Catholic-envy

The New York Times did a moving article about the Catholic mission in Nigeria some weeks ago. It's just the kind of thing that fuels my longstanding Catholic-envy. Why is it that the Catholic church doesn't worry about racial and ethnic diversity? (There are more Catholics now in the southern hemisphere than in the northern.) Why is it that the Catholic church can pack working-class people and intellectuals into the same room? What are the mechanisms that ensure that David Tracy and Jean-Luc Marion speak the same spiritual language as the abjectly poor Nigerians who sleep on the church floor (see image)?

Yesterday my Episcopal parish held a very nice dinner for newcomers in one of the parishioner's house. The house was filled with books, American Indian pottery, Victorian photographs, Oriental rugs, handmade ceramic dishes and cups. The guests were friendly and welcoming, many of them were professors from the University of Oregon and many could be overheard talking about their dissertation topics. Ten years ago, I would have found this environment foreign and "other": they would have represented to me the habitat of educated upper middle-class white people. Today, I find this environment familiar. Since my involvement with the Episcopal church in college, I have become as "waspified" as one could as a Taiwanese-American immigrant. Even though I was still the only non-white person at the dinner, this environment is no longer "other" to me; it is a part of me. By participating in it, I feel that my place is ever more secured among educated white people who are also my natural work colleagues (I was one of those university professors at the dinner last night). It also means that my distance from the abjectly poor Nigerians is increasing.

During one of the conversations last night with various people, I briefly mentioned the Anglican church in Nigeria. My interlocutor immediately commented on a well-known fact: "The Nigerian churches are extremely homophobic." Indeed, I wouldn't deny it. But this comment also suggests that the Anglicans and Episcopalians of North America have very different values and priorities than their African brothers and sisters. (Do they consider the Africans brothers and sisters? The Catholics would.) Is the ordination of gays and lesbians the most important issue in a country where, according to the Catholic leaders in Nigeria, the church is only functioning institution, where people have no place to sleep and no access to adequate medical care? While the social advancement of gays and lesbians is a worthwhile cause for middle-class persons living in the northern hemisphere, is "homophobia" enough of a reason to break with the African churches? Should we consent to choose between LGBT brothers and sisters, who resemble us in class and education, and African brothers and sisters who may be homophobic but do not shop for organic vegetables?

The Roman Catholic church is said to be homophobic, misogynist, anti-modern, anti-democratic, patriarchal, etc. In fact, I can even add more adjectives if I wish: corrupt, crypto-pagan, mafia-like, sadomasochistic, perverse. The truth remains that this institution has survived for 2,000 years because, despite all its failings, it is concretely and not simply rhetorically committed to the universal brother- and sister-hood of human beings across race, ethnic and class divides. It has held on to the notion of "We are all one body," excruciatingly as it may be at times. The idea seems to be that it's better to go to hell all together as one big family than to be in heaven as separately saved individuals.

Recently, a completely irreligious young man asked me gleefully, "Hey, I heard that the Episcopal church is not religious at all, it's all about people making social connections with the high powers. That's the way it should be! Maybe I should join!" Needlessly to say, my Catholic-envy only increased.

A thought out of time

It's been a hectic time recently. Work, professional conference, travel in the middle of the academic quarter. All of which means that I have not taken care to give room in my mind for things of a higher order: that is, higher than the PowerPoint lecture I have to give tomorrow, higher than the midterm I have to make for students, higher than the documents I have to review for the next faculty meeting. But what does it mean, things of a higher order? For religious persons, it probably means something like spiritual truth. (Yes, it is Lent, so I am being doubly bad for not giving room to things of a higher order.) The question is thus easier - and therefore not as much fun - to answer for religious persons than it is for secular individuals. What does it mean for the secular person to give room in her or his mind for things of a higher order?

I was teaching Duchamp today. In 1913, without having any notion of creating a work of art or a "readymade," Duchamp mounted a single bicycle wheel on top of a kitchen stool. In so doing he destroyed the stool: it could no longer be sat on. He also destroyed the wheel: it could only turn in vain instead of serving as an instrument of locomotion. This new entity amused Duchamp; it also calmed him. He compared to the experience of watching it turn in his studio to the experience of watching flames in the fireplace. Without the two being the least alike in visual resemblance, the flames in the fireplace and the bicycle readymade had in common their timelessness.

What a strange thing to say: The Duchamp bicycle wheel is timeless like the flames dancing in the fireplace. One may imagine easily the timelessness of the flames: most likely the fire did for the cavemen a similar number as the one it does for us now. But the Duchamp is a distinctly twentieth-century invention. In retrospect, Duchamp had invented the first work of conceptual art. What can this possibly have in common with the timelessness of the flame?

One way of thinking about timelessness is that it is eternal, forever unchanging. Another way is to think about it as out of time, in the sense of having stepped out of ordinary time, no matter for how short or for how long. One must therefore imagine the wheel spinning on top of the kitchen stool as something that profoundly changes the way we think about movement in relation to time. In ordinary time, the speed of the spinning wheel corresponds to the speed in which the bicycle carries us from point A to point B. The faster the wheel spins, the shorter the time it takes for us to get to our destination. Movement in this case is utilitarian, or interested. We have an interest in how fast or how slow the wheel spins. By mounting the wheel on top of the kitchen stool, Duchamp effectively disinterested it. Now, the wheel no longer carries anything. Nothing is at stake in it anymore. Whether it spins fast, slowly or not at all has no consequence in life whatsoever. It becomes like the flame in the fireplace: whether it flickers this way or other, whether it cracks now or then, it makes no difference to the fire as a whole. Above all, the wheel is not going anywhere no matter how fast or slow it spins. The stool is stationary: it holds the wheel up but also grounds it. The entity therefore has the effect of a turtle or beetle turned over on its back: its legs frantically moving in vain.

Yet there is nothing frantic about Duchamp's bicycle wheel. Duchamp's own view of it is that of an affectionate detachment: he smiles instead of despairs over the finitude of the wheel. Does Duchamp smile because he thinks the universe is closed like a chess game, but enigmatic because of the infinity of moves that can nevertheless be had within a strict set of inviolable rules? Probably. But I think he is smiling also because he found a way to defeat interested-ness; he found a way out of time. This is why the object is ultimately a calming object: it is the paradox of a static movement or a moving inertia that suggests the uselessness of all efforts to move, to beat time.

Paradoxically, it is the way out of time that allows Duchamp to make some of the most important interventions in twentieth-century art; by stepping out of time, he makes history. How so? In an increasingly utilitarian world, we might entertain the counter-intuitive idea that only the non-utilitarian has real value. For instance, what I am writing here has no scholarly value (probably). I will not publish it; I will not use it advance my career; I will not need it to demonstrate that I am learned about Duchamp (I am not). But for the very reason of its disinterestedness (other than that it amuses me, distracts me, relaxes me), what I am saying this evening about Duchamp may have more interest in the long run, more interest than my scholarly publications. Interest for whom, for what? The fact that I cannot answer these questions is already suggesting to me that I may be right.

