Church in the Catacombs?

In the article "Church in the Pub?," Hans Boersma from Regent College discusses what he thinks is wrong with the recent phenomenon of holding church in pubs and other secular spaces. His argument boils down to his dislike of holding Holy Communion in the pub, because the distinction between the supernatural and the natural ought to be marked. I think this might be a little inconsistent with his nod to a broad understanding of sacramentality--that is, that all the world's sacramental--but I'm inclined to think that 1) he isn't really invested in broad sacramentality and 2) you could argue that precisely because of broad sacramentality you need to perform specific sacraments in a marked manner to heighten the experience or awareness of their specific sacramentality (he doesn't make that argument, but I could comfortably supply it for him).

The core of his argument isn't really what caught my eye in the article, though. This did catch my eye:

It’s not as if we need cathedrals to worship God. However, I do take issue with the dismissive attitudes that comes across in the article [describing churches in pubs] toward celebrating the liturgy in church buildings. When, because of persecution, we celebrate communion in the catacombs, we’re suffering. Meeting with God in such environments is incongruous with our understanding of who he is and what we’re doing together in this liturgical celebration.

Catacombs seem, to me, to be the worst example he could have chosen to make his point. If you couldn't hold the Eucharist in a cathedral, I can't think of a better place than the graveyard to hold it. The Eucharist, after all, is a celebration of a botched death, an execution that didn't take. It's a promise that death will not be meaningless, and that it will not be permenant, but that it will happen, and that's a promise that only means anything at all amid the dying. Catacombs seem to be exactly congruous with a robust understanding of the Eucharist. (And, in fact, this should become truer the more conservative you are: Chesterton speaks of tradition as democracy with the dead, after all.) For goodness sake, lots of Christians, even now, hold celebrations in graveyards on purpose.

I'm a little bit convinced that the atmosphere matters to the proceedings, and for this reason I'd be inclined enough to eschew pubs, but if you really want a setting that is congruous with the sacrament, then I have some settings I'd which to suggest to Regent College: Hastings Street, Vancouver General Hospital, and Riverview Hospital. I don't think there's anything wrong with suffering a little when we celebrate Communion (so long as that suffering is something we've chosen ourselves), if only so that we can appreciate the fact that we're celebrating communion with the suffering.

"American suburban fantasies of manliness are used by real killers"

I have no time really to write a blog post, but I thought some of you might want to read this article: "Jesus, meth, and masculinity." Andrew Brown of the Guardian explains how John Eldredge's Wild at Heart, an American evangelical handbook to normative Christian masculinity, has become the official handbook of La Familia Michoacana, an especially brutal Mexican drug gang known for decapitation. It makes sense; the logical end of normative masculinity is unfathomable violence. But of course Eldredge is horrified by this turn of events. I don't have time right now to talk a lot of about how masculinity and Christianity make terrible bedfellows, but I don't have to: I've done it before ("Feminine Christianity"), and a bunch of people have done it better than I have ("Mark Driscoll makes pacifists fighting mad"). And of course it's nothing new that the somewhat silly daydreams of privileged people are horrific when acted out: I love pirates, for instance, except when they're real and contemporary.

Wild at Heart does happen to be on my bookshelf, though I haven't read past perhaps the fifth page or so. It is the only book I've actually flung across the room, and I made a point of leaving it where it landed for a few days before putting it away. I do not want to own it anymore. I want to be rid of the thing. But I do not know how to get rid of it. Donating it to a used bookstore seems like a bad idea because then someone might read it, and this seems like a worst-case scenario to me. Destroying the book seems like the best alternative, but the idea of book-burning gives me serious willies. Perhaps I should try to make some sort of craft out of it, but I'm not really sure what I'd make. (I'd like to make something like this, but I haven't the skillz.)

7 Quick Takes

1. I've been moving the last couple of days (and will still be in the midst of getting my stuff together in the coming days). If you've been noticing a marked absence in posting, this is partly why. I'm moving from a basement suite into an apartment of my own. This will be the first time I'll have my own place, no roommates, no housemates, no shared accom.

2. I have purchased and played Portal. I realize that I'm at least a half-decade behind on this, but I'm happy I finally did get caught up. I very much enjoyed it. Part of what interests me about it is that the game is (relatively) non-violent, at least in so far as you get shot at but you don't do any shooting. It's puzzle-based with a simple, stream-lined story. (In this case, I'd say it's simple in a good way.) Also, the gimmick the game is built around--that you can make linked portals on surfaces that you can travel through--is a lot of fun, in that it requires a slight tweak to your regular spacial reasoning.

