The Dinnertray

Update

Now listening: Adele, "19"
'Specially: Track 4, 'Cold Shoulder'

I am not dead, but neither do I have a viable research proposal combining the work i want do do on Trinchard, post VII mass, traditioning, sacrifice, and the emergence/reification of the dominant religious form(s). So mostly I'm writing other things for the moment.

As a point of interest, however, i would like to point out that this blog, when examined by genderanalyzer.com, has a 59% chance of having been written by a guy.

Thoughts on having seen, finally, Scorcese's 'The Departed'

Now listening: Rolling Stones, "Let it Bleed"
Specially: Track 1, 'Gimmee Shelter'

I don't entirely understand the 21 gun salute for the funerals of heroes.

Why is it honor, shots fired and ungrounded? Bullets unburied, unfleshed. Ineffective weapons. No hostile intent, just wasteful excess.

Bataille would be pleased. Or curious. I've been thinking, again, about terms and rates of exchange. In the Life of Pelagia, for example, there is the translation between the prostitute's lovers and the bishop's Bridegroom. There are strict rules for throwing over Satan and cleaving unto God. There are strict regulations on what prostitution money can be spent on, can be used for. What it may touch. There's some metaphysical excess, some value sunk into the Kingdom of God, but it's really thoroughly commodified and documented and measured out in the anarchic suburbs of Eden.

Bataille's point put simply is that excess is a category of exchange, and I've almost maybe got a handle on his parameters for that category, and they may be what I want. Maybe not though, since I keep reading him as ultimately satisfied with the unformulatable 'nature' of that excess. I should read him again.

There's something graceful and horrible about bullets fired for a shot body but into no skin of their own. It's a weird ritual. I've looked up the history, and I know there are reasonable explanations. But it's Kafkaesque as well. A remainder of the process of reason - I mean, there's the process, and then there's also a remainder. An apple sunk into an abdomen, a whipping in a closet, a needle run off its groove. When kids read Kafka, he's presented as a weirdo. You don't start with Kafka. You wait til you've been brought through weird by Faulkner, maybe, or Melville. Perhaps then you go through some Flannery O'Connor, whose world at least looks plausible. Kafka's world, made plausible by your reading of it, denatures plausibility. I need to find the Kafka of terms of exchange/ritual studies.

Question Concerning Technology

Now Listening: Blind Pilot, '3 Rounds and a Sound'
'specially: Track 2, "The Story I heard"

Communication is a bit of a sacrament, or it can be. You lose some of that connection ("lit up, beyond question, with grace") when you know a thing without being given it. When your available information exceeds the conversation you can have. So do you press the conversation, force it to adjust to outside information, or do you let the nuances of that conversation open, or not open, at its own pace?

I like the latter.

Tissues, boundaries, bones

Now listening: The Notwist, "The Devil,You + Me"
'Specially: Track 9, 'Boneless'

I study religion, because there is a thing that makes a person say (some things; some people), "we/i/one are/am/is made for more than this".  And it's either the "more" or the "made" upon which hinges something interesting (which is not the same thing as its being communicable; here is a potential problem for my study.  Shh.  Moving on.).  Ends or origins.  What could be meant when someone means these?  Means them in the midst of some "this" that is mere, somehow unsatisfactory and obvious?

(There's lots of other ways to interrogate that sentence.  Wittgenstein would point you towards the backslashes, for example.  I suppose you could interrogate my particular interrogation and find the gaps in which I stand.  Loll.  Lollygag.)

I think i'm safe asking it this way.  If I asked what is more, what its architecture and economics, or if i asked what is made, (what the sinew, what the law), then i can't imagine taking it seriously.  But I ask what is meant by meaning these, and I think there's techniques available to me for that sort of research.

If you've ever read some Goethe, it will not surprise you to know that these thoughts?  Children of a bitch toothache.

