A Full Moon

Even though I have had a decidedly adolescent sense of humor since about the age of five, I still have just plain missed many of the opportunities for immaturity that fate has provided me. Returning back to my parents' home for a visit, I have discovered one of these lost opportunities. As long as I can remember, my parents have had the toilet paper roll on the paper dispenser in the bathroom, and they kept a spare roll underneath a crocheted dolly on top of the toilet. If you put the paper roll under the doll figure, her dress becomes a hoop skirt, and she looks like a beautiful girl who is going to her first ball. I have always taken for granted that, if you look on top of the toilet, you will see a boring sight: a perfectly nice toilet paper roll made to look all pretty and girly. Charm is deceptive and beauty is fleeting, since it's what's on the inside that really matters.

Well, imagine my surprise when I went into the bathroom yesterday, expecting to see the boring old hoop skirt girl, only to discover that she was now mooning me! There, in all of its unflattering glory, was a prominently raised tush. Since there was no one else in the room, it hardly seemed probable that she had intended to moon someone else.

I suppose, in retrospect, it cannot be said that she was actually "mooning" me. It was a bathroom, after all, and that's the kind of thing you see when you open a bathroom door without knocking. It was also nice to see the doll demonstrating the very activity she was there to help me out with--kind of like an airline stewardess, only, for the bathroom. I can't help thinking that if the author and stylist Henry James had visited this bathroom, he would have been charmed by the doll's preference for "showing" the action rather than "telling" the action. Indeed, this new doll position clearly fulfilled the modernist artistic ideal of form fitting function in a way that the hoop-skirt never could have. You could also see the entire bathroom incident as a surprizing manifestation of the "poetic justice" you usually only observe in stories: like the robber who has been robbed by his intended victim, or the schemer trapped in his own designs, I was the one being mooned by the very person I had mooned many times before.

Anyway, I discovered upon exiting the bathroom, as I was stumbling around and giggling uncontrollaby, that my wife "accidentally" left the figurine in this provocative pose when she had taken out the spare toilet paper roll. Accidental---or providential? It's exciting how many chance beauties we might miss if we're not looking and our back is turned--or someone else has turned hers.

Shoes--The Terrorist Weapon of Choice

My wife and I are visiting both our sets of parents--a week and a half ago we drove to hers, and yesterday, we got on a plane to visit mine. As of 4:25 pm today, we still haven't received our lost luggage from the airline. A few hours ago I gave up on the idea of languishing in my own filth until my real clothes arrived, so I took a bath and put on some of the embarrassing clothes that I left in the bureau of my old room. These are, of course, the clothes that I had hoped never to have to wear again, such as my underwear that now seems to be imitating the "ripped jeans" outerwear craze.

However, this entry is not about my underwear; it is about my shoes, or "sneakers," to be precise. I am a simple man, and I am a wearer of simple sneakers. Two years ago, I purchased two pairs of black Reebok sneakers, buy one, get the other half off. The first pair behaved in standard shoe fashion until I felt compelled to throw them away once I could see part of my sock. The second pair, at least until four months ago during my last plane trip, seemed normal, manifesting the standard forms of decay one would expect from a year's worth of wear.

But this time, after I went through airport security, took off my shoes, and put them on the conveyor belt ... something happened. "Excuse me, sir; we have an alarm on your shoes. We need you to step over here." They then needed to place my sneakers in some complex scanner thing. I started to put on my coat when they said, "Please wait, sir." They then needed me to stand off to the side, without my sneakers, and have a scanner run all over my body.

Now, I recognize that the government and/or the airline needs to take certain precautions to safeguard our safety in light of terrorism. But I don't understand why a beaten-up old shoe would pose such a threat. Further, I'm really not sure why, if my shoe posed such a threat, they needed to run a scanner over my shoeless body after I had already walked successfully through a metal detector. Yes, terrorists may have all sorts of newfangled equipment that they may smuggle in ingenious ways. What I don't understand is that, if the shoe is the apparent terrorist weapon, what did they hope to find on my body? Did they fear that the shoe was a "sleeper agent," and on my body I carried a gizmo that would awake the shoe and cause it to engage in unshoelike behavior once upon the plane? Had I missed the telltale signs that my shoes had recently been influenced by religious extremists, and there was (ahem) terrorist activity afoot?

Don't misunderstand me: I was not angry that airport security did this. No, the real sensation is complete and utter bafflement, which is worse, and will stay with me until I die, if not after. Much as audience members puzzled over the meaning of "Rosebud" in Citizen Kane, it is as if I heard an airport attendant's last dying gasp, "Beware the--the Reebok shoes of doom," and I am the one shouting, "What--what does that mean--you can't be dead, NOOOOOOOOO!!!!!" and being taken away by airport security.

A Christmas sermon I'd like to hear: "Cursed be the day I was born!"

For Christmas Eve, we were staying with my wife's family. Before 0pening the presents, someone suggested, "Does anyone have a passage of Scripture for us to read?" Someone suggested, "How about something from the book of Job?" This got my own mental gears atwirling, and I suggested the passage in Job 3:3, "May the day of my birth perish, and the night it was said, 'a boy is born!'" Jeremiah 20:14 offers a similar passage for meditation, "Cursed be the day I was born! May the day my mother bore me not be blessed!" Perhaps I was reminded of these passages from an incident back in college, when I was blindfolded for my surprise birthday party and had such cheery passages read to me.

