The Dinnertray

Seen through a trope darkly

Now Listening to: Karate's The Bed Is In The Ocean ('specially track 2, The Same Stars)

(Um.  Spoiler alert?  I am going to parse the plotlines of two current releases, 'The Cabin in the Woods' and 'The Hunger Games.' If you don't want to know things about them, you should turn away. And probably avoid conversations with me.  I suck at discretion.)

Once every half-decade I see a horror movie.  Which is to say, I come from a less-than-deep knowledge of that particular genre, and when it comes up in conversation I've been limited to making comments about 'Cloverfield' and the Matthew Lillard vehicle '13 Ghosts' (it wasn't technically a Matthew Lillard vehicle.  There was some kind of doofy, breathy brunette chick that I think was supposed to be the draw. I, though, went for le Lillard.). But this afternoon, I saw the Joss Whedon vehicle 'The Cabin in the Woods' (I think the designation may be more accurate in this instance). So now I've shored up my capacity for a horror genre conversation, but it's still a small capacity.

I'm a little more prepped for a discussion that limits itself to a comparison of themes in 'The Cabin in the Woods' and 'The Hunger Games.'  To the trope of a group of young people, somehow manipulated  into agreeing to their own torture, who are observed, who suffer, and are supposed to die so that society may continue.  That's a rough synopsis, but it structures both plotlines.  Collins' book was published in September of 2008 and Whedon's script (co-written with Drew Goddard of Buffyverse and Cloverfield fame) went into production in March of 2009.  The film version of 'The Hunger Games' and 'The Cabin in the Woods' share a Summer 2012 release.  So they approach, at around the same time, the same trope from within two different genres (YA fiction and horror film, respectively), and reach the public at around the same time as well, if we count the film version of the 1st book instead of the book trilogy itself.  Obviously, I am going to do that.

On our way out of 'Cabin' this afternoon, my friend K. started a discussion about the similar anxieties in this film and 'Hunger Games.'  Initially, I was hesitant to overdo the comparison; and I'm still hesitant to make a sweeping, ahistorical argument about a 'new' anxiety or a defining cultural moment.  K.'s interest was in issues of performed vs. natural identity in an age of social media, and I'm pretty sold on that.  I mean, I think that's accurate, even if I'm not sure it exhausts the texts.  But I'm more interested in the notion of expatiatory violence.  Because I have several Rene Girard books on the shelf behind me, and I kind of love them.

Suzanne Collins' heroine is an adolescent who 'opts' for inclusion in the games.  The structure of society makes this a hollow choice, but the structure of society is such that contestants must at least follow the outline of choice.  For some reason 'agency' has to be coopted to make the victim a legitimate sacrifice.  Even the other contestants, who do not volunteer in someone else's place, file obediently into a public space, and walk up to the stage if their name is called.  They may pay for extra rations with extra chances at being chosen.  There is a system, and it feels like a trap but it performs like a voluntary association.

Whedon/Goddard's protagonist is a young woman who reads latin from a diary and calls up a family of redneck torture-mad zombies to kill everybody. (NEVER READ THE LATIN.  THIS IS ... SERIOUSLY?  WHY WOULD YOU READ THE LATIN.  That may be the very, very stupidest of horror movie tropes.  And seems to have been inserted by some old-school Catholic hierarchy in order to discourage the laity from an overly full participation in the mass.  They're all like, "See? Latin is a dangerous language.  If you have not been trained in its sacred arts YOU ARE GOING TO RAISE A FAMILY OF REDNECK TORTURE-MAD ZOMBIES.  THANK GOD WE ARE HERE TO WARN YOU ABOUT THAT. GO AND SIN NO MORE, DUMBASS.")  This is a slight distinction in the way Collins and Whedon organize their structures; the system of expatiatory violence is public knowledge in 'The Hunger Games' and secret in "Cabin in the Woods' - Katniss's community knows that they are sending kids to die for the sake of national unity, but no one outside of the 'production company' running the woodsy cabin (and their companion houses in other nations), especially including the poor doomed protagonists, know what's happening.  So there's a difference in the way knowledge is used.

