708049/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410083&sr=1-1&keywords=joe+gould%27s+secret">Joe Gould's Secret</a><br />
Alexander Theroux - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Primary-Colors-Three-Essays/dp/0805031057/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410104&sr=1-1&keywords=the+primary+colors+theroux">The Primary Colors</a><br />
Cormac McCarthy - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Blood-Meridian-Cormac-McCarthy/dp/0330544586/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410122&sr=1-2&keywords=blood+meridian">Blood Meridian</a><br />
Judy Oppenheimer - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Private-Demons-Life-Shirley-Jackson/dp/0449904059/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410149&sr=1-1&keywords=private+demons+shirley+jackson">Private Demons: The Life of Shirley Jackson</a><br />
Jeff Sharlet - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Sweet-Heaven-When-Die-Faithlessness/dp/0393344231/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410191&sr=1-1&keywords=sweet+heaven+when+I+die">Sweet Heaven When I Die</a><br />
Jacques Derrida - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Gift-Death-Jacques-DERRIDA/dp/B000OOS0ZE/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410252&sr=1-1&keywords=the+gift+of+death+derrida+-literature">The Gift of Death</a><br />
Gene Luen Yang - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/American-Born-Chinese-Gene-Luen/dp/0312384483/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410272&sr=1-1&keywords=american+born+chinese">American Born Chinese</a><br />
Aaron Belz - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Plausible-Worlds-Aaron-Belz/dp/B004YT9UX6">Plausible Worlds</a> (poems) (<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/churchgoing-misanthrope-poet-plausible-worlds-aaron-belz-free-capc-members/">my review</a>)<br />
<br />
In progress:<br />
<br />
Michael Schmidt - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Novel-Biography-Michael-Schmidt/dp/0674724739/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410297&sr=1-1&keywords=the+novel+a+biography+schmidt">The Novel: A Biography</a> (<a href="http://christandpopculture.com/2014-christ-pop-culture-25-25-21/">my blurb</a>)<br />
Atul Gawande - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Being-Mortal-Medicine-What-Matters/dp/0805095152/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410318&sr=1-1&keywords=being+mortal+gawande">Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End</a><br />
Joan Didion - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Slouching-Towards-Bethlehem-Essays-published/dp/B00E32HE8M/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410355&sr=1-3&keywords=slouching+towards+bethlehem+didion">Slouching Towards Bethlehem</a><br />
Roberto Bolaño - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Savage-Detectives-Roberto-Bolano/dp/1447202856/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410380&sr=1-2&keywords=bolano+savage+detective">The Savage Detectives</a><br />
—<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Between-Parentheses-Articles-1998-2003-Paperback/dp/B00IIBAAGW/ref=sr_1_6?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410400&sr=1-6&keywords=bolano+between+parentheses">Between Parentheses</a><br />
Gregory Wolfe (Ed.) - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Bearing-Mystery-Twenty-Years-IMAGE/dp/0802864643/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410424&sr=1-1&keywords=bearing+the+mystery+20+years+of+image">Bearing the Mystery: Twenty Years of IMAGE</a><br />
Michel De Montaigne - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Michel-Montaigne-Complete-Penguin-Classics/dp/0140446044/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410456&sr=1-2&keywords=montaigne+complete+essays">The Complete Essays</a><br />
Virginia Woolf - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Mrs-Dalloway-Virginia-Woolf/dp/0156628708/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410499&sr=1-1&keywords=mrs+dalloway+virginia+woolf">Mrs. Dalloway</a><br />
Sarah Ruden - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Paul-Among-People-Reinterpreted-Reimagined/dp/0385522576/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410522&sr=1-1&keywords=ruden+paul+among+the+people">Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time</a><br />
Miguel de Unamuno - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Three-Exemplary-Novels-Miguel-Unamuno/dp/0802151531/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410570&sr=1-1&keywords=unamuno+three+exemplary+novels">Three Exemplary Novels</a><br />
Fred Sanders - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Deep-Things-God-Trinity-Everything/dp/1433513153/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410605&sr=1-1&keywords=sanders+the+deep+things+of+god">The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything</a><br />
David Bentley Hart - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bliss/dp/0300209355/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410641&sr=1-1&keywords=the+experience+of+god+hart">The Experience of God: Being, Consciousness, Bliss</a><br />
—<a href="http://www.amazon.com/Experience-God-Being-Consciousness-Bliss/dp/0300209355/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410641&sr=1-1&keywords=the+experience+of+god+hart">The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Truth</a><br />
John Cheever - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Stories-John-Cheever-1ST/dp/B002MH1OV8/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410702&sr=1-3&keywords=cheever++stories">The Stories of John Cheever</a><br />
Felix Ó Murchadha - <a href="http://www.amazon.com/Phenomenology-Christian-Life-Philosophy-Religion/dp/0253010004/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1420410740&sr=1-1&keywords=a+phenomenology+of+christian+life">A Phenomenology of Christian Life: Glory and Night</a>Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-18875383878699105252014-07-22T17:19:00.003-05:002014-07-22T17:19:51.686-05:00A Broken Link to the Past: James Franco on Tom Bissell and ZeldaJames Franco rarely bothers me anymore, but last night I saw a few paragraphs he put up at VICE about a 25-minute screen test he did for <i>Blood Meridian</i> some four years ago, and it made me angry. <i>Blood Meridian</i> is a beautiful and brutal book. I don't know whether it can make the jump to film. Someone with a creative vision on a level with McCarthy's own could, maybe, use it as source material to create something similarly disturbing and awe-inspiring for the screen, but that person is not James Franco. He's gone and done it anyway, though. Because he's James Franco, and he's made of money, and he can go and do anything he wants and then put whatever that is in front of an audience and they will watch it, or eat it, or read it, or do something else with it. Because he's James Franco.<br />
<br />
In light of this I decided to post a thing I wrote about him a while back. This piece is at least a year and a few months old, and I wrote it in anger about one of the first installments of Franco's column at VICE. I've lightly edited it for clarity and what-have-you. Have at it:<br />
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Sam Anderson <a href="http://nymag.com/movies/profiles/67284/">captures</a> something important about popular culture's self-feeding obsession with James Franco in a 2010 piece for New York Magazine. After a first interview with his subject—who is enrolled in four graduate programs, who stars in student films and full-length features, and who cranes his neck to continue talking about himself at a urinal while his interviewer scribbles notes behind him—Anderson says goodbye to Franco only to catch a wink from the celebrity as he turns to cross the lobby. Anderson's confusion expands rapidly:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
I have no idea what this is supposed to mean. As he and Abramovic walk off together toward the elevators, my mind starts to run through all the possible interpretations. Was it a cheesy Hollywood-schmoozer wink, meant to charm and titillate me—the equivalent of a personalized James Franco autograph on our conversation? Or was it sincere, a gesture of goodwill and openhearted, rakish, devil-may-care bonhomie? (Is a sincere wink even possible, here in the cinema-studies department at NYU, in the year 2010?) Was it ironic—a wink set in quotation marks? Was he making fun of me, and of himself, and of the whole vexed transaction of celebrity journalism? Was he flirting with me, or metaflirting—making a sly reference to all the gay rumors swirling around him, and to our strange homosocial trip to the bathroom together?</blockquote>
This wink, Anderson comes to believe, is the skeleton key to the whole James Franco myth. The only problem is that there's no telling what it meant.<br />
<br />
Recently, I received a James Franco wink of massive proportions by way of a recent <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/my-name-is-tom-and-im-a-video-game-addict?utm_source=vicetwitterus">installment</a> for his new column with VICE magazine, "<a href="http://www.vice.com/columns/a-few-impressions">A Few Impressions</a>". Below an image of Zelda franchise hero Link photoshopped to bear Franco's visage, the star offers his reflections on Tom Bissell's wonderful quasi-memoir <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Extra-Lives-Video-Games-Matter/dp/0307474313">Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter</a></i>.<br />
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In the first line of the piece that is not a Bissell quotation, Franco incorrectly states the subtitle of the three-year-old book—which I feel justified to assume that he had on hand, since he was writing a review essay on it for a widely-read online publication. It's an amazing mistake, and I find it telling for reasons to which I will return.<br />
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First, a sense of duty compels me to convey the scope of the failure of this piece. Although, why should I? Franco won't read it; VICE doesn't care; it doesn't deserve any more attention than it's already gotten. I know all this, and yet my indignant heart-of-hearts whispers to my soul: take it down. Pull this high-flying turd right out of the sky. Show at least one or two others that the emperor is not wearing any clothes that are not made of poop.<br />
<br />
From a bird's-eye view, the whole piece has the feel of a bright middle-schooler's reflections on a book he likes. Take the second paragraph: a comma does not appear until the last line, which follows five bland sentences that mostly succeed only in connecting subjects and predicates. By way of example, there's this banal gem: "[Bissell's] book makes excellent arguments about video games being the newest popular art form that can do a variety of things that other art forms can’t." If I came across this sentence in something I'd written, I'd assume that I had somehow missed the document's yellowed cover page with a crayon illustration, or failed to see the alarmed margin note in red ink calling out the filler that is so lazy as to suggest that I'd died of boredom.<br />
<br />
There are also parenthetical inserts scattered throughout. These would be permissible if they functioned as asides to the reader. Instead, they read as though they are comments from the margin of the Word document that were inserted by accident—perhaps notes Franco wrote to himself by way of reminder for a later editing stage that the piece never reached.<br />
<br />
These issues only annoyed me, though. Plenty of celebrities are probably terrible writers. I can forgive Franco's banality and inelegance because there's something just sort of interesting about reading the opinion of a famous person on a subject I'm interested in, particularly when the famous person claims no special expertise. You know: they're just like us, etc.<br />
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However, after we reach the paragraph four mark, Franco commits a grave sin in the pursuit of credibility. It has angered me to a point of throwing me into the second person. Here's the disturbing section:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Over the years I have dipped into various video games. I was a Nintendo Legend of Zelda fanatic. The later incarnations of Zelda—I think one was called Ocarina of Time—helped me through difficult times in high school, while also making me feel like a loser because I was spending hours playing a children's game when I could have been out socializing with the cool kids.</blockquote>
God help me, when I read those lines I could feel the outrage of a million offended gamers washing over me. To call yourself a Zelda fanatic and then write "I think one was called Ocarina of Time" is like calling yourself a US history buff before saying "I think one of our wars was called the Civil War,—help me out, y'all, was that a major American war?" Calling yourself a Zelda fanatic on the internet at all is risky, since you're probably attracting the attention of fanatics of much larger magnitude who sit with watchful eyes just beyond the ring of your digital firelight. Disproving your own avowed fanaticism the moment after you make it known—and by memory lapse! In the age of Google and Wikipedia!—is either a clear joke (which I can't believe it is), or a very lazy suicide.<br />
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Every bit of the above that follows the <i>Ocarina</i> flub sets off my BS detector. My credulity has been sorely strained by the preceding nonsense and it doesn't help that here, at this critical point of doubt and dismay, I'm asked to believe that you, James Franco, actor/celeb/bipedal performance art project extraordinaire, had a difficult go of things in high school to such an acute degree that you found real consolation and escape in the pixelated dales of Hyrule. Did you pick your nose too, James? Did you wear glasses? Did some jock crush your bagged lunch and drink your milk carton? Were you constantly aware of where your hands were hanging or laying? Did getting called on in class fill you with dread?<br />
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Further, I am asked here to believe that the game made you feel like a loser because you were "spending hours playing a children's game." I'm sorry, a children's game? Weren't you trying to establish your gamer cred with this anecdote? Better to avoid disparaging the gaming community, then, considering most gamers nowadays are middle-aged and above, and a whole lot of them love the <i>Zelda</i> series in the way you claim you once did. That the ESRB sticker on a game's cover is intended to delimit the game's audience by age is news to me.<br />