Newtown, Our Town

This week, a difficult encounter with a student in a course I taught this term plus the disastrous news from Newtown, Conn. made it hard for me to concentrate on my writing.

I am an art historian, I do research and teach students the history of modernism and the avant-garde. But I am also an educator, which makes me an officer of the intermediary realm between home and society for our nation's young people. In my short career of teaching, I have regularly encountered students who are mentally ill, and who need more urgent help than what I can provide. Within the infrastructure of the university, I have to refer them to other professionals for help. Even when I successfully send a student off to more qualified providers, I never stop thinking about them. I always wonder if they end up stepping out of their predicament.

Gun control would be a very good idea indeed, but not enough. It is imperative that we reflect on the rise of adolescent mental illness, the social marginalization of suffering individuals left to cultivate their destructive fantasies in a private theater whose curtain only opens when it is too late.

As an academic, my immediate social and professional milieus consist mainly of educated middle-class white people. It is striking to me how rarely parents discuss problems and/or difficulties of their adolescent children. I have the impression that people delight in cataloging the adorable gestures, speeches and talents of their toddlers. I rarely hear people discuss the anorexia of their teenage daughter, the drug troubles of their teenage son. At the same, I know for a fact that these problems are as real as the success stories of families.

Troubled adolescents are a lot less charming than angelic toddlers. In the wake of the Newtown disaster, we are still more interested in heart-warming anecdotes concerning the victims than in the dark despair of the killer, whose anger against life itself caused him to carry out a series of highly symbolic acts of destruction. It is no accident that this act was carried out during Advent and Hanukkah, when the rest of the world rejoiced, just as spring time is high time for suicide. To kill one's own mother is the ultimate act of denying life: one assaults life by killing the one person who gave one life. After the killing of the mother, all others became possible: innocent children became the target precisely because they symbolized life at its purest, most untarnished. True to this act of pure rage and destructiveness, the killer didn't spare himself; in fact, the whole shooting had been one massive, explosive suicide in which other innocent lives are included merely to aggrandize his descent.

From a theological point of view, we have less to worry about the innocent victims, who are no doubt in heaven, than we have to be concerned with the killer and others like him. To overcome my depression, I re-watched Archbishop Desmond Tutu's commencement speech at Gonzaga University, in which he talked about God's reliance on young people's passion as the means to do His work. It may be that in biblical times, young people were valued and given opportunities to work and apply their passion. Today, we don't value young people other than in their capacity as consumers. The capitalist market promises all kinds of happiness to adolescents other than the kinds that strengthen them, guide them toward productive and meaningful relationships with humanity. But young people will always remain passionate. If their passion is not directed to good things, it can go elsewhere.

With all the talk about angels, perhaps it's time to talk about fallen ones too.

Joyce and Gale Do Kinfolk

Dial 1 for Angel

Apparently you can call an angel on the cellphone now. This story about the human impersonation of an angel in Holland provides insight into how religious icons are created and then sustained. First, you need an iconography (image, preferably a statue). Second, you need a name and a site (angel, cathedral, etc). Third, you need a method of activation (in the Middle Ages, touch is the way; in the 21st century, you call on a cell phone). Fourth, you need a public (lonely people in need, in this case). Once you have all these elements, the religious icon becomes fully operative - and that's when the Catholic church moves in to make a few bucks.

Mondrian on Ash Wednesday

I (almost) blamed Mondrian for my (almost) forgetting Ash Wednesday this year. In the days leading to it, I had nothing else in my mind other than improving my lecture on the Dutch abstract painter for my modern art survey class. I checked out new books and scanned new images in order to make the perfect PowerPoint. I wanted every image in the presentation to be thoroughly researched and then studied closely, and every slide ought to tell a story (for instance, the influence of Cubism, the problem of the diagonal, the move from lozenge to geometric shape, the difference between him and the rest of De Stijl). Even more importantly I wanted to have something compelling to tell my students beyond mere facts. Like a 19^th-century Kunstwissenschaftler, I believe that art history should not be taught as a catalogue of works. Nor should students be treated like tourists in a museum: they are not here to be entertained. The rigor and fastidiousness of Mondrian must be presented in the right way so as to both challenge, dazzle and awaken the students from their habitual West-Coast stupor.

The lecture was successful: I got worked up preparing for the lecture, and I got really worked up delivering it. The students were excited to find out that Mondrian was right: the diagonal ruins everything, it seduces your eyes, it makes you focus on one area in the painting instead of giving general attention to the entire picture, and it deludes you into thinking that there is a little figure somewhere making faces at you (c.f. 1914 Oval Composition at the MoMA). I also found out that the majority of them have never seen a Mondrian in person. That’s something to aspire to, says Professor Cheng. One student came to see me after the class and told me how much she enjoyed “that last artist.” She realized the difficulty of abstract art when taken seriously. This is pretty good for a first lesson in Mondrian, I thought. How gratifying it is to know that Mondrian’s permutations of perfection still resonate today with our young, as long as we explain to them in the right way.

I was feeling rather pleased with myself when I found an e-mail from Gale: Don’t forget to get ash-ed this year! Suddenly the horror and sense of dejection from last year came upon me. By now Gale knows how good I am in missing feast days. One year I missed Palm Sunday twice in a day because my clocks and watches were not adjusted to daylight saving’s time. Last year I missed Ash Wednesday service, which I had remembered in the morning but forgotten at night, having been absorbed by my assistant-professor-frantically-preparing-for-lecture mode. I walked around the desolate streets of Eugene at around 8 p.m. in the evening, looking for a service, and I just missed the Episcopal service at St. Mary’s downtown, which ended at 7:45 p.m. In brief, I did get ash-ed last year, but through rather un-orthodox means (thanks to the good office of St. Mary’s young parish priest at the time). The important thing was to realize how abandoned, “left out,” as it were, I felt, when I entertained the idea of not having participated in Ash Wednesday service and therefore not having begun Lent the right way and therefore will not be “clean” for Holy Thursday and therefore the whole Triduum will be ruined and therefore the Resurrection of our Lord on Easter will not have the same meaning, etc and etc. In short, the world will come to an end.

Thanks to Gale, I didn’t miss Ash Wednesday this year, but I went to a Roman service on campus (it was the closest one at hand). The sanctuary was completely packed (so many Catholics in Eugene!) As is the case with Roman parishes in Eugene, it’s where you see all the people of color that you don’t see anywhere else in this town. I sat next to an elderly French woman, and all around me were Hispanics, Filipinos, South and East Asians, Afro-Americans as well as whites. The congregation looked like the utopia of the diversity initiative of the University of Oregon, who cannot seem to get the percentage of minority students to go into the double digits.