Even though I initially mentioned the passage as a joke, after thinking about it longer, it struck me that it would be a good passage to read at Christmas. Even if most of my posts are (at least meant to be) funny, I am being serious here. Such a passage is most fitting specifically because it seems least fitting, and might challenge us to think of Christmas in a new way. Job, looking back on the whole of his life and seeing his recent suffering in its immediacy, thinks it would be better if he had never been born. Wouldn't Christ have reason to feel the same? A divine God trapped in a frail human body, betrayed by one of his hand-picked disciples, believed to be insane by His own family, and He dies on a cross while His countrymen shout, "Crucify him?" Yet on the day of his birth, choirs of angels sing that these are tidings of good news. Jesus had good reason on the cross to curse His birth, yet instead He prays, "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do" (Luke 23:34). With divine irony, His birth is a day of good news for us specifically because His birth will end with His suffering and death--a death which is not an end at all, but a new beginning of an imperishable body for Him and the promise of redemption for His people. "Anyone who is hung on a tree is under God's curse" (Deut. 21:23), just as His birth, from different perspectives, is both curse and blessing.

An Inspirational Moment from Boswell's London Journal

Every Christmas, I am struck anew by just how little I manage to accomplish over the break. Some new obstacle always seems to arise in my path: nephews with impressive lung capacity; a card game; a cold. Still, I've been on the lookout to make the most of every opportunity: if the house is virtually quiet, I break out Michael McKeon's _The Theory of the Novel_. If there are noisy nephews, I pull out Boswell's _London Journal_ instead, since it is lighter reading. Boswell is the famous eighteenth century biographer who wrote Life of Johnson, as well as a rather infamous (and posthumous) autobiography. I found myself moved by one particularly inspirational moment.

To put the moment in its context: Boswell went to London rather horny. He had already twice been visited by "Signor Gonorrhoea"--the 1st time it lasted ten weeks, the 2nd time, four months. This time, his plan was to keep a private mistress rather than visit a prostitute in order to ensure no future infections. Despite taking this precaution, Boswell comes down with gonorrhoea again. That's the sort of experience that makes you think he's just going to give up--maybe sit around, recover by sleeping all day, and do nothing for several months, much as I might be tempted to spend my Christmas break. But no. He does not give up. In fact, he resolves that, during his period of recuperation, he will read all six volumes of David Hume's History of England. As you might infer from the phrase "six volumes," this is a lot to read. Think Tolstoy's War and Peace. Think Proust's Remembrance of Things Past. Think Samuel Richardson's Clarissa, which you have probably never heard of. You've got to admire a man who gets hit by gonorrhoea and wants to read six volumes of something that is not The Far Side.

Having never gotten gonorrhea myself, I still find Boswell's experience remarkably motivational for my own work over break. Don't misunderstand me: I am very critical of Boswell's personal morality decisions. Nevertheless, there have been so many Hollywood triumph movies about "the little guy" who, despite significant impediments (like having an injury, coming from a lower social class, etc.) , will end up the uberchampion in golf, boxing, horse-racing, etc. Frankly, it is refreshing finally to see a "little guy" like Boswell with a more intellectual goal, and much easier for myself as an academic to identify with him, except for the whole gonorrhea thing.

I also like that Boswell seems to offer an alternative to the lifestyle especially prone to the transmission of STDs. The movie Down with Love, for instance, suggests that women do not need to give in to their baser animal urges with men, because they can just eat chocolate instead. Anti-drug commercials remind us that it is enough to be "high on life." Similarly, Boswell reminds us that there is no need to get gonorrhea, because we have history books to read. We must recognize that those who do not study history are condemned to repeat it, and when it comes to gonorrhea, you don't want to repeat the experience a fourth time. More, we learn that the study of history can provide an outlet for our sexual urges: on Feb. 20, 1763, Boswell writes, "I employed the day in reading Hume's History, which enlarged my views, filled me with great ideas, and rendered me happy." Instead of enlarging his customary protuberance, he has grown as a person--he has learned to enlarge his "views" instead. I would really like to see a new educational campaign with slogans for adolescent males like, "I'm big--on history," and for the adolescent females, "History fills me--with great ideas!"

-Leopoldtulip

Hugginess Protocol

Yesterday, before driving to visit family for Christmas break, we had to do something with the cats. Normally, we just leave them outside and just pick up some new cats when we get back, but we do like this bunch, even if one of them is so lacking in fine motor skill development that his aim for the litterbox can be off by as much as 200 feet. Not trusting them alone, we decided to drop them off at a place I shall call the "Inn of Feline Slumber." It is a nice set-up--$22 a night for the two cats, and they get their own room, a seat, and this thing with a hole in it. Later correction: according to my wife, the thing with a hole in it is called a "Heidi box," or maybe she meant "Hidey box." The lady working there didn't hurry us out the door, so we spent a couple of minutes validating the cats with various phrases that would be condescending to a human--"you're such a brave little boy for not hiding in the thing with a hole in it," "don't worry, everything will be all right, even if you won't see your foster mommy and daddy for several weeks, which is about a billion in cat years," etc. Then the woman working there said all such of validating things to us--they'll take care of the kitties, they'll give them a little toy mousie to play with to make up for their pain and sense of rejection, etc. But what threw me for a loop was that she hugged my wife, and then she hugged me. This is a woman I have never before seen in my life, and who my wife has seen (at most) on two previous occasions.