And speaking of computer games, I think you might want to look at this trailer. The genre is squarely cyberpunk and has all of the conventions of it, but I'm interested in how it indicates a change in how computer games are marketed. I've fallen out of that world for a little while and I don't want to make unfair generalizations, but story and theme seem increasingly valued. Maybe Tycho at Penny Arcade exaggerates a little in his assessment of how philosophical this product is, but I think we are headed somewhere where his panygeric is not an exaggeration. (Though, given his writing style, I imagine he would up the ante as well and continue to overstate.) (And maybe he doesn't exaggerate. I've never played the game. And I may have unrealistically high expecations for theoretical questioning, since that is what my career seems to be right now.)

3. I visited a Buddhist temple. Not with the intent of converting, mind you, but of just looking and learning and (hopefully) taking photographs. However, no one there at the time was especially fluent in English, so my ability to learn things was a bit hampered by this (combined with my own lack of Mandarin, of course) and by the fact that I didn't really have any questions prepared, since I knew almost nothing about that temple before I visited. (I was lucky enough to see Pure Land displayed prominently somewhere, and to remember a little bit about the Pure Land sect from my RELS minor in undergrad.)

I was only allowed to take photographs of the exterior, but that's still pretty cool. The property is very beautiful, the interior more than the exterior, I think.

4. I have been going to David's Tea fairly often, equipping myself and my new crib, and trying new teas. I'm still a novice at this whole tea-drinking thing, and I've been meaning to find some new black teas--no fruit, no spices, no flowers--for first thing in the morning. I like the fancier teas later in the day, but first thing in the morning I like a straight black tea. Also, I got a kettle and a travel mug (with a built-in French press! what luxury!) that is wide enough for me to get my hand in to clean the bottom. This is always a problem for me with travel mugs.

Anyway, I like David's Tea because the staff are so extraordinarily friendly and helpful and chatty, and I am learning a lot about teas. Whenever I go in requesting one kind of tea, they show me others I might like based on that (and when I go back to try one of those, they show me more...).

5. At church I have been performing new liturgical roles. I am now trained to do pretty

much everything, liturgically speaking, with the exception of those things the priest does (of course). I imagine it's somewhat unorthodox for me to be doing them--I'm not even a diaconal assistant--but "somewhat unorthodox" is our modus operandi. However, as much as I am "good" at liturgy, I am increasingly reminded that no one is good at something they first start. I fumble as much as I did when I started being a server, and unfortunately those fumbles are bigger now. Still, everyone is quite nice about it.

6. I was reading Sedgwick's Epistemology of the Closet, which is very important and theoretically originary queer literary theory/queer theory without the literary, since Sedgwick is somewhat lauded for her ability to make bridges from text to politics/practice, a move that's difficult, controversial, and otherwise fraught. However, even though I enjoyed it a lot, I found that I stalled entirely at the beginning of the final chapter and simply haven't finished it. I need to move on. I've been trying to work with Precarious Life ("how mourning and violence might [...] inspire solidarity and a quest for global justice"), but I may need to read something lighter, at least until I'm finished moving. (I did want to finish it before classes began, though.)

7. For the last few weeks, we have had only one day of rain. The grass is dying here. This is so unlike Vancouver. It has also been less than excellent for purposes of photography, though I am finding that I can get some beautiful pictures of flowers in bright sunlight, even though it's usually the case that slightly overcast is all-around better for floral photography. If you can avoid the sunflares and the terribly inconsistent light levels, though, bold sunlight makes for bold colours.

Protection from Temporal Power

or, The Separation of Church and State

I am certainly not the only one who has voiced deep suspicions regarding the idea of secular spaces and parts of life, but I have voiced them, here. On re-reading those posts, however, I realize that there may be cause for confusion, and so I wish to make a clarification: while I do not believe that I can divide my life into the religious and the non-religious, I will defend secularism as a political institution. That is, I will argue for the institutional separation of church and state.

I can understand, though, how a devoted Christian (or other believer) could desire a conflation of a religious group and the ruling party. If you do truly believe that your religion offers the best understanding of the universe and the best moral framework, then it may seem to follow that your religion should guide (dictate?) your society's political decisions. The best way of ensuring that, unless your electorate is homogenous, is to have your religion unambiguously in charge. (I think of C S Lewis' allegory of the fleet in Mere Christianity.)

