My Atheist Ambivalences

So, in November I gave a talk called "My Atheist Ambivalences" to the university's Atheist Student Organization (I used to be their faculty advisor). Somebody at the Unitarian Church got wind of it and asked me to give a similar talk there, so I'm preaching again on December 29. Since I have more atheist issues than can actually fit into a half-hour talk or a one-page handout, I'm putting the complete list here. Maybe I'll write or talk about some of the neglected issues later.

Full list of atheist-ambivalence questions of Jean (as of Dec 2013):

Language gaps: Without recourse to "I'll pray for you," how do I show compassion? How show humble gladness without "thank God"? Shall I just go ahead and say "pray" or "god" or "faith" or "spiritual" whenever it's convenient, but mean the words in a different way than theistic believers mean them?

Is it okay for me to adopt the language/rituals of believers when among them? Would it be insulting for me to partake in the sacraments? If yes, why? (On Buddhist retreats, I have no discomfort whatsoever doing all the chants and prostrations.) Why did I get so nervous when my Dad wanted to make a speech at my wedding (1987) about our family's Mormon heritage, given that I had already agreed to have a Jewish wedding to please my Jewish fiancé and in-laws? I told Dad I didn't want to give a false impression that I was Mormon, but as he pointed out, it didn't seem to bother me that I was giving a false impression that I was Jewish.

How much do I need to respect other people's religious qualms that violate my own ethical standards (e.g. taboos about menstruating women)? If, as I believe, there is nothing "up there" to blaspheme against, then isn't the concept of blasphemy just as bogus a category of reproof as miscegenation, and it all just comes down to just human politeness and clashing etiquette codes (or the exertion of privilege/power)? How do I feel about live Mormons baptizing (e.g.) dead Jews? How do I feel about the Danish cartoons? How about that time at Borobudur where there's this thing that you try to touch the Buddha statue to get a wish, but women touch on the foot and men higher up?

What are my moral obligations with respect to coming out of the closet as an atheist? How do I present myself to minimize offense and other bad outcomes? How does context matter? Especially, how do I handle myself in the classroom? When, if ever, is it a good idea to engage in metaphysical debate with believers?

Bill and the Darwin fish (see blog post titled "Letter to Clyde").

Biggies:
#1. Are religions bad/dangerous?
           On the one hand, the New Atheists have some points. On the other hand, I know a number of excellent people, kind and centered and emotionally intelligent, for whom religion acts as an organizing principle. Would they really all have done just as well without it? Certainly I don't want to snatch it away from them! Thought experiment: There's at least one person I know who I wish would find Jesus.

#2. How much does belief in god matter—emotionally, intellectually, morally—shorn of other (tribalist) baggage? What if creedal beliefs (as opposed to attitudes and emotional styles) are largely irrelevant for most people? Supposing the chasm which appears to yawn between us is largely illusory, how do I bridge the gap between me and a believer with whom I share most of my important values? What are the best alliances we can form and how do we form them? I'm really liking that Pope Francis!

#3. The future of secularist movements:
What should atheist organizations be like? Should believers be welcomed to participate? At the first meeting of UTPA's Atheist Student Organization I was disconcerted to see a former student who had caused difficulties in one of my classes with his constant proselytizing and opposition to literary language and topics he considered inappropriate. Based on this prior experience, I very much doubted he was atheism-curious, seeking to learn more. No, he was here to teach. Taking the most charitable possible view of his motives, squinting sideways and granting a few erroneous premises, I could assume he meant well, mostly, but at best he had always been a time suck and I didn't want to have to keep considering his feelings. This group was supposed to be for people like me. There should be safe spaces for atheists where they don't have to censor themselves for the sake of believers' feelings. ...Yet if secularists get too zealous about enforcing our boundaries, are we maybe repeating the errors of many religions? Becoming sectarian, insufficiently inclusive?  For now, it should be borne in mind that in the US at this time the generally privileged group is believers, not nonbelievers (look at the professions of belief among US politicians if you doubt the accuracy of this big-picture claim).

Conversely, should atheists push for seats on interfaith councils? Can/should atheism take its place among other (religious) lifestances? Can/should atheists pitch themselves as one among many other "faith" options? Create atheist churches? As a matter of branding, what should we call ourselves?

After the Sermon (Jean's Sermon #1, "Moral Foundations")

It's been a week and a half since I gave a sermon titled "Moral Foundations" at the Unitarian Universalist Church in San Juan, Texas. I'm still psyched, and I will probably give some more sermons in the future if they want to have me again. I also collected the names of several people who might like to work through Ronald Dworkin's Justice for Hedgehogs in a reading group with me this fall semester.

I've recorded the sermon and I'm going to make it available on youtube for the people who were interested but couldn't get to the church that day. Something went wrong with the camera that I don't immediately know how to fix: sorry about that big black rectangle. I'm going to post it anyway, even with its flaws. And I'll also make available on Facebook the powerpoint I created for the sermon after the fact. This should make it simple for anybody who wants to follow along. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMLA7tTl1KA

Extended response to V.:

On the day of the sermon itself, during the Q and A, one person made a pointed commentary about my decision to use honor killing as an example of an atrocity (the word I used in the sermon was "abomination"). He thought it was inappropriate for me to use what he called a statistical "outlier" in philosophizing about the sort of ordinary functional moral theory that my U.U. audience was probably interested in, and likewise inappropriate to go pointing fingers at a culture not my own. (He claimed I had "typified an entire culture" by one hideous practice.)

I was just unsettled enough by his critique to want to respond at leisure and in depth, so here we go. First, I had no intention of "typifying" any culture: I don't consider myself an authority on any society but my own, and not even all parts of that; that's why I specifically built into that example a thought experiment in which I would meet and debate with an alternate-reality version of me who was raised to believe (and does believe) that honor killing is a moral necessity in some circumstances. I don't think that hypothetical alt-Jean is inferior to me; I don't think her culture is inferior to mine across the board; very probably it is superior in many respects which she understands deeply but that I have little sensitivity to. All I say is that she's wrong on this point, and also on some other preceding moral premises or rules that she may have relied on to reach that conclusion. ("Men rightfully have moral responsibility for women"? "Loss of face injures a high-ranking person even more than bodily assault or death injures a low-ranking person"? "Nothing really bad can happen to a truly innocent person, because God (or 'the universe' or 'karma' or whatever) watches over and protects the deserving"? I'm only guessing at exactly what's amiss in alt-Jean's moral reasoning, but I do know that something is amiss. NB: I am far from supposing that my own moral reasoning is flawless.)