Once inside the arena, though, both sets of protagonists are set the same task: suffer, and die, so that human society can be saved from destruction.  War, in Collins' universe; 'Old Gods' in Whedon's.  Go figure, by the way, on that last one.  It is really, really tempting to find in this a symptom of globalization and media-saturation; we are now aware, to a nightmarish extent, that our privilege is enjoyed on the backs of the suffering of others.  The one-third world fritters hours away on iphones made through two-thirds world labor; their automobiles run on gasoline provided through predatory international foreign policy.  Actually, it's more than tempting.  It's compelling.  I think that's a viable reading of both of these plotlines, though I also think its viability stems from a liberal worldview that I'm projecting onto both texts.  There are enough of us holding a liberal worldview, though, that I think the interpretation is statistically as well as semiotically significant.  That's a bit of an aside, though.

My main interest is in the ritualized, saving violence and how it plays out in two systems, one essentially political and the other essentially supernatural.  I initally cast it as a distinction between the political and the metaphysical, but this is actually a good example of the slippage between 'ideological' and 'metaphysical;' both terms fit both systems, in ways that flag the difficulty of differentiating 'religoius' and 'political' violence from each other, or from their surroundings. So political and supernatural it is, then.  In the political scenario (Collins), there is full public knowledge, but varying levels of misrecognition distributed along class lines. That is, the upper class central district folks think they are preserving the peace through the horrific games, the lower classes do not think there is a viable alternative, and all groups come to see in Katniss, the 'willing victim' the potential for a different outcome.  In the supernatural scenario, there is no public knowlege and the misrecognition is ... complicated.  I suppose you could say that the production team misrecognizes the horror of what they're doing, but the movie gives them an out by justifying their worldview; the old gods *do* rise if the human sacrifices aren't properly performed.  Structurally, supernaturalism casts the escaped victims, triumphant socially in their defeat of the production company, as gloriously independent destroyers of human civilization.  Politics, in this scenario, casts the escaped victims as socially triumphant and gloriously independent preservers of human civilization. Which is not to say that Collins has this all work out smoothly; I really enjoyed the way she ends the trilogy.  In pain and suffering and angstful things.  Well done, Collins.  But Politics depends on articulate and comprehensible human figures; supernaturalism revolves around powers that do not have human heads or bodies - powers that are incommensurate and immeasurable.  Beyond negotiation; or beyond something reducible to agency. 

So, obviously, there are supernatural systems in which sacrifice, even interrupted sacrifice, is a perfectly good means of saving human civilization.  My point here is restricted to the way in which a supernatural system functions within cultural productions, or, more specifically, within 'The Cabin in the Woods' released in Summer 2012.  And here, the supernatural system allows Whedon/Goddard (and I really see so much of Whedon in this, but perhaps mostly because I haven't followed Goddard's career as closely) to do something slightly different than Collins.  Both plots take victims, highlight their agency and make it a fundamental part of their victimization.  In Collins universe, without a supernatural component, this agency escapes its misrecognition and in suffering productively, but not dying, ends social oppression.  In Whedon/Goddard's supernatural system, agency escapes from the manipulations of the system, suffers unproductively, and in not dying ends society.  To have ended differently would have required comprehensible gods, gods who are not beyond understanding or communication.  The supernatural structure requires agency to function as a limited, self-indulgent glory.  A glory the film absolutely celebrates, but one which it shows to be essentially pyhhric.  Escaping manipulation, the emancipation of the choice, does not free the protagonists, or the society; it dooms them both.

God on the Order of Art

Now Listening: Wild Flag's "Wild Flag"

'Specially: Track 1, "Romance"

 

Earlier this week, in a discussion of Foucault's Order of Things, somebody made the comment that "art is," for Foucault, "for the limit."  We were talking about the reference to Borges' Chinese Encyclopedia passage that starts the OT introduction, and about the 'Las Meninas' section that opens the book, and a little bit about the function of works of art in his earlier Madness and Civilization.  The consensus, such as such things go, was that there might be a foucauldian tendency to let artistic productions, and artists more generally, serve the rhetorical purpose of demonstrating or exploding the limit of normal orders.  Whether Foucault thinks 'art' always does that, or only art, we can at least say that the pictures and poems he mentions are mentioned because they make you laugh or look closer, and just generally stop you in those tracks laid for you by the order of things.  There's a sort of promise, there, of transcendence or freedom that I'm not sure really works systematically.  But it pokes its hopeful head up every once in a while.