I suppose this has made me ponder hugginess protocol. I have googled the phrase "hugginess protocol," and found no hits. Yes, there are a number 0f hits for "hugging protocol," but "hugginess protocol" is different. That is, "hugging protocol" is about certain objective norms for all people, the "average Joe" huggers, who are placed in certain social settings in which they must choose to hug or not to hug. "Hugginess protocol" is about, given that someone already has a certain propensity toward hugging (e.g. someone she just met who has not performed any particularly endearing action, such as saving her baby from a burning building), what are the situations in which this person consumed by the personality traits of hugginess determines that hugging is unwarranted? For instance, if we had not said encouraging things to the kitties about being brave boys or manifested positive affection toward them, would she still have hugged us? If we had not simply omitted to say positive things, but said negative things--if we told the cats, "Bwah hah hah, you're all gonna die!" would she still have hugged us? If we had remembered to bring our own toys from home to show the cats we really cared, during the hug, would this woman I never met before have collapsed on our shoulders and sobbed, "You are both such beautiful people, the world is not worthy of you?"

Don't Judge a Book by its Cover

The nice thing about being a graduate student is that you rarely have to return library books. While the lowly undergraduates who pay for my stipend can only have books out for–you know, to be honest, I don’t know when they have to return them, let’s say they can only check them out for two days, bwah hah hah–anyway, while they must return them within an obscenely short period of time, I only have to return books every six months. Better yet, I can automatically renew all 200+ books already checked out to me on the library’s web page without ever locating them amongst my bookcases and bring them in, meaning, ideally, I can check out a book for six years. I suppose they like to think that, before clicking on the "renew all" button, I verify that the books are actually in my possession and where they are, but who has time for that?

Unfortunately, the library does occasionally force you to return the books that ought to belong with you when somebody (usually another grad student or faculty member) "recalls" them. This usually consists in sending you an email that says, "return this book in two weeks, or we will freeze all your assets," inevitably listing a title you don’t even remember checking out. A month later, after the email is thoroughly buried in your inbox, you’ll receive another email, "no more late returns, we mean it, anybody want a peanut?"

What happens far too often is that, once you spend an hour looking for the book and conscientiously return it, you are penalized by having another book recalled from you. It is rather suspicious that, after returning volume one of Paul Ricoeur’s Time and Narrative, immediately afterwards, volume 2 is recalled from me, and then later, volume 3. It is also rather suspicious that I keep having books on narratology recalled–books with titles like, "Narratology: an Introduction," "Narrative Discourse," etc. It is as if some unseen foe is stalking me, and every time I return one of the books, he or she looks at the bibliography and finds out even more books to recall from me.

Since we’re leaving to visit family for Christmas vacation in a couple of days, I decided I’d better return all the books being recalled for me. I spent about fifteen minutes looking for the recalled title "Narratology and Narrative Discourse," which, according to the library’s web page, I hadn’t returned yet. I couldn’t help but think, "I must have returned this book, its title is so familiar," since it sounded the same as every blasted book I’ve been returning for the past month. I have a bookcase which, at present, I call my "Narratology bookcase," because it’s supposed to have every library book on narratology I’ve checked out. I looked over the bookcase three times, carefully, and found nothing. I typed in the book on Amazon to try to get some hint about what color the freakin’ book was, in the hopes that would ring a bell ("no image available"). Why doesn’t the library, instead of just sending me the book’s title, clarify, "that white book with blue stripes," which would have been far more meaningful than just listing another book with narratology in the title.

After leading a life of loud desperation for fifteen minutes, I suddenly had a "Duh" moment: All this time, I had been looking for a book that would say on its spine, "Narratology and Narrative Discourse." Surely you see now how foolish I was: what if the book didn’t actually give its name on the spine or cover? Sure enough, I found it: A book which on its outside says nothing but "French Literature and Language Series Vol. XLVII" (or something like that). You must actually open the book to discover that it has a different title.

So, I suppose my experience has led me to several innovative suggestions: 1.a book should give its actual title on the spine. 2.if you are a library that receives a book without the actual title on the spine, let your patrons know what the spine is going to say when it is recalled from them. 3.Even if the book does include the title on the cover, remind patrons what blasted color the book is!

-Leopoldtulip

The Theological Significance of Eating Dirt

One of the perks of being at a research institution is the web resources--especially ECCO, or "Eighteenth Century Collections Online," which is a searchable database of 150,000 printed volumes from the eighteenth century. It's a lot of fun just to browse, discover an interesting subject, and then see if any other texts talk about it. On this particular occasion, I happened to be conducting searches for the phrases, "eating dirt" and "eat dirt."

I grant that there may be important theological issues at stake in debates which seem, prima facie, silly. As Dorothy Sayers comments, the medieval question "how many angels can stand on the head of a pin?" is actually addressing whether angelic substance, if immaterial, can have extension (i.e. if angels are spiritual, incorporeal beings, can something without a physical body really be "six feet tall?"). I have not spent a substantial amount of time researching the theological issues at stake in the eating of dirt. I did, however, glean something from some eighteenth century texts. What to do with this information, I leave the reader to ponder.