Second, it's true that I chose a relatively unchallenging example of morally wrong behavior, given the audience to whom I was preaching. There are of course a wide variety of examples I could have chosen to illustrate the concept of "abomination" and why I have chosen to retain the concept in my own thinking rather than dismiss it as naïve or antiquated. I could have spoken of things I find shameful in what my own country's highest-ranking folks have ordered or let happen in recent years: Abu Ghraib, extraordinary rendition, Guantanamo, "enhanced interrogation techniques," prison privatization, etc., etc. Maybe it was just a bit too easy, choosing something very clear-cut and also very far away that I knew my audience could comfortably deplore. But….

But I only had 20 minutes and my thesis was not about any particular moral conclusions nor was it a call to any particular moral actions. The sermon was not intended to be of the genre that exhorts the flock to behave better their own selves. (Not yet, anyway! Foundations come first, before building.) Au contraire, it was intended as encouragement to those who, like me, lack moral confidence.  The one thing I wanted to establish in this, my maiden sermon, is that "hedgehogs"—believers in right and wrong—don't have to be fundamentalists, nor ignoramuses, nor arrogant self-righteous power-grabbers. In other words, you don't have to lack all conviction, just to distinguish yourself from folks you find distasteful who are full of passionate intensity.

Finally, even if honor killing is a bit of an outlier, in the sense of being relatively rare, I think it's deeply connected with other practices which are more widespread. Female genital mutilation, for instance, or closer to home the impulse to deny reproductive autonomy to women. Close inquiry into what we in our neck of the woods all pretty much agree is the faulty moral reasoning of the proponents of honor killing could still provide useful insight into our own possibly disordered thinking.

What Universities Are For: an Open Letter to UTPA President Nelsen

Dear President Nelsen:

Toward the end of this semester I hurriedly completed my evaluation of all the administrators who serve above me, including you. Since then I've been fretting about one of my answers, even though I was (obviously) anonymous. I gave you the highest score possible on "Demonstrates concern for the students" but then in the optional comment field I wrote "Sometimes a bit too dang concerned about the students." Can't you just imagine my careless remark quoted on talk radio, exploited to reinforce the caricature of tenured radicals who at best condescend to the public they're supposed to be serving, who are more concerned with faculty privilege than anything else? So here is the thing I am willing to breach my anonymity to explain: yes, for me there is something in the university enterprise—for now I'll call it academic ideals—that looms even larger than the students. As I think it should for all of us at the university.

Mind you, teaching at a "student-centered" institution suits me fine. I'm a passionate teacher; I reckon the lion's share of my professional energies is devoted to my students—somewhat at the expense of my own writing time and career advancement. But I'm still uncomfortable with the unending local refrain that nothing matters except "what's best for the students." There is no such thing as best-for-the-students simpliciter, only competing desiderata and tradeoffs. What's best for my least savvy students is accessible and entertaining materials to whet their intellectual appetite; the structure and review that they need to feel secure even as I try to wean them from the idea that their relationship to me is as employees whose chief duty is obedience; and exposure to a seminar atmosphere in which they can see others genuinely curious and engaged in intellectual pursuits. What's best for my most advanced students, meanwhile, is to be segregated away from the laggards; they would be better served by much higher admissions standards and less concern for retention. They need the bar set high enough to challenge them, they need to sample the most rigorous studies, and they need to know that competition is stiffer in many places than what they're used to from their previous education in south Texas.

What many of my students regard as their best educational interest is maximizing the ratio of output earned (the grade or credential) to effort put in. What some others regard as their best interest is whatever will maximize their lifetime income. These are both rational, outcome-oriented positions, but I take it that relatively few educators see their "product" primarily in such terms. Many legislators, though, are thinking along similar outcome-oriented lines when they impose credit-hour caps and other measures designed to reduce time to degree, or seek to configure university education to the anticipated job market. They want education to be the shortest distance between two points, with no wasteful meanders in it. For me, the meanders are the education. How do students aged 17, 18, 19 have the wherewithal to make a one-time, binding choice about the mental furniture they'll have for a lifetime when they have no idea even what the range of options is?

Clearly, educational policy decisions aren't made in a context-free vacuum but are relative to other philosophical commitments. Certain legislators are thinking of students mainly as potential participants in the national economy and so they want what's best for business interests—er, the students, I mean—in economic terms. But I am thinking of students as participants and potential participants in something I consider much more significant: the grand, centuries-long human quest for knowledge and understanding. This quest is intimately connected with but is not identical to promoting the material wellbeing of humankind. "Education is my religion," I say in class sometimes. The students laugh, but I'm not really joking.

My ideal of the university is an institution firmly set apart from either commercial or state interests; though it may derive funding from some combination of those two major social forces, it should never be beholden to either. The purpose of the university is to study the nature of things as they really are irrespective of what may be immediately profitable or what would consolidate and preserve power. In the long run holding accurate information about things as they really are benefits a nation and thus wise governments have motive enough to support universities but also to avoid interfering with them. Tenure and academic freedom are the safeguards that maintain the necessary separation of university and state, university and commerce. They have a price but the price is worth it.

During the 1980s, I used to make a living as a Russian translator. Where US politicians relied on certain stock phrases, Soviet politicians rolled out whole stock paragraphs extolling the virtues of their rationalized central economic planning—waste free, unlike the West! Workers' councils were said to be enthusiastically supporting the Five-Year Plan, competing in friendly fashion to "fulfill and overfulfill" their quotas even earlier than last quarter, though the quotas were set even higher now and will be set higher still for next quarter. Some of the conversations going on at UTPA now remind me of those olden days. The provost, for instance, discusses tenure in terms eerily similar to Soviet lingo: continual escalation of targets is desirable and supposedly achievable; faculty should "meet and exceed," not just meet, tenure requirements. And the revision of the core curriculum is a monument to central planning if there ever was one—do you think the (presumably capitalism-loving) planners that kicked off this curriculum reform in THECB will be able to predict and control the future better than the communist ones did back in the failed, fallen command economy of the USSR? Even by the early 1980s it was obvious that no one, not even the speakers themselves, believed those words about the plans, the overfulfillment, the enthusiasm. It was just what they thought they had to say to maintain their own positions.