 

I'm reading Peter Hoeg's The Quiet Girl this month.  I used to read more quickly, a book in a few days, but I'm slower now with everything except young adult fiction (Hunger Games.  Was Awesome. And read in well under twenty-four hours.).  I'm not sure, though, that I'd read TQG any faster even if i were on my earlier game; it's fantastic.  Really, really beautiful and difficult and I love it, and i have to look up from it every twenty or so pages to take a break and sort of dwell on it for a while without moving forward as a distraction.  I wrote someone somewhere a few years back that I thought i was done finding favorite authors, but Hoeg has been creeping up on me (I really enjoyed Borderliners when it came out, and thought The Woman and the Ape was more than solid, but neither of them were quite convincing as favorite authorial options), and now I'm totally won over.  If we have ever had a conversation about books, and had the same taste at all, i totally recommend you pick up Hoeg's latest novel.  I'm in love.

 

I don't know if Hoeg is 'art for the limit' with The Quiet Girl.  There's a quote, though, that somewhat pertains to limits, and more specifically to religion, which is why i've come here to post about it.  Hoeg writes about the protagonist Kaspar (a philosopher clown in Denmark with superhero hearing), "... One found natural catastrophes.  Children mistreated.  Kidnappings.  Loneliness.  Separation of people who love each other. His anger increased.  The problem with anger against God is that it's impossible to go higher in the system to complain."

 

Especially given my inclination to look at the building up of authority through appeals (for example, the accretion of power to church legal systems when medieval european peasants appealed to church figures after feudal powers proved either too far away or too oppositional to suit their interests), the idea of God as that-beyond-which-there-is-no-appeal is really satisfying.  I'm entirely comfortable with a metaphysical view of God as the anthropomorphization of limits, a thing on which to rest one's deepest anger, or gratitude, or hope.  Not that that's the only role/identity/aspect of God, or necessarily the most import one.  Just that, taking this view, we have an interesting intervention into the rhetorical force of God.

 

 To have a system of expectations in which catastrophes should be prevented, children should be well-treated, no one should be kidnapped or lonely or separated from those they love, is extremely human.  And extremely social -- we are best served by a society which tries to prevent human action from producing these horribly disrupting things.  So it is individual not to want to suffer these things, or to suffer the experience of watching those we love suffer these things; and it is communal to police individuals such that, in seeking to prevent such suffering in certain quarters they don't bring it down on others.  But of course suffering still happens.  The world is beyond an individual's total control, and individuals are beyond society's total control.  So we have God as the space defined by a dissatisfaction with the system that can't be redressed.  God as the figure who can't be played off against other figures, in monotheisms at least (this approach would i think get usefully complicated, but not undermined, by an exploration of poly- or non-theistic traditions), and who therefore can't avoid all your wrath (for disaster) or all your adoration (for its prevention).

 

Art, for Foucault, is for the limit of the reasonable, productive maintenance of social order.  Maybe.  Something like that anyway, at least in his early writing. (Which makes one think he's incredibly indebted to Bataille, but we'll leave that for the moment).  For Hoeg's Kaspar, God is for the limit of anger; a point which shows you the dimensions of your world with the good and the bad and the out-of-control all picked out in stark relief.  In this order of things, religion is what allows full humanity (the actual geography of experience) and full divinity (the absolute limit) to co-exist.  It is also a relationship between one's emotional and rational reactions to the world.  It mediates the limit without in any way threatening the legitimacy of the limit, because the limit is felt, both emotionally and rationally, as a part of the experience of being in the world.  God is a presupposition of sorrow -- and of joy, though that's less a part of this passage.

 

The risk here is to echo Marx, and call God/religion "the sigh of the oppressed people," which is not at all what i mean.  God is the coproduction of the oppression and the ability to sigh, or their ground, or the pivot on which those two things, oppression and sigh, can be seen as in opposition.

 

Again, I don't mean to imply that that's all there is to religion.  It isn't.  God isn't even all there is to religion, and this isn't all there is to God.  And it isn't even all there is to philosophical clowns in beautiful literature.  But it's in there, among all the other things.