1.Eating metaphorical dirt is spiritually nourishing. In "The Church Porch" in The Temple, George Herbert admonishes, "Look on meat, think it dirt, then eat a bit/And say with all, Earth to earth I commit." Pretending to eat dirt reminds you of your own mortality and that your hope is not in this world.

2.Eating actual dirt is sinful, but God can forgive it. In Thomas Wills' The Spiritual Register (1787), there is the moving story of a child's conversion: "He came to his parents one day ... his little heart had one burden-- 'I am afraid, Sir,' said he to me one day, 'I hurt myself by eating dirt' (his appetite being depraved) 'and that our Lord will be displeased with me.' When I endeavoured to comfort him in the confidence of his pardoning grace, his little eyes glistened, and he expressed his hope that 'the Saviour would forgive him, and receive him.'" Eating dirt is a reminder of original sin, the depravity that infects even the supposedly "innocent" child, but grace can forgive it. This reminds me of when I was a child, and believed that "Take not the name of the Lord thy God in vain" meant that I shouldn't think the word "God." Much like trying not to think of "purple elephants," I kept thinking, "God, God, God" and then would immediately pray my repentance (prayers which, perhaps ironically, began, "God"). I sometimes performed such acts of contrition while on my tricycle, dutifully closing my eyes. I eventually determined, after hitting into several trees, that I should stop pedalling while I was praying.

3.In remembering that eating dirt is sinful, we should not think it is comparable to other sins, or we become deists. As expressed in both The Religious, Rational, and Moral Conduct of Matthew Tindal (1735) and Memoirs of the Society of Grub Street (1737): "the deists of this Age declare themselves of the opinion, that the most unnatural Lusts are, in Foro conscientiae [the tribunal of the conscience], no more criminal than a Child's eating of Dirt." Ironically, by upholding the sinfulness of eating dirt, we risk moral relativism. We must maintain an uneasy tension: all sin is dirty in God's eyes, but eating dirt is a less dirty sin than many others are.

4.We are responsible not simply for our own eating of dirt, but also for its eating by others. The Bible, after all, says it is better to tie a millstone around your neck than cause one of these "little ones" to sin; Ezekiel would bear the responsibility for his fellow Israelites' sins if he refused to point it out. As John Donne points out, "No man is an island," meaning not only are we not a piece of land surrounded by water, but we should not eat pieces of land surrounded by water, and when one person eats dirt, it's like we all do. In Madame Leprince de Beaumont's Dialogues for Sunday Evenings (1797), she writes: "though no earthly Judge call you to account for neglect of infants;...yet God will surely punish you....How many nurses there are ... [who] suffer the poor little baby to eat Dirt" (189). There is, then, not simply the sin of comission in the eating of dirt, but the sin of omission in failing to remove the speck in your brother's mouth.

How can we be attentive to all four of these dirt concerns? Well, if one were preaching a sermon, which I'm not, I'd tell you to remember these four points with the acronymn mnemonic, "DIRT."

Deism-avoidance: Don't pretend that unnatural lusts are only as bad as dirt-eating is.
Island, no man is: Don't pretend that you are not responsible for others' eating of dirt.
Repentance for eating dirt: Don't pretend that eating dirt isn't a bad thing.
Temple, The, by George Herbert: Do pretend that you are eating dirt when you aren't.

-Leopoldtulip

Muscles

Do you ever have a dream where you remember just enough details to make you wish that you remembered more--what the context was, the meaning, etc.? I happened to wake up mid-dream this morning. I don't remember much about the dream. I was in church, singing a hymn. The hymn went like this: "God, give muscles to the boy/God, give muscles to the boy/God, give muscles to the boy/God, give muscles to the boy." I even woke up remembering the tune (though I can't remember it now). But I don't know who this boy was that I was singing about. I realize that this is the season of advent, so I suppose it's possible that my subconscious was singing about the incarnation--that God would not just send baby Jesus, but give him muscles. Perhaps it was like Chariots of Fire, and there was a little boy in the congregation who refused to break the Sabbath for little league baseball, so he was going to compete in a sport he'd never competed in, like professional wrestling, and it was an important witnessing opportunity, so we were all praying for his muscles so he'd win and there could be a made-for-tv movie about it. Maybe there was a little boy who had never been bitten by a genetically-enhanced spider but had fought a villain named the Green Goblin anyway, and the only way for him to be able to stop a train from hurtling to destruction was if God gave him additional muscles. Maybe "the boy" was an allegory for the church, and "muscles" was an allegory for the Bible and sacraments. Any alternate interpretations out there?

Baldur's Gate--A Waste of my Talents?

Back before I was a graduate student, I spent my recreational time reading. Now that I read full time, much of my "fun" reading also ends up being from the time period I study, so it's hard to know how to categorize a text: for instance, I read Pascal's Pensees for "work," but John Locke's 1st Treatise on Government as "fun." After all, the treatise contains such zesty zingers as Locke's scathing sarcastic commentary on his philosophical opponents: "But according to [Sir Robert Filmer's] way of writing, having once named the Text, concludes presently without any more ado, that the meaning is, as he would have it." This is sarcasm in its highest form, and by that, I mean, on drugs and kind of stupid.