There are some obvious problems to this: for instance, even if Christianity were in charge, I don't think it's clear whose Christianity is in charge. Pope Benedict's? Pope John Paul II's? (I'd say these are different.) Fred Phelp's? Gene Robinson's? Pat Robertson's? Alexis Seniantha's? And how would such religious-political power be enforced? This also holds true for any kind of ideological power, really: can you maintain it and enforce it without violating the principles of that ideology? The sort of Christianity I believe in can't be enforced without contradiction, and this is, I think, an important point. Again I would like to turn to Huston Smith on Hinduism (not that I get everything I know about religion from The World's Religions, but I find it's succinct and usually make explicit what I want to refer to).

In the following passage Smith explains the role of the brahmin in the Hindu caste system:

Members of this class must possess enough willpower to counter the egoism and seductions that distort perception. They command respect because others recognize both their own incapacity for such restraint and the truth of what the seer tells them. [...] But such vision is fragile; it yields sound discernments only when carefully protected. Needing leisure for unhurried reflection, the seer must be protected from overinvolvement in the day-to-day exigencies that clutter and cloud the mind [...]. Above all, this final caste must be protected from temporal power. India considered Plato's dream of the philosopher king unrealistic, and it is true that when brahmins assumed social power, they became corrupt. For temporal power subjects its wielder to pressures and temptations that to some extent refract judgment and distort it. The role of the seer is not to crack down but to counsel, not to drive but to guide. [emphasis mine]

We see here that it is not only political, institutional power that corrupts the brahmin, but also social power. It is likely an oversimplification to say that the worst excesses of Christian churches--whether Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Pentacostal--are a result of power, but I am certain that power was involved, and I think a cursory glance through your own understanding of history will support that.

For instance, much of my sense of the specifics of doctrinal history come from my Lutheran confirmation class some years ago. To my understanding, many of the problems that Luther sought to reform in the Catholic Church, leading to his excommunication and, eventually, the formation of one of the earliest Protestant churches, were fairly obviously instances in which the political power of the Church resulted in a corruption of its doctrine. In particular, the sale of indulgences could only exist in a setting where the church dealt in wealth and power. (Or so you'd think, but Scientology and the celebrity version of Kaballah do sometimes exchange spiritual status for money, and I'm not going to say that televangelists are above similar tricks. But these are somewhat different phenomena.) More than this, Luther was forced into exile because of his heterodoxy. When political power and religious groups are closely tied, heresy is necessarily political. (In better news, it wasn't much later that the Catholic Church conceded he was right on the indulgence count.) If you prefer other examples, I can think of the abuses performed both on Aboriginal bodies and on theology in Anglican missions in Canada, or the current theological "work" being done to support the subjugation of female and homosexual individuals, and to support aggression against Islam (in the past it would have been communism), in certain Protestant churches today.

And so I support the separation of church and state not just to protect the state, but to protect the church. The role of any religious institution is to guide and teach, to offer aid and sanctuary. The effect power has on these roles is largely negative. I had a professor once who said that Christianity might improve for its loss of cultural influence, by forcing it to remember its origin as an outcast belief and thereby forcing it to remember its duty and allegiance to the marginalized, an allegiance all but forgotten these days.

A word of caution, though: I imagine some of the ugliest forms of Christianity that exist today get their ugliness from their loss of power. That's not to say that the loss of power won't, in time, be cleansing for most, but for those invested too much in the idea that America is a Christian nation, or the equivalent of that in other countries (like my own), this loss of power will result in some atrocities. I want to note, though, that this is still a result of power's corruption; you just don't always see the rot until you kick the log over.

And another word of caution: The role of the brahmin is to give direction to society, including and perhaps especially the prince. Isolating the brahmin from power doesn't mean he or she has no role in it. The trick seems to be that the brahmin's resulting power must be invisible to him or her, the (hopefully healthy) inverse of an Ender's Game scenario.

And a final word of caution: It is not only religion that is corrupted by power. Economic or scientific beliefs, even when in themselves good, can be too. While Marx may have been on to something, Stalin wasn't; while genetics is true, when combined with power you might get eugenics.

On Denominations and Preferance

[Apologies for ugly white space errors. I seem unable to remove them.]

The other day I wrote a post explaining one reason I prefered liturgical churches, and received some positive feedback on it. In this post I am not contradicting that, but I am going to suggest that that preference, though obviously shared by others, is still personal and non-objective. In so doing, I am going to explain one way that I envision denominationalism, which is mainly wild speculation on my part. Don't expect much reasoned argument. On an entirely separate note, I will begin this post with a brief discussion of Hinduism, because it was in my readings of Hinduism that I begin to think this way about denominations.