The priest had an affect typically associated with gay men, and he opened the service with a sassy reproach. “I’d like us to take time to look around and welcome the newcomers, many of whom probably don’t come to weekly Sunday mass [cough, cough].” The mixture of reprimand and affection in his tone appealed to me. It manages to scold and tolerate failure at the same time. That’s a trick I have to steal for my students who show up only on Wednesdays for the quiz, I thought. After all, what is Ash Wednesday but an opportunity to reflect on finitude? The important thing is that my students did come to class, just like the church-slackers who come running to the chapel on important days. When we do come back, moreover, God is as content and satisfied as Professor Cheng when she watches her students writing industriously in little green exam books in class.

But industry and discipline are both hard to come by. The priest tells us to fast, but admits that he himself is not particularly hungry: “I already had my meal today and it was good.” The strange thing is that God loves us anyway, as the priest told us over and over again, and I could not help feeling overwhelmed by what Gale used to refer to as the “kitsch-factor of Christianity.” In fact, my very first impression of Christians was in fact that they were “cheesy” people who could not stop talking about “love.” But is there something philosophical behind the “kitsch-factor”? At least for Episcopalians and Catholics, there is the strange fact that we can stray as far and as long as possible, we are still welcomed back to the church whenever we do decide to show up. This was the miracle that struck Jean Cocteau, who, when he finally returned to the Catholic church, wrote to the theologian Jacques Maritain of an angel who had been “saving his seat” ever since he left, in the hopes that he’d be back one day.

Who is welcome to the church? “Sinners, sinners!” says the priest, waving his hand energetically to signal his role as the first-sinner-among-equals. Yet it doesn’t really make sense. How can God love sinners as much as he does the righteous? It doesn’t seem fair. Unless, it suddenly dawned on me, sinners are the ones who testify to the existence of God more than anyone else. Sinners make God be because they need God more than anyone else. Thus, in a strange way, it also kind of makes sense. I think of an analogy from the classroom: Student A is intelligent, industrious and independent. Student B is confused, often absent in class, and likes to come whining at my office hour. Student A is easier on me but student B needs me more. If I do my job properly, I would give him/her more than what I give student A. Thus, in a paradoxical way, it is student B who makes me the good professor that I am. As Gale said to me once, the good student doesn’t make us a good teacher; s/he merely deludes us into thinking that we’re good. It’s the bad or mediocre student who gives us a chance to become the good teacher that we should all strive to be. So in the end, it does comes out even. God gives more to sinners than to the saints because sinners need God more.

So what’s in it for student A, or the “good one” who exerted almost no pressure on the teacher? I was a student A, so were many of my friends in college. These are motivated people who had high expectations for themselves. Some of us strive for perfection so much that we cannot let ourselves off the hook. But the will to perfection and the self-persecution that results from failure are in fact the other face of hubris, which God does not commend. After psychoanalysis, who can deny the exalted sense of election, the glory of martyrdom, the sadomasochistic power that an individual permits him/herself to feel when s/he succeeds in persecuting him/herself? As Bernanos’s young country priest says to a parishioner who condemned herself to a life of perpetual self-reproach, God also wants us to have mercy on ourselves. Since each of our souls belongs to God, to be unforgiving toward oneself is also a way of disrespecting God. Judging and sentencing oneself is pretending to do what only God has the power to do. After all, beyond the desire to regain mastery, is there not a more devious motivation behind someone’s taking the whip into his or her own hand, namely, to outshine the other fellow human beings in the competition for virtues, so as to have priority seating in the concert hall called paradise?

My Ash Wednesday ended with a concert of eighteenth-century music, performed by faculty in the School of Music at the university. It took place in the lobby of the university museum, with makeshift chairs and a small staff. The space was packed and many of my friends in the community were there. The leading musician of the chamber ensemble was Marc Vanscheeuwijck, a musician and professor of musicology, who gave a brief presentation about the program entitled “Le concert galant.” It consisted of music written right after the end of the Baroque era but cannot yet be considered as classical. It included pieces by Heinichen, Schiffelhoz, Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach, Platti, Mattheson, De Fesch and Blavet.

As I listened to the energetic and heartened performance, I understood what the leader of the ensemble referred to the mixed, irregular character of the music. I also could not help remarking how un-Mondrian this music is, so much it embodies qualities that he had abhorred: heterogeneity, lightness and, yes, pleasure. Furthermore, due to the non-standardization of eighteenth-century instruments and their relative imprecision (we had learned earlier that cellos of the period did not have to have a fixed number of strings), the music inevitably sounded out of tone to my “musical ear,” or what the Anglophone calls the perfect pitch. This music is the opposite of perfection. At one point the flutist had to cough and restart the piece. Yet why was I enjoying it so much? Why did I find myself relishing in the specific gifts of each musician: the cellist’s tremendous musicality, the flutist’s fluidity, for instance? Is there something compelling in this music and in this performance, something that becomes obvious to me precisely because we are not dealing with a Beethoven symphony or the Chicago Symphony Orchestra?

As the concert wrapped up with joyful applauses from the community of audience, many of whom were friends of the musicians, I realized, with a mixture of both surprise and relief, how much goodness and joy can be shared in the intermediary space (Zwischenraum) between perfection and finitude. Both – the temptation for perfection and the inevitable limits of being human – are part of God’s plan, but God also means for human beings to have a lot of room to live in between. In-between-ness is what this eccentric eighteenth-century music taught me. Once in a while, one among us will make a go for the extreme, as Mondrian did in painting, Simone Weil did in philosophy and ethics, and Dietrich Bonhoeffer in action. Most of us will not come even close in our entire life times to the inhuman rigor of these individuals and the solitude they were prepared to face. It is therefore a comforting thought that such wingless creatures as we can still achieve goodness through small, gallant leaps, and that the apparent frivolity in this refrain from Verlaine can also be a humble acceptance of our finitude and humanity: “Dansons la gigue!”

22-02-2012

Eugene, Oregon

We've been busy lately.

New jobs, new cities, new projects.

And now summer's coming to an end and classes start up again. Living in close proximity to college students, September always makes me think about change and my first weeks at college. Even though I tend to remember happy memories over anxieties and complications, in this case, I don't remember being excited, but I do remember being apprehensive. In fact, when I see the freshmen and their parents unloading their cars, the ghostly shadow of that sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach returns. Why did I think it was a good idea to move 1000 miles away from home, again? I worried about finding someone to sit with in the dining hall and figuring out where my classes were meeting, and I can distinctly remember getting up early on a Sunday morning and going in search of a newspaper because I wasn't sure what else to do with myself. The student union was empty, the dining hall was closed, no one else was awake, and there was a stranger still sleeping on the bunk below me. Of course, by the end of that first week, I had made friends - many of whom are still my friends - and the sensation of the world atilt had subsided. A day spent exploring Chicago with two new friends had helped, as had the bonding experience of smooth-talking our way into a cocktail party being held in the Hilton penthouse. How could they say no to three bright-eyed college freshmen who just wanted to see the view of Grant Park and the lake?