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(By the way, Mr. Franco, I hope you didn't mean to say that <i>Ocarina of Time</i> in particular helped you through your difficult high school experience, since Buzzfeed has <a href="http://www.buzzfeed.com/josephbernstein/why-is-james-franco-lying-about-the-legend-of-zelda">pointed out</a> that <i>Ocarina</i> came out over two years after you graduated. Since <i>A Link to the Past</i> came out in '91, you get a free pass which, unfortunately, doesn't mean your article is any less execrable from anything but a narrowly ethical standpoint.)<br />
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Finally, the very idea that you "could have been out socializing with the cool kids." To start, "could have been" implies that you had some agency you weren't letting on to when you began this anecdote. In high school, I found my (roughly sea-level) social status to have more of the character of a ruling passed down than a choice I made. If you were choosing to stay in with your 64, why make a show of feeling bad about it? Additionally, "with the cool kids"—I'm sorry, did you have an elderly relative ghostwrite the last part of this sentence for you, perhaps in return for removing yourself from his lawn?<br />
<br />
Or, did you mean to distance yourself from the game (and, by natural extension, the gaming community) that you once loved and identified with? That would be in keeping with the description of Link you give in this sentence:<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
If I indulge myself too much in the world of video games, I'll feel as I did in high school—a sad boy who was running from the scary social world, comforting himself by inhabiting the controlled otherworld of Link, a little elf who shoots arrows and fights dragons.</blockquote>
A "little elf"? Who "fights dragons"? When does Link fight dragons? And are you aware that Link is little only part of the time? Did you mean for me to hear this as though it were a line read by your character on <i>Freaks and Geeks</i>? The problem with the tone of this piece never goes away. I can't tell whether you intended to address fellow gamers as someone who belongs among them, or as a high-minded critic who's gaming days are squarely locked in an embarrassing past. Your academic mode turns out garbled and jargon-filled non-statements, while your weak attempts at solidarity with the gaming crowd earn you far more enmity than trust. I admit to having read the whole piece out loud to two different audiences. Both groups were filled with laughter and scorn in an oscillating pattern that paralleled the oscillations of your writing mode.<br />
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I could go on and on, but by now I'm just depressed. Dropping the second person, I'd like to return to the telling mistake that falls from the sky in the introductory paragraph, where Franco misremembers the book's subtitle.<br />
<br />
VICE is clearly letting the man do what he wants, which makes perfect sense. The man is James Franco. He's beautiful, ambitious, and a talented performer. Since he's a landmark in the pop culture landscape, giving him a column is a big investment in your own pop-cultural relevance.<br />
<br />
The mis-remembered title demonstrates that Franco most likely isn't being copyedited, as though the cadence and tonal problems and general inelegance hadn't made it clear already. This initially made it seem to me as though VICE is having a laugh at Franco's expense, a theory corroborated by the fact that each column he writes is accompanied by an image into which his face has been photoshopped (my favorite so far is the <a href="http://www.vice.com/read/james-francos-impressions-of-gatsby">Gatsby</a> poster). The joke on Franco is clear: here's a guy who gets himself into everything, who plausibly <i>sees</i> himself in everything. "A Few Impressions" is VICE's decision to allow itself to be a vehicle for James Franco's all-consuming, and impossibly meta, narcissism.<br />
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The only thing is, James Franco doesn't care. He was the only actor in the cast of <i>This Is the End</i> who <a href="http://www.avclub.com/articles/how-seth-rogen-and-evan-goldberg-turned-their-fear,98878/1/">didn't give the writers a list</a> of things about himself he wanted to be off-limits for jokes. If there's a joke to be had about the James Franco phenomenon, rest assured its butt is totally in on it, probably before anyone else. It's all a part of the brand.<br />
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What else is there to say? I still can't make sense of the Franco wink. Did he really like Zelda? Is he a gamer? Is he an academic? At the end of the day, it doesn't matter. James Franco has probably written another four columns by now, VICE has benefited from increased site traffic, and I have only had my anger on behalf of a community of friends who feel deeply enough for the Zelda franchise that they know the title of every installment. So it goes.Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-79032934569868608892014-04-02T13:53:00.002-05:002014-04-02T13:54:18.677-05:00Holy Relics: The Christian Flag, B-Side<blockquote class="tr_bq">
Each week for <a href="http://christandpopculture.com/tag/holy-relics/">Holy Relics</a>, my column at <i><a href="http://christandpopculture.com/">Christ and Pop Culture</a></i>, I analyze some bit of evangelical cultural ephemera. This week the Christian flag is on the docket. While my <a href="http://christandpopculture.com/holy-relics-the-christian-flag/">main piece</a> is up at the site, I thought I'd use this space for this week's B-side: a series of surrealist vignettes. </blockquote>
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I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of
America, and to Jesus Christ, its only Son, one state and three governmental
branches; I pledge that it was born of a virgin, suffered under the British
Parliament, was taxed without representation, was crucified, died, and was
subject to wanton quartering; on the fourth of July it was raised from its
shackles and now lives at the right hand of God; it is coming again in glory to
arm the living and burn the dead.</div>
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A bloodied Christ hops off the cross and punches a centurion
in
the face. He seizes a spear and then a white
garment from
the soldiers who were about to cast lots for it, and this garment he ties to
the upper third of the spear. Waving this improvised banner over his bruised visage, he looks into the
camera. “I want you,” Jesus says, “for the Lord’s Army.” Letting out a war cry,
he leaps into the air and is immediately upon the soldiers<span class="msoIns"><ins cite="mailto:M%20J" datetime="2014-03-31T21:11">,</ins></span> whose eyes are
wide with terror at the Son of God in his strength. <o:p></o:p></div>
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The screen goes black as the VCR clicks and whirrs. “And
that, kids,” the Sunday school teacher says, “is where the Christian flag comes
from.” The children cheer and toss their chocolate Easter bunnies into the air
before rushing the enlistment table to become missionaries. <o:p></o:p></div>
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In the sanctuary down the hall a half-asleep man is in the
throes of a waking dream. The pastor’s rousing message has bypassed the level
of conscious thoughts to sink directly into his lizard brain. Visual flotsam
slides over his retinas and produces images of threatening shapes that loom
behind the pulpit. “Christ calls us to take up the cross,” Pastor Mark says
into his microphone, his helmet pushed back over his forehead, “and that the gates of hell shall not stand against his Church.” The roar of propellers drowns out his
voice. Smoke rises from empty choir seats. The rafters shake and dust falls all
around. <o:p></o:p></div>
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Behind the pastor, two flags loom. The somnambulist in the
pew has an eye on each and in the half-awake haze of his mind they combine into
a single one. “…the upward call of CHRIST” cuts through the noise, and the
dozing man jerks awake. Two flags stand again distinct. <o:p></o:p></div>
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“How would you design a Christian flag?” the youth pastor
asks the youth in the youth room. Hands go up,
suggestions are made. “Yes, that’s good. Fortunately, you guys, we already have
one that suits us just fine.” He reveals the flag, which had been standing
obscured behind a projector screen in front of a wall covered in brick
wallpaper. “The white is for Christ’s purity, the blue for baptism, and the red
for the blood shed on the cross, which is inside the blue box here. The white
is also for surrender. It’s a pretty neat flag if you ask me.” The brass cross
atop the flag pole gleams under the fluorescent tube lights. <o:p></o:p></div>
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“But who’s surrendering here?” Tim asks. “Are we surrendering? Is God? Is the Church? If our flag is next to the
American flag, is the Church surrendering to America? Shouldn’t it be a color
like green instead? You know, for life and growth and living things? But like,
what is a flag, anyway? A nationalistic totem? A military device with a very
specific rallying function? A symbol of a nation-state? Is it okay for the
Church to appropriate the visual language of nationalism, militarism, and
battle for the church? What about how the pledge to the Christian flag echoes
the pledge of allegiance? Also, why do they stand at the same height? What
about the interposition of a symbol between us and another symbol, which is the
cross itself? What’s wrong with that symbol? Why hasn’t someone nailed down the
exact dimensions for that canton?
Plus, like, why is it so dumb looking?” By the time Tim finishes asking
his questions everyone else has left, and he is alone with the back half of a
spray-painted Camaro and a Skillet poster. <o:p></o:p></div>
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“LOL what kind of idiot could believe that something comes
from nothing??? I’ll tell you what kind a DAWKINS KIND LOL. Please remember to
bring logic/reason to the logic/reason fight next time, Ath315t.” User COL.1.17 clicks
“post” and waits. Christ will be victorious on the internet, he thinks. Minutes
later his mouth forms a frown around a straw poking out of a Mountain Dew can
as he reads the first three replies to his comment. “These NYT types,” he says
to himself, spelling the acronym out loud, “they just don’t know when they’ve
been more than conquered.” <o:p></o:p></div>
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<i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal;">Christus Victor</i>
marches across the world under a banner so large it unfurls across entire fronts
in the war with the powers of the world. This is by design; the better for his
soldiers to see his sign in the absence of himself. He holds a bright
sword aloft and rides out upon his white horse. The world will be overcome once more under the shadow of the cross-spangled banner. The legions of the Lord are
legion, and they are marching. </div>
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Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-82197948447695432162013-08-24T13:37:00.000-05:002013-09-05T22:31:24.480-05:00Liberal Arts in the WoodsA fresh crop of undergraduates has matriculated at my alma mater, and for the past two weeks I guided a group of eight of them through an intensive transitional program set in the beautiful northern woods of Wisconsin. Eight bright-eyed dudes, laden with books and rumors of books and myriad anxieties, scrambling up a 12-ft wall under the benevolent gaze of me, their bearded leader, silently cheering for them.<br />
<br />
We ate meatball subs and debated the proper shape of Christian witness in politics under canoes lashed to the ceiling of the dining hall. We pondered the unfathomable depths of the love of God on a pontoon boat, which 20 minutes of effort helped to anchor in the shallows near the lake's bank under a patchwork cover of pine tree shade. We talked about community sitting cross-legged in cool dirt, stood up to brush off our behinds and hike back to camp. As campfire smoke filled our jackets and fleeces we talked Dostoevsky, transubstantiation, metaphysics, and dating. I commented on academic paper formats and the school's language requirements while picking marshmallow out of my beard.<br />
<br />
I helped to build the cabin they slept in. We built it lincoln-log style from some kind of kit one year when I went north for spring break to read and work. During the long winters, the snow muffles everything but the sound of the wind across the frozen lake. It is possible to build a fire in the middle of the ice, a couple hundred feet from the nearest shore. Standing in its glow, looking at a darkening forest above the buried banks while the sun goes down, it can feel as though you've reached the edge of the world—where eternity clips time, as Annie Dillard says.<br />
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In late summer, the sounds never stop. Bugs and outboard motors, shouts, rifle retorts, backfires, fireworks, campfire crackles, leaves rattling like a cascade of rice across a counter, deer suddenly bounding through the woods in front of you, birdcalls. It all floats on a light wind, the organic counterpoint to the mechanical city hum I've become accustomed to.<br />
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We walked over acres of forest and grass, turning over ideas and perspectives in the workshops of our souls and burning off extra energy in a steady chatter. Hymns sung next to a sputtering Hobart lifted the dishwashing room into the celestial spheres. Our puckered hands slung food waste and scrubbed baking sheets. The damp that spread through aprons into t-shirts was holy water. We may as well have been wearing robes and tonsures. God smiled upon us, likely in amusement.<br />
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Of course, you have to come back to earth sometime. Those students are about to begin their freshman year; our wonderful faculty advisor is already busy advising his new advisees. The engine is about to turn, and within a few weeks, Wisconsin will likely seem distant in history. That doesn't matter, though. What happened will prove its relative value over time. I'm just glad to have been a part of it, whatever it will mean in the long term. Embodied, thinking creatures that we are, I don't know of a better place to start a liberal arts education than in the woods along the banks of Long Lake.<br />
<br />Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-91021713262946989792013-08-01T01:00:00.000-05:002013-08-01T01:00:09.079-05:00EXTRA, EXTRAHi all.<br />
<br />