In The World's Religions, Huston Smith writes of Hinduism the following:

The spiritual trails that Hindus have blazed toward this goal [to unite the human spirit with God] are four. At first this may seem surprising. If there is one goal, should there not be one path to it? This might be the case if we were all starting from the same point [...]. As it is, people approach the goal from different directions, so there must be multiple trails to the common destination.
Where one starts from depends on the kind of person one is. The point has not been lost on Western spiritual directors. One of the most noted of these, Father Surin, for example, criticized "directors who get a plan into their heads which they apply to all the souls who come to them, trying to bring them into line with it like one who should wish all to wear the same clothes." St. John of the Cross called attention to the same danger when he wrote in The Living Flame that the aim of spiritual directors should "not be to guide souls by a way suitable to themselves, but to ascertain the way by which God Himself is pointing them." What is distinctive in Hinduism is the amount of attention it has devoted to identifying basic spiritual personality types and the disciplines that are most likely to work for each. The result is a recognition, pervading the entire religion, that there are multiple paths to God, each calling for its
distinctive mode of travel.

From which recognition develops the four different yogas in Hinduism. (Actual Hindu yoga is a different order of thing than the sort of lululemon yoga we see in North America; one kind of yoga, for instance, mainly concerns study of Scriptures, while another involves working hard. Body positions are limited to one facet of a certain kind of yoga.) At any rate, what is interesting is the fundamental recognition in Hinduism that "People are different." [Note: that Brahma is often depicted with four faces, as in the photo above, is not to my knowledge related to the existence of four yogas.]

I've done a little denomination hopping in my twenty-and-so years so far, and I can see strengths and weaknesses in each. As I recently outlined, I think that the strengths far outweigh the weaknesses of some ways of doing things and that that's less the case for other ways of doing things. But I constantly find myself coming back to this point that people are different and that these different people have different needs. That is, I know that some people are in such a position that they can't find God in "ceremony." I think this is a bloody shame in the same way I think it's a shame that some people don't like to eat raisins or don't like looking at insects, but I nonetheless sympathize. (Well, I have a hard time sympathizing with anti-insect sentiments. They're just so cute.) I especially sympathize because abuses from whatever church they grew up in could be part of why they can't tolerate that sort of service.

For this reason, while I would not want to attend the sort of church with lots of hand-raising and spontaneous hallelujahs and dancing in the aisles (I cannot emphasize how much I would not want to attend such a chuch), I do encourage their existence. There may be people for whom this is the best path to God, and it is not my place to decide that they must instead sit still in a pew when we sing and must walk calmly and quietly when coming up to receive Eucharist. And I'll also thank-you very much for not calling the way I do things mystifying and bloodless.

So even though I sympathize with the desire to universalize all church services, to insist that churches all incorporate more responsive reading/ Scripture/ spontaneity/ traditional hymns/ what have you, I want to suggest that that's a bad idea. Basic human variation, locally and across geographies, suggests that we should have different churches that have different ways of worshipping God. Of course, we already have this: denominations. The bonus with denominations is that this allows for difference within a region but similarity across regions; in my last post, Leah commented that she liked universal liturgy because you could go to any Catholic church in the country and know what to expect. Of course that's not always true of Protestant or Anglican churches, but you'll still know that Anglicans and Lutherans will be more litugical while Baptist and Pentacostal churchs will be far less so.

The trouble, however, with taking denominations as simply different in worship style is that that's outright false. Different denominations--different parishes, even--differ not only in practice but in doctrine. I have always found that it is easier to disagree with doctrine than with service style, but there are some doctrines I find too odious to put up with. I have a low tolerance for sexism or homophobia, for instance, and this rather limits my choices. And, unfortunately, certain political positions tend for whatever reason to congregate around certain worship styles. To take denominations as entirely aesthetic and not semantic in difference would be an enormous factual error.

Nonetheless, I will continue to defend the right to worship in ways I find incomprehensible, so long as churches do not violate issues of social justice, and I will tend to choose churches more on worship style than on doctrinal content, beyond certain cut-off points. (This may in part be due to the knowledge that I am probably heterodox in almost any church I enter. But there are places where doctrine crosses over into practice and politics and I am unwilling to tolerate some of those consequences.) This also means that I place a high value on ecumenism, but not on dissolving all denominational distinctions. Due to doctrinal differences, we must have theological conversations across denominations, and due to differences in practice, we can learn practical things from one another as well. But I do not think I would, given the chance, remove the system of denominations wholesale. After all, people are different.