I wonder if many people in the US today still have faith in the fad for numerical accountability at every level of education. Every time you turn around some fresh scandal about fudged assessments is in the news. Anyone's who watched The Wire understands how official pressure from above leads to "juking the stats." How many of our education-reforming politicians are sincere, and how many, like the Soviet blatherers, are completely cynical? The problem with all outcome-oriented approaches to education is the same thing that did the Soviets in: if we're really committed to progress we can't know in advance where we're going to end up. If we're really committed to what is actually true then that, not ever-increasing numbers, has to be our top priority.

Dr. Nelsen, I regret my choice of words on the administrator evaluation form. I love my students, I do. But I could not love them, dear, so much, loved I not academic ideals—disinterested and unfettered intellectual inquiry into what is actually the case in the real world— more.

Sincerely yours,

Jean Braithwaite,
Associate Professor (the nonfiction person),
English Department

Letter to Clyde

One of the reasons I don’t want to discuss my own metaphysical positions in class is that I don’t want to seem to be using my classes as an opportunity to try to push my views onto my students. Nor do I like other people hijacking class time to proselytize, either politically or religiously. It can be a pretty fine line, given that literature almost always has moral concerns, and sometimes we rightly reject authors’ writing not for reasons of craftsmanship alone, but because their theme or tone or whatever doesn’t meet our moral standards. We have to be able to talk about things like that. But there is a difference between expressing a personal moral response to a text, and just hogging the seminar conversation to advance one’s own agenda. Because I hold this principle as a sacred academic value, I want to follow my own code myself too.

But since you ask, Clyde, I am willing to spend a small amount of non-class time; here you go:

I don’t believe in supernatural entities. The idea that some conscious being, much bigger, better, more powerful, smarter than humans, but in some other ways something like humans, at least to the extent of being some kind of discrete individual that can observe situations and has preferences and can make decisions and take actions—that some such being either created the universe and/or presides over it and/or provides it with moral significance that goes beyond the wellbeing of ordinary biological sentient beings such as humans and animals… this idea seems quite implausible to me. Maybe not disprovable, in some kind of mathematical-logic sense, but not at all a reasonable belief to hold given the rest of our state of understanding of physics, biology, astronomy, psychology, and so forth.

I have spent many years thinking and reading about the subject; I consider it pretty unlikely that somebody will come up with some new argument in favor of God’s existence which I’ve never encountered before. I am not very much interested in entering into debate on the subject, but I guess if somebody—a believer—was just trying to understand: How is it possible that such a sensitive, kind individual, someone devoted to honest inquiry into the truth, could have an atheistic outlook? I guess I could try to give some quick sketch of how it feels to think like me.

The shortest route by which to give some notion of my basic worldview is this: I believe consciousness is, demonstrably, a biological phenomenon. Individual consciousness arose as part of the same evolutionary process that gave rise to animal bodies: unlike plants, a creature that can move around voluntarily can by its own actions either increase or decrease risks to its staying alive and healthy; so it has to have a sense of itself as an individual, and a desire to protect its individual bodily integrity against all kinds of harms. Our consciousness and our bodily existence are inextricably tied together. Therefore there is no such thing as non-embodied consciousness, and thus there can be no spirits, ghosts, demons, angels, devils, gods, souls, immortality after death, etc. Consciousness only actually makes sense as an attribute of a living animal, not as an attribute of something existing on a cosmic scale or beyond physicality altogether. Stars and planets and galaxies and infinite space and pure abstractions and so forth don’t need to be, and can’t be, conscious, any more than a rock or a flower is.

These are beliefs I have--I would even call them empirical beliefs, as opposed to the faith-based kind--but they are not a moral code or a spiritual practice. They don’t really tell you much about me, Clyde. I doubt your desire for “context” has been satisfied.

Although I think atheism is a perfectly accurate label to describe my metaphysical stance, these days I’m not all that eager to present myself to the world as an atheist, since the prejudice against atheism is so deep in this country. And it’s not even just because I fear being discriminated against, it’s that I don’t want to affront people who (wrongly in my view) interpret any expression of atheism as necessarily equivalent to hostility directed against them. I went to graduate school with a Catholic man and we were walking through a parking lot one time and I saw one of those Darwin fish-with-legs on a car, and it gave me a little lift, like I assume it gives a Christian a lift to see the regular old Jesus fish. So I said, “Look, it’s a Darwin fish!” And Bill muttered darkly and shook his head. He thought the car-owner was mean, mocking Christians like that. I said, “Bill, why does it have to be mockery? Can’t the person just be saying, You have your beliefs, I have some too, mine have just as good a right to be shared and celebrated?” Bill said no. There is no possible blameless intention a Darwin-fish displayer can have. It made me sad, because I had sometimes toyed with the idea of getting such a fish and displaying it in just such a spirit as I described. But now that I realize it will inevitably be seen by many as an anti-fish, never mind, I guess.

In the last few years, when Christians knock on my door or something, I’ve been experimenting with labeling myself a buddhist instead of an atheist, since this tends to strike people more gently. They may have no idea what buddhism is, but they take it for granted that it’s some kind of system more or less analogous to their own. It isn’t, really, but so what? They don’t get a nasty shock and we shake hands and it’s friendly and over quickly.

I have a great fondness for Jewish culture—the literature, the intellectual contributions—and a soft spot for Israel. In terms of cultural identity, though, my heritage is Christianity more than it’s anything else. There are plenty of secular Jews, but you don’t often run across people who think of themselves as secular Christians. Too bad! I feel that I have more in common with Christians who have values and temperaments similar to mine than I do with people who may share more of my empirical/scientific beliefs but are sneery egomaniacs rather than compassionate humanists. People can be right about some things and wrong about others. Beliefs can be held lightly and generously, or stubbornly and spitefully, regardless of their propositional content (contra Sam Harris). Or beliefs can be—they mostly are!—halfway held, shifting and inconsistent things. I believe delusion is part of the human condition; I catch myself in delusions of one kind or other on a daily basis. So I try to be forgiving about other people’s, with a few exceptions. For instance, if people really, really believe in a hell of literal eternal torment, and they’re down with that, they think that’s a fine way to organize a universe and a just God sees to it that everybody gets exactly what they deserve in the end—infinite suffering for some? Perfect! Well, I think that’s one fucked up idea, excuse my French. I really don’t see how people can get that idea sitting comfortable in their heads alongside their other ones about God and goodness.