Since I am now advising a few first-year students as well as teaching a first-year seminar, I try to keep these memories fresh. Are my students experiencing similar anxieties? Probably. At least to some degree. I don't want and can't get a window into their worlds, but I wonder if cell phones, Facebook, and Skype make going to college different than it was ten or fifteen years ago. It's different to reconnect with high school friends five or ten years on than never to lose touch in the first place. With friends on speed dial, on Facetime, and posting regular updates of their first weeks of college, the jump from home to away-from-home must be less harrowing.

Debating the Past?

To continue the previous post:

As per this report, it is disheartening to discover that the people setting the curriculum for K-12 history books are more concerned about the political affiliations of various historical figures than about creating standards that would contribute to students' understanding of the past. It seems that with a few exceptions, professional historians have been excluded (or have chosen not to participate) in these hearings. It is difficult to imagine a similar set of hearings about cancer prevention, say, that would not include top-ranked physicians.

I was also disappointed that one of the testifiers complained that "American exceptionalism" had been replaced by "American imperialism." The speaker had little understanding of the relationship between the two terms, or the fact that they are not necessarily exclusionary (indeed, one could argue that America is exceptional precisely because of its methods of imperialism; the United States was, after all, a post-colonial nation that developed its own complicated ways of balancing between a democratic republic and an expansionist occupier of other people's (and nations') land).

God, America, and Texas Textbooks

This week the Texas State Board of Education will decide on new curriculum standards for Texas public schools, and the big debate centers on American history. The 9-person committee on social studies includes several conservative members, including Bill Ames. A quotation from the Texas Tribune article:

Ames, for instance, may have been speaking for the elected board’s majority when he tried to push through a standard on “American exceptionalism.” Depending on how it’s interpreted, exceptionalism can mean simply that the country, particularly its founders, did exceptional things. Or it can mean — in a definition endorsed by Ames in his treatise — that America is “not only unique but superior,” that its citizens are “a chosen people, divinely ordained to lead the world to betterment,” and that it is “not destined to rise and fall. Americans will escape ‘the laws of history’ which eventually cause the downfall of all great nations and empires.”

Ames failed to get such notions through the committee. “He believes we’re ordained by God to play this role. It’s like the modern version of Manifest Destiny, which gave us the conquering of the West, the slaughtering of the Indians and all that,” said Julio Noboa, a University of El Paso history professor who served alongside him on the history standards committee. “He wanted a nice whitewashed view of American history, with no pimples. We said no. Students need to understand there are problems within the capitalist system … Politicians aren’t going to give our rights to us on a silver platter. Democracy is evolutionary.”

The committee didn’t necessarily object to any mention of exceptionalism as theory — it was first coined by French political philosopher Alexis de Tocqueville in the mid-1800s — but members recoiled at Ames’ casting of it as unassailable doctrine. “Our take on that was that you can’t force your beliefs on students in a history book; It has to take a non-biased view,” said committee member Margaret Telford, a 34-year educator who currently teaches in the Grapevine-Colleyville Independent School District.

The question of American superiority likely will come up again at next week’s SBOE meetings, Lowe said. “The state board members had given them (committee members) clear direction in the spring that we wanted that concept included, so it’s surprising they voted it down,” she said. “We don’t have to tell students what to think, but any educated person should have learned about American exceptionalism.”

Asked if she supports the same definition Ames had offered, Lowe said: “I don’t believe America is the chosen nation the same way (I believe) Israel is the chosen nation. I do believe we have a special and unique place in history. We are not one of many.”

“We’re Texans,” she continued. “We believe our state is better than all other states, too. Why wouldn’t we believe the same about our country?”

I teach graduates of Texas public schools, and believe you me, they already think that the United States is pretty exceptional.

If I had one wish to inject into the social studies curriculum it would be the concept of historiography - that what counts as a part of the historical narrative changes over time. It's a bit meta, sure, for third graders, but I think that it could be introduced in middle school history classes, and that it should absolutely be a part of high school history. In relation to the American exceptionalism question presented here, for example, why not teach about de Toqueville; Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis; the Progressive Era's Charles and Mary Beard who argued that the US's founding was based on the founding fathers' economic greed; Perry Miller's homage to Puritans and American destiny; Bernard Bailyn's Cold-War-era focus on ideology, and the ties between British Radical Whigs and the American revolutionaries; and the recent surge in America and the World, like Thomas Bender's A Nation Among Nations?

Then, the question moves from "Is America exceptional? Is America superior to other countries?" to "How has the idea of American exceptionalism changed over time?"

If history classes are meant to teach children about the events of the past, why shouldn't history classes also teach about how interpretations of those events have their own history?

Desmond Tutu and the Christian "Yes" to Life

As an anecdote to the melancholy musings of Simone Weil, I looked up some speeches and interviews of Archbishop Desmond Tutu. Aside from being extremely moved by his commitment to forgiveness and reconciliation, with which we are all familiar, I was especially struck by his manners, affect and humor as the pure embodiment of joy. Indeed, one has to ask the question, what is Desmond Tutu laughing about? Born and raised in the evil regime of apartheid, Desmond Tutu watched his people experience daily humiliation, imprisonment, torture and abuse. Even after the extraordinary moment of liberation for black South Americans and the initiative of peace and reconciliation, South Africa is still plagued with corruption, the AIDS epidemic, and violence. But it is clear from the speech he gave at UC Santa Barbara that Archbishop Tutu laughs, tells jokes and dances - in fact, much more than the average white Americans who have not come even close to experiencing the evils that he has witnessed in his lifetime.

Christians so often fall into trap of warm-bath pseudo-theology (how nice it is to be told once again by some feeble-minded preacher that "God loves us all!" "Jesus loves us all!") that it would be easy to mistake Desmond Tutu's radical Christian rhetoric of hope as one of false optimism. But there is nothing easy about Archbishop Tutu's claim that God loves Bin Laden and George W. Bush, too. It is not easy because he is not saying that they are not guilty. Nothing can be farther from the truth than the claim that Desmond Tutu is indulging the brutal white oppressors. He makes it clear that he is far from granting them innocence. In fact, the concept of forgiveness would have no meaning if the forgiven person were to be found innocent. Responsibility being an urgent question in modernity (nowadays it seems that every criminal has the right to his or her crime based on his or her childhood traumas and adolescent misadventures), Desmond Tutu is holding the criminals responsible yet holding open the door.

Desmond Tutu's feat lies in his application in the political realm of two Christian notions that on the surface look like the most a-political notions of all: forgiveness and confession. These two notions do not sound as political as "the first will be last, the last will be first," the notion that makes the Christian roots of socialist revolutions unmistakable. Both forgiveness and confession are about surrendering power and rights. To forgive, as Desmond Tutu puts it beautifully, is to jettison one's rights to revenge. To confess, one admits one is wrong: both in the confessional booth or in mass, one is asked to kneel in order to display a physical sign of humility. Both confession and forgiveness give away power, which is why they are much more unpopular than their weaker kin, namely justice.