In Praise of Lazy

Now listening: Whiskeytown, "Strangers Almanac"
Especially: Track 9, 'Waiting to Derail'

A week is barely time to get one's house in order, catch up on fiction and make new charts & tables of grammar points to prepare for summer language study.  It being all the time there is, though, it'll do.

I'm without my computer for the week, which keeps me on track, though; it's amazing how much more productive i am without constant internet access.  The first two mornings I woke up with an urge to check email, and had to distract myself with books and breakfast and a walk.  Going to bed it's the same: without email, facebook, online shopping, how do I know I've completed my day?

I titled this entry "In Praise of Lazy", because I'd like to express my adulation for low-speed productivity.  Not inactivity, just not furious, driven, industrialized nations productivity.  The sort of quiet plodding best suited to life in a small tower on a midsize island, where you mostly eat bread and beer and produce, and write in notebooks while listening to casette tapes you made of college radio shows.  And every day, somehow, there's still time to wash dishes and sleep soundly and check the horizon for new kinds of sailing vessels, even while you're reading and writing and eating, which is all I do anyway, but here and now these things take up more time.

The beauty of city living is, honestly, the people.  Whom I love.  And I feel inhuman wishing for an island without them, wishing for solitude and focus.  I mean, I get why folks sometimes want to be quietists; but I also get why larger communities hold them in suspicion.  It's a fine line between self and others.

Symmetry and Empire

Now Listening: The National, "Boxer"
'Specially: Track 2, "Mistaken for Strangers"

There have been some beautiful sunsets this month. Beauty to break you. And whether their beauty or my breaking came first, I cannot tell. Post hoc is not propter hoc, necessarily.

At the coffee shop the other day I ended up sitting near a student of mine from a while back. We said 'hi', and then moved on to our own things. My thing was a book by a neo-traditionalist Jesuit disgruntled about the "diabolical feminine" bouncing around in the American church today (SoGoddamnAwesome.); hers? A conversation of undergraduate proportions. Drama, and punkrock, and new knowledge. The group spent like 10 minutes trying to remember how English does the subjunctive. It is not, we learned, by adverbs. Or by participles. It is by ... some other thing. My tongue was near bit off as the two of us (tongue and I) wrestled with the possibility of conversational intervention. I, and the book in front of me, won -- my tongue had to be content with the americano there on the bar (temperature, texture; we should be so lucky.)

It is finals. I am writing two papers. One proposes to examine 'Apostasy Within', the book I refer to above as Awesome (a completely reasonable assessment) through comparison to a couple of ethnographic treatments of refugee/victim communities - that is, groups (with individual experiences, but collective stories; individual sensations, collective explanations) who have been from their origins untimely ripped. I'm looking at the work of Liisa Malkki, and the Hutu refugees who escaped Tutsi massacres to settle in either towns or camps - camp settlers end up a little pissed at the town settlers who 'move on' to a certain extent from the collective story, who dissipate its centrality instead of repeating it into myth. Veen Das looks at the victims of partition violence in the India/Pakistan split, and then at the anti-Sikh riots following the assassination of Indira Gandhi. She talks about the difference between 1) finding 'everyday' outlets for pain in the creation of new stories and structures, and 2) repeating stories without authorial voice, without personality, stories recycled and recapitulated without character development that become the rumors that instigate mob violence. And I'm comparing that to neo-traditionalist American catholicism. Because I see symmetry, perhaps, in places that are not altogether obvious. That may not, altogether, exist.

Anyway, I'm not sure exactly what I mean by supplementing that 'symmetry' with 'empire' in my title above. Except that empire is not just about control, regulation, oppression, colonialist expansion. It's about structured relations, some of them hierarchical, some of them just based on contingency: on proximity and working together.

Tradition is my working term. It's about power, sure, but about connection too.

Also, I need to write something today on scripture, language, and conciliar documents/documentation. Eh.