Was that what you wanted to know, Clyde?

mennonite in a little black dress

I saw Rhoda Janzen’s mennonite in a little black dress at the library and I picked it up because I’m always willing to take a look at a memoir of growing up in a religious subculture. Even if it’s not exactly my cup of tea, it may be useful to recommend to my students, who often want to write about their own religious subculture but generally need to build their skills in communicating to a heterogeneous audience that includes folks with very different backgrounds and premises, up to and including non-Christians. Even atheists! So I checked it out for possible amusement/pedagogical value, despite the two strikes against it: one, it came out in 2009, so this is not a book review I can peddle anywhere, and, two, it was blurbed by Elizabeth Gilbert, the author of Eat, Pray, Love, as laugh-out-loud funny.

http://www.rhodajanzen.com/

Not that I think Eat, Pray, Love is terrible or anything. But there was a certain glibness to it, a willingness to divert attention away from truly wrenching emotions into light comedy without fully acknowledging and exploring the pain. And not that I have anything against comedy, or think it incompatible with profundity. But there is a difference between the mood and impact you can build with a protracted, cumulative life narrative, and what you can get with a bunch of episodes from a situation comedy. In the latter, there’s always a distance between us and the characters; we never fully enter into their experience. Their catastrophes tend to be played for laughs like those of a cartoon character flattened by an anvil or exploded by dynamite. I do understand, and partly admire, the self-deprecatory impulse that leads Gilbert and Janzen to cast themselves as feminine Wile E. Coyotes or Elmer Fudds: they fear, and rightly so, the self-aggrandizement of the high-tragic memoir. But really, there is room on the tragicomic spectrum for writing that allows, right alongside the laughs, sincere respect for human suffering (including one’s own, including that which is brought on by one’s own errors).

I almost quit reading mennonite in a little black dress a few chapters in, when I could see that no narrative arc was under construction. Nothing about it compelled—or rewarded— my sustained attention. But it was easy pleasant reading to dip in and out of and I left it on the kitchen table to while away odd minutes. And then, at a certain point, I had accumulated enough biographical tidbits about Janzen to know that I liked and respected her. I had encountered enough tidbits about Mennonite culture to feel I was learning something. And I had run across a few real gems of expository or meditative prose, e.g.: Feo Belcari (a 15^th century poet/dramatist so obscure here and now that his only Wikipedia entry is in Italian) is introduced in humorous, accessible terms, along with the information that there are a few people, including the author, who actually care deeply about his work. A significant theological inquiry into the relations between god and man is introduced gently in the context of a family board game and pursued many chapters later in an old woman’s reminiscences about her missionary family in China. There’s a screamingly funny (at least to a teacher) joke about undergraduate writing slipped into an account of a kind friend’s holding Janzen’s hand to get her through the heartbreak over her husband’s betrayal. There are some amusing first dates with snappy dialogue. And finally—oh, but almost too late for readers to care—we see an object of great significance from Janzen’s childhood, the symbol of her attraction to worldly sophistication, the spur to her ultimate intellectual growth and exploration outside her homogeneous community. Rhoda! Why did you wait so long to tell me about the blue silk hosiery envelope?

Janzen is a well-published poet. That bent no doubt has something to do with why her book reads more like a collection of humor columns than it does like a book-length narrative. It feels more like a series of good first dates than it does like a long-term relationship. Still, I’m going to give mennonite in a little black dress four out of a possible five stars. That’s about half a star higher than I gave Eat, Pray, Love, but maybe I’ve just undergone some spiritual growth since then.

I sure like Rhoda Janzen. And, students, the book has plenty of valuable craft lessons to teach, despite my complaints (the missing narrative arc, of course, and, well, some of the characterization is a tad bit flat as well). If you can fill up your portfolios with scenes and settings this well drawn, with sparkly humorous highlights and pockets of hinted-at depth, you’re getting an A, all right.

Imagine Karaoke

On Tuesday, at the Applebee’s in Harlingen, TX, I’m going to get up and sing John Lennon’s “Imagine” in front of a group of mostly strangers. It started out as kind of a joke in my sangha (meditation group). One of the things I think is cool about going to a church is the singing with other people, and it’s not just a select group of good singers that do it, but everybody in the congregation, for mutual connection and uplift out of the workaday mind. Well, I wanted to sing in the sangha, too. Why not compile a Buddhist hymnal? There are many great numbers with a Buddhist philosophy: “Let It Be.” “Give Peace a Chance.” “(Can’t Get No) Satisfaction.” We were all calling out the names of songs and laughing and occasionally breaking into a line of song to illustrate. Someone mentioned a certain plaintive number from “Hair,” the disappointed-in-love ballad called “Easy to Be Hard.” Several of the other people there didn’t know the song, so I started singing it from the beginning, because I could. As a teenager in the 1970s, enthralled with 1960s culture, I played that record over and over and over. And even though I hadn’t really thought about it for 35 years, I still remembered most of the words, enough to get well advanced into the song. I can’t say for sure whether the sangha was impressed with my long lyrical memory (or my audacity), but I know I felt relaxed and happy. Confident, not of having noteworthy talent, but of my right to exhibit my averageness.

“Let’s have a Buddhist karaoke group!” I said. “Let’s buy a karaoke machine and use it for a Buddhist Karaoke Night Benefit!” I was kidding, but I also meant it. “I’ll buy the machine,” I said. “When we’re not using it, we could rent it out to other organizations.” Yes, yes, they said, go for it. (Kidding?)