On Unspoken Rules and Why I Prefer Liturgy

I have said before that I find supremely useless the following dancing advice: "Just move to the music." People who know how to dance often offer this advice to those of us who don't, thinking it is helpful. It's not, and the reason it's not is quite simple: the person who knows how to dance knows what not to do. There are particular ways of moving your body that are disallowed, but these are not posted visibly anywhere in the club. Moreover, no one can tell you what these movements are because no one seems to know until you've already done it. Then they know very well that you've broken the rules, and they will sanction you for it. Think of how unfair this is: you ask what you should do, they tell you, you do it, but since you do it "wrong" according to rules they didn't (in fact couldn't) tell you about, they sanction you (by laughing at you, by avoiding you, by being embarassed "for" you--which means "by you").

Ballroom dancing is different. In ballroom dancing, the movements are all very explicit. You can ask what you're doing wrong, and people who know how to ballroom dance can tell you, or at least show you. That's not to say that there isn't room for taste or interpretation, but you can ask for explicit instruction and receive it. In a way, it's difficult to do, but it's easy to start learning. This is unlike club dancing, which is easy to do but very difficult to learn.

I prefer liturgical church services for very similar reasons.

When I was young, I had confirmation class at a small Lutheran church. As part of that process my class and I were often acolytes, which means that we lit the candles and performed minor ceremonial functions during the services. More cosmetically, it means we stood up at the front during the service and wore albs. I was often quite nervous because there were so many rules I was supposed to follow. Sometimes the pastor was quite severe and I had significant pressure to adhere to holiness codes exactly. I needed to remember to bow at the right time, to light and extinguish the candles in the right order, and so on. I was anxious about it. (Which, at that age, was par for the course: I was anxious about everything.)

When I was in my undergraduate degree, I attended a congregational church. I was shocked at first that there was no altar, that there was a band (aka "worship team") and not an organist, that the pastor didn't wear vestments, and so forth. I did get used to in time, though. It was a very energetic church. There was a lot of music and not much in the way of responsive reading. There was no fuss about candles and there was no cross to bow to.

During this time I also starting attending Praise and Power, a worship service held for students in the evening once a month. This was not administrated by pastors or anything; it was run by a committee of student musicians who played worship songs that we all sang to. There was also usually a skit or a speaker of something, too, but the focus was on the music.

These were the opposite of liturgical. I was new to this sort of Christian culture, and for a while I was quite nervous. I didn't know what was expected of me. People are raising their hands. Am I supposed to raise my hands? People are praying for each other. How does one do this spontaneous prayer thing (or "popcorn prayer" as some people called it)? What do you say? What are you allowed to say? What are you expected to say? There's a sort of awkwardness if you don't do what you're supposed to do with confidence, but how does one get the confidence if you don't know what you're supposed to do? And if I asked people, I was either told to do what I found natural (which wasn't anything like this, frankly) or do whatever everyone else was doing (thanks, like I hadn't picked up that principle in kindergarten) or, worst of all, let the Spirit guide me. Which is theologically sound advice, maybe (maybe), but unhelpful because my concern wasn't so much what was Spiritually mature but what conformed to this particular culture.

The problem, of course, was that the people who breathed this sort of culture effortlessly didn't realize that there were rules. They didn't think of it in terms of rules. To an extent, they couldn't. They thought they were being spontaneous, that they followed the Spirit where it willed, that they were accepting of all who earnestly sought Christ. All of this meant that they couldn't recognize that what they were doing was patterned. I'm not saying there wasn't spontaneity, but that it existing within a certain framework of allowable actions at allowable times. (For instance, no one spontaneously removed their clothing or began swearing at the top of their lungs. Moreover, no one kneeled. No one canted in Latin. No one took out a rosary. No one made the sign of the cross. No one venerated an icon. No one tried to meditate.) And I'm not saying that the Spirit wasn't leading them; if they were Spirit-led, though, then the Spirit pretty clearly wanted them to adhere to the social norms of the culture, and until I knew those norms, I was at a loss. And they would accept anyone's right to be there, but that doesn't mean there were no sanctions. Sanctions came in the form of awkward silences, of gossip, of gentle teasing, or of (depending on the situation and the person doing the sanctioning) "Christian" rebuke.