Heaven is a Track

Now : Andrew Bird, 'Armchair Apocrypha'
'specially : Track 2, "Imitosis"

I've been thinking a lot about 'Deathcab For Cutie' lately. About how they barely feel like a band to me -- and not (entirely) because they mix the (lovely!) Gibbard vocals so high, though that could be a whole 'nother thing. I mean: they feel like music that happens, not that's made.

There's the possibility that they've been a mainstay of my listening pleasure since college, and I have so many memories built around hearing them over headphones as I walk places, or seeing them play, or thinking along to their melodies as something else - otherwise unrelated but now inextricably meshed -, actually takes place. So they're an always-already, 'cause I'm just so used to them bein' 'round.

That's a far easier position to prove (for all y'all working on the response paper) than one dependent on some essential characteristics of 'Deathcab-for-Cute'ness, but I wouldn't foreclose the possibility that there is some metaphysic peculiar to their sweet-yet-uncuddly punk. A thing to communicate, or a method of communication, that is a messenger, angelic, ideally suited for my ear.

I would not like to meet them.

Have you ever been to a show? And stood near the front, and closed your eyes? And danced a little bit, but mostly in your head? And then opened your eyes? And met those of the band?

It's jarring. Uncomfortable. They're playing, and you're listening, so contact should be incendiary, right? The gaze itself burning the (ocular) offering? But they're making the music, and you're hearing it. These are essentially different modalities, and my reception can't conceive of the mechanics of their emission; their creation can't conceive of the imperfections (i'll get there in a minute) of my re-creation. I watched a tour documentary on the band over Christmas, and there's a point where Gibbard says something about liking to write songs sometimes because the girl in the song is prettier than she ever was in real life.

There is an essential disconnect between the written/controlled/complete and the real life/overdetermined/ongoing. Artists, god love 'em, really do communicate something -- but it is not a dialog. It is not intersubjective.

Individuality (i'm supposing) is imperfect repetitions of the past - of histories/ideologies/biologies and suchall. It's a wonderful, empowering feeling to re-create. But it requires previously created material for substrate. We make gods of those(/That) who create(s), because we can't make partners of them. Freewill requires some vacuum, some withdrawal of the origin to make space (fall) for our own imperfections. Our changes. Our particular invocation of Something to enact some things.

To sum up, religion - like fandoms of a more indiepop variety - depends on an entirely absent beloved. The ethics of engaging that beloved within the actions of this world is centered (at least functionally; theologically, we'll leave for another field) in the head of the believer alone. When we talk about religious action - whether in the interest of social justice or electioneering or other - one of the most crucial elements to consider is the power in re-creation of the original transmission, and of the concomitant pangs of separation sensed in that movement. The Gap in which they Stand.

Happy 2008

Now Listening: Red House Painters "Red Perspective"
'Specially : Track 5, 'New Jersey'

The new ipod puts the lock toggle in a different place than I'm used to.

I depend a lot, usually, on a certain tactile memory; I like to be able to flip my phone on, apply chapstick and unlock my ipod without checking up on my fingers, because then I don't have to stop paying attention to traffic, or conversation or whateverhaveyou. So this new ipod configuration is pretty annoying, even if the ipod itself? Is pretty.

If you've ever met me, or heard me tell the story about the time my dad tried to teach me to drive, you might be suprised at the idea that I have any sort of physical coordination whatsoever, but there you are.

This relates in no way at all to religion, politics, or the space between.

Happy 2008!

Origin Sins

Now : New Pornographers, "Challengers"
'Specially : Track 3, 'Challengers' (I am a sucker for both Neko Case and the Banjo; this was predictable)

(Excerpted from a paper, in progress, on a heresiologist (Irenaeus) in the early church who was sort of freaked out by childbirth. Seriously.)