So in the interval since my last post, I got a new writing gig. I'll still be putting stuff up here whenever the mood strikes, but now you can also find stuff I write on a regular schedule over at <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/christandpopculture/author/mwendell/">Christ and Pop Culture</a>, a repository of Christian cultural criticism.<br />
<br />
The blog is a good one, and I'm pleased to be able to contribute content to it. So far, pieces of mine have gone up on <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/christandpopculture/2013/07/yeezus-people-how-kanye-west-is-the-voice-of-the-millennial-generation/">Kanye's new album</a> and <a href="http://www.patheos.com/blogs/christandpopculture/2013/07/transfiguration-avenue-michael-chabon-and-relearning-to-see-the-world/">Chabon's new novel</a>. Check them out if you like! As always, thanks for reading.Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-75800348377870980432013-06-17T01:51:00.001-05:002013-06-17T15:13:23.431-05:00Recent Media Intake in Review: Cloud Atlas, Telegraph Avenue, &c. <u><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1371111/">Cloud Atlas</a></u><br />
<u><br /></u>
An enjoyable weaving-together of stories across space and time, <i>Cloud Atlas </i>is at its best when it's at its least message-y. Rarely have I felt so bombarded by a movie's thesis. The prosthesis-heavy makeup, 172-minute running time, and an enormously unfortunate use of dialect also threaten to scupper the film, but for me there is a saving grace in a clutch of deeply human stories.<br />
<br />
The message, though, clangs around like a bolt in a steel drum. Ultimately, its ubiquity is matched by its simplicity: we are all connected, and our present actions will have consequences across future generations. In case you fail to hear it explicitly every few minutes in the dialogue, the Wachowskis decided to include a thorough exposition of the idea in a subversive broadcast late in the film. "From womb to tomb..." intones a central character into a microphone. As violence again bursts out in front of her, she delivers a speech to the world that sallies forth with all the rhetorical power of a few rejected Hallmark cards. The simple meagerness of the film's moral vision comes into a harsh light when this climactic piece of oratory is set alongside that of another film from a very different time.<br />
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From <i>Cloud Atlas</i>:<br />
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From <i><a href="http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032553/?ref_=sr_1">The Great Dictator</a></i>:<br />
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Sure, the comparison is unfair—<i>The Great Dictator</i> is unique in film history for the context of its creation, which is essential to its power and importance—but I also find it illuminating as far as it goes. The Wachowski's sentimental New Age-y spiritualism just doesn't fare too well next to Chaplin's urgent humanism. Make of it what you will. I enjoyed <i>Cloud Atlas</i> for its accomplishments with a complicated narrative, for several of its stories and its sheer ambition, but the transcendence it aims for seems to remain consistently out of reach.<br />
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<u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/books/dp/0061493341">Telegraph Avenue</a></u><br />
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D.G. Myers <a href="https://twitter.com/dg_myers/status/346256994975510528">thinks</a> it may be Michael Chabon's best yet. There's certainly a lot to love here: Chabon's characters live in a real, adult world with real, adult problems to match, and yet they are no less beautifully and humorously sketched than any of his past creations. The stunning prose picks up from page one with a description of a skateboard's wheels sounding out with a "granular unraveling"—I particularly enjoyed chewing on the vivid aural descriptions and vocabulary, a lovely expansion of Chabon's stylistic powers necessitated by this book's saturation with musical themes, motifs, and allusions—and yet some subtle lack left me hankering after a little more.<br />
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What's missing, exactly? Well, I suppose you might call it a sort of spiritual urgency. Chabon continues to strike me as a writer driven to create by his Updike-level giftedness with words rather than by some truth about life that he needs to get out there, if I can chance a rough distinction. That makes this book perfect for the beach or the subway commute, but perhaps not as well-suited to the solitary nightstand in a one-bedroom apartment, if you get my drift. All the same, it's a frequently dazzling piece of work with big characters and a jazz-timed heartbeat. Reading it reminded me of the rich pleasures that become uniquely available through good fiction.<br />
<br />
<u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Death-Comes-Archbishop-willa-cather/dp/B000NX5MDY/ref=sr_1_3?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371449421&sr=1-3&keywords=death+comes+for+the+archbishop">Death Comes for the Archbishop</a></u><br />
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Hopefully this 1927 novel by Willa Cather will make an appearance in an upcoming essay on religious belief in fiction, which essay I am turning over and over in my drafts folder. In anticipation of that day of posting, might I encourage you to pick up this spare and powerful testament to the power of faith, and wonder at its depths? Father Vaillant and Bishop Latour are Catholic missionaries to the southwestern regions of the growing U.S. territories in the 19th century. We come to know them as we do other people: from the outside, with almost no indication of the internal workings of the mind of either man that would be unavailable to an onlooker or overhearer. Subtext and intention are only discernible through the actions and words of each, and sometimes then only through accumulation; so it is that I could be devastated by an unremarkable aside from one to the other in the waning days of their work together. What <i>Cloud Atlas</i> would rather make explicit in spoken dialogue, Cather's book allows to well up in the negative space. It's refreshing to be trusted by an author in this way.<br />
<br />
<u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/My-Bright-Abyss-Meditation-Believer/dp/0374216789/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371449452&sr=1-1&keywords=my+bright+abyss">My Bright Abyss</a></u><br />
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Christian Wiman's reflections on his faith as a modern person issue in jagged shards of insight, and the wisdom these gathered fragments contain is alloyed with suffering. I had been reading Simone Weil's <i>Waiting for God</i> in anticipation of Wiman's book, and the similarities in perspective, tone, and concern were illuminating. If you are a person of faith, gird up your loins and prepare for a bracing wind if you decide to follow after Wiman's lead. You will be asked even to abandon your need for the consolation of an afterlife, for the sake of allowing God a sliver more of his terrible and awesome scope. On the other hand, if you believe religion to be impossible in the present day and age, perhaps consider this a map that may point you toward something resembling the intelligibility of belief as a still-living option for a thinking person. Seeing as <i>My Bright Abyss</i> is a book that deserves its own post—or series of posts—I will save further thoughts for another time.<br />
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<u><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Up-Old-Hotel-Joseph-Mitchell/dp/0679746315/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1371449487&sr=1-1&keywords=up+in+the+old+hotel">Up in the Old Hotel</a></u><br />
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I wish I'd heard about Joseph Mitchell sooner. I picked up this omnibus of his midcentury reportage only a couple months before <i>The New Yorker</i> began publishing a series of newly-discovered reflective essays by their old staff writer. As a person whose literary education began in a post-DFW era, my experience with Mitchell has been invaluable. His self-effacing attention to his subjects casts the John Jeremiah Sullivans of this world in a rather unflattering light, and that's coming from the fingertips of a Sullivan fan who foists "<a href="http://www.gq.com/entertainment/music/200401/rock-music-jesus">Upon This Rock</a>" on his friends at every chance.<br />
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Mitchell is a quiet genius and a master of his own brand of straight-shooting prose; his journalistic essays and taut reportage are a cooling balm for the tortured and inward-turning soul of the millennial writer. In the first section of the compilation alone we meet a cast of bearded ladies, gypsy matriarchs, fishmongers and itinerant preachers, Native American construction workers dancing across windswept steel girders and homeless writers assembling a people's history of the American republic. These and others gathered for Mitchell's portraits are accorded dignity and respect even as their quirks and sundry weirdnesses shine through. Read the man like you've got something to learn from him and your writing will benefit, I promise.<br />
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In addition to above-mentioned drafts in various stages of completion, upcoming posts will include thoughts on a number of things I've got in the hopper, such as Colum McCann's latest novel and Terrence Malick's <i>To the Wonder</i>. Thanks for reading, and please don't hesitate to share your opinion on any of the above in the comments.Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-90167638391602966582012-11-12T19:53:00.002-06:002012-11-12T19:53:46.242-06:00"Upper Middle Brow" and Suspicious HermeneuticsI'm frustrated with a series of short cultural analyses I've read today. It all starts with an <a href="http://theamericanscholar.org/upper-middle-brow/">essay</a> by William Deresiewicz entitled "Upper Middle Brow," in which the author attempts to identify a strand of culture-production designed to "make consciousness safe for the upper middle class" by "approving our feelings and reinforcing our prejudices." A step above "midcult" (a term I hate and thought had fallen out of fashion), "upper middle brow" consists of cultural products that possess "excellence, intelligence, and integrity," but that "always let us off the hook" by failing to disrupt our assumptions and challenge us. The "us" in question refers to a nearly-new creative class of college- and postgraduate-educated professionals whose tastes verge on the downright literary. <br />
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Who is implicated in this sophisticated, stylish, post-ironic pat-on-the-back party? Apparently: Jonathan Lethem, <i>The New Yorker</i>, Wes Anderson, This American Life, <i>Lost in Translation</i>, and GIRLS. Also, "the films that <i>should</i> have won the Oscars." But not all of them—a handy list of midcult artifacts ("peddling uplift in the guise of big ideas") includes Malick's <i>Tree of Life</i>. Who else is on the midcult list? Franzen, Jonathan Safran-Foer, <i>Middlesex</i>. (Just separating Lethem from this company seems a microscopically fine exercise in hairsplitting, and attenuates the explanatory power of the typology.)<br />
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So what does Deresiewicz suggest as an antidote? Upper middle brow is, after all, a problem framed in a way that implies a particular solution. The suggestion he offers is that we need a return to an art that will "disturb [our] self-delight", because we are "engorged on our own virtue" and allowed, by our choices of aesthetic consumption, to remain complacent and untroubled.<br />
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Does art have a function? This questions is one step below Deresiewicz's analysis; his working premise is that it does, and that art's primary function is (or, should be) to disturb and challenge. But this is hardly a given, as John Wilson points <a href="https://twitter.com/jwilson1812/status/266590019911835648">out</a>. In the first place, "art" is hardly a univocal phenomenon. For a century now, its identity has included the forever-repeating act (or gesture) of posing the question of what it <i>is</i> to itself. Its multivalence is a key to its power and the security of its place in human life. Forcing "art" to fit upon a single plane, while allowing for analyses and prescriptions such as Deresiewicz's (ok—D, from now on), is destined to fail to comprehend art's range, and leads to screwy interpretations of artworks aiming for targets that fall outside the evaluative grid.<br />
<br />
Jonathan Fitzgerald at <a href="http://www.patrolmag.com/2012/11/11/jonathan-d-fitzgerald/i-wont-apologize-for-watching-wes-anderson/">Patrol</a> understands this well, referencing John Gardner's <i>On Moral Fiction. </i> Gardner's characterization of the "traditional" view of art involves that which "seeks to improve life, not to debase it." And although Wheaton professor Alan Jacobs has written in praise and defense of Tolkien on the same <a href="http://ayjay.tumblr.com/post/13589267620/modernist-ambiguity-or-realist-emotional">point</a>, against "middle-to-highbrow" critics—Tolkien is interested in courage and weakness of will given a clear moral context, thus affirming conservative values in his own way, which wrongfully strikes liberal critics as naïve—Jacobs <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/jacobs/upper-middle-brow/">approves</a> of D's typology and conclusions, saying that we need to look to books of the past for the suggested antidote. (Perhaps he sees moral realism a la Tolkien as truly transgressive in this day and age, against a widely-accepted kind of fundamental and inescapable moral ambiguity.)<br />
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Other essays in response to "Upper Middle Brow" affirm the basic thrust of its analysis. Several of these pieces, interestingly enough, are posted at the American Conservative—in addition to Jacobs' brief response, Noah <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/millman/disturbing-our-self-delight/">Millman</a> questions whether UMB is more a type or a style, but agrees that it exists, and has the problem of being "self-involved without being self-examining." On the same site, Jordan <a href="http://www.theamericanconservative.com/the-perniciousness-of-upper-middle-brow-music/">Bloom</a> explores its "pernicious" effects upon music and musical taste.<br />