The word "justice" holds much more power in secular society, both as a name for our legal apparatus and for our so-called humanitarian activities, which often has "social justice" written all over their brochures. One wonders if the enormous satisfaction we get out of watching television shows about the court or the police has also to do with the momentary exhilaration of watching the bad guys get caught, prosecuted, etc. What is radical about Desmond Tutu's theology and political action is that he wants to go beyond justice, because he knows that justice does not restore equilibrium and harmony. There is almost something ecological about his way of handling human affairs: the issue is not so much who are the evil-doers, who threw the poison into the river, but how do we get the poison out of our community so that we all may drink good water again.

Without in any way disagreeing with Hannah Arendt's assessment of Adolf Eichmann as a buffoon, I wonder how the 1200 or so pages of his testimony (the inanity of which made Arendt laugh out loud instead of cry) would have been different if he were asked not to defend himself but to confess. I wonder if Arendt could have been spared her enormous irritation with the sob stories of victims (the very irritation that got her in trouble with the Jewish community all over), if they were not asked to perform their victimhood, if it was acknowledged as the premise of the trial that they had been hurt. Obviously this would not have been a conceivable model for the Jerusalem court, but is there any surprise that the defendant should always be someone who closes oneself off to the accusing party, for defense means no other than closing one's fortress, closing one to truth? Is there any surprise that a system based on justice and retribution would require that the accusing party to demonstrate their grievances?

Desmond Tutu's radicality lies in his transformation of the system of justice from the defendant-plaintiff model to the confessor-forgiver model, whose political value lies in its openness. What is interesting is that Archbishop Tutu's "political ecology" is only possible with a notion of evil that is not attached to a person but is something that takes a person hostage. It is a system that assumes that all human beings strive for life and the good the way plants strive for the sun and water. Nietzsche famously accuses Christianity of slave mentality, and whether he is right or not, he is calling attention to the inherent pessimism and perhaps masochism in a religion that is based on the idea of turning the other cheek. But in Desmond Tutu, we are reminded that if the good is on the side of the oppressed, it is also on the side of joy, harmony and peace. While the image of Eden might be a dangerous trap for the kind of utopian thinking that leads to bloody revolutions, it can easily be mobilized in Desmond Tutu's ecological ethics as the imaginary in comparison to which oppression and evil cannot but appear as an aberration. Eden, as an image of flourishing, of life, of harmony, is not so much our dream but "God's dream for us." Maybe the image of Eden is the secret to Desmond Tutu's seemingly perpetual smile, a smile that is as warm and genuine as it is enigmatic.

In listening to Desmond Tutu, one is struck by the sense of exaltation that permeates all his speeches and interviews. The use of metaphors such as an eagle being let free off the cliff, to "fly, fly, fly" certainly presents a very different image of Christianity than the "no to life." If only Nietzsche could have seen, instead of depressed, myoptic, crouching German Protestants of the 19th century, this African elder who laughs, who tells jokes, who shouts "Ubuntu! Ubuntu!" who leads his people away from violence, revenge and destruction and into the joy of life. No doubt, Nietzsche is right that Christianity as a tradition is itself largely responsible for secularism, disenchantment and the nihilism that ensues in the west. But it is perhaps not so much the presence of Christianity but the absence of "Ubuntu," the being of person through other persons, that made the white man so depressed, alone and full of resentment. Perhaps this is all the more reason that the white man needs the man of color to bring him back his humanity. The individualist white man needs the black man to teach him once again that life is joy only when it is not simply "my life" but the life principle itself that every being shares.

Peasants and Beggars

Jackie asked me about articles on beauty in urban neighborhoods, so my mind wandered as I thought to myself, "But what do we really mean by beauty? Whose beauty? The Anglo-Saxon ideal or the African-American ideal?" (The recent exchange on music in the church included a comment by Jackie that some folks can't get beyond the 19th century, which I assume to be Victorian, Edwardian culture, etc.) I then started to think about why the contemporary discourse on poverty, illness, old age and death is so insufficient in this era of speed, beauty and health. We have no patience for melancholy (psychiatric over-prescription is a real problem), for old people who walk and talk slowly, and needless to say, for the poor.

Beauty is indeed the question; I have been advocating it in my last posts as part of elite Episcopalian social responsibility. I am not taking those thoughts back, but I wonder if we should also think about representations of the socially marginalized. I did a quick search for images of the beggar in the history of western art, and intriguingly I found that pre-modern depictions of beggars and cripples are usually absent of any psychologism or sentimentality. More importantly, as demonstrated by the great northern painter Pieter Bruegel the Elder's painting, Peasant Wedding, there is no fetishization of the poor as the "other." Where are the "poor" in this painting? The decor of the room is bare and simple; the celebrants of the feast are in humble peasant attires and their manners naive and rough; the food looks like soup. By our standards, these northern European peasants of the 16th century would be poor. But in this painting, they are the hosts of a feast; moreover, they're letting the beggars into the party in the upper left hand corner. The beggars, for that matter, don't seem to look as miserable as the modern bourgeois would like. We are more used to romanticized depictions of near naked children, bare-footed yet doe-eyed, sitting on the road. If they happen to be dark-skinned, it sets them even farther away from our comfortable lives and allow us to shed even more tears of pity. But this painting presents a raucous scene of festivity that is completed by the entry of the beggars. If they are taking away resources, the beggars also add joy and merriment.

Pieter Bruegel represents a school of painting that is relatively indifferent to the aesthetic standards of the art academies, which in Italy and France began to flourish based on a systematization of artistic achievements of southern Renaissance. Instead, Bruegel is known for enigmatic, ludic scenes that derive from the vernacular, the folkloric. He is the painter of the peasants and their non-ideal faces: crooked noses, fat chins, missing teeth. Yet no one who has spent some time looking at Bruegel's paintings could remain untouched by the unruly tenderness that he gives to these figures. They are paradoxically both ugly and beautiful: they occupy the ambiguous zone between the real world and the fairy tale. In this strange way, this painting does not separate the world into the rich and poor, the beautiful and the ugly. Instead, it divides the world into the hosts and the guests, both of whom have a right to fill the house where food abounds. I wonder if there aren't some things to be learned from such a view of the world.

The need for beauty is human, but it is also essentially fascist and totalitarian (there are hundreds of books and articles about fascism as the aesthetization of the world), unless we commit ourselves to loving only what is both beautiful and good, and what is good must be real. Crooked nose and missing teeth are real; the uncouth manners of the peasants are real; the bare benches and pots of brown-ish soups are real; and the disruption of the party by the hungry beggars is real. But Bruegel seems to be charmed by such realities; he muses on them; he transforms the beggars and the peasants, not by idealizing them as 19th-century bourgeois novelists would do, but by distancing himself just enough to give us a totalistic view of how the world is composed.

I think this painting is the perfect image for Jackie's community kitchen, because it includes the beggars into the world. Ultimately, homeless people and bourgeois people still belong to one world, they still tread the same ground on God's earth - this is the greatest mystery of all.

"Elation. Elegance. Exaltation."