Despite such substantial recreational outlets as Locke's 1st and 2nd treatise, sometimes I get a yearning for non-book recreation, such as a computer game. Past computer games have taught me a great deal of guilt--Planescape Torment, Warcraft III, Heroes of Might and Magic IV--but none have made me feel as guilty as Baldur's Gate.

Let's begin with my character. Almost inevitably, whenever I click on him to tell him to do something--walk down a street, save a human being made in God's image, etc.--the audio voice comments, rather scornfully, "A waste of my talents." Perhaps it might seem implausible to readers of Augustine's Confessions to believe that a little child crying out "tolle lege" is a call from God. But now imagine that you are a Ph.D. student, and you have your character say (for the fiftieth time that day) "Waste of my talents," how can it be anything but a divine commentary on my pursuit of a vanity of vanities? If even the computer character, who when push comes to shove is not even sentient, feels sullied by his participation in the game, how much more should I? Like Balaam's ass, my computer surely saw the angel of the Lord with sword poised to slice me in two if I play for even ten minutes more, as surely as my own character was just sliced in two by the bandit leader Davaeorn. If even the very computer pixels seemed to cry out to arrange themselves in a different pattern on my screen--just how pathetic was I?

Don't get me wrong. There are momentary glimmers of educational value that temporarily postpone my self-loathing. The game starts off with a quote from Nietzsche, after all, about monsters. But I don't remember what the quote actually said, because there was no loud obnoxious voiceover reading it. No, all I remember are the jovial little phrases that the voiceovers repeat endlessly. Phrases like "Death to you all!" and "Go for the eyes, Boo! Go for the eyes!" I, who have tried and failed to memorize the carefully balanced couplets of Alexander Pope, have indelibly etched into my cranium some of the worst conversation starters and battle cries in history.

I also have to say that, even granting that Baldur's Gate represents a fantasy landscape, I refuse to believe that any characters would really talk they do. For instance, when you character is wandering the town, he can start conversations with the locals. If you happen to be starting a conversation with a local hooligan, the voiceover inevitably greets you, "So, I kicked him in the head 'til he was dead--heh heh." I refuse to believe someone I just met, even if he were a hooligan, would begin a conversation that way--at the very least, he would say something like, "There's this guy named Gary I don't like, so I kicked him in the head 'til he was dead--heh heh." Further, I refuse to believe that every time I met a different hooligan, he also has kicked someone in the head. Kicking someone in the head till he was dead should be a sign that that hooligan is special--but "if everyone is special, no one is" (The Incredibles).

There is also a striking discrepancy between the voiceovers and the character's speech text given at the bottom of the screen. For instance, let us say you click upon a little boy whom you have never met before. This little boy's voiceover greets you, "Loser, loser, loser." Now, let's forget for a moment that you are a level 7 cleric with level 5 fighters and a powerful mage, so this must be a relatively stupid little boy who is going to be sent to heaven very soon. Even granting this, I refuse to believe any voiceover can be so stupid as to taunt me, "Loser, loser, loser," while the text representing his speech below says, "Can I have a lollipop." I refuse to accept that "loser" is a flattering term that makes warriors spontaneously give lollipops to children (I did have some poison in my inventory, though ...). For a little while, I considered the possibility that the game designers were remarkably crafty--the very fact that the child was calling you a "loser" and asking you for a lollipop at the same time was a clue that he had hyperstupidity, probably because a witch had cast a spell of stupidity on him. Even after meeting several such tykes, I tried to keep an open mind, believing that eventually I would find an adult character who would say, "Please, I need your help, the Wizard Sagothon has cast a stupidity spell on all the children of the village, maybe you've noticed that every child you have spoken with is stupid, even beyond your wildest dreams of stupid."

Given that now I have a number of stupid, stupid, stupid phrases cluttering my brain, it has struck me that, ultimately, they may be no stupider than many of the common conversation starters we use every day. "What's up?" is just as unclear in its antecendents as "I kicked him in the head 'til he was dead, heh heh." If you stop and think about it, "How are you doing" doesn't even have a direct object--is this any less strange than a sentence that drops out a verb, like, "Death to you all?" I think if there were a grass-roots effort to greet friends with catchy phrases like this, the habit could spread to the outermost edges of the world, i.e. England, and then I, and many like me, would feel that Baldur's Gate is not a waste of their talents.

-Leopoldtulip

Food for thought, sh-t for brains

As a graduate student, I’ve been teaching a 12:50-1:40 class. Since I am cheap–um, er, conscientious in my spending habits–this means that I eat lunch at home around 11:45 rather than buy a lunch on campus. Sometimes, like today, this means that at the same time that I am rushing to eat and rushing to prepare for class so I can leave, another need rears its ugly head–um, er, butt. At the moment that I have designated for eating lunch, I suddenly needed to use the restroom. Refusing to sacrifice my lunch habits or my bathroom ones, and refusing to be a bad teacher by showing up late, I decided to integrate the experiences by
Warning: this is a public service announcement. Any of you who fear being privy to too much information about the privy may wish to stop here.
eating my lunch at the same moment that I was availing myself of the facilities. Surprisingly, I had a truly aesthetic experience. I don’t have to tell those of you who have read James Joyce’s Ulysses that the bathroom can be a source for artistic expression; if Leopold Bloom’s bathroom visit transformed literature as we know it, why may not a visit made by me, Leopoldtulip?
As I sat there, eating, etc., I couldn’t help thinking of what William Blake might call a "fearful symmetry," a daring harmonization of form and balance that is both beautiful and frightful–the food was entering me at precisely the moment that former food was departing, flow and ebb, ebb and flow. Food still in its prime, and elderly food in its last stages of decay, both merged together to become one within me. I was the chronicler, the biographer extraordinare, compiling not simply the history of an isolated piece of food but the history of every piece of food ever eaten, where it began and where it must inevitably go.