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I suppose one of the biggest bees in my bonnet over this whole conversation is its elitist bent, which is inescapable given the basic terms in which the conversation is framed. (I do, however, appreciate the self-implication of D, who admits that he mostly "reads and looks at" upper middle brow things.) Literary critics and cultural commentators sometimes play this game, in which a hermeneutic of suspicion (a ubiquitous touchpoint for me of late) is invoked in order to get at the "real" reasons for the creation and consumption of a particular brand of cultural product. Maybe the diagnosis is sound, albeit in a qualified way. Perhaps there really is a need for disruptive art, and a new avant-garde with a warrior mentality who will take on the bourgeois mores of my self-satisfied demographic.<br />
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But it's not the whole story. And another problem with D's original piece and several of the followups is that they seem to take the concept of "upper middle brow" and employ it as a metanarrative that accounts for the success and relative merits of a huge and disparate assortment of artworks, indexing them to a set of qualities and motivations that the artists themselves could not have been privy to in the moment of creation, nor the audience in its moment of engagement. Suspicion, see?<br />
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I have two questions for D's account to close. The first concerns the work of the avant-garde he hopes will come back from their forever lunch. It is difficult to understand what foil they would find to push against. Is there a fixed, moored shape that the "creative class" finds for its values? Is one necessary? <br />
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The second is a related intake problem. With values privatized and in perpetual flux, without clear hills to collectively die upon, D's disruptive art could likely find itself consumed just as though it were another "upper middle brow" product, absorbed into projected versions of ourselves that include cutting-edge artistic tastes. Who's to say if anything is able to shatter our glittering self-regard? Perhaps its resonating frequency has become impossible to reach. In that case, can there really be anything that arrives "beyond" upper middle brow? "Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the horizon?"<br />
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But at the end of the day, maybe the problem is simply that I hate feeling as though I need to defend my tastes against people who suppose they can lay a claim to the subterranean reasons for them. And yes, I am open to the idea that maybe, just maybe, that is a sign that I could use a little disrupting myself. But probably not.Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-17260015722632425162012-11-02T15:22:00.000-05:002012-11-02T15:25:40.317-05:00Hyperbole, in Good Faith<br />
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A friend of mine used to accuse me of falling into hyperbole when describing items of interest in my life. “No,” I swore, “I don’t mean to exaggerate, I’m giving you a true record of my experience—it was truly, superlatively [adjective]!” This little essay is an attempt to get at possible motivations for spending big words on little things, while also offering a hesitant typology.<br />
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So I figure: there’s hyperbole, and then there’s <i>hyperbole</i>. Hyperbole A is a straightforward rhetorical device. As my dictionary widget tells me, it’s an intentional exaggeration for the sake of humor. Saying that a flight attendant’s invisible efficiency made you afraid for your life, is an attempt at humorous hyperbole. Saying that a man’s head was big as a blimp, is hyperbole. Saying that you’re so tired you could die, might be hyperbole. (Jury’s out on the science of sleep, as it were.) </div>
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But then there’s <i>hyperbole</i>. Hyperbole B is not an intentional exaggeration. Hyperbole B happens when your brain gets swallowed up, when an upswell of life and feeling carries your soul away. Hyperbole B pretends to a sort of accuracy in giving its account of something, even while knowing that its task is probably impossible because its target datum is somewhere beyond the reach of its meager tools. It’s a little bit of flirting with the ineffable.</div>
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I immediately want to distinguish this from varieties of excited cliché that seem endemic to political reporting, for instance. The sorts of exaggeration I read every day in headlines across the internet seem closer to Hyperbole A for being intended as knowing overstatement, except that the humorous motive has been replaced by a cynical one. Harry Frankfurt’s technical use of the term “bullshit” is applicable here. </div>
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But even after this distinction, there’s a problem. Next to its adult brother, Hyperbole B could seem to be, well, kinda-sorta childish. The 5-year-old whose day turns on receiving a temporary tattoo at K-Mart while his mom orders a couple boxes of Little Caesar’s has yet to experience his licensing test at the DMV, his first day of college, the birth of his own child. His tattoo enthusiasm and the exclamations that follow in its wake are proportionate to the size of his world. Are my enthusiasms similarly proportioned?</div>
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I suppose therefore it might be important to get at a maturity gradient for Hyperbole B, because I don’t think everyone who uses it is experiencing some kind arrested development. At one end, we could put a person who has been caught up in some momentary delight, and who gives voice to it in overblown terms. Maybe he’s grown up, maybe he hasn’t. And here, apparent sincerity can come across as the new irony, as I suppose a Zoe Deschanel character or other <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manic_Pixie_Dream_Girl">MPDGs</a> demonstrate well enough. Then, at the other end of my gradient, perhaps there are some deep wells, some poets and sensitive souls who manage a real openness to the overdetermined milieu of the world. Pardon my self-serious exaggeration, of course. </div>
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The difference between these poles may be imperceptible in experience, held behind an impenetrable veil like Kant’s moral will. But it’s real! The difference is real. And it is essential to how I might justify a tendency to fly off into the clouds on a nudge. Reflection occasionally brings back to the fore the miraculous idea that before the fact of a thing—the coffee mug in front of me, the candle on my table that is just now flickering out—there is the fact of the <i>existence of the thing at all</i>, and lockstep with that miracle, there’s the more overwhelming miracle of the existence of anything at all - of existence itself! Cue wonder, cue fascination, cue vertigo a la Sartre’s protagonist in <i>Nausea</i> upon the sight of a gnarled root under his park bench. There is an incomprehensibility in the divide between being and nonbeing that is at play in every experience of things. It's western philosophy's mystical side. </div>
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This lands us right on the aforementioned Kant’s doorstep, although the door itself is locked. As David Bentley Hart writes in <i>The Beauty of the Infinite</i>, the sublime of the third critique (which, to be clear, I haven't read) breaks down our powers of representation and leads us to revel in the excess, and in the power of the subject to grasp that excess in its formal way. Mathematical infinity, for instance! Who could imagine it? The mind boggles, and pleasantly, if Hart on Kant is to be believed. And the funny thing is that this and other infinities seem to glow just underneath the finite furniture of the world we are accustomed to navigating without a thought. </div>
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What can words do, when the world is re-made mysterious, re-enchanted? This formica tabletop, that kitschy peacock hanging from the ceiling, a mite of dust, an oily pebble in the street outside; how can a guy speak for these things, holders of impossible conceptual depths, inscrutable for being here right now, for all the contingencies and alternatives and, Lord knows, classier choices of décor? </div>
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Stretching for a big word to call forth a small thing— I suppose it could be a kind of faithfulness. I’m a Christian, shoot. In spite of the armies that march under the banners of disparate hermeneutics of suspicion, I have to believe in the original sanctity and general peaceableness of language, its ability to carry safely its passenger-referents, to speak well for them and give them everything they need to manifest themselves in all fullness. Language has a kind of sacramental function, which says nothing of the possibilities for its misuse except that such possibilities are a very serious business. </div>
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My favorite authors and poets do the good work of Hyperbole B all the time, with maturity and sure-handedness to counterbalance the occasional wild ecstasy, and all in the service of sacrament. They adeptly help us to practice philosophy, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty would have it, in relearning to see the world. When this world comes at you with a new, sudden power, or pulls a trapdoor in your mind and confronts you with some hidden eternity, or lends great moment to an item of no significance to another human—perhaps it’s then that language is at its healthiest, its most athletic and tragic and beautiful for being at its limits, even if those limits are as near as the cuff on my sleeve, or a puddle’s reflection of a streetlight and the night sky. That’s hyperbole in good faith. </div>
Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-38426217260858530432012-10-25T17:29:00.001-05:002012-10-25T17:29:22.378-05:00American Life, ReduxI am back—both in the States and on the blog. Seeing as I'm unemployed, I intend to return to semi-regular postings for supercurriculum. I hope you find it worthwhile!<br />
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The new apartment address—in case of parcels, visits, or otherwise—is:<br />
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Martyn Jones<br />
2707 N. Kedzie Ave.<br />
Unit 2<br />
Chicago, IL 60647<br />
USA<br />
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Thanks for reading, everyone. You're the greatest.Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-84895762345083423072012-10-25T00:05:00.000-05:002012-10-25T08:00:05.451-05:00Steaks on a Plane<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;">
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"Excuse me, sir, could I please see your boarding pass?"</div>
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I looked up from my laptop, instinctively tightening my feet around my bag and placing a hand on my rollaway. A woman in my airline's uniform with disarmingly large Persian eyes stood waiting for my response.</div>
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"Um, yeah sure, just a sec."</div>
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I handed it to her out of my shirt pocket, and waited to be told that I would need to go back to American Customs Pre-Clearance to sort out the ambiguities I'd inadvertently penned into my information card.</div>
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She eyed my ticket. "Please bear with me for a moment, sir." Then she walked away. I closed my computer, watched the desk under the sign for GATE 105, and thought about what a great story I'd have if I were detained in Dublin for the whole weekend by customs agents perplexed by my inconsistent passport use on flights to and from the US.</div>
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I ended up with a different story, however. My flight attendant returned and looked at me with her huge eyes. "Sorry about the confusion, sir. You'd gotten an upgrade and we wanted to make sure it was printed on your ticket." She handed me my boarding pass and I looked at it, then back up at her. "Wait a second—I'm sorry, what does this mean?" I must have misunderstood the word printed in place of "Economy" in the lower right corner, next to the almost-certainly misprinted "SEAT 3G". She replied, "It means you are now flying business class." She turned on her heel and walked away. I smiled, caught myself, furrowed my brow, and smiled again, unable to bury my excitement.</div>
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So it begins: the story of a wide-eyed midwestern boy's adventure behind the business class curtain. </div>
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Soon after receiving boarding pass 2.0—the experience was akin to that of receiving a handwritten note from God, in my state—I was standing in line to board with my fellow business-class travelers, doing my best to look both serious and at ease. My anxiety intensified as they boarded two rows of disabled passengers. We would walk past their section on our way to the front of the plane.</div>
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The wealthy and powerful were clustered around the gate, fiddling with iPhones or staring impassively at the tunnel we were about to enter. Soon we were given the go-ahead. After entering the plane’s thick steel door, flight attendants directed us left. I glanced to the right, down the empty rows reserved for my true plane class, and felt a guilt settle upon me. This was unbelievable, as far as good fortune goes. </div>
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The curtain opened for us and we entered. With wide eyes, I beheld my enormous seat. An empty arc of plastic extended behind the headrest; this space would allow me to to recline my chair down into the console of the passenger behind me without affecting his mounted video screen in the slightest. There was also a cave for my feet, or so I inferred. I was not permitted to put my bag there.</div>
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Everyone sat, so I sat. I self-consciously opened my Raymond Carver book (<i>Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?</i>), thought about classism, and looked up to see an attendant emerge from the curtain in front of us carrying a silver tray laden with water, orange juice, and champagne. My guilt was not assuaged.</div>
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With the PA system apparently on mute in our part of the airplane, the business class was free to lounge about, enjoying a selection of mixed drinks and imagining that economy was steadily, pleasantly filling with economy passengers—people who were absolutely not having a hard time heaving their bags into place, and who were definitely not climbing over one another, or sweating, or trying to pacify their restless infants. The champagne and spirits certainly helped us to imagine these negations, or so I assume. Myself, I opted for the most delicious orange juice I have ever tasted.</div>