This past Sunday, All Saints Sunday, Christ Church Cathedral in Houston hosted a jazz mass featuring an improvisational piece called The Gospel According to John Coltrane (based on "A Love Supreme") in lieu of the sermon. The composer's jazz quartet performed the majority of the service music gleaned from African American spirituals and Americana: "He's Got the Whole World in His Hands," "Let Us Break Bread Together," and a rousing "When the Saints Go Marching In" at the end of the service. The composer of the Love Supreme piece also arranged the music for the Gloria, Sanctus, and Agnus Dei.

As I glanced through the bulletin while listening to the bassist tune his instrument and the saxophonist warm up, I had my doubts. Not only had I had my own personal spirituality-and-Coltrane horror story (imagine a seminar on African American religion in which the students had to lie down on the floor and listen to "A Love Supreme"). I also got the sense that the cathedral's highbrow choir and congregation are much more notable for their appreciation of exquisite traditional song settings than improvisational music paired with Coltrane's psychedelic lyrical musings about how all thoughts and vibrations trace back to God. They might appreciate Coltrane in the abstract, but this was a different animal.

Early on, it became clear that the cathedral was getting pretty full - almost to Christmas and Easter numbers - and that it was a mix of people, including a good number who aren't the usual Sunday crowd. The opening hymn was a traditional Ralph Vaughan Williams accompanied by the organ, and then came the Gloria. An upbeat gospel tune. The presiding priest continued with the Collect, adding in some extra phrases (oh yes we do!) as she prayed in her Texas accent, and the congregation chuckled and then laughed loudly as we all sat for the first lesson. Clearly the jarring presence of this kind of music, the fullness of the church, and the awareness that we were mostly white folks had created a level of nervous energy that needed some release. Charismatic we are not.

Things settled down after that, and then, instead of the sermon, the Love Supreme piece began. Like the original Coltrane recording, it was a four-part piece that combined spoken word (a choir member reading of the words of Coltrane's poem from the liner notes - words that are also "spoken" through the saxophone), the choir singing certain phrases, and, of course, the quartet's music. The most jarring part: the extended drum solo. The most moving for me: the duet between the saxophone (moved to the rear of the church), and the trumpet, still in the front. From wailing and mournful to ecstatic, the two instruments played off one another, filling the entire building with their plaintive cries. All throughout, Coltrane's four beats (the part where he softly sings "a love supreme") continued, driving the music forward underneath all of the improvisation - the choir softly sang "we thank you God" from time to time as well.

I was sitting next to an elderly woman and a visitor there for the jazz (he didn't take communion), and I realized that this is what church should be. This is what Episcopalians can offer: openness and experimentation some Sundays, Anglican plainsong on other Sundays - a whole range of voices and experiences that speak to a whole range of people. If anything, I felt a strong and stirring sense of community with everyone who was in the cathedral experiencing this unusual and striking mixture, and all of this came together even more poignantly when the presiding priest proclaimed that All Saints Day was for mourning and for celebrating life - she listed all of the names of those who had died in the past year, and we renewed our baptismal vows.

The service ended perfectly with a very New Orleans version of "The Saints Go Marching In" - the choir, instead of processing, gathered at the front of the church, next to the jazz quartet, and clapped, as did we all. Somehow reconciled with this uncharacteristic display of joy in church, everyone burst into extended applause at the service's end.

Le style c'est l'homme meme

Quoted in Peter Novick's That Noble Dream: The "Objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession:

Style is, above all, a system of forms with a quality and a meaningful expression through which the personality of the artist and the broad outlook of a group are visible. It is also the vehicle of expression within the group, communicating and fixing certain values . . . . It is, besides, a common ground against which innovations and the individuality of particular works may be measured.

From Meyer Schapiro (an art historian), "Style" in Anthropology Today, (Chicago, 1953).

Episcopalianism and A Sense of Style

This is following up on multiple conversations on the front of the Episcopal church, beauty, art and style with Jackie and Gale. Jackie would love to have hipsters at her church; Gale teaches her students (sometimes in vain) that a sense of style is important in the White House and the American identity. These are fruit for thoughts. Lots of blue-blooded Episcopalians have a profound sense of beauty and culture - though, curiously, this is not the same as being hip. Are English hymnals and William Morris hip? Probably not - it's probably considered old-fashioned. After all, IKEA made this rather vicious campaign against English "chintz," urging the English to throw out their Victorian furniture in return for Billy bookcases and Paong chairs. But what English hymnals and William Morris have is a sense of coherence: they are linked by tradition and a set of values.

Jeremy and Gale came to the conclusion long ago that one of things that make us and our group of friends not so "bobo" is that we went to church. Most church people are not exactly hip. (And what is the sociological makeup of hipsters anyway? Gale, any thoughts? Do they not come from Episcopalian families?) Being cultivated is not the same as looking glamorous - there aren't many dandys around in this country. But the value of hipsters is perhaps their youth and their glam. If everyone thought that it was so "cool" to help out at St. Paul's soup kitchen, then social justice might be advanced. So how do we make social justice hip? (Why isn't it? Eating organic surely is.)

Bread & Roses in Massachusetts

http://www.breadandroseslawrence.org/

Jackie, is this organization anywhere near you? They have the right idea - and I think the Episcopal church is in the position to broaden this to the arts, because it's what the Episcopalians have more than any other Christians in this country.

The Right to Beauty (In Response to Jackie)

I had to post because my comment got too long.

I am preparing for my spring course on the *History of Design* and have been relatively unmotivated because I know little about the subject or how it's important to students. But this exchange between us is very inspiring. You're absolutely right to fight for the right of Ralph Adams Cram's church; I incidentally looked him up and found out that he's totally the arch-gay Anglo-Catholic aesthete that our friend Eric would surely appreciate. (Yes, Eric's music program in such a church would indeed bring a glimpse of beauty and love into the mills.)

Too often, Episcopalians don't connect their own love for the arts with social justice, you are the exception, and the other is a lay parishioner at St. Paul in Hyde Park who gave this ravishing sermon one year on Good Friday. She asked us to reflect on the true meaning of beauty: is it just for us to consume and feel good about ourselves as privileged Christians who could afford fresh flowers and professional musicians at our services? No, she said, it's so that we could feel the miseries of the world in a even more profound way.

I remember watching a Chicago elementary school teacher receive the Golden Apple Award last year, a young Hispanic woman who took her Hispanic students to have high tea at the Four Season's, with the reason that "I want them to know that they are good enough for this, that they have the right to this." The Dominican priest Alain-Marie Couturier also told the workers of Vance that they deserve the Matisse chapel that they helped build: "Don't ever resort to the false humility that you are too simple to understand this art, because it's below your dignity as Christian, nothing is too high for you..."