We shall see! One step at a time. I found a venue. I went last week to reconnoiter, learning that the quality of singers varies widely and the crowd doesn’t heckle. The worst-case outcome is that only the two or three closest tables give only polite applause for a few seconds. The best-case is more enthusiastic applause from the half the bar that’s paying any attention and a few hoots of approval from across the room. There are many quirky song choices, not all latest-hit numbers. An eastern-inflected Beatles number, for instance, would fit in just fine. I’ve announced the event on my Facebook page: world debut of the Buddhist Karaoke Circle (which may turn out to consist of just me). I’ve chosen and practiced a song.

I’m going to do it. Tuesday. My little dare to me. My little achievable project to cultivate fearlessness and joy. Not just mine, but for all sentient beings. Imagine!

David Small's Stitches is now out in paperback. I'm using it as a text in three classes, Intro to Creative Writing, Intro to Creative Nonfiction, and Graduate Nonfiction Workshop


.

It's a great book for teaching what I want to teach--thematically rich composition, moral complexity, subtlety of the narrative focus and voice, plot structure, suspense, characterization, tone: it's all there and all working beautifully. And people like the book. And I like it, which is a bonus in teaching. Teaching a text I don't like is tolerable for one semester, maybe even two, but after that I can't stand the rereading.

Anyway, so, I loved Stitches, let's have no mistake about that. Nothing but praise for the design and the execution. And, I largely share what I take to be the author's moral assessment of the characters. The parents have clearly not done a good job of parenting: the failure to give their son appropriate medical attention is appalling. "Neglectful" and "cold" are a generous description of the mother; many people if not most might call her abusive, though perhaps her methods aren't way out of line with cultural norms: David is shouted at and slapped when he runs off to play where he was told not to, losing his shoes in the process.

Make no mistake: I do not approve of the mother's behavior. Small shows her slamming around the house in resentful silence for days on end; I don't think it's right to give little children a punitive silent treatment for more than a very brief time, though what constitutes brief I shall leave as an exercise for the reader. (I don't favor hitting, but a parent has to have some means of indicating disapproval in moderation. Though maybe a childless person shouldn't pontificate too long on the subject.)

I don't believe the author intends us to read this narrative in the simple way some people like to read: identifying wholly with the boy and having zero compassion for the mother, investing 100% of their empathetic imagination in his perfect innocence and her perfect contemptibility. Look: the boy calls out for his mother's protection against a roughhousing older brother and against his harsh, unstable grandmother; doesn't that mean she must have provided him some degree of maternal protection on some occasions? In fact, we see David's mother's spontaneous impulse to shield him from her own mother's menace, and, by a short imaginative hop requiring only a one-link chain of inference, we realize that as bad as David's childhood may be, his mother's was likely worse on the average day.

Even the grandmother is handled with some measure of compassion in the narrative. She is discomfitted when her grandson can't understand her country speech, and does a pained double take when David asks what a crucifix is and she realizes the extent to which her daughter has rejected the religion of her childhood. David then wounds her deliberately when he says "Mama says people who say 'ain't' are stupid!" The grandmother's had a pretty hard life, but--let's have no mistake about this--I think it's worth calling her "evil" if we're ever going to use that word at all for assessing people's behavior. But the evil grandmother is portrayed not as someone animated by an inexplicable force of unprovoked malice and consciencelessness (like the evil people in much popular culture and a certain brand of politics); she's a damaged person, like David, like his mom. If David's misdemeanors--joyriding, truancy, etc.--are mitigated by the suffering and mistreatment he endured beforehand, aren't the felonies of the mothers mitigated by their suffering and mistreatment too? Not excused, mind you. We can understand and pity without necessarily forgiving. I think it hurts to be evil. Maybe there are a few exceptions--joyous psychopaths--somewhere, but not in this book.

There's only one place where I can't quite go along with what I take to be the book's assessment of the characters. I sort of feel I'm kicking over the pedagogical traces even to say this. Shouldn't I keep my own attention on form and technique, leave the students (at least the undergraduates) to work out their moral reactions free from my influence? What do you think of the characters, class? What do you think David Small thinks? Yes, by all means bring your own life experience to bear, but remember to keep coming back to the details of the text....

No, I can't help it. Listen: I think the psychiatrist did a wrong thing. I don't consider it wholesome to start therapy with a 15-year-old by saying "Your mother doesn't love you." What a dangerous, potentially injurious thing to say, even if it were definitely true and the shrink definitely knew it to be true. But I also don't think he had any very good grounds for making that assertion. How long could he have spent with the mother at that point, a couple hours? What arrogance, to be so certain about another person's inner life! And, yes, I think there is an element of Freud-inflected, mother-blaming misogyny there. The mom and shrink probably made mutually poor impressions on each other at their initial interview; the mother thinks psychotherapy is "throwing money down a hole." And, whew, that reminds me: the parents were paying for this. The Small couple paid for a shrink three times a week to reinforce David's worst feelings about his mother. Yeah, the therapy made David feel better about himself, but at his mom's expense. Oh, so, turns out it's the (male) shrink whose love is supposed to be true! Well, it's pretty easy to love someone for only an hour at a time, when you're getting a good salary, and you never have to take that teenager home with you and bear full responsibility for them, bailing out of jail and so forth.

Granted, we know that David's mother certainly didn't love him in a uniformly good or effective way. Granted she made consumer goods and partying a higher priority than nurturing him as she should have done; but it's ridiculous to suppose she didn't care whether her own son had cancer: she was in denial about the lump in his neck, is the reasonable explanation. Do you think love is a blanket of kindness, settling evenly over every interaction with the loved one and (especially in the case of parents) smothering every more self-centered desire? I have loved and I have been loved. I am not a parent, but I have parents, and I am here to tell you that love is not a blanket of kindness.

David, if you read this, I loved your book.

In Franz Wright's remarkable poem "Robert, Cat" a man feels his cat bestows "unqualified forgiveness." This may just be the speaker's persona, of course, not the author's view, but I feel like disputing it anyway, since lots of pet owners do hold this notion that animals have feelings that are just like ours, only deeper, purer, unsullied by ulterior concerns. The thing is, we really don't know what animals' mental states are like. Maybe Robert the cat doesn't even have any clear memory of having been mistreated by the speaker, if, indeed, he ever even had any sense of mistreatment in the first place. Heck, I can't even count on my own spouse bringing the same frame of reference to any interaction that I bring to it, so how can you make that assumption in an interspecies relationship?