Eventually I learned most of the rules--one of the big ones during Praise and Power was when to stand and when to sit, because it was our own "choice," but that choice was enclosed by unspoken social expectations. Once I became one of the oldest generation there, I was part of our closely-knit trend-setting class, so (to an extent) what I did set the pattern, within the larger expectations of the group (and the rest of my generation). That made it easier, especially when I got a handle on those rules. But this was a slow process, and I was rather anxious even then, let alone before I had that confidence.

After I graduated, I went to Fort McMurray and eventually joined an Anglican church. The church was liturgical, and it felt like coming home. I realized how much I missed candles lit in a certain order, chalices with wine, vestments (with different colours based on the season!), cinctures, responsive readings and Books of Alternative Services, scripted prayer. There are lots of reasons for liking liturgy, but when I signed up to be a server I got a handle on one of them: it's much easier to learn very exact rules than it is to learn unspoken ones. If I had a question, I could just ask. Of course, it helped that the preists and the deacon were very nice and forgiving of mistakes. (We laughed an awful lot, I recall.) And it's the same at the church where I now serve. Of course I worry sometimes about getting things wrong, but if I ever forget what I'm supposed to do, I just ask. It's quite easy, really. (It's even easier at St. Faith's, too. The bulletin has everything printed right in it and we never sing hymns back-to-back, so I don't need to worry about when I'm supposed to perform my assorted duties.) As a congregation member it's even easier to pick up the expectations. Again, you can just ask. (Note: our church looked nothing like this photograph. St. Thomas's was very low-church and had strains of charismatic worship if one priest was presiding that day.)

Later I learned that St. Thomas' in Fort McMurray wasn't even all that liturgical. The Anglo-Catholic churches and High Anglican churches generally are even more liturgically inclined. Perhaps a more strenuous insistance on doing liturgy correctly could increase anxiety, but I still maintain that that's better than a non-liturgical church or worship culture where doing things correctly are equally important. Of course, there's a middle ground, too; the United churches I've visited aren't very liturgical but also don't especially require the congregation's participation. This means that there's almost no stress at all on the congregation member and, therefore, the degree of liturgy or non-liturgy matters much less.

Someone I know from St. Thomas' once said that all churches have liturgy; liturgical churches just admit it. I think she's right, in a certain sense. In the culminating course of my Religious Studies minor, we read a paper about the specific patterns of behaviour followed by some of the more evangelical, charismatic, Spirit-minded churches. Close analysis of who did what when--and, specifically, how the genre of "testimonial" was constructed--shows that there is a very rigid pattern. Testimonials must address specific, gender-linked tropes and follow specific narrative structures. These churches are among those who are most insistent on their spontaneous following of the Spirit, and at the same time an observent, trained anthropologist could formulate an accurate liturgy. (And, somewhat more terrifying, these churches are more likely to ostracize you for breaking the rules than an Anglican church.)

I know people new to liturgical churches are often nervous about the rules, but I can assure it's easier to learn these rules than it is to learn the rules of the non-liturgical churches, especially those which are very energetic and allow for lots of participation. I would far rather start attending a new liturgical church than a new non-liturgical church, even beyond the other reasons I value liturgy. If can choose between explicit and implicit rules, I will often choose the explicit ones. There are of course exceptions, but that's for another time...

Catch-Up

Looking through my archive, I see that I have not given you all an update of my life since 25 February. My apologies; I assure you that I have been quite busy. If you take a look at that last 7 Quick Takes, you'll see that I bought some journals, which means that I actually have a record of what happened in the meantime. Fancy that. Let's dive in.

1. I have become a sidesperson and a liturgical assistant-in-training at my church. I am a member of the church for real. In the instance of the latter, I get to wear an alb again. Regular readers will know that this pleases me. What's even more exciting is that my church does not have albs big enough for me, so I get to wear the priest's spare clergy alb. One of the unexpected privileges of being a liturgical assistant-in-training is that I am sometimes asked to serve the priest the Eucharist.

2. I gave up tea for Lent. It was difficult but I survived. I also planned to write a sonnet each week; I only got two written. Not so good. If you want to see someone who succeeded at a more daunting sonnet Lenten devotion, go visit Miss Lazarus' site.

3. I picked up a new webcomic, Order of the Stick. I'm no table-top RPG player but I still find it delightful. Genre-savviness makes me swoon, what can I say?