Going to the bathroom was not art, eating lunch was not art, but by doing them together, I had become art. This is what Alexander Pope is trying to get at in "An Essay on Criticism": "In wit, as Nature, what affects our hearts/Is not th’ exactness of peculiar parts;/’Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call,/But the joint force and full result of all..../No single parts unequally surprise,/All comes united to th’ admiring eyes." The beauty was not in the isolated parts of the experience, but in the whole, the "joint force" of fear and beauty united, of the life-force of food and the death-force of defecation.

If one had taken a photo of the moment–which I did not–but if one did, you would not even see me–or rather, you would see me–but I would be looking as if I were Rabelais, as if I were Bakhtin, as if I were all peoples and all foods at once, yet none of them. I would show you eternity in a grain of bread, would show you infinity in the palm of your hand.
-Leopoldtulip

C. S. Lewis and "Do Ya Think I'm Sexy"

In An Experiment in Criticism, the literary scholar C. S. Lewis makes the provocative claim that "we can find a book bad only by reading it as if it might, after all, be very good." The same is true in music. For over a year now, I have been haunted by the implications of Lewis’s claim if applied to Rod Stewart’s "Do Ya Think I’m Sexy." To exorcise this personal demon, I have decided to fully consider Stewart’s "poem" as a consciously constructed literary work of artistic value. You can see the lyrics here:

Let us look first at the chorus: "If you want my body,/And you think I’m sexy." We might be tempted to see these two statements merely as repetitive, as if it were Rod Stewart’s desperate cry, "If you’ve got some lyrics, and you’d like to give them, come on, genius, let me know." Yet as recent studies of Hebrew parallelism have shown (see for example Kugel’s The Idea of Biblical Poetry), poetic parallelism is rarely a mere repetitive structure: the second statement in some way completes or extends the scope of the first statement. There is indication that Stewart intended such a link by his use of the conjunction "and": In Stewart’s opinion, it does not suffice for the woman to want his body; she must also think it is sexy.

What, then, is the subtle difference between these two statements? "Want my body" most likely refers to the physicality of desire. Yet by demanding that she "think" he is sexy, Stewart makes an unambiguous affirmation of the cognitive, evaluative element in human relationships. Women have sexual desires for the body and have cognitive faculties that enable them to discern sexiness. In distinguishing wanting the "body" to thinking of it as "sexy," Stewart further moves from the subjectivity of personal desire to the objectivity of universal approbation; the woman does not see him simply as meeting her own personal needs but also as a fulfillment of universally held aesthetic norms, of being categorizable as "sexy." As a romantic poet, Stewart was faced with the choice whether to elevate bodily love or cognitive love, to elevate subjective personal preference or an objective standard for sexiness; his answer, as later echoed by noted poet Czeslaw Milos in different words and about a different subject, is, "Not at all! Why either-or?" Stewart boldly asserts it is "both-and," and offers his two-pronged conditional statement that unconditionally stabs into the very heart of the mind-body dialectic and the subjective-objective dilemma at the same time.

It is intriguing that, narcissistic as we might think the song is, it is not about Rod Stewart’s sexiness: rather, Stewart is the third person omniscient narrator, observing a relationship in its very opening stages at a dance club. He sings what his struggling characters cannot speak aloud. The song claims that it is poetry and music–aesthetics alone–that can express our anxieties about self-sexiness, express the poetic subtext that lies beneath the surface of ordinary speech. The only truth is that we dare not speak the truth, we dare question but never answer: as Stewart expresses it, he is "avoiding all her questions," and "he’s acting shy looking for an answer."

Stewart makes the subtle point that men and women are similar yet also, almost imperceptibly, different, facing similar fears under different circumstances and in different degrees: "her heart is gently pounding" at the club, while "his heart’s beating like a drum" back at his apartment. Two hearts, one beating gently, the other violently. "Beating like a drum" also contains a subtle in-joke, a passing allusion to the fact that Rod Stewart’s drummer contributed lyrics to the song; this resembles John Donne’s own poetic technique in "Hymn to God the Father," in which he included the allusive pun on his name, "Thou hast done [Donne]; I fear no more." We must also note the rigorous phonetic demands Stewart places on his music: mere one-syllable rhyme is for the little leaguers, as Stewart reaches out for something more, the daring multi-syllable rhyme of "apartment" and "heart meant." As the two lovers will soon become one, so two syllables must become one rhyme.