 

Our Cities, Ourselves

Now listening to: 'Thirty Thousand' by Colonies

Especially: Track 3,"Morning"

(I like Colonies, and not just because they're from Tacoma.  'Thirty Thousand' draws on Deathcab and Modest Mouse, and has songs about Argentina's Dirty War that are not exactly shoegaze and not exactly post-rock, so I will just call them lovely. ) 

 

At one point in the development of this weblog, I meant to write about religion and politics and culture and ended up writing mostly about pop songs.  Lately whenever I mean to write about religion and politics and culture and pop songs I end up writing about cities.  About my shifts through them and where I am when I miss them and what it's like when I return.

I spent two weeks recently flitting between all my cities, all my home towns, anyplace I've ever had an Amazon shipping address.  I went from my college town to the city where I signed my first lease to the city I lived in up until last year, and ended up idling for a week in the city where I was born before coming home to the city where I live now.

I tend to think of myself as explained in important ways by being from Tacoma.  It's my origin, this quasi-dilapidated port city on the shores of an inland, island-strewn sound.  It's my formative years and my biannual pilgrimage.  I am never not bound to it, and it came first, before college or Philadelphia or Seattle or Chicago.  My aesthetic and my ethic and my level of enthusiasm for smalltalk are all Tacoman, on this view.  If you call me on something odd, and I have no other explanation to give you, I will tell you about being from Tacoma and really believe that tells you everything you need to know.  All my whirling, all my exploration and my drive, has a center holding it together.  Geographically. And it is called Tacoma, the City of (my) Destiny.

The origins of things are as much a structural obsession of religion as they are a metaphysical one.  That is, the 'birthplace' of gods and saints and local practices holds traditions together in diaspora as much as do the prayers and cosmogonies.  There are things that were perfect at the beginning, and in returning to them (to their sacred time/place collision), traditions stay the same tradition they've always been.  The idea that a faith tradition's home is some knot through which each new stitch of historical thread is looped, again and again, anchoring the stitch and expressing the accumulation of new developments in the fabric of the original moment, itself always already and ever unchanged, is a bit lopsided.  The homesoil, the origin story, the root of the tradition and the density of its gravitational pull, are narratively necessary, not physically necessary.  Rome and Baltimore and Vatican II and all such things are not as determinant as they are authorizing, and the fact that they are called on to authorize, to knit together, is both the source of their power and their constant instability.  Because it is not true that they are ever unchanged.  Being called on so often doesn't just reveal their contingencies and their mad, arbitrary constructions; it co-creates them.

I realize, every once in a while, that some of the things I tell people I get from Tacoma have in fact been modified, by college or my first job or my 2nd degree, so far beyond something explicable by Tacoma that they are actually obscured by that description.  Also, that some of the patterns and practices by which I move through Tacoma now are abstractions knit-together from other cities I have known.  Tacoma is itself an unstable center, a changing beast, most obviously in my subjective experience of it; but also materially, in terms of the spaces I occupy, the services I provide and the products I consume when I return there.  Cities are mapped by civic bodies, and vice versa, and this is how everyone cross-pollinates.  Everyone and everytown is a collection of inexact imprints, an endlessly generative node of interpenetrations.

Which is not to say that I will quit telling people that my dislike of smalltalk is a Tacoma thing, or my love of old warehouses.  Or that Catholicism will (or should) quit attributing things to Rome.  I do not abandon my interst in the real value of origins, as both story and angle of incidence; but origins change too.

Pop Goes the 2010!

 Now Listening to : Pop Goes the 2010

Happy 2011!  I made a mixcd a few weeks ago to hand out in lieu of christmas cards/gifts, but only to people I actually saw.  And felt kind of bad about that. But not bad enough to make a bunch more copies and mail them around. 

Then I thought: this is why the internet was invented.  So I 'xplored the internets and found links to the songs I'd put on the mix (WHICH.TOOK.FOREVER.) and have collected them below.  For you.  Happy Holidays from the Dinnertray!