If I step on a fire-ant nest in the yard, and get bitten, I don't harbor any feeling of resentment toward the individual biting ants. I don't think, "You little bastard, you're the one who did me wrong." In my head, a vague sense of menace and annoyance surrounds the whole anthill, but that's it. Suppose tiny robot servants carefully plucked just the "guilty" ants from my body and saved them in a separate petri dish, I would have no feeling about those ants that was different from any other fire ants.

That's why I've always thought hell was such a crazy idea. That a supposedly omnipotent being would bother to punish such comparatively insignificant consciousnesses at all, let alone infinitely, is preposterous. Or to love them, either, in any but the most abstract and not especially gratifying way.

Nope, hell is invented by humans, for humans, in a paroxysm of masochism or hate.

I'd put the whole Wright poem up here, but I don't want to run afoul of copyright. It's worth a look.

*Lit* - Mary Karr

I read Mary Karr's *Lit* this week. I've gotten interested in addiction memoirs. David Sheff's *Beautiful Boy* was so lovely. (Should I go and read the son's memoir too?) Anyway, *Lit* was pretty gripping, there's some fine writing. I got just a weensy bit tired of the how-I-kept-resisting-God narrative thread, which was repetitious and plodding.

But I read with interest about all Karr's relationships, some with famous people whom I admire, like Tobias Wolff, others with people I never heard of before, or whose names had been changed anyway, like her ex-husband, or people for whom Karr gives only a first name, like "David," who she bumps into at an AA meeting halfway through the book, socializes with at a halfway house, and later has a stormy affair with. David gets "Mary" tattooed on his arm even before they've "kissed on the lips," and then later he breaks her coffee table in a raging fight.

It was an interesting relationship, well integrated across 130 pages, though on restudying it, I find the David story takes up less than 6 pages total itself.

And then I'm done with the whole memoir, and I'm reading the back matter, which includes a *Huffington Post* interview, and the interviewer asks about people Karr wrote about maybe not seeing things just the way she did, and she says, among other things, "Whatever David Foster Wallace's motivation was for throwing my coffee table..."

Whaaaat!?

I would have read the book quite differently if I'd known that "David" was David Foster Wallace. So I go back and read the relevant parts again and feel like a fool for not twigging before. Karr was playing a tricky, coy game with us, wasn't she? The first sighting of David includes the trademark bandana, the vocabulary, the logic; when he begins to write Karr love letters they are "meticulously footnoted." How did I not notice those things? But of course I wasn't expecting David Foster Wallace. And why didn't she just tell me, isn't that deceptive? But no, it's simply accurate to her experience, because he *wasn't* David Foster Wallace yet, back then. And maybe she's bending over backwards to take the high road and not exploit the connection. But then she does put in the bandana and the footnotes, so is it kind of *wink-wink-nudge-nudge* having it both ways?

Not only did I have to go back and study every page in *Lit* on which DFW appears, I had to google up "mary karr and da..." by which time Google completed the phrase for me. In an interview in *Busted Halo* Karr says a few more things about DFW. She's not all hagiographic about him like most people who reminisce. She describes his famous solicitousness as kind of an act and says he was a "pussy hound" "in a creepy way" when she first knew him. So maybe it wasn't just incredible imagination that enabled him to write *Brief Interviews with Hideous Men*.

Debt is sharecropping

Unlike most people I know, I regulate carefully the spending of small amounts of money on things like clothes, haircuts, manicures, books I want to read once but can just as easily get on interlibrary loan if I wait, bottled water, soda, coffee, treats and prepared foods, eating out, and in general any food item that doesn't derive from the grocery store or somebody's garden. How did it come to seem normal for middle-class and even working-class people to spend so much on prepared food so many times per week? This is not, by the way, moralizing on behalf of elaborate slow-food family dinners--not that I'm against that stuff either, if you like it--but for myself I favor the fastest food there is: bread and peanut butter and fruit straight out of the fridge, for instance. The cost in both time and money is negligible. I really don't understand the desire to spend more. Why isn't retaining their money worth more to people than a series of impulsive mini-luxuries and illusory conveniences throughout the week?

Advertising has something to do with it, and so does habit and social norms, and a general background level of prosperity--compared to the third world, anyway. (I'm aware that relative incomes are slipping in the US for all but the top percentiles.) And each individual item, taken singly, doesn't cost a huge amount. It just costs way more than it needs to and is unnecessary. A twenty-dollar bottle of moisturizer? Thanks, I'll hold onto the $20, "because I'm worth it." (I know, I know, that's not even anywhere near the high end products.)

I don't mean to scold or set myself up as superior. Everyone has the right to determine their own priorities; I just advocate awareness: for instance that the cumulative amount spent buying sodas each month (compared to the amount spent on more nutritious food staples) really does reflect the proportionate position a person thinks soda ought to occupy in his life.

I'm aware too that my habits are way outside the norm, freakish by current cultural standards. It hurts to suspect that some of my nearest and dearest may think me "cheap." I don't think of myself that way. I didn't buy the cheapest house I could find, or the cheapest car. Ditto furniture and major electronic appliances. Those are long-term investments and I want to get the best long-term value I can. I love going to museums or getting tickets to other artistic performances. But I don't want to drop unmonitored little bits of money on restaurant food or objects and services whose ability to provide satisfaction is fleeting. The cumulative effect is significant.

This is not a moral issue. It's practical, like a well-insulated house. You want all the money you invest in heating and cooling to go directly to your comfort, instead of being dissipated uselessly outside of your own living space. You want to eliminate leaks.

The worst sort of financial leak there is, is consumer debt. Of course, go into debt for a house or car or an education: those things can be worth it because in the right circumstances they promote your long-term assets. But nothing else is worth debt. All money spent paying interest is money that could otherwise have been spent to enhance your life. If you cumulatively spend more on consumer purchases than you can cover with your income, and make up the difference with credit cards, you are reducing your spending power, not increasing it. This is obvious enough, and in fact, I've learned recently that a slight majority of US citizens don't pay any interest at all to credit card companies, either because they don't have credit cards (about 25%) or (another 30%, including me) because they pay off every new charge within the grace period before the interest is applied. Prior to googling up some statistics while writing this blog post, I was under the misapprehension that the average American pays a whopping credit-card interest charge on a regular basis. Not so. But a good-size minority does, only a whisker less than half. The average amount of income that went to credit-card debt among households carrying a credit-card balance was 21% in 2004. Now, since the financial meltdown, it's down to under 17% in most places, but still, OMG, 17% is a sixth of your income, a hefty fraction, and many people are forking over that much or even more of their resources mostly just to purchase the privilege of continuing to owe money while chipping away with a teaspoon at the original purchase amounts (paying the credit-card minimums ensures that total interest expenses will comfortably outweigh the principal amount). What a trap.