Stewart reminds us of the paradox of human relationship that when we draw closer to another person, we often must move away from another. There is no gain without loss. In a poignant moment, the woman realizes she must trust this man to "give me a dime so I can phone my mother," must choose between her mother and her man, to leave in order to cleave. "Aloneness" can express either the greatest alienation or the greatest intimacy: while in the first verse aloneness represents estrangement ("she sits alone"), it is transformed into a celebratory affirmation of human closeness ("Relax, baby, now we are alone"). Love is the only nectar needed in this bower of bliss: "he says, ‘I’m sorry but I’m out of milk and coffee’/’Never mind, sugar, we can watch the early movie.’" Coffee with milk and sugar has been replaced by him as the only "sugar" she needs. In watching "the early movie," they are no longer merely participants in Stewart’s story but become observers of another story, this "early movie" that, through the form of the poem, becomes inextricably linked to their own story. Stewart seems to say that, dramatic and mythic as their story is, it is merely one version of an endlessly repeating, endlessly connected story that began before us and will continue when we are gone, a television set that we can perhaps tune out, but we cannot turn off, except in the literal sense. Even if Rod Stewart’s song has ended, his legacy remains.

Dental Depravity; or, Jansenist Teeth

There is no easy way to say this. A little over a week ago, I had a dream in which some of my teeth were sent to hell. In my waking life, I've been working on a dissertation chapter in which I was researching Jansenists--basically, they were Calvinist Catholics who emphasized the complete necessity of grace for any good work and that God predestines before the foundation of the world who the elect will be, who will be "saved." Some of you may remember that I recently got a filling, and an offhand remark by the dentist about "saving the tooth" somehow was categorized by my brain as "salvation: entry 2; Jansenist beliefs about teeth," and during the night I dreamed that some of my teeth were not "saved" but in fact damned to hell.

Pondering this dream--or should I say "vision?"--I realized that it must have happened for a reason. Given that Jansenist theology has a firm commitment to the omnipotence of God and the purposes of providence, a dream about Jansenism must also be an expression of providential purpose. And then it hit me. People have deduced the existence of the trinity from something as simple as an egg; surely, woven within the very fabric of twenty-first century creation was an allegory for predestination, found within the dental profession. Scripture reveals that God has numbered the very hairs on our head (Mt. 10:30), so surely he has numbered our teeth as well. It is frightening to realize that, despite our great ignorance of what hell will be like (Dante notwithstanding), the chief New Testament categorization is that it is a place of intense suffering--for sinful teeth! ("there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth," Mt. 8:12)

Since Jansenists might be described as "Calvinist Catholics," I figured it might be helpful to sketch out how each of the five points of Calvinism may be illustrated by teeth.

1.Total depravity (that every facet of toothiness is corrupt and needs God's grace to vanquish cavities). Even when teeth look happy and nubile, they are rotting at their very core. Because of our innate arrogance, we are ever tempted toward the Pelagian heresy, of reducing Christ to a mere dental mentor who came to earth to teach us how to brush, that now we can do it all on our own with just a little help from the toothpaste (i.e. the Bible). We forget that Christ is example and savior, man and God, patient and dentist. ("Patient," of course, comes from the Latin word meaning "to suffer"--we often speak of Christ's "passion," which comes from the same Latin word. Coincidental ... or providential?) The "wisdom" tooth the dentists have rejected has become the cap tooth, earning Him an imperishable crown (see Mt. 21:42; for Jesus as wisdom, see I Cor. 1:24). We have a dentist who is both dentist and the perfect tooth that was pulled for no fault of its own, but because we had no room for him in our mouths and did not receive him (see Lk. 2:6, Jn. 1:11).

2.Unconditional Election (the salvation of a tooth is based not on an anticipation of the tooth's meritorious actions but on God's grace). Some people never eat sweets, brush ten minutes a day, and never get a cavity; some people eat sweets, rarely brush or floss, and yet remain cavity free. This is proof that it is not the excellence of the brushing habits but in the grace granted to the teeth.

3.Limited atonement (Christ has died only for elect teeth, not the reprobate). Christ would not place a filling in a tooth which he was going to pull out anyway; why then do foolhardy men insist that His life can be else but efficacious for those he desires to save through his death?

4.Irresistible grace (teeth cannot successfully resist Christ's desire to save them from their decay and rebellion). This is true in two senses, 1st, in that the tooth cannot prevent the drill from burrowing its way within and crushing our sinful cavity nature; 2nd, that although the dentist never "forces" us to get a filling, yet he indefatigably and winsomely persuades us into accepting his filling by showing us pictures of people with rotting teeth.

5.Perseverance of the tooth (all elect teeth will stay in your mouth, because Christ will not let them fall out). Even if a tooth may appear, from a human perspective, that it cannot be saved--that it struggles with decay, needs fillings, has perhaps even pained and shamed the rest of the tooth community by requiring repeated visits to the dentist--yet it shall stand firm to the end. It shall grind, but it shall never be ground up.

-Leopoldtulip

"The Shortest Way with the Terrorists" (with apologies to Daniel Defoe)

I’m teaching an English class where we’ve just finished reading Daniel Defoe’s "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters." (If you’re already familiar with the text, just skip this paragraph.) It was written at a time when high-church Anglicans were interested in new punitive measures against religious nonconformists who refused to be members of the Church of England. In the piece, the dissenter Defoe offers an ironic imitation of the voices of high-church Anglicans in order to expose the uncharitable spirit beneath their rhetoric. Since readers did not initially know Defoe’s authorship, many (if not most) believed the work was written by a high-church Anglican and interpreted seriously (and often approvingly!).