4. I went to a Contemplative Prayer service or two in the elapsed time. In the most interesting I was introduced to the Anglican Rosary. I am a fan; I wish I had one. I am not sure what makes it different from a Catholic Rosary.

5. For class I have read a number of interesting works, some new to me and some familiar: "Death and the Compass" by Borges, The Tempest by Shakespeare (as well as other things by him, but that's in my opinion the most interesting of them), Waiting for Godot by Beckett, a host of stuff on reported speech, including an article by one Wooffitt on mediums reporting (supposedly) the speech of spirits.

6. I have officially (for myself, at least) moved towards Universalism. I'm aware that it's not fully worked out, but I consider the problems with Arminianism and Calvinism more insurmountable than those of Universalism. This move was entirely instigated by the series over at Dr. Richard Beck's blog.

7. I have started running. Twice a week, that is, in the morning, with a friend of mine. Athleticism is such a strange concept for me yet I've fallen into this routine easily enough. The trick is, will I continue over the summer?

8. I saw a Green College production of The Importance of Being Earnest. If you can believe it, I'd never seen nor read it before. I quite enjoyed it.

9. I also attended the EndNotes conference, the UBC English Department annual graduate conference. This year's theme was "Beyond the Book." I heard friends and colleagues give papers on how the Twilight franchise has impacted the community of Forks, Washington; how Canadian history and archive is explored in the comics of Seth; how V's mask relates to reader identification and the genre conventions of melodrama (theatre) in V for Vendetta (the graphic novel); how narrative pornography has begun to rise with Pirates and what this has to do with the potential for feminist pornography (that one was a bit controversial, you can imagine); how Girl Talk enacts the Death of the Author; and how intertextuality and copyright operate in the Arthurian legend of Swamp Thing #87, in which Merlin draws Swamp Thing back in time to Camelot to defend the kingdom against Mordred. It was an exultation of grad student nerdiness and I loved it.

10. I wrote two papers. One concerns a particular type of self-reporting speech which I examine in detail in order to learn more about self-reporting. The other concerns the constitution and perversion of the ideal male military body through its parodic inversion in the Coventry and Gloucestershire muster scenes of 1 and 2 Henry IV respectively. (Those are Shakespeare plays, in case you are not fully read up on your early modern drama.) The process of researching, writing, and editing was, of course, harrowing.

11. Immediately after submitting my papers I graded about 50 student essays (each of my 25 students had to write two essays for their final exam, as well as do an identify-and-state-the-significance-of section) and calibrate my final grades for submission. I did this perforce over the Easter weekend, which I found quite distasteful. During this process, I crashed a little bit.

12. For these essays, I read papers and books on the early modern English constitution of masculinty and on the dynamics of everyday speech. For the former, may I suggest Gary Spear's article "Shakespeare's "Manly" Parts: Masculinity and Effeminacy in Troilus and Cressida" and Patricia Cahill's Unto the Breach; for the latter, may I recommend Goffman's Forms of Talk. (His Frame Analysis is also interesting and was written earlier, so perhaps you should skim it first. Both are tomes.)

13. I have given substantial thought to some things other than my papers during this time, among which has been what friendship is and what sorts of requirements come with it. Altruism has always been important to me but certain interpersonal issues seem different when framed by general ideas of altruism than when framed in a context of friendship. As I make and solidify new friendships here in a new city, these question gain some immediacy.

14. Some time in the midst of the above, I finished One of Us, which I wrote on before. I'd like to share another excerpt, one I thought worthy of copying out in my journal: "But what if we understood such twins as people who are no more broken than anyone else? What if we stopped thinking of biological anomalies as the sworn enemies of humanity, and started recognizing their full social nature, perhaps even their social potential? In the long run, we can do more than try to guarantee every child a 'normal' body. We can try to guarantee a just world. If you take seriously what conjoined people have said about their bodies and their lives, you realize they are still experiencing what Mary Wollstonecraft felt in the late eighteenth century: 'It is justice, not charity, that is wanting in the world.' Let us now stop referring to children who undergo massive normalizations as 'real fighters,' and start recognizing that we are the ones who construct what they are fighting against." [emphasis mine]

Now I'm free; I'm very tired at the moment, but I'm loose in the world again. And, who'da thunk it, but it's spring! (Actually, it's been spring here for months now. Vancouver is like that.)

7 Quick Takes (75)

Yet another two-week edition.