A person mired in consumer debt is in exactly the same position as a sharecropper.

*Project Runway* lets me down

You'll think this is terribly naive of me, but last week I lost my innocence with respect to reality television. For the last year or so, I've become an avid watcher of Project Runway, which will be a surprise to anyone who knows my extreme reluctance to invest any time or money with clothes and fashion. My mate got me into it. At first it was only something to do while snuggling on the couch; I brought my book with me. Gradually I came to see that clothing design is an art form like any other; following its trends is no more inherently contemptible than following literary trends. Tim Gunn is a delight, providing the kind of compassionate, honest critique I aspire to as a teacher and workshopper. And besides, the human drama is riveting. Watching the designers try to maintain grace under the pressure of extreme desire and fear as they wait onstage to hear whether they will be eliminated is a moral education just like literature is. I'm often very impressed by their integrity. (Whether it's at all decent to exploit that kind of mental suffering by actual people for mass entertainment is a different question.)

So, but, okay, Season 8, Episode 9, "Race to the Finish." At the end of the previous week, Episode 8, the preview scenes showed Tim saying to Valerie "You can't forfeit!" Then the bathroom door swinging shut and Gretchen saying: "Val...?" And then Tim in the workroom in announcement mode saying "Even I'm shaking over this." My mate and I looked at each other in wild surmise: what's next? A contestant dropping out? (It's happened before.) A trip to the hospital? (It's happened before.) Worse?

http://www.mylifetime.com/shows/project-runway/season-8/video/full-episodes/episode-8/a-rough-day-on-the-runway

Well, what it was, really, was nothing. The implied narrative arc among these three incidents was a complete fabrication. Tim's "shaking" was just a commiseration with all the designers over the not-really-all-that-surprising twist added to the ongoing challenge (create a ready-to-wear complement to the high-fashion piece). The "forfeit" business was only an offhand bit of teachery encouragement. And the bathroom weeping was unconnected with either of the other moments of dialogue and action. AND they were put out of chronological order.

Oh! Oh! I'm so disappointed in the person who bears moral responsibility for this piece of blatant fibbing. The director, would that be? Well, not Tim, anyway, I comfort myself.

I mean, of course the material for any show like this is manipulated, shape is imposed on umpteen hours of raw footage edited down to a scant one hour. I knew that. But there are honest and dishonest ways to do that kind of artistic manipulation, and I guess somewhere in the back of my head I assumed, naively no doubt, that Project Runway was more or less honest. Now it's right up there in the front of my head: What if there are things in the show that are lies in the same way that trailer was a lie? Nothing prevents it. This could be happening all the time, and I wouldn't necessarily know it.

The Project Runway trailer reminds me a bit of emotional upsets that my mate and I had early on, before we arrived by mutual efforts at our present happy state of stable equanimity, affectionate generosity, and tolerance. Not that there was any dishonesty involved in the case of our relationship, but I would be shocked sometimes to learn that out of two or three of what I had regarded as completely trivial and unrelated incidents over the course of a few days, she had constructed a linked narrative of inconsiderate behavior rising to a plot climax. I've been the object of unflattering narrative-construction at work also, where Dr. X believes, on the basis of a botched communication from Dr. Y, plus another unfortunate coincidence--I happened to be present when somebody asked him something he didn't like, but it wasn't my idea, but he probably thought it was--that I'm an enemy. Alas! There's pretty much no fixing that impression at this point. Every new contact between us gets grafted onto the existing story.

And then, and then... what if--? Could I myself, honest memoirist that I am, also be falling into unconscious narrativization errors? Creating a storyline at times where none really exists, from random events no more related in the real world than the stars of the astrological constellations? It's what people do. It's what Buddhist teachers are warning us about when they tell us to "drop all the stories we tell ourselves."

Okay, I'll try to keep a skeptical eye on my human tendency to narrativize, and I hope y'all will too. But as for the Project Runway preview, that's just despicable.

Rereading *Middlemarch*

So I assigned Middlemarch for a class on “Form and Theory of the Novel,” mostly because I wanted a 19th-century realist novel with a classic omniscient narrator that sees deeply into the inner life of multiple characters. I’m making the evolution of narrative point-of-view one of the themes of the course, since it’s mostly MFA students, in training to write fiction themselves. But I’d forgotten what a sheer pleasure it is to be absorbed in Middlemarch. It’s a life-enhancer, just as George Eliot intended. I’ve read it about once per decade since 1980-something and each time I felt like the book grew me.

I’ve always been curious about the sexual aspect of Dorothea’s marriage to Casaubon. Eliot signals from the start that young Will Ladislaw is the appropriate mate for Dorothea’s beauty, eager affections, and moral passion; almost every character who knows Dorothea (except Dorothea) recognizes the wrongness of her marrying the unlovely aging Casaubon. The right match will be made eventually, but in the meantime, she’s married to the old dude for more than a year. So, did they do it, during that time, even once?

I know how crass I sound, but really I do think the question matters, for a number of reasons. Say the marriage was never consummated at all, then it’s odd that that fact never comes up in the ruminations of either Dorothea or Casaubon, each of whom ruminates at length over her/his disappointed marital expectations. On the other hand, if they had a sexually successful honeymoon and thereafter a reasonable frequency of gratification (just apply your own standards here) for the duration of the marriage, then that’s significant, as contrasting starkly with their emotional disharmony otherwise. If their sex life began satisfactorily and went awry later, who snubbed whom, or whose desire petered out, or who withdrew first? If he wanted sex more than she did, or vice versa, or the sex drive of one of them was positively disgusting to the other, any of those things have characterization consequences, and Eliot is sidestepping the consequences of every possible sexual permutation.