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I abruptly discovered that the panel on my left armrest opened on a hinge, and furthermore, that the panel concealed a complicated diagram of my seat. Smooth buttons rose out of the diagram at different junctures, and I realized that these must refer to various axes of movement. I stared at this diagram. My neighbor, who sat adjacent to the other aisle, stared at me. I looked at him. He glanced at the buttons. I looked back at the buttons, then at him again. He looked up. We looked at each other.</div>
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"I was given a surprise upgrade and don't belong here and I don't understand how to operate my chair," I confessed, and also lied, because I had sort of figured it out during the "looking" episode.</div>
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"Oh, that's fine," he said Irishly, "don't ask questions, I say." (About the upgrade, I inferred.) Then he pointed vaguely at the seat diagram, and as my legs swung up on the back of an extending leg-rest in response to a depressed button, I voiced my appreciation. "Yap, there we go, thanks." My new friend then tried to get a conversation going, but when he found out that I was returning from a school program, our chat faltered. With a look of nonchalance, he attended to his own buttons. Apparently no one is a pro at omni-positional seat management. </div>
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We took off. I calmed my takeoff nerves by holding the traveler's toiletries kit we'd been issued along with menus and water bottles. It had a clear plastic pouch that was pleasant to the touch. Packed inside were numerous miniatures: mouthwash, toothbrush, toothpaste in a tiny tube, moisturizer. The kits were meant to be used as part of a landing protocol for business class passengers, who<span class="s1"> </span>would likely be meeting important people on the ground and therefore needed to be looking the freshest, the cleanest, the moistest, the lip-balmiest. For my part, I intended to close my collar and put on a tie. I didn't yet know who would be on the ground waiting for me.</div>
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At cruising altitude, smiling attendants stepped down the aisles to take drink orders. There was no point-of-sale now, and nor would there be, because tickets for business class are all-inclusive. Inferring this, I opted for an adult drink. The ensuing dialogue is fairly representative of my whole experience: </div>
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"Would you like something to drink, sir?" </div>
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"Yes, I'd like a glass of red wine, please." </div>
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I hesitated and timidly asked for the Chilean, the description of which I'd studied at length during her approach. She pulled the bottle out of her cart and held it up for me, half-cradling it as waiters do at fine restaurants in movies and situational comedies where the main character is about to become the butt of a joke about pretending to sophistication. </div>
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"Will that be all right for you?" The bottle loomed. Her smile was huge and white and unrelenting. "Yes, that's fine." Adeptly, she poured into a glass that had a three-leaf clover laser-etched on the far side. This she had set on the wind-swept expanse of my tray table after covering it with a folded linen cloth. This linen: it was not the sort you can just spill wine on without withering under a sudden red-hot shame, I quickly discovered. </div>
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What would emerge next but our hors d'oeuvres for the afternoon, "hot and cold Canapés”? Arriving in threes atop delicate porcelain plates, the Canapés were little rounded cracker constructions filled with zesty cheeses. I had not heard of them before I saw them on the menu, and was thankful I did not have to actually pronounce an order for them. While sipping my Chilean wine I furtively glanced around, just to see how everyone else was handling the task of actually eating the stupid things before making my own attempt. You never know when an indirect route to ingestion is to be preferred, according to some inscrutable custom, when immersed in a foreign culture. In this case I discovered that the method was fairly intuitive: Canapés are to be popped into the mouth, chewed, and swallowed. Fair enough. </div>
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A new discovery perplexed me. While sitting, I would occasionally close my eyes to rest, or turn to peer out a far window, or blink. Whenever I returned my gaze to the linen'd acre of tray table in front of me, I often found that my wine level had risen, miraculously, and for this miracle I gave thanks many times. I then progressed to asking forgiveness many times. </div>
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Flight attendants in business class apparently have two modes. One is cheery, visible, and helpful, while the second is silent, invisible, perfectly efficient, and terrifying. “Unsolicited stealth refills” sound amazing, and are amazing—but something about mixing job qualities that would benefit an assassin with the normal service-oriented set left me feeling, well, concerned for my life. And the more stealth glasses of Chilean wine I imbibed, the more suspicious of a conspiracy against my life I became. I also felt woozier and more loquacious, but that is certainly besides the point. </div>
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The crew delivered blankets shorn of plastic packaging to each of us, returned to their dark anteroom, and reemerged with hot towels. I swathed my face in a steaming cloth and looked back up at our attendants with narrowed eyes. Then I put my glasses back on and swaddled myself in the blanket. By this point the Chilean wine had finally dissolved the last vestige of tension, my conspiratorial anxiety, which had lasted all of about thirty imaginary seconds. As they brought out my steak fillet with scalloped potatoes and asparagus—and a chocolate volcano cake after that—I only smiled with drowsy gratitude. </div>
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I am not ashamed to say that I spent more time watching snippets of television shows than I did reading my Raymond Carver and my Thomas Merton. During the excellent animated movie <i>Tangled</i> I even shed a couple tears, which I turned to hide from my Irish seat-mate out of self-consciousness—which rotation forced me into watching, through watery eyes, an entwining couple across the aisle, mid-cuddle. I stared only so long as it took for my face to dry, which could not have been more than ten minutes. They didn’t mind, I inferred. They were wearing complimentary eye-covers. </div>
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Sleep was all but impossible in this cylindrical dreamland. The coffee—poured into fine china cups over yet another linen cloth, and served with crystalline chunks of maple sugar and adorable pitcherettes of cream—kept my neural pathways busy and open, but not enough to sustain a desire to write or read. Instead, I was trapped in a sort of alert consumer state, sipping and chewing and watching while leaving my pen and paper in a stowed bag. </div>
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The sun set; the sun rose; windows were pulled down and back up; people massaged their stocking feet and stretched. We were nearing Chicago. I sat, exultant, leaning to get a glimpse of the skyline through a far window. The woman across the aisle noticed my excitement and asked me if I had been away for long. “Sort of…” She smiled at me and looked back at her amorous companion, who was still slumped against the plastic wall. The yellow light of a midwestern summer sun was irradiating his double chin in all its folded, stubbly glory. </div>
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I buttoned my collar and put my tie on in the bathroom. I gathered my things. I read a final Carver short story. I prayed that the landing would not redirect my journey across the River Styx. We descended, and my prayers were answered. We had already traversed the only body of water we were meant to cross during our flight, the Atlantic. </div>
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Finally came the muffled squeal of tires on the runway, and an easy landing. Business class immediately pulled down its bags and evacuated the plane. While disembarking I carefully avoided glancing into economy, my erstwhile aerial home. Guilt over my good fortune had never quite lifted. Outside, the tarmac quivered like a mirage. Temperatures had climbed into the triple digits that day. </div>
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Among the first pieces of luggage to appear, my bags sluggishly swung around the carousel before I heaved them onto a cart. My father appeared soon after. As he sped up his pace and opened his arms to embrace me, I wondered if my indulgent jaunt behind the curtain had all been a dream, or worse—a mistake I was going to pay for in full. “How was your trip?” he asked. “Oh man,” I said, putting a hand on my luggage cart, “you’re not going to believe this…” His incredulous laugh reassured me that the airline would not bill me for my upgrade, and together we stepped out into the American heat, free and happy. </div>
Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-14221553703193425722012-06-09T07:10:00.000-05:002012-06-09T07:10:29.273-05:00The Really Real and the Really, Truly, Indubitably RealI went for a run today in the rain. By the time I got back to my building the sun had come out. With my contacts in, I was able to see a lot of detail in things that would otherwise be obscured by my glasses. I don't know if crumbled concrete and a rotting white door are proper objects of wonder, but here we are. <br />
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I was cooling down, walking and stretching, when my mind quietly seized. In the clouds and trees, even in the brick buildings and cobblestone parking lots, I saw a desert open up. Everything was a flat, consistent plane, each surface equally opaque and continuous with every other. There was a kind of inscrutable hiddenness in everything.<br />
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In this state I prayed. I asked God for a sign that this was his work. By the end of my silent prayer, everything had become a surface—not just the sights of things, but their sounds, smells, feels. My mind became a point suspended in something I know not what. I turned around like a baby in utero, looking at a world made strange.<br />
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I don't know if God answered my prayer in a way I could understand, but my heightened sense of alienation at least reopened a window that's been shut for a long time. Here's the view, familiar enough: my little brain does its best to dance over the surfaces of things, and is satisfied with a cursory knowledge of the contours they present to me. It cannot, however, open a door into a stone, or touch the life that animates an olive tree. My brain can only gesture at reality at a slant, and ponder it from a distance. Perhaps otherwise it would be consumed—or simply fall silent, like the collapsing body of the man who tried to steady the ark with his bare hand.<br />
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Maybe it really is true, that everything we think or say is essentially and most truly about what we cannot think and can never say. Who could know? And could she say it if she did know?Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-36373406915401704352012-06-02T13:27:00.001-05:002012-06-02T13:27:54.101-05:00Opa Leijs, 1924-2012Yesterday I helped to lay my grandfather into the ground. We led the narrow pine casket over a gravel pathway, following a towering man in a waistcoat who gave us instructions in clear, formal diction at each stage of the procession to the plot where Opa was to be interred. After arriving there, we hoisted the coffin off its wheeled platform and placed it on a pair of steel wires that stretched over the grave. An attendant in a black suit pulled a long tool out of a hedge and pressed its end into the ground above the plot. The coffin descended, rocking gently on its cables. There was silence except for the wind and the whirr of the unseen lowering mechanism. Each family paid its respects and walked with crunching steps back to the main building.<br />
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In the chapel twenty minutes before, two of my uncles and my aunt Els spoke about Opa. The back of the chapel was open to the graveyard behind it, and light played across the blank walls flanking each person as he or she spoke. A spider spent half the service crawling over one of these walls, primarily visible to me by its elongated shadow. Another spider dangled under the podium. I suppose the building usually stays open in nice weather.<br />
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Dozens of relatives and acquaintances came to the visitation and reception to offer condolences to the family. I learned how to say "my condolences" in Dutch but have since forgotten. I also learned how to say "he doesn't speak Dutch" from my mother's repetitions of that phrase, but forgot that as well. I also forgot a lot of names.<br />
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With a lot of coffee in you, surrounded with complicated feelings of grief, adrift in a foreign language, and with plenty of time to be alone in your head, you might find yourself wandering over some strange mental topography. You might laugh at a contextless memory, some random neural firing, and reflexively judge yourself for it. You might create a fanciful backstory for the man in the colorful scarf you've just met. You might imagine Opa himself walking into the reception, hunched, an anxious and confused look on his face, his own obituary in his hand. You might be knee-deep in the mire of death in your brain and catch someone's eye and pull a smile up over your face and as the person approaches you with a baggy hand outstretched, you might think "what is it that I don't speak?" You might notice the sun come out and try to see every leaf in a shuddering tree outside, diverting yourself from the people inside, any of whom might approach at any moment.<br />
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I saw a lot of distant stares over the last two days. We are rarely able to meet the occasion of a funeral. It refers to a whole life and is over in four hours. What can you say? How much can you remember? Opa has written themes into the lives of two generations. His children and grandchildren will unwittingly echo and translate those themes, play their own variations on them, and write their own, which will inevitably be taken up by their own children and grandchildren. So it goes: a continuous, looping thread.<br />