Pop Goes the 2010! (A Happy Old Year's Mix): 

1. "Neverending Summer" - Dayplayer
2. "Science Competition" - The Zebras
3. "Tell the Boys" - Jesse Sykes
4. "Wedding Bells" - Lissie
5. "The Tennis System (And Its Stars)" - The Lilys
6. "Where Do You Run To" - Vivian Girls
7. "Seer" - Motopony
8. "City With No Children" - Arcade Fire
9. "Station Coffee" - Jonathan Fire Eater
10. "Just Don't Leave Town" - Dolorean
11. "Lost In My Mind" - The Head and the Heart
12. "Kill This City" - Aaron Thomas
13. "Draw It On A Map" - The Young Evils
14. "Oranges to Florida" - Cerys Matthews
15. "Hometown Glory" -  Adele
16. "Tacoma" - John Craigie
17. "Dirty City" - Kids And Animals
18. "Cosmic Love" - Florence + The Machines
19. "England" - The National
20. "Incandescent" - The Guild League
21. "Voice In Headphones" - Mount Eerie

 1/9/11 ETA -- As of the time i put them up, all the links let you listen to the full track but not download it, and wherever possible it also points you towards a place to buy the artist's music legitimately if you wanted to, though that didn't work out for every track. If you find a dead link, or one that takes you to an iffy site, please let me know and I'll try to find an alternate source.

    It's also been suggested that I say a little something about the organizing principle behind the mix, inasmuch as there was one.  Mostly it's a list of songs that I, for whatever reason, loved this year.  Many of them were released in 2010, but by no means all.  Quite a few are about cities, about hometowns, about leaving or hating or missing or settling into a particular place, which, coincidentally, would be an accurate if romanticized version of my own personal 2010.  Some of the tracks are specifically intended for one or more of the intended recipients, but most aren't.  A few clusters might tell a story because of how they're arranged, but I put them in this sequence not for story but for how smoothly or dramatically one song led into the next in terms of volume, instrumentation and melody.  This, in principle, is how I organized.

Moody Moderns

Now listening: Cerys Matthew's 'Don't Look Down', especially Track 6: "Smash the Glass"

 

    'Modern' is one of those rich, annoying words - like 'Justice(1),' which I've already I think gone on about here - that's both an orientation and a data set, evidence and methodology.  Modern Catholics live in a post-VII world; this means both that they live along a timeline which follows said historical event, and that they approach said living in a way conditioned by particular forms of knowledge.   Modern scholars too, live in the 21st Century, and they school along with trends in critical, post-critical and post-ironic theory.  All so very modern.  (And I'm doing that which I hate, dividing the human world, at least in part, into thought and practice.  Ideology and observation.  It seems ...useful...to do that here, but I hope I don't have to stop with that.)  Which proves 'Modern' is a living, important bit of verbiage, one worthy of the work it puts you to.  Judging from the decade-long wrestle I've had with 'Justice,' I assume the farthest I'll every really get in terms of the ability to use 'Modern' in a way that feels responsible is a sense of resignation as I pick a use and apologize to all its disruptive supplements, like kids I'm not feeding who'll get fed somewhere else.  And maybe foment revolution when they hit puberty.

    My two projects for the next few weeks involve working through two 'Modern' moments: contemporary study of religion, and recent work in American Catholicism.  Now, neither 'contemporary' nor 'recent' are synonyms for 'Modern' in any but the sloppiest ways.  And yet.  Theories and understandings of modernity run throughout.  There's an idea that we've had a radical break with even the 'human' that came before us; and I can't help feeling that every generation ever feels that way.  That they've killed their idols.  That they've formed a distinct new branch off the evolutionary tree.  And I'm not entirely convinced by the myth of the self-made modern.  But my hermeneutic of skepticism is no substitute for looking closely at what's there, so I'll look for real discontinuities (conditioned, of course), and I'm sure I'll find them. Because if nothing else, the 'Modern,' is an inevitable comparative framework.  You can study 21st Century CE French Islam and 3rd Century BCE Chinese Ascetics in the same week because the scholars are both modern, the studies are both markedly modern in methodology.  Or, you can study Dragon King Temple resurgence in post-Communist China and Internet pilgrimage among Western Catholics because both are governed by 'popular' and 'technological' revolutions, markers of modernity as far as we've thought them.  But I'm still undecided whether 'Modern' has any good, solid use for me outside of marking off certain comparative dangers to avoid.  I'm afraid, though, that saying that commits me to a reification of discontinuous history, which just seems unverifiable.

 

 

(1) My feeling on this, basically, is that 'Justice' can be understood as a balancing of the scales, a way to restore equilibrium.  But it intervenes, makes cuts, re-organizes.  It isn't a balancing in the sense of restoring some perfect, prior, order; it builds an order it presupposes, and you could develop a system that 'restores' the equilibrium disrupted by 'Justice', and then corrects for that, ad infinitum.  I don't think that makes 'Justice' in any way unnecessary, I just don't think it's got some kind of inherently transcendent purity to it either.