Idealism of the fool? No - I was in Gary, Indiana last November canvassing for the Obama campaign, and it was a spiritual illumination to listen to the steel workers, who told us how dejected they feel because their city lacks beauty. No one cleans the sidewalk, there's trash and weed everywhere. How can you not become depressed, how can you not gradually lose pride (pronounced "prad" which means in African-American idiom a kind of dignity, strength, resilience) in yourself, how can you resist from slowly identifying with your own unhappiness, if everything in your immediate physical environment spells "misery"?

The poor and the miserable need beauty more than any of us. We've been in it for so long that we have the power of the imagination, but they depend on beauty's physical, earthly manifestations, in the lovely chapel, in the music, in people who believe that "they are good enough for this." I am very sensitive to food not only because I like to eat, but because it is often food that divides the rich and the poor. Any mystery why Christ used the bread, the wine and the table to unite his people? At least once a day, people need to be reminded that EVERYONE, the poor above all, deserves to eat and drink, and not only that, at a table covered in white table cloth.

As Episcopalians, we need to turn our love for the arts and beauty into a form of productive outrage: we cannot morally acquiesce to a world where some people are led to believe that they don't deserve the white table cloth. To think that we've done Christ's work just by feeding the poor - as if they were just animals, as if they should be grateful to us just because we gave them soup in plastic cups in some dim, fluorescent-lit church basement - is simply bourgeois false consciousness and un-Christian.

A lot of people criticized the Arts & Crafts movement and the likes of Morris, Mackintosh and Ruskin because their socialist ideals did not prevent their decor and furniture from becoming commodities for the rich. But your case about Ralph Adams Cram's church proves that this is not entirely true. The poor too can enjoy the legacies of the Aesthetic Movement in interior design - no one has to pay to come to this chapel. Culture is there to be shared, because it is like bread, it is organic and vital. It provides a sense of wholeness without which no human being can live a meaningful life. This sense of wholeness should not be the privilege of the rich, unfortunately, it is increasingly the case in our capitalist society, where the poor are deprived of even spiritual resources to create their own culture. When we lose our sense of connected-ness, we become vulnerable and we fall prey to fanatic ideologies and political demagogy. This is what happened to the poor Muslims in India, Pakistan and Afghanistan. This is also what happens to the American working class and farmers.

Very few of us can really go be with the poor the way Mother Theresa or Simone Weil did. But the very least we can do as elite Christians is to fight for the preservation and sharing of beauty, which is nothing other than the material manifestation of God's hope for us.

Episcopalians, know thyself!

I had a nice evening out with a colleague of mine, a young Latin Americanist in my department. She turned out to be a southern Californian and, unsurprisingly, episcopalian by upbringing. We had a conversation about Episcopalianism not as a religion but as a community, a culture, a tradition, and yes, as a set of weird ticks shared by a paradoxically privileged yet discrete group of Americans. My colleague was very amused by my observations and she said, "I've never thought of it like that, but now my entire life makes sense!" It amuses me too, that so many of the cradle Episcopalians I have met never looked at themselves as an "ethnic group," precisely because they are so "liberal." Race theorists might well be right to say that being "white" and "privilege" somehow makes you "normal" and "colorless," namely, cultural diversity includes you being surrounded by other colors that are not white.

The truth is that Episcopalians, when scrutinized closely with an anthropological lens, betray all the signs of being a very distinct community, with a basis in Anglo-American culture. They usually drive beat-up cars (Toyotas or Suburus) and spend lots of money on wine. They have dog-eared books at home on anything from Hannah Arendt to Baudelaire to Franz Boas (Jackie, your copy of "Primitive Art" is on my shelf!), but they haven't read them for a long, long time. Many of them are very progressive but have a bizarre idealization of history, which distinguishes them from the European left-wing. They might not advocate return to pre-Revolutionary time, but they can't give up their grandparents' Queen Anne furniture even if they don't manage getting them re-upholstered. Many of them also don't consider "Jingle Bell" a proper Christmas song. They support women's liberation and the use of contraceptives, but are often closeted papists who get very excited about visiting St. Peter's and getting a glimpse of the pope. Nature and culture in their unadulterated form are what Episcopalians love: so they either have a cabin in the mountains, a cottage by the lake, or spend that money on family vacations in Europe. (Italy is top on the list - I suspect that it's thanks to English Romanticism, Ruskin, Keats, etc.) Little reproductions or actual Byzantine/orthodox icons may be spotted in their living rooms. Episcopalian men are often one of the rare species of American males who can be both very macho and love Titian. Episcopalian women are often very good at writing "Thank You" notes and organizing potlucks and auctions; they apply such skills to areas as diverse as art history departmental social hours and Hyde Park Jazz Society fundraising. Aesthetically, they are contradictory: their personal manners are very restrained, but they love the exaltation of the arabesque (look at the legs of their furniture). Politically, they are both Republicans and Democrats (which is why they're interesting). And, as pointed out by Gale a long time ago, their are united by having cocktail hour at 5pm, no matter what name they might grant to the occasion.

These are quirky observations but I think that Episcopalians should realize more that they are a kind of ethnic-religious group much like the Jews. This might permit them to be more self-aware as a large constituency of the American elite. They should be more courageous in promoting a socially responsible and culturally intelligent form of Christianity in the US, and dare I say, in the world. I find it insidious that Episcopalians are so powerful and discrete about their identity - the American Jews at least have a very visible role in public life due to their strong identity. The advantage of coming to terms with your religio-ethnic identity is that you can better see what your contribution to the world can be.

Amira Hass, Guardian of Truth

The left-wing Israeli journalist Amira Hass won the 2009 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Women in Media Foundation this week, and for days now I have been in a kind of elation. I was spellbound by her 2003 interview at UC Berkeley, where she spoke with the relentless energy, impatience and honesty of someone who loved truth and justice more than herself. (I admit I cried through half of it.)



In Amira Hass I saw the ghosts of Hannah Arendt and Simone Weil, two of my heroines. I think about what unite these three women: their gender, their Jewish background, but more importantly, their incorruptible search for truth, their tireless efforts to share that truth even when no one hears or believes it, and their willingness to expose themselves. Arendt went to Jerusalem to report on Eichmann's trial, subsequently exposing herself to the attacks of Jews and Germans alike. Weil went to work in the vineyards and the factories, exposing herself to harsh physical labor and dangerous working conditions. Hass went to live in Gaza as well as Romania under Ceausescu in order to report on oppression with lived experiences and observations. What strikes me about all of them was how little they seem to be concerned with themselves, their reputation, their career, even their influences. When Amira Hass spoke of her "lifelong achievement" as "lifelong failure," she is dismissing the opportunity to glorify herself and risking the favors of those who honored her. When she says that she has not made an impact (because Israeli colonization of Palestine continues to justify Palestinian self-destruction), she is not complaining that people are not listening to her; she is complaining that people do not listen to truth.