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His window on the world has shut, I think to myself as my mind traces over his empty chair in my Oma's living room. Its cushion remains conformed to the contours of his body. He sat there and told me how batteries work, what his involvement with the Dutch Resistance was like, how difficult it can be to start your own business, what our relatives in Alaska had done for Jesus and how far the family had stretched itself out over the world. He and I stood a few months ago in his garage and looked at his blackboard-sized map of the US, tracing our favorite trips across its yellowed surface and thinking out loud about where each of us would still like to visit. He'd hoped to come to America for Natalie's wedding.<br />
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My aunt will now be finishing the genealogy project that he started. In the final decade of his life, knowing where he and his family had come from became enormously important to him. Now he has rejoined many of those distant relations in the earth, that penultimate site of convergence for our human family. Rest in peace, Opa.<br />
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<br />Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com3tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-22270649978741533512012-05-20T15:39:00.000-05:002012-05-20T15:39:20.426-05:00CrucibleRadio silence until June 1. The thesis and three papers are all due on May 29. May God have mercy on our souls.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">the promise of June</span></div>Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-64005670418865093102012-05-09T17:26:00.001-05:002012-05-10T02:35:32.959-05:00One More Night in Leuven<br />
In the afternoon, a surprise storm blasts Leuven with bizarrely-intense rainfall. I hear a rumble grow in our apartment and assume that a pot is coming to a boil on the stove. A sideways glance reveals roommate Dan in mid-reaction to something outside. I stand and look: water from the sky is roaring on the glass. The pot in the kitchen is drying on the rack.<br />
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I walk to an unlatched window that has blown open and the force of the storm astonishes me; I haven’t seen rain like this for a long time. Agitated and smiling, I superfluously yell down to a drenched bro running in the courtyard “run, bro!”, and this earns me a middle finger. The bro and I both laugh. He probably didn’t understand me. Twenty minutes later, a rainbow arcs out to the south; it looks as though it was painted on a photograph. Before I can take a second picture with Dan’s camera the color fades into the sky. My soul throws Dan's camera out the window in frustration before my physical hands return it to him.<br />
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Hours later I head to the library under the clear light of the sun. Mud and puddles cover swaths of my route, and the smell of wet grass rises from the earth all around. It is warm. The weather is perfect. Of course I head inside, therefore, and bow my head over a white desk, rallying to eek out a few hundred words while the light outside dims.<br />
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I leave when the library closes at ten and walk home. The sky is still a deep blue, blackness waiting in the east for the sun to recede further so it can finish its work. Stars are beginning to pop out; they go unnoticed by the group of undergraduates I see standing around outside a faculty bar. Each wears a caveman costume, and when I glance at the bunch of them they are in the middle of helping one another light up. Soon the entire pack is dotted with tiny glowing embers.<br />
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I hold my chin as I walk, trying to keep an idea from escaping out of the far end of my face. I look weird, other people give me looks, I don’t care. The lingering thickness of the air, all that moisture and the rich smell of earth, gives the wind a little living extra to carry over the puddles and pools that still line my way home. The idea I am trying to save becomes the scent and vapor of the evening. I don't remember what the thought was that I was trying to think before it dissipated into the materials of the moment.<br />
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I am close to home, timidly fording a rock-strewn patch of mud, when I hear the notes. I slow my pace in anticipation. My favorite nameless Leuven resident lives on this street, behind our building. I know the ground floor of his apartment better than I have any right to because I am an occasional creep, and he doesn't seem to believe in curtains.<br />
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I half-step towards his window and swing out from the sidewalk to expand my view. A portrait enters the lit rectangle of his window; in it, a grayscale figure sits and looks just away from the viewer. My man's grandfather? His favorite composer? Just a constipated person? Walking further reveals a white banner splashed with inky Japanese characters that fall into a swirling wave. Finally, the man himself appears, leaning into his piano. His gray hair frizzes around his ears, his sleeves are rolled, his glasses hang on the end of his nose. He is playing something delicate and soft, in a minor key, I think, and he’s taking it slow, perhaps practicing a new section. The glass panes cut his figure into a grid; some of the squares cast him in translucent pinks and yellows. Lost in it, he plays with a wide, closed smile. I think he is a teacher. I look inside long enough to merit a spot on the neighborhood watch "suspicious characters" list before easing back into my gait. The notes fade behind me as I walk.<br />
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By now I am positively, stupidly drunk on this upsweep of life, and feel porous to the world. I step lightly over another puddle, watch a splotched cat dash after a splotch of something else, hear a shower running inside a room through a propped window. I lean into the leaves that fall across a brick wall next to my route and take in a familiar scent I can’t name. Clouds to the west have purpled undersides, street lamps light up circles of asphalt with an inviting yellow glow; it's as though I’ve stepped into a book cover. The crunch of silted gravel, voices carried on the wind, a temperature that makes the air imperceptible to my skin when the wind stops. The whole atmosphere is a pleasant blanket over a soft earth. There’s not a sharp knife or broken bone in the world right now, I am tempted to believe, caught up in the throes of my porous idiocy.<br />
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Sure, I’ll admit it; I’m going to miss this place when I’m gone. I hear a moped engine whine and recede on some nearby block as I approach my building. Under a growing visual chorus of stars, the city is turning in for the night. I hum to myself the last bits of the music I heard on the street before putting my key in the door. Soon I enter my apartment, change for bed, and sit down to type. For the time being, I am still here.Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com5Leuven, Belgium50.877571 4.70432850.797419500000004 4.5463995000000006 50.9577225 4.8622565tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-696174401365265502012-04-18T17:23:00.009-05:002012-04-18T17:41:41.679-05:00Sci-Fi Thought ExperimentA kind of hominid on a planet like ours has evolved with a head that is tilted at a 90º angle, so that the chin of the skull fuses with the top of the chest; the survival of the species is miraculous and a result of an astoundingly high mean intelligence. Forward motion induces vertigo for these creatures' being unable to set their eyes on a point in the middle distance, as we do; they survived for ages in sheer cliff dwellings, are excellent climbers, and have developed a civilization that ingeniously accommodates their apparent biological deformity. Unable to look up at the sky or out at their larger surroundings without great difficulty, they have constructed enormous cities with tiny architectural footprints; these towers are built to resemble the cliffs that sheltered the species in the early days of its history.<br />
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To compensate with technology for the cruel genetic hand that nature somehow dealt them, these creatures have devised a video monitor system that affixes to their clothing with a special apparatus; it displays an image directly under the earth-pointed face of its wearer. The image is of the area directly in front of the creature, and so mimics what we understand to be normal human sight. Rapid forward motion, however—whether from running or piloting a vehicle—is experienced as psychically akin to falling, because falling is the only visual analogue available to them for it. Genetic memory therefore makes long-distance travel terrifying, and the new technology has inspired a genre of fiction that mythologizes horizontal motion, and plumbs the psychological depths of the minds of those so unfortunate as to undergo it. In these works, which are intelligible to us as poetry, a full-speed run may tear a rip in the fabric of reality, and pilots spontaneously catch fire, and walking around on the ground outside a village may cause it to collapse into a sudden abyss. Speed as such is a cultural wellspring of dread and provides a context in which daring and fear alike are made manifest.<br />
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Philosophical metaphors for knowledge are primarily tactile; an idea is trustworthy like a good foothold is trustworthy. Knowledge is always only ever partial, one-sided, decidedly practical; claiming to "see" something (such pretension!) invokes a fallacy, one described with reference to the enormous, intractable blind spot that has prevented the best and most courageous representatives of past generations from realizing that a predator was threatening from above. The controversial fallacy, which would invalidate so much discourse, has come under attack in the recent literature; some think the idea of the horizon, visible for those who don the apparatus, is a dangerous, poetic lie; some think it is an absolute revelation, a gift given by sight that helps to explain the immutability of the mathematics that allowed for the species' architectural achievements. Is visual knowledge possible, and if so, what is its nature? This question will preoccupy generations of thinkers.<br />
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Since eye-contact is not possible without engaging in unusual contortions, speakers will indicate the intended recipients of a given remark by clasping the recipient's forearms with one or both hands. Signing with one's fingers while touching an interlocutor's arm is a way of emphasizing and accenting one's remarks, or of adding a second layer of meaning, creating a harmony.<br />
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The primary metaphors for wisdom identify with physical and psychological elements that enable a safe, slow descent from a great height. The language of violence issues in the terms of quakes and dreadful free falls; the language of love invokes hiddenness, darkness, stability. Fire travels upward and so is manageable from the perspective of those above it and irrelevant to those below; what comes down from the sky, however—whether hail or rain or lightning—is impossible to avoid when out in the open, and therefore a source of much anxiety. Surprise, misfortune, and calamity are expressed in figurative phrases that refer to an event in, or caused by, the sky.<br />
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Early religiosity, the species' primitive animism, cherished the buried and heavy and unmoving; rushing water, wind, and birds of prey were gods in constant need of appeasement. In the developing monotheistic mode, God's presence is the gravity that allows hands and grips to work in sync to establish one's firm position on a rock face. Theodicy commonly refers to the impossibility of the growth of crops without rain; therefore good requires evil in an inscrutable relation of apparent dependence but (believed in, hoped for) truer overcoming. Prayer is believed to affect gravity and move the earth.<br />
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Conservative voices condemn the New Technology, which permits an unprecedented engagement with the terrors of some other hominid's mode of travel—forward motion. Progressives hail it as a way forward and some even have the audacity to suggest that communities be built on a wider and shorter plan, which would reduce the risk of a fall to the death, but would require dependence on the New Technology in order to be at all feasible. Political reality is otherwise, well, complicated.<br />
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Our imagined hominid friends—80% of them—believe in an afterlife. The less reflective ones hope for an enormous mountain full of golden tunnels; the creative ones hope for perfected bodies with heads that pivot, unfused, as do their deft, calloused hands; the pious ones yearn for an unprecedented revelation and mystical union with something <i>like </i>the earth (but not identical with it; the earth is, of course, just a metaphor, with a limited range of use); the sensitive ones imagine that by some miracle, all hands will be clasped in an unbroken circle; the peculiar ones imagine a flight into the air, the sight of it all, and then a disappearance into darkness. The fullness of time—their <i>parousia</i>, their eschaton—is the consummation of lived time, in their theology; it is an unforeseeable disclosure, a perspective on the full length of their history from the sky, great and terrible, which they are only accustomed to viewing when plummeting headfirst into death. It is the arrival of the truth they still believe to be impossible by their own lights, the gaze of an eye that would fix their world in place, and make it real, as they cannot wholeheartedly believe it to be.Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-5561875322065190802012-04-10T18:05:00.000-05:002012-04-10T18:05:28.787-05:00East BerlinMy sister's apartment is two blocks from where the wall once stood. To memorialize it, they've put up a long row of steel framing poles that replicates its original interior scaffolding. The architectural differences between the city's two halves remain, in spite of almost a quarter-century's worth of colorful renovations on both sides. My sister is taking the day off work tomorrow in order to show us around. I look forward to expanding my acquaintance with Berlin beyond the insides of a couple of apartments and trams.<br />