Aging as History

Now listening to: The Sadies' "Darker Circles"

'specially: Track 7, 'Whispering Circles'

Fifteen years ago, both Rebecca Gates and Ken Stringfellow were playing in (separate) bands.  I recently saw a posting for a show they'd be playing together -- both are currently touring for solo careers that began some time ago.  I love that fifteen years ago, I was not expecting this show; just not thinking about it at all. Reading about it now, though, I have this thick, thick description of the event.

I had "Manos" by the Spinanes (Rebecca Gates' band with soon-to-be Built to Spill drummer Scott Plouf), backed by Tracy Chapman's self-titled album, on a cassette that I brought with me on a school trip to Australia.  I hear 'Spitfire' and think of bus or plane windows onto trees and clouds that looked unfamiliar just because I knew they were.   I remember listening to 'Please Return It' off "Amazing Disgrace" by the Posies (Ken Stringfellow's band) on extended, loud repeat while housesitting the summer before I left for college -- the joyous freedom of not having anyone around to be annoyed by my popsong obsession.

And now both bands are done*, and Gates and Stringfellow are playing solo shows, sometimes together.  I love that I have this extensive personal investment in this one event, that the time and energy I put into these bands, these songs, these artists has prepared in me a totally entangled reception of this event.  That wasn't the point at the time; I listened because, at any given moment under any given set of circumstances, that was what I wanted/chose to do.  Or someone else wanted/chose. History here isn't causal or contingent, it's the accumulation of discrete and overdetermined occasions that lead not to an event, but to a particular appreciation of it. An appreciation that I have because of how I spent my time, and how they spent theirs.

I'm old enough now that on my birthday, at least half my birthday cards make jokes about how women lie about their age.  I haven't done that yet - I may eventually, but I sort of don't like the thought of that particular lie.  In all my years I accumulate observations and responses, and I am the only thing holding all that past together. Which isn't important in any sense, but it's singular.  Without me doing it, it wouldn't happen.  Without all the time I spent sneaking Posies songs onto my college radio show (supposedly a folk/americana hour), or the the invitation emails I sent out that advertised a Spinanes-based party soundtrack, I wouldn't have this particular reaction to the combination of solo tours by Rebecca Gates and Ken Stringfellow.  And if that reaction didn't exist, it wouldn't be a loss to the world so much as a loss to me -- I love the sense of time I get from this whole process.

This isn't really about religion (Although, let's be honest. I've probably written more about music on this weblog than about religion. Sometimes tangentially, and sometimes to illustrate a point about religions, but still.), but it may be a nod to my approach to History.  I'll start a doctoral program at Northwestern this fall on North American Religions, and I think a big part of my first year is going to be familiarizing myself with history as a discipline and genre. And, as of now, my idea of history is more about appreciation of an event than determining its cause.

*(ETA) I stand excitedly corrected.  The Posies are not done and are 'bouts to release a new album.  Score!

Tacoma

I once described my hometown as "like closing your eyes and turning on your fingers." I could, I think, describe a lot of things that way -- or at least a lot of remembered things -- but Tacoma is special. There's something very physical -- fingerable - about memory. Very tactile and drawn and strung out. And Tacoma is so much in my memory that it feels like it operates my bones; draws my knees up and my elbows in when I walk, pushes on my ribcage when I breathe. I love this town. I'm not sure I love living in it, but I do love it. I feel pulled in every direction when I'm home -- towards Ruston Way and the sea-sucked piers; or the downtown warehouses, with the turn of the century advertisements so light against brick walls they look like hallucinations; or Northend trees and houses I saw once a very long time ago, and then remembered that first look every other time I passed for decades, til the sight of them is layered in me like levels of skin. Every street I move down, I want to see what's on either side as well. I want South Tacoma Way and Commerce Street and Verde, the whole of each, to be around me at all times (a geographic impossibility, but not a conceptual one) and I want Wrights Park and Point Defiance and the Narrows Bridge in reach. To hand. It feels like dancing feels. It's an odd embodiment, maybe. It's joyous though.

It somehow seems appropriate

To post this on here, considering this here weblog was begun, originally, to document my academic career.