In my class, I tried to recreate these conditions, providing only the historical context necessary for understanding the argument, not the biographical material to reveal Defoe’s ironic intention. What surprised me is how difficult it seemed for the students not to read the work ironically. Rhetorical moves that I associate with persuasive rhetoric–e.g. the use of repetition for key phrases–were interpreted by students solely as indication of an ironic intent. They were reticent to believe that someone could argue in this manner seriously.

I don’t really like to bring up politics in the classroom. But I was very much tempted to bring up the status of the Republicans and the Iraq war–not to argue that Defoe’s narrator and Republicans are responding to similar situations but to suggest that the rhetorical strategies both employ are strikingly similar. What seems to us obviously ironic in Defoe’s writing could carry the plausibility of a serious proposal if it were placed in a different context in which we’re responding to a group by which we feel threatened. I don’t pretend here to analyze the motives of war supporters, whether the Iraq and/or Al Qaeda threat is real, or how to respond to that perceived threat; rather, I’m interested in drawing an analogy with the conditions of our own historical moment and Defoe’s context in order to illuminate why/how Defoe’s original audience might have taken "The Shortest Way with the Dissenters" seriously. Using "The Shortest Way" as a model, I’ve written below a pro-war/anti-terrorist/anti-Democrat statement with relevant passages of "The Shortest Way" included in parentheses.

"The Shortest Way with the Terrorists and/or Democrats"

Now the Democrats are preaching "Peace in Iraq." Have they forgotten that they voted for the Iraq war? Do they forget that decades ago, the Democrat presidents Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson were largely responsible for our presence in the Vietnam War? Another example of their hypocrisy is in relation to the filibuster. Back when Democrats were in the majority in 1975, they tried to prevent the filibuster when it would aid Republicans, but it is only now that they’re in the Senate minority that they become such vocal supporters of the "freedom" to filibuster. Now we have a Republican president and a Republican majority. We have a mandate from the people, and we need to make use of that power to present solid leadership.

("There are some people in the World, who, now they are unperched ... begin ... to preach up Peace and Union and the Christian duty of Moderation; forgetting that, when they had the Power in their hands, those Graces were strangers in their gates!...And now ... the throne of this nation is possessed by a ... member of, and friend to, the Church of England!")

The time of waiting for Hussein to get rid of his weapons of mass destruction has passed. We’ve seen what the terrorists and Hussein have done in Kuwait, in 9/11, against the American people and in his butchery of his own people. We were attacked on 9/11, and the time has come for "Operation Infinite Justice."

("No, Gentlemen! The time of mercy is past!...[the Dissenters] have butchered one King! Deposed another King! And made a Mock King of a third!...[Penalization of the dissenters] can never be called Persecution, but Justice. But Justice is always Violence to the party offending!")

The terrorists hate our freedoms. We must safeguard our freedoms and peace through the Patriot act. We need to protect ourselves from the future threat of chemical warfare and carry out a preemptive strike, before Iraq can attack us. If we show the terrorists that we are serious and will retaliate against their violence, their organization will crumble, and we can see democracy spread throughout the eastern world!

(The dissenters are "to be rooted out of this nation, if ever we will live in peace!...[the dissenters must be punished] "not for any personal injury received, but for prevention, not for the evil they have done, but the evil they may do!...If one severe Law were made, and punctually executed, that Whoever was found at a Conventicle should be banished the nation, and the Preacher be hanged; we should soon see an end of the tale! They would all come to church again, and one Age would make us all One again!")

-Leopoldtulip

Song of My Shelf

Last week, I woke to a crash. Having seen The Exorcism of Emily Rose a few weeks before, I uncontrollably checked the clock to make sure it wasn’t 3 a.m., the witching hour. I got up from the bed in a stupor and spent a few seconds puzzling out what you do if you hear a crash and have confirmed it probably wasn’t a demon. Dizzily, I recollect the notion of causality and determined that the sound waves must have come from somewhere: a prowler? That probably means I’ll have to get some weapon from our (visibly graduate student) bedroom, a nice blunt object like ... a book! Staring down at the floor, I discover that a shelf on my bookcase has decided to collapse at 5 am.

In the two hours that I lay in bed unable to get back to sleep, I was reminded of Walt Whitman’s poem, "Song of Myself." I thought, I could re-write Whitman's poem to partake of the cosmopolitan spirit of my bookshelf. It would be a bold celebration of miscegenation, daringly interweaving within the rich tapestry that was my bookshelf such diverse voices as twentieth century British writers E-O and twentieth century American writers E-O. The shelf was not simply a symbol of book diversity but crap diversity, offering a safe haven for broken pencils, cassette tapes that I should have thrown away, index cards, and lint. I could "feed on the spectres in books" and plunder Whitman's words for my own ends!

The next day, I tried reading his poem again and gave up. Here’s what I came up with in five minutes.

"Song of My Shelf" (with apologies to Walt Whitman)

I celebrate my shelf and sing my shelf
And every book belongs to me and not to you.
The shelves are crowded with perfect books
(my shelf is large; it contains multitudes)
I will go to the bath with a book and become undisguised, naked.
The End.

-Leopoldtulip