Once, Hannah Arendt was asked by a journalist what kind of influences she had hoped to have on others. Her response is perhaps the only feminist moment in Arendt: "But it's so masculine, to always want to be influential! I just want to understand, and if I can help other people understand along the way, then I am happy." I wonder if Arendt has touched on something that she, Weil and Hass all have in common, namely, a voluntarism animated by a love for the world, a love that does not ask for any returns. These women remind me of why women have a place in public life; more specifically, they show why some women are particularly suited to be guardian angels of truth. Perhaps part of the problem with patriarchy is that it was a system of pride and delusions of grandeur, which prevents people from seeing the truth. What blocks truth more powerfully than anything is the attachment of the self to illusions.

It gives me such satisfaction to know that, in the 20th century and perhaps the next, it is female geniuses like Arendt, Weil and Hass who reveal the true meaning of philosophy: the love of wisdom that overpowers the love that the rest of us give too much to ourselves.

America: Home for the Brave – and the Unfeeling?

I had a small dinner party last night at my house, gathering old and new friends. At one point during the evening, we touched upon a subject that came up often in my interactions with non-American friends: why (white) Americans (in their view) do not seem to valorize human relationships. One of my guests mentioned that Mexican restaurants and supermarkets are so much friendlier than the white American establishments. When she visited the Mexican deli shop in her neighborhood the second time, the people immediately recognized her and asked if she had enjoyed the guacamole that she bought the last time (her first visit). Any white American establishment, however, would never betray their recognition even if they did remember you from the fifty times that you had bought coffee there. Another of my guests used a stronger term: she said that the Americans seem de-eroticized (ent-erotisiert), since they almost never express sympathies (distinct from the friendliness) with strangers. She also told me that I am thus far her only social contact in Eugene whom she feels comfortable calling and inviting; the colleagues in her department kept saying that they ought to “do lunch” – but only in two weeks, because they are too busy now. Her comment reminded me of an Israeli friend who once said that Americans pencil friendship into their work schedule. “What do you mean you have to look at your calendar? If I am your friend, I’m calling you and knocking on your door all the time, and you’d do the same to me,” he said, completely baffled by what he perceived as the lack of spontaneity in American social mores.

As someone who has several great (white) American friends, I am slightly defensive of this perception of Americans as unfeeling, professional-minded robots, but this perception has been put to me so often that I feel like there has got to be some reason behind it all. It is true that friends in Paris handled social relationships in a different way, and people in the same neighborhood solidarized much more than in the United States. In Paris, the butcher flirts, the boutique owner tells the trouble with her business, the professional cook invites me to lunch in his workshop, and the bookseller stays until 1 o’clock in the morning in the shop because we spent three hours talking about religion and politics. This bookseller in particular, who owns Tschann Libraire in Montparnasse, remembered me from 2001 when I first spent four months in Paris; I was 22 then, and when I came back to Paris again I was 27. I told him that his hair had turned gray during those five years. Once, I got locked out of my apartment, and instead of paying 200 euros to get a locksmith, I had the owner of the brasserie across the street come up to save me: His trick involved a radiogram and 15 minutes of nonstop banging on the door.

These memories are now particularly poignant to me because I find that the “friendly Oregonians” can sometimes be so cold to strangers. This morning, the bus driver turned away a whole station full of students, carrying heavy backpacks in the chilly fog, on the basis that the bus was full. It was not true at all: by the standards of Chicago or Paris, we could have easily fit 15 passengers more into the bus. (In India, perhaps another 50.) But that would require strangers to stand shoulder to shoulder, which is perhaps too much contact for them. Later, on the same bus, an old lady struggles to get up from her seat in order to get off the bus, and the student standing in front of her did not have bother to lend her a hand. Instead, she simply moved her body slightly to be out of the old lady’s way. Everything is so calculated and utterly absent of spontaneity.

I don’t know why civic life in Oregon here seems cold, but I do think that professional life in America forces people to turn off a large part of their affective needs in order to be perceived as self-sufficient and invulnerable. I noticed that almost all of my American friends were made during college, with one or two exceptions. College was the romantic time of our lives: we stayed up all night listening to jazz records and had useless intellectual debates about literature, existentialism and other such things. I am not nostalgic about college, but I do wonder what happened to that spontaneity after we became professionals. I strongly suspect that American professionals are often circumspect in their approach to friendship because the risk of exposing one’s humanity (that is, weaknesses and imperfections) in a professional context is too great. At the same time, I find it hard to believe that anyone would not want friends. Wasn’t there a theory that TV shows such as “Friends” and “Sex in the City” owe their success to the yuppies’ unfulfilled longing for close friendships, which were out of reach for them in real lives?

What disturbs me about the foreigner’s perception of American social relationships is its oblique but real link to our attitude toward social welfare and above all healthcare. David Brooks has long pointed out that the Republican party is especially successful in reinforcing a false version of American optimism, which has little tolerance for discourses about failure and needs. But what about the liberals? I don’t find them personally warmer than the selfish, unfeeling Republicans who deprive us of healthcare. Is it because they also don’t like weakness, and the need for human contact is considered a weakness in professional America?

Youth Springs Eternal, for good or for ill.

In reading last week's New Yorker (the one with the books on the cover), I was surprised and fascinated by the review of picture books, and Rebecca Mead's article on the YA-lit factory, Alloy Entertainment. It's also interesting to think about these things in relation to the success of the movie version of Where the Wild Things Are.

The picture books article shows how contemporary parenting styles trickle into children's books, and how children in today's picture books run all over their passive and bedraggled parents who insist that their children "use their nice words" and get played by their tyrannical three-year-olds. I'm not sure what this says about my personality, but when I was little, I liked orderly books - these disorderly and disobedient children would have made me anxious. I distinctly remember getting stressed out reading the Cat in the Hat. I completely supported the fish, urging the Cat to stop making such a mess. I was better with Dr. Seuss's other books - the Lorax. Speaking of autocratic books, my family also read a lot of Bernstein Bears - it's all about order, decorum, and self-control. Maybe this stifled my rebellious streak early on, but I think that it was already embedded in my personality, even as a six-year-old.

The Alloy Entertainment article ("The Gossip Mill") is very interesting for other reasons. The translation of news, political scandals, and adult novels into young adult novels, and the mode of presentation is fascinating. I rarely read these sorts of books when I was a young adult - the Christopher Pike horror/thrillers, VC Andrews' romance novels, Sweet Valley High (the Gossip Girl of the 80s?) - and so on some level, I don't understand the appeal. I've just gotten to the part in the article when Twilight enters into the picture - and I wonder if the unexpected and surprising popularity of the series throws a kink into the YA factory. I feel like teenagers' likes and dislikes seem easy to decipher, but they can also turn on a dime and embrace the least expected trend. They're also quick to sniff out when they're the targets of marketing campaigns, and I wonder what this means for Alloy's future success.

Along those lines, I also just read this Times article on Sherman Alexie whose long career took off when he published an autobiographical young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. I want to read it and see how it compares to written-for-adults coming-of-age fiction (Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, Lev Grossman's The Magicians), and if there is a distinction. Is it all in the marketing? Probably. And I also wonder if teenagers drove the sales of Alexie's book (I do know that it's a popular summer reading assignment), or if adults are behind its success?