Comparative Religion Written Examination

Student Major Paper: Authority Among the Good: An Examination of Authority in Conflicts Between ‘Orthodox’ And ‘Heterodox’ Religious Groups (Proto-Orthodox Christians, Medieval Cathars and Post-VII American Traditionalist Catholics) 

Student Minor Paper: Communion and Exclusion: Consideration of the Mass as Sacrifice in Explanations of American Traditionalist Resistance to Post VII Liturgical Reform

Questions for MA exam

Field: Christianity
     When compared and contrasted with some other religious traditions, Christianity has often been characterized as placing most of the emphasis on ideas rather than practice in its fundamental self-definition, on “orthodoxy” rather than “orthopraxy.” Is that a useful generalization or a problematic one? Imagine that you are sketching out your lecture addressing this question, as one unit within your upper-level undergraduate course on “Fundamental Issues in the Study of Christianity.” What would be your main points? What 2 or 3 or 4 examples from primary sources would you certainly want to include among the students’ readings for this lecture, and why? Be sure to mention at least a couple of the most important scholarly articles or books that would also be read for this unit, and give some indication of their pertinence.

Field: Religion and Culture
     Discuss the central differences between learned and popular witch beliefs in Europe. Your essay should consider the distinct origins and context of these levels of belief, as well as specific regional examples of how the belief systems interacted during the witch trials of the 15-17th centuries.

Field: ‘Theory and Method’ Offer a working definition of ‘religion’. Defend your definition by explaining how it responds both descriptively and analytically to the needs of a field like ‘comparative religions’ in the contemporary academic world of interdisciplinary scholarship and engagement. How might you understand it in relation to definitions of religion put forward by Durkheim, Geertz, Bataille, Girard and Godelier? (Address at least 3 of these scholars in your response.)

Sacramentality: Death of a Matriarch

It begins with knowing, because knowing is the half of battle that engages you, that tells you what the sides are, the stakes are, and what you can realistically expect to take out of the whole mess by the end. So you know she's ending, and you run through the apologias of a death now, of a stretching on until the wedding; of a going in peace, of getting to say everything that twenty-three people could possibly say to the one person they've all known as long as knowing's been an option. These aren't alternatives like in the sense of choosing one and pushing it forward, they're stacked contrarily in your palms so you can grip them all together, smooshed, ambivalent and opaque. Like literature. Like a defense mechanism.

Everyone attends her. Brings her water, exhibits varying degrees of worry about her chapped lips, stares at her cheek bones and her forehead and her wrists. At her walls and then her breathing. Speaks; is whispered to. Comes back out into the living room with everyone else, with the other people who will go in later or who just can't go in anymore tonight. Who all together watch college basketball on mute and talk about each other, about buying houses or finding jobs or keeping them, about rivalries and psychologies, about choosing majors and spouses, and about making her funeral plans. About the symbolism and the practicalities. About the finances and the aesthetics. And asks someone who just got up, to check the mail or bring in beer or order pizza or pull out the roast. Everyone must eat and sleep and check their email and finish lesson plans, and they can do all these things while keeping to a schedule of dosing her with roxanol and advil cream and oxycodone. You eat cookies and you take her temperature. You check the score and then you roll her body to a new side, hold her tightly so she knows you won't drop her, clutch her not in love but in caretaking because these are different and she knows it and she feels horrible for changing all that, and angry at you for not hiding it better. Or for other things.  But she breathes on and then she's sleeping, and you watch that for a while and then you reconcile it to yourself, and trust that she's doing the same; and you go back to the living room and the processing and the beers.

When she stops breathing, the one's nearby put whiskey in glasses and they drink toasts over her, in the quiet of a room without an oxygen machine. Her room is quiet and they drink like her children and grandchildren: noise and wit and the drive to communicate. Like mourning that is another half of battle, equal parts action and unknowing. They call everyone else, reach them in college or at home or on a business trip. They call the funeral home. They rub their foreheads and the edges of their glasses. They call everyone else again, or wait to be called. Phones are funny, absent presences, promises of bodies to come.

She was Catholic, so they are. Catholic enough to know what they can't remember anymore. To plan a funeral mass with a priest they've either never met or not seen in a decade. But they pick hymns and readings, and choose readers and eulogists and pallbearers and eucharistic ministers. Catholic enough, some won't take communion themselves because they won't take confession. Won't ask the Father to schedule it. They are sacramental and lapsed and familiar.