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To get here we rode a long-distance train—no private compartment for us, though; in a show of solidarity we opted for "proletariat class" seating, and were even blessed with access to the bar car for our good-faith gesture. Prices were a little steep for our humble tastes, I should say. Without major nourishment but also without major exertion, we passed the time by reading and playing cards. The fields that rolled by us were beautiful, full of cows and small brick houses that faded into the evening until we could only see our own bright reflections in the window. During the ride I finished <i>Self-Consciousness: Memoirs</i> by Updike, and thought a lot about death.<br />
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Rewinding further, my aunt's house was delightful during our weeklong visit. I bled out around five thousand words for my thesis, visited Amsterdam, and spent a lot of time drinking tea while staring out the window at falling rain in the garden. The town of Bussum, where my aunt lives, is stylish and small, allotting a generous (by European standards) plot of land to each freestanding house; most conform to the aesthetic of traditional Dutch architecture, orange roof tiling and all. In the afternoons we would eat cheese cubes off a wooden board and sip wine in anticipation of an hours-long wait for dinner, usually served at 10pm. A good vacation rhythm until Easter ushered us out. The tomb is empty; my aunt's house is also no longer full.<br />
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On Saturday Jeremy and I will be returning to Belgium and a frantic race to the end of our program. Strange to think that I'll be back in the states in less than three months. Time flies.Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-56075246274724703132012-04-03T18:46:00.001-05:002012-04-04T05:55:14.615-05:00Holland Redux: a Table for the Ages<div class="p1">I love the table in my aunt’s house for how solid it is. At some point, a man in need of a table simply pounded together a set of floor slats, passed on the varnish and affixed a set of thick legs; I imagine that he promptly ate off its naked back after setting it upright. Years of footsteps followed by years of dining have lithographed the surface with grooves that hint at heavy, scraping pots and tossed-about silverware; coffee stains and burn marks set off the grey-brown with a deeper brown and brown verging on ashy black. </div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p1">Such a purely functional eating platform. What could be more inviting come mealtime? It's as sure a sign as any that the real attraction is the food. My aunt emerges from the kitchen laden with a platter or a pan of something spattering and clops it onto the table with a deep thud; no fear, you could airdrop munitions onto this thing and the dust would clear to reveal it standing, proud and intact still. A metal pail full of slush and chilled bottles leaves a ring of condensation near the eastwards end; crumbs pile up in the hidden hollows that once sourced branches for another generation’s forest. Priorities. No frills, no unnecessary decorative elements (apart from a false drawer, but this only reiterates its patchwork origins). Just the Platonic idea of support, realized in the air above the dining room floor. And the food does not disappoint. </div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p1">I sit at this table in the light of the morning sun and see time, spread out, trapped in the frozen flows of the wood grain. An Ikea table wipes clean; it can be restored to an impeccable state within minutes of a meal. My aunt’s table—well, in the first place, there’s not an impeccable state to which it can, in principle, be restored. It was born old, wizened from a former life of soft beatings under the soles of its owners’ shoes. Its history intertwines with that of the family in the signs of a weathering that has affected every square inch. Nothing is left untouched by its own duration, after all. </div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p1">The moment it was first lifted up and ringed with chairs, this table began its work of acquiring tell-tale marks, pointers to its history as a communal object of specific uses. The rings convey this most clearly; nicks and smaller stains gesture at moments lost to memory. The whole surface has certainly faded and made it impossible to tell its original color from its present one. Devoid of the sharp angles of new furniture, its worn, rounded corners conform to whichever new hands would hoist this table during a repositioning. This table does not resist; it will outlast your celebration, your snacks for the game, your lifetime.</div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p1">Such a table can undergo a thumping. Slapping the wood next to one’s plate mid-laugh, pounding it while gesturing with the opposite hand like a dictator, even bringing down two fists in a memorable rage—each of these is a matter of indifference to the enabling piece of furniture. Your humor and your anger will both subside, someday with an unmistakable finality. Such a table will not bend a leg for the event of your expiration. On the eventual day of my death, my aunt’s table will remain upright, austere, imperturbably resigned. The end of the world will elicit no reaction from it. You may as well be serving a noon brunch, for all this table cares. </div><div class="p1"><br />
</div><div class="p1">So yeah, that's why I like my aunt's table. </div>Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-81659964609005385402012-03-12T19:12:00.002-05:002012-03-12T19:13:34.834-05:00The Viability of Art Apparently Devoid of Grounding References to Human Beings, Prelude<div class="tr_bq">What follows is the story "Archangel," a quasi-short-short by John Updike that originally appeared in his collection <i>Pigeon Feathers. </i>I put up the whole thing, hoping that either 1) no one comes across this blog who might care about the fact that I've posted an entire piece of someone else's fiction, or 2) I'm legally in the clear, and have not, in fact, violated some literary executor or <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawcett_Publications">publishing company</a>'s copyright by making the text in its dazzling entirety available to "the public." You will find it after the jump. </div><br />
Be warned, though; it's a tough nut to crack. My recommendation is to wait until a quiet, serendipitously free half-hour presents itself, and then to make some tea, and then to sit down and read the piece maybe three times through—slowly, perhaps out loud. Let it wash over you. The goal of comprehension in this case should be subordinate to the goal of sheer aesthetic appreciation. I have read it probably ten times, most recently on a weekly beat going back about a month, and honestly, I am still at a loss to say who is being addressed, whether the narrator is trustworthy, where this scene could be taking place, and so forth. But I love the story all the same, not least for the density of its play of sounds and images. In the future I intend to write a followup with some thoughts related to the theme of this post's title. But anyway. I hope you get a chance to savor this before I receive my "Cease and Desist" letter:<br />
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<blockquote><u>Archangel</u> </blockquote><blockquote>Onyx and split cedar and bronze vessels lowered into water: these things I offer. Porphyry, teakwood, jasmine, and myrrh: these gifts I bring. The sheen of my sandals is dulled by the dust of cloves. My wings are waxed with nectar. My eyes are diamonds in whose facets red gold is mirrored. My face is a mask of ivory: Love me. Listen to my promises:<br />
Cold water will drip from the intricately chased designs of the bronze vessels. Thick-lipped urns will sweat in the fragrant cellars. The orchards never weary of bearing on my islands. The very leaves give nourishment. The banked branches never crowd the paths. The grape vines will grow unattended. The very seeds of the berries are sweet nuts. Why do you smile? Have you never been hungry?<br />
The workmanship of the bowers will be immaculate. Where the elements are joined, the sword of the thinnest whisper will find its point excluded. Where the beams have been tapered, each swipe of the plane is continuous. Where the wood needed locking, pegs of a counter grain have been driven. The ceilings are high, for coolness, and the spaced shingles seal at the first breath of mist. Though the windows are open, the eaves of the roof are so wide that nothing of the rain comes into the rooms but its scent. Mats of perfect cleanness cover the floor. The fire is cupped in black rock and sustained on a smooth breast of ash. Have you never lacked shelter?<br />
Where, then, has your life been touched? My pleasures are as specific as they are everlasting. The sliced edges of a fresh ream of laid paper, cream, stiff, rag-rich. The freckles of the closed eyelids of a woman attentive in the first white blush of morning. The ball diminishing well down the broad green throat of the first at Cape Ann. The good catch, a candy sun slatting the bleachers. The fair at the vanished poorhouse. The white arms of girls dancing, taffeta, white arms violet in the hollows music its ecstasies praise the white wrists of praise the white arms and the white paper trimmed the Euclidean proof of Pythagoras' theorem its tightening beauty the iridescence of an old copper found in the salt sand. The microscopic glitter in the ink of the letters of words that are your own. Certain moments, remembered or imagined, of childhood. Three-handed pinochle by the brown glow of the stained-glass lampshade, your parents out of their godliness silently wishing you to win. The Brancusi room, silent. <i>Pines and Rocks</i>, by Cézanne; and The Lace-Maker in the Louvre hardly bigger than your spread hand.<br />
Such glimmers I shall widen to rivers; nothing will be lost, not the least grain of remembered dust, and the multiplication shall be a thousand thousand fold; love me. Embrace me; come, touch my side, where honey flows. Do not be afraid. Why should my promises be vain? Jade and cinnamon: do you deny that such things exist? Why do you turn away? Is not my song a stream of balm? My arms are heaped with apples and ancient books; there is no harm in me; no. Stay. Praise me. Your praise of me is praise of yourself; wait. Listen. I will begin again. </blockquote>Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-71698247834600298612012-03-06T18:41:00.001-06:002017-02-15T09:59:27.971-06:00Jean-Louis Chrétien on Prayer, Second InstallmentThis is part two of my projected series of indefinite length on Jean-Louis Chrétien's analysis of prayer. To recap, Chrétien is a young French phenomenologist, theologian, and poet whose work remains largely untranslated, and whose exposure to the American academic world is therefore fairly slight. Even the European students in our program do not often recognize his name. My professors, however, have spoken of him in hushed tones of reverence and with restrained enthusiasm (too much would be unbecoming for a professional academic, of course). Chrétien's French is quite beautiful, I have been told; fortunately for me, much of the beauty survives in his English translations, miraculously.<br />
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<span style="font-size: x-small;">The man himself. </span><br />
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Chrétien is rumored to live quite the hermitic life. Writing in isolation on a typewriter utterly devoid of affectation, in what I fancifully imagine to be a secluded French country house filled to the rafters with books, Chrétien only set up an email address at the urgent request of his publisher after his unreachability very nearly drove his literary agent off the deep end.<br />
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But while Chrétien seems to seclude himself from living humans, his work is bursting with connections that he sketches between representatives of far-flung intellectual eras and traditions. Most of his interlocutors are long dead. Their dusted insights help propel a search that has guided his entire philosophical career so far; in a retrospective millennial essay surveying his work over the preceding decade, he states that his overarching goal has been to describe the "<i>excess</i> of the encounter with things, other, world, and God"—an encounter that "requires, most imperatively, our response, and yet seems at the same time to prohibit it." ("Retrospection" in Jean-Louis Chrétien, <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Unforgettable-Unhoped-Perspectives-Continental-Philosophy/dp/0823221938">The Unforgettable and the Unhoped-For</a></i> (New York: Forham University Press, 2002), 121.)<br />
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Before moving on to the analysis of prayer, a brief note on the meaning of the above quotation: "excess" here may be roughly understood to mean a surplus of content that defies our attempts at grasping it through our understanding. Excess is frequently associated with the experience of the sublime, which leaves a person speechless, awe-struck, overcome. Another site of excess would be an encounter with God (theophany), which cannot but overwhelm a finite subject. Chrétien, then, has sought to reveal this surplus as something that leaves traces in even the most common experiences of wholly unexceptional things. In his perspective, something has pushed us to lose sight of this basic dimension of excess, but it remains, for those who are willing to "relearn to see the world."<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
* * *</div>
<br />
The essay "The Wounded Word" appears in translation as a part of the previously mentioned collection entitled <i><a href="http://www.amazon.com/Phenomenology-Theological-Turn-Perspectives-Continental/dp/0823220532">Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn": the French Debate</a> </i>by Dominique Janicaud et al<i> </i>(New York: Fordham University Press, 2000). I now wish to start exploring the development of Chrétien's analysis, in the hope of eventually teasing out a viable account of the essence of the act of prayer.<br />
<br />
A bold statement opens the piece: "Prayer is the religious phenomenon par excellence, for it is the sole human act that opens the religious dimension and never ceases to underwrite, to support, and to suffer this opening" (p147, all page references are to <i>Phenomenology and the "Theological Turn"</i>). Prayer is our mode of access to the religious dimension. How can this be? Aren't there other aspects of religious life that do not begin and end in prayer, that are essentially different from it? Perhaps—but, as Chrétien points out, "[i]f we were unable to address our speech to God or the gods, no other act could intend the divine." Therefore, he writes, "[w]ith prayer, the religious appears and disappears."<br />