The fact is, Eliot has a tough row to hoe, because she wants Dorothea to be completely blameless with respect to Casaubon. She can’t be mercenary, so her initial desire for Casaubon himself (not his money or position) has to be genuine if ill-founded; on the other hand she can’t be such a ninny that she never wakes up to having overrated the man at first; she can’t be selfish in her disappointment; she can neither withhold affection nor become demanding of attentions and treats as Rosamund Vincy would do; no, she has to try her level best to achieve her own rather lofty ideal of wifely loyalty; she can’t be unfaithful even to the extent of flirtation or fantasy; finally, she can’t be frigid, not least because she will need to bring a healthy sex drive later to her union with Will. To meet all these standards simultaneously, Dorothea has to have no discernible sexual traits at all, not even asexuality. Eliot left this part of the picture blank, on purpose, presumably feeling it was the best she could do.

Since Dorothea can’t be chilly, Eliot has her actively desire to shower physical affection on Casaubon in the form of hand-holding and the “childlike caresses” that are the “bent of every sweet woman” who has practiced love since girlhood, kissing the “hard pate of her bald doll.” She calls Casaubon “dear,” and rushes to his side when he’s physically distressed. In terms of all G-rated caresses, it’s Casaubon who drops the ball, but we are not really ever invited to assume that analogous initiatives and rejections are occurring behind the closed doors of the boudoir. This is not merely a matter of 19th-century propriety. Eliot could, if she wanted, have led us to make the correct inferences. Just a few years later, in A Modern Instance, William Dean Howells makes his heroine’s sexual enthusiasm very clear to all savvy readers without any overt indelicacy, and Eliot’s skills are surely equal to Howells’s.

What do I want from her, why can’t I just drop it? I can’t, though. Did Dorothea ever feel attracted to Casaubon erotically, on the basis of her misplaced intellectual crush? We shouldn’t rule it out. Dorothea is a person of bodily passion: she enjoys horseback riding, for instance, in what she considers a “pagan, sensuous way.” And it so happens I have reason to know that a woman of 19 can indeed be filled with intense physical lust toward an admired professor in his fifties.

And Casaubon’s erotic response? There’s a suggestion of impotence. Courting Dorothea, ready to “abandon himself to the stream of feeling,” he finds it “an exceedingly shallow rill” in his case:

As in droughty regions baptism by immersion could only be performed symbolically, so Mr. Casaubon found that sprinkling was the utmost approach to a plunge which his stream would afford him; and he concluded that the poets had much exaggerated the force of masculine passion.

Still, even a “sprinkling” of moisture is more than zero. Even if Casaubon’s foremost motive was “to secure… female tendance for his declining years,” he had made a conquest of a woman that everyone in the county regarded as a major babe. Surely he would have at least tried to enjoy sexual relations with his brand new wife, at least on the honeymoon.

I don’t really hold it against Eliot that she felt she couldn’t go there. If you want a beautiful, explicit evocation of a realistic, near-miss sexual misfiring between two characters, virgins up until their historically situated wedding day, each individually sympathetic in his/her own way, go read Ian McEwan’s On Chesil Beach. McEwan will give you full satisfaction.

I love Middlemarch, and Eliot, and Dorothea very much. But I still wish for a bit more. I could have felt closer to both the Casaubons. The question of whose fault their lousy marriage was didn’t have to be played as such a zero-sum game. I would have cherished a slightly less saintly Dorothea just as much and believed in her more. And I have always, always—should I admit this?—identified strongly with underachieving, fearful, intellectually vain Casaubon. Even when I was 19 and like Dorothea wishing for a mentoring-marriage that would naturally lift me up to a higher plane.

Lesbian Vampire

Oh, no, no, Rachel, no.

I watched the podcast (a day late as usual) of the Rachel Maddow show from Friday, September 17. The film clip ("The Shocking Truth About Rachel Maddow")of the redneck guy denouncing you for being an out lesbian and very probably also a closeted vampire was very funny, of course, but it made me uneasy, because I knew the guy couldn’t be for real. Where did this fairly obvious plant come from? thinks I, and is Rachel’s show in on the deception, or not? Much as I admire your work, I admit I felt a qualm. Unless the podcast somehow differed from the live show, the source of the final segment was not identified in any way, neither by Rachel nor by the speaker in the video. That’s a dangerous habit on a news show, a real news show, something that fits in quite a different category from, on the one hand, Stewart or Colbert, and on the other hand anything broadcast by Fox….



I’ve since learned that the persona of “Billy Bob Neck” is the creation of comedian Paul Day. So, whew, I don’t need to fear for the Maddow show’s integrity. This was satire, and intended—??—I guess—to be recognized immediately as satire. Though it would have helped if you hadn’t clipped off the beginning of the video where Day says “This is Billy Bob Neck…” The outrageous name, along with the exaggerated accent and mannerisms, might have been just enough to clue in all reasonably savvy viewers. But as it is, a significant percentage of the commenters on the Maddow Blog clearly took the performance straight: “Another Tea Tard trying to 'think'!” and “He is what he is, bless his heart.”

Rachel, you have to be careful. You’re an important cultural voice now. Vice presidents speak to you. Right-wingers campaign for public office as if they were running against you: this is evidence that you’re making a difference in the political landscape. Don’t jeopardize that for a lark. Sure, be news with humor, news with lively commentary, news grounded in a particular perspective, but don’t do anything that’ll make it easier for people outside your most devoted base to see you as simply the mirror-image on the left of the distortion machine on the right. After the ACORN smear, after the Sherrod fiasco, surely it’s clear that high-minded progressives need to avoid even the appearance of impropriety in how video clips are presented? Otherwise, there goes the center-right and center (if anyone is still in the center): You see? they’ll say. Both sides are equally extreme, equally biased, and take equally cheap shots. And since it’s now been established that no one at all can be trusted to hold accurate reporting as a higher value than their short-term political agenda, then we might as well just tune in to whatever panders most effectively to our current feelings.

What I’m saying: don’t give your detractors any ammunition. I hope when I watch Monday’s podcast (on Tuesday), I’ll hear you say “Just in case some of the viewers didn’t get the joke, the “lesbian vampire” guy is comedian Paul Day….” I know, you did it on the blog. But that’s not enough.