... A quick note about my use of the term ‘obvious’ here. One element of literary analysis is the examination not just of what an author writes but of what she leaves out – either because introducing this into the text may highlight a flaw in (or completely undermine) her argument, or because it is so obvious as to be an unnecessary inclusion. For example, if I tell a story about my summer vacation and do not end it with a reference to my return to school, this may be because I am done with school, which thereby changes the nature of summer vacation from interim relaxation to post-graduate aimlessness; what I wanted the reader to understand as ‘summer vacation’ in the general sense of that phrase is actually not ‘properly’ understand in this category. More information would cripple my project. On the other hand, I may not have mentioned it because the very category of ‘summer vacation’ implies that at the end of it I naturally returned to school; this return is obvious, and to include it in my narrative would be a redundant waste of my reader’s time. The work of, among others, Rene Girard and Jacques Derrida has shown how useful analyzing for the former case may be for textual analyses; it is the second case that more directly informs my argument here, and for that the ideological theory of Louis Althusser is more directly applicable. Althusser defines ‘my’ ideology as my imaginary relations to the real conditions of my existence. That is, the manner in which I relate to the physical, social and economic realities with which I negotiate for my living. These negotiations are more conscious and explicit the more they deal with new and unfamiliar relations; old relations are often near-automatic repetitions of familiar negotiations, and therefore take less attention.

A basic component of an ideology is the collection of questions it forecloses – in the 2nd scenario above, my not ‘asking’ my narrative to specify that I came back to school is such a foreclosed question. Ideology makes social communication possible by establishing certain certainties: we are not constantly required to ask each other what ‘hello’ means and how best to respond to it; we are not constantly required to test the sidewalk with a stick to make sure it won’t fall away underneath us if we put our weight on it. While neither of these situations is absolutely certain (‘hello’ may be a distraction in order to initiate a mugging; flooding may have knocked out the support of our walkway), they are certain enough that we can usually disregard the possibility of their acting in an unexpected way unless foreign details (a furtive glance or a recent rain) have been introduced to make us wary. In persuasive texts such as the heresiological writings of Irenaeus, the ‘obvious’ points, the truths too certain to need examination can give as much insight into the world he imagines as the explicit points of his argument do to the world he advocates. He argues for a world where the transmission of the knowledge revealed by Christ is limited to Apostolic succession; he imagines a world where procreative transmission is an essentially destabilizing process, not only because desire is chaotic but because desire generates new meaning. It is fertility, not only lust, that makes up the immorality of desire. ...

All kinds, they say

Now listening to : Band of Horses, "Cease to Begin"
'Specially : Track 1, 'Is There A Ghost'

I am after travels, finally, and a walk around wallingford this afternoon was lovely and familiar and full of grace. Or, my ipod was full of Band of Horses and Rogue Wave and Galaxie 500 and Arcade Fire, and Blonde Redhead and other things that soar, which is, operationally, the same.

In San Diego, I thought of paper topics (the place of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert in the history of Jewish and Catholic humor, respectively; the history of academic disciplines, the breakoffs and conjoinings, the context that makes inter-disciplinarity possible and disruptive; a comparative analysis of religion courses offered by each state as transfer credit from community colleges to 4 year state institutions; Cheshire Calhoun's moral failure as a supplement or interrupt to Judith Butler's negotiation of gay rights in the world of Islamophobia) and ate excellently (avocado tempura, breakfast sandwiches, whiskey sours) and got around via public transports (busing and footing and $42 cab rides to Clarmont). I spent time with lovely people and ideas, and though it was too smoggy to see Mexico, I feel I got my weekend's worth.

Tacoma was, as ever, like closing my eyes and turning on my fingers.

Seattle is now, and cold, and caffeinated; and my apartment is a mess of things temporarily set aside (while I hunt for this book to write this section about it, and drop this bracelet onto that coffee table because the jewelery box isn't on the way from the door, and leave the nutella jar by my bed in case I want it again).

I'm anticipating a month of visits and visitations, and exchanges. And musical accompaniment. And every once in a while at least the intention of an entry here.