<br />
Now Chrétien is clearly writing about prayer, but he is also working here to locate his piece within the philosophical context described in the <a href="http://supercurriculum.blogspot.com/2011/12/jean-louis-chretien-on-prayer-first.html">first installment</a> of this series. An analysis of the paradigmatic religious phenomenon, if sufficiently rigorous and methodologically pure, could open up the world of religious experience for legitimate phenomenological investigation. This, I have to believe, is one of Chrétien's goals—to demonstrate that such a phenomenology is possible.<br />
<br />
But back to prayer. Chrétien wishes to write a paper rather than a book, and this requires him to impose a limitation on his analysis right from the get go. Prayer, he says, will be considered as a "speech act," loosely understood—but this isn't just an arbitrary narrowing of the field of play. Chrétien actually thinks that the vocal aspect of prayer may get to its very essence, as immediately after introducing the "speech act" qualification, he proposes a guiding question for the rest of the piece: "[i]s vocal prayer merely one form of prayer among others, or is it the prayer par excellence, the sole one in relation to which all others can be defined and constituted, either by derivation or privation?" (149). This question is so detailed as to be mostly rhetorical, an anticipatory statement spoken with an upward intonation at the end so as not to appear too confident. But even if it were a more sincere question, we may still expect the vocal aspect to play a salient role in limning the essence of prayer. Chrétien's treatment of silence is particularly compelling to watch as the argument unfolds.<br />
<br />
With the main points of the introduction behind us, we are on our way to being knee-deep in the lake of Chrétien's analysis. Seeing as his essay is very dense and runs to almost forty pages, I intend to save most of his arguments and insights for future installments. But I will close this post with the first descriptive element disclosed by this phenomenology: prayer is situated, Chrétien writes,<br />
<blockquote class="tr_bq">
in an act of presence to the invisible. It is the act by which the man praying stands in the presence of a being in which he believes but does not see and manifests himself to it. </blockquote>
<blockquote class="tr_bq" style="text-align: right;">
- "The Wounded Word," 149. </blockquote>
So prayer is embedded in a person's act whereby she purposefully makes herself present to a being that she believes in, although she does not see it; she believes herself to be in this being's presence, and "manifests" herself to it. We could also say that she discloses herself to this being, that she wills herself to "be" before it. The monotheistic belief in the omniscience of God illuminates an important aspect of this move: though a praying person may believe herself to always be in the sight or presence of God, in prayer she intentionally directs herself towards God, as though to meet his invisible gaze, and willfully presents herself to him.<br />
<br />
This self-manifestation to the invisible leaves the praying person in a state of extreme vulnerability; everything is given and nothing is held back. The preparations of ritual cleanings, the use of certain garments, bodily gestures and movements of all kinds—all of these, Chrétien writes, "can be gathered together in a summoned appearance that <b>incarnates the act of presence</b>" (150, emphasis mine). Incarnates the act of presence—what could <i>that</i> mean? Well, venturing one interpretation, it means this: our presentation of ourselves to the invisible being to which we pray is actually embodied in the physical acts of prayer. When we kneel, light candles, don vestments, doff our caps, and so forth, we are symbolizing our self-presentation to the divine, and in a way, effecting it.<br />
<br />
This is why bodily or ritualistic actions symbolize rather than signify the act of presence: because the gestures and acts are unified with the central act of self-manifestation, and bring it to "incarnation," as it were, allowing this act of self-manifestation to involve the whole of the person praying. Prayer is not just an offering of an idea or a thought or a plea to God, in this account; Chrétien wishes instead to say that prayer is the offering of our whole selves to God.<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">
* * *</div>
<div style="text-align: center;">
<br /></div>
<div style="text-align: left;">
And that brings us about a tenth of the way into the essay. Almost all of the riches are still ahead for us. Anyway, thanks for reading! I hope you return for installment three. By then we should really be cooking with gas. </div>
</div>
</div>
Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com9tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-50244876069702869932012-03-03T17:07:00.002-06:002012-03-04T10:14:55.559-06:00How to Store Your Books If You Are Awesome and RichI thought of this the other day while talking with roommate Dan about <a href="http://bookshelfporn.com/">interesting ways to store books</a>. I couldn't find illustrations online for anything close to what I had in mind, so I downloaded a free drawing <a href="http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/sketchbook-express/id404243625?mt=12">program</a> from the app store and attempted to sketch out my idea. Here goes:<br />
<br />
First, imagine that you own a house with a large basement or ground-level room. The floor is basically composed of congruent glass panels set in a grid pattern, like so:<br />
<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpgplGZ_xxC0RESD2pYB1NdbuGAJUJ4-7HkIrvkK_epgaCCPPnYi4nezVr0HYGaWlp6VwAuSgDjSe7SXwmCgCptNeNH79Y_DeNHWmOTFRrFHWyJTwPSgugR4QzxSPuoGAP0VvCioiqJzBv/s1600/basic.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="172" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhpgplGZ_xxC0RESD2pYB1NdbuGAJUJ4-7HkIrvkK_epgaCCPPnYi4nezVr0HYGaWlp6VwAuSgDjSe7SXwmCgCptNeNH79Y_DeNHWmOTFRrFHWyJTwPSgugR4QzxSPuoGAP0VvCioiqJzBv/s320/basic.tif" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">I had to clear out the furniture to draw this picture.</span></div><br />
The glass is reinforced—it's like, an inch thick and bulletproof—which allows people to walk over it and place furniture on top of it. You are probably wondering why there is a hazy blush of color in the center of each of those transparent or translucent (homeowner's choice) glass panels, huh? Well, I'll tell you why! It's because underneath each panel is an inset storage shelf, upon which has been placed a row of books! Seen from the perspective of a person standing on this floor, the vertical alcoves would look something like this:<br />
<br />
<div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxLTq29GiVhtRuA5uLeWLUnBVVhot989OhddPYLayFhyphenhyphenSy5PSdWM-d4clTPsXGZE7Ektn76t96IefB3-Klh6fgsfV6l5W2GCDMR3hCE8fuf63yVOS7KoBfqb4IiUGrUI0Wxz8ijHGN0f5U/s1600/basic2.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="172" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjxLTq29GiVhtRuA5uLeWLUnBVVhot989OhddPYLayFhyphenhyphenSy5PSdWM-d4clTPsXGZE7Ektn76t96IefB3-Klh6fgsfV6l5W2GCDMR3hCE8fuf63yVOS7KoBfqb4IiUGrUI0Wxz8ijHGN0f5U/s320/basic2.tif" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">A first edition of Yale Press's 1954 <i>The Future:</i> <i>Progressive Essays in Experimental Ontology</i> anthology? Amazing!</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">How might a person go about accessing the books they put under their glass floor? Did I hear that question correctly? I sure hope so, because that's precisely the question I was about to answer. Notice that on the right side of each glass pane, there is a pair of dots. Those dots represent small holes, the rims of which would be specially reinforced with rubber O-rings. Why is this important? Because you, as the owner of this classy, bookish basement, have in your possession a grip with two prongs that are designed to fit into the holes on these glass panels. Each prong would terminate in a curve designed to slide into a groove under the glass, for a close and sure fit. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKYSpOSCGFSSyPIEAx8PAKspbnbbZpJmcn5PjoYLRVpMyDBnyATTb2mi8MlKeKY_JSWqNdZTr1T0PD10u2WZywjhvQU3fEqpxTcbBXLk3_LFPFAqcgYR7WF8WBF_v92U1pdCE9tWloZYRF/s1600/basic3.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="172" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEiKYSpOSCGFSSyPIEAx8PAKspbnbbZpJmcn5PjoYLRVpMyDBnyATTb2mi8MlKeKY_JSWqNdZTr1T0PD10u2WZywjhvQU3fEqpxTcbBXLk3_LFPFAqcgYR7WF8WBF_v92U1pdCE9tWloZYRF/s320/basic3.tif" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">The backwards beamed eighth notes pictured are actually the grip. </span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">When the prongs go in, the attached grip becomes a handle with which you may open the glass panel! Each pane will turn on a hinge that allows it to open like a square glass door. You know what that means? It means that with this grip, you have exclusive, easy access to your basement library! When you're finished retrieving the tomes you want, you can close the panel, remove the grip, and hang it back up on the bronze hook you installed in your kitchen, closet or panic room. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt-CZMaKHcbSUX7JReB8ExX5j2XHxI5TYFRewywPrVLJJXTk6xTtWE8uokhZNirv5pjf9ZDzWbHWQCFXjlCzsWbCLBBF8weVpkNngtYRbA_2Ek7gnFg5B31DN-IJ4DVxmgeSDhbHS57d8a/s1600/basic4.tif" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="172" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjt-CZMaKHcbSUX7JReB8ExX5j2XHxI5TYFRewywPrVLJJXTk6xTtWE8uokhZNirv5pjf9ZDzWbHWQCFXjlCzsWbCLBBF8weVpkNngtYRbA_2Ek7gnFg5B31DN-IJ4DVxmgeSDhbHS57d8a/s320/basic4.tif" width="320" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">What pretty pastel-colored spines your books have!</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: left;">And there you have it. So, if you're a wealthy homeowner with a large spare room that's got a high ceiling (this design would move the level of the floor up a couple feet), and you happen to own a lot of books, you should consider storing them in this way—under a beautiful, thick plane of square glass panels. You could even line the walls with traditional standing bookshelves, especially ones made of fragrant wood, like pine. People would walk into that room and say things like, "I am in a great hall of knowledge!", "this person is serious about book storage!", "what a great-smelling repository of literature and philosophy!", and so forth. Who doesn't like compliments?<br />
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<div style="text-align: center;">* * *</div><div style="text-align: center;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">UPDATE: In light of my usual standard of scrupulousness when it comes to citing my sources, I am a tad bit ashamed to admit that Dan was the one who originally introduced the idea of the glass floor. When I started writing and sketching the above yesterday, I was operating with the sincere belief that I was the originator of the idea, but alas! It came out in conversation today that Dan is the true source. Consider the above an appropriation and development of his original idea, which emerged in rapid-fire brainstorming (hence the mistake). Sorry Dan! </div></div>Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com4tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-5687634480176520790.post-69109016821500679432012-02-13T17:22:00.000-06:002012-02-13T17:22:55.442-06:00Round TwoOur break has ended, and a new term has begun. The department secretary will be posting our first term grades on Wednesday, at which point we'll be able to see who will need to come back in August to retake failed examinations or rewrite failed papers.<br />
<br />
Most of the courses being offered this term are in a seminar format, which means both smaller class sizes and higher expectations for enrolled students. A difficult choice looms: I have room in my schedule for two seminars, but there are three relevant options:<br />
<br />
<ol><li>An intensive course on disgust. Fascinating and exciting material, taught by an intimidating (but wryly funny) professor who has leveled some very serious demands regarding course attendance and preparedness. I expect it'll be engaging and a lot of fun. The only question I have, the one preventing me from locking it in to my schedule, is: how relevant would this be for my thesis? </li>
<li>The Husserl Archives Seminar. This would probably be the most directly useful for my research, but it will also probably be the most dry and boring of the three. Might just have to bite the bullet and take it anyway, my apprehensions about reading large quantities of Husserl notwithstanding. </li>
<li>Wittgenstein's <i>Philosophical Investigations</i>. This class will meet for extended sessions once a month until the summer, and promises to dig deeply into the later work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. He's the original reason for my philosophical interest in language; I would love to deepen my acquaintance with him, but given his location in the canon (he has primarily been appreciated and appropriated within the analytic tradition in philosophy), this seminar would probably diverge the most widely from my current philosophical interests and research. </li>
</ol><div><br />
</div><div>As you can see, concern for the thesis provides this semester's dominant theme. Hopefully my research panic doesn't edge out my commitment to classes for this term; it will probably be important to come up with both a sense of boundaries and a regular work schedule in order to avoid dropping any of the various balls I'm going to try to juggle. </div><div><br />
</div><div>Bonus round: here's a picture of me and roommate Dan at the Eiffel Tower just over two weeks ago: </div><div><br />
</div><div class="separator" style="clear: both; text-align: center;"><a href="http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/420802_607980496928_187703149_32133385_671460201_n.jpg" imageanchor="1" style="margin-left: 1em; margin-right: 1em;"><img border="0" height="320" src="http://a5.sphotos.ak.fbcdn.net/hphotos-ak-snc7/420802_607980496928_187703149_32133385_671460201_n.jpg" width="171" /></a></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;">"Look, my cowlick is gone!"</span></div><div style="text-align: center;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><span style="font-size: x-small;"><br />
</span></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br />
</div><div style="text-align: left;">Write us letters and emails; we are hardy boys but it is going to be a tough fight, and our souls are sensitive to the rain and the slush and the existentialism that apparently soak this town during the winter months. </div>Martyn Wendellhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/16706046502490971084noreply@blogger.com3