Everyone comes to the rosary, and almost everyone needs it explained. The rosary beads are plastic, made in Italy. Each comes with instructions which they follow along, and when the woman at the front misses a 'Hail Mary' everyone notices and looks at each other all, "dumbass," but they are still impressed at how quickly it all goes.  At the rhythm and the hum.  The people who speak next were friends and neighbors, loved her. They are sappy and intrusive if they aren't family, but they also make you sob brokenly and honestly, and it's a relief. And then you look in the casket, and the embalmed body has her teeth back in, and looks like artistry. There is spackle where the wrinkles were and the chapped lips are waxed for eternity and decomposition. Everyone was crying before, but this sight stops it. There are jokes and tissues, and then cookies and coffee and the greeting of everyone else who came to be sad and respectful with you. And then everyone extricates themselves, ends up back at the house where she died with cases of wine and plates of macaroni and they sit in the living room again, college ball on mute, and every chair, including hers, full of someone, and everyone else on the floor with their backs against someone's legs. And everyone is drunk and/or full, and everyone knows what to do at the church tomorrow.

At the church everyone is in blacks and whites, and red necklaces and blue neckties. Thirteen grandchildren stand by the casket, walk with it on its rollers into the church, and eventually up to the altar. They sit with their families, they open their hymnals, they sing. They sit and stand and kneel slowly, when someone tells them to. Some of them walk up the aisle, genuflect, read at the lectern, genuflect and return to the pew. Some of them almost cry, some of them shake a little. Some of them tell jokes, anecdotes and gestures towards (here) unrepeatable stories. They exit the church, walk the body to the hearse and step back.  Six children take the aspergillum from the priest and send its water over the distance to her casket.  Then everyone disperses, greets everyone else they didn't notice before, then get in cars and find the cemetery, the gravesite, the casket again.  They bury her with flowers and pageantry and unknowing.   She is, among all the other things, a body in a box on a hill.

After the cemetery there is a 'wake' of sorts (a tradition handed down, handed over; suited to its times).  There are tables and countertops of bread and ham, tossed salads and cooked carrots, pastas and casseroles and rice dishes.  There are coolers in the backyard of bottled beers and canned sodas, a table with rows of wine six, seven bottles deep.  Everyone is toasting and talking, but eventually everyone else begins to leave.  The thirteen grandchildren toast in the garden with Bailey's.  More people leave.  It is only the family, and they meet in the kitchen, perched and leaning and standing.  They each take a plastic cup of Jameson and they toast her, all of them, and toast each other.  Toast to toasting.  Toast to whiskey.  Toast to stories told all the way through now, that were gestures under church ceilings.  She is a memory and a body and a battle and a battler.  They are in food and drink and reminiscing.  They are a group without her, that is without her.

Instead of Effort

Now listening to: Andrew Bird's "Noble Beast" '
Specially: Track 10, 'Anonanimal'

In my navy blue vans and my academic elbow pads, curling and uncurling in my local coffee shop, I am I think not far off from what I could have imagined for myself 15 years ago. I wouldn't have gotten the laptop right, or necessarily guessed the full contents of my ipod, but aside from technological developments (and the allergic reactions to home one develops if one stays away from home too long) this all seems quite predictable.

On my tabletop there are books, and I'm supposed to be writing things about them. That, more than anything else, was predictable. Wasn't it. But I'm not writing on literature -- at least not on literature 'as such', which is the closest I come to surprising this afternoon. I'm writing about religion, about the ways available for the mediation of grace.

I want to be able to work some comparisons among historical examples of heretical or schismatic movements. 'Heretical', as in opposed to some sort of orthodoxy. Only, it's the opposition that creates the division between the two, so how to examine the situation, the tension, without falling into category traps? Without accepting the names the winner gives, just because things need names. Parts do. I think I don't really get history. Chronology is such an assumption.

The other thing, thoroughly unsurprising to and of me, is that I cannot focus, and do not know how to write when i don't have something I want to write about. Falling back on nitpickicisms does not a presentation make. Also, just to state it for the record, i hate the spelling of the word 'surprise'. I think the first 'r' makes it ugly. Yeah, I'm not writing this paper right now.  But someday it will be epic.