1. Last week was Reading Week. What time I did not spend procrastinating, watching Firefly, or visiting with friends, I spent working on a biography review or grading papers. I shouldn't talk about the later as a matter of professional discretion, but I can discuss the former. If I were you, I would not read Park Honan's Christopher Marlowe: Poet & Spy. It is surprising that a biography about a brilliant poet and playwright, a libertine with ambiguous sexuality, a swashbuckling spy, could be so boring. If you do read this book, prepare for such a surprise. If you nonetheless insisted on reading a biography of an early modern playwright, then I might be more inclined to recommend Shapiro's A Year in the Life of William Shakespeare: 1599. While its literary readings of Henry V, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and Hamlet are not the best in the world, they are at least interesting, and it nicely situates Shakespeare in the time of his writing. I am not a fully-converted New Historicist, but I find that I appreciate Shakespeare far more (and far more maturely) when I think of him as situated in his time, nation, and culture.

2. I went to the Regent Chapel service on Tuesday morning with a friend, and we went for lunch afterwards. The service was interesting; I'm intrigued by, though not entirely comfortable with, the idea of an overtly religious post-secondary institution. This one is small and feels very collegial. I did, however, like the looks of their library and bookstore.

3. That following Wednesday evening I acquired Hopeful Monsters and a journal. I had received a phone call explaining that my book order for Hiromi Goto's collection of short stories had come in and realizing that I had reached my threshold of productivity for the day, I visited Chapter's that evening to get the book. While there I bought a set of journals. They have writing-paper lining and not graph-paper lining, but otherwise they are identical to those pictured. I have been told by Creative Writing professors and others that I should use a journal as a collection of insights into experience. This will be a useful repository as I write. I am not thinking of it as a "Dear Diary" sort of writing-as-catharsis exercise, though it may be that in some instances; rather, I am thinking of this as a commonplace book of experience. It is also a little bit of a commonplace book more generally, as Bakhtin, Foucault, Barthes, and Firefly have all featured in this first journal.

I know perfectly well that I will not get a chance to read much of Hopeful Monsters soon.

4. On Friday I went to a dinner party organized by the church. It has been a long time since I've been to a dinner party. It was very nice. Fortunately I knew most of the people there at least a little bit, but it's interesting to note how this sort of event, in which the host is good at leading conversation and involving people, is an excellent way of getting to know people better or at all. Having dinner parties is a skill I don't see developing especially well in my generation and/or demographic, and yet it seems tobe a key element in the social fabric of previous generations. Something to think about.

5. On Tuesday, despite being intellectually and emotionally exhausted by Reading Week (I hope you'll forgive me my reticence regarding the reasons--plural--for the emotional exhaustion), I gave what I felt was a good presentation in my Reported Speech class. It was on an essay by Short, Semino, and Wynne on faithfulness in reported speech. That is, they argue that faithfulness is important in some contexts when people report the speech of others. This may interest anyone outside of the field because most people (or most academics, anyway) assume that when we quote, we quote verbatim. What I am learning in this class is that such an assumption is all lies and deceit. We certainly do not quote verbatim. For the most part (especially in conversation) we don't even pretend to. What Short, Semino, and Wynne argue is that faithfulness (not verbatim) is important in some contexts, and while they are right to point this out, their argument is still problematic on a number of details. If this interests you, let me know and I'll tell you more.

6. The last few days have been spent in a glut of social interaction. I am making up for the scarcity of the same over Reading Week (other than ocassional Skype, a smattering of collegial talk in the Graduate Reading Room, tea at a bakery one morning, and what I wrote on above, I spent most of my Reading Week in scholarly isolation). I have a short but heavily-weighted paper due on Tuesday, so I need to put my nose to the grindstone and all of that good stuff. However, to see friends again, even after a week's absense, is a balm.

7. Just last night I started reading DeLillo's End Zone for the class in which I am a TA. I love it so far. I am not a fan of American football (nor should I be), but this book is only about football on the surface. So far I can tell that it is far more about language and the politics of devastation: it examines the jargon of the Cold War and the jargon of professional sports, reducing them to a moment in which they mean either far more than we'd like or nothing at all. Of a player, Bobby, who is "famous for saying he would go though a brick wall for Coach Creed," the narrator says the following:

Maybe he had heard others use it and thought it was a remark demanded by history, a way of affirming the meaning of one's struggle. Maybe the words were commissioned, as it were, by language itself, by that compartment of language in which are kept all bits of diction designed to outlive the men who abuse them, all phrases that reduce speech to units of sound, lullabies processed through intricate systems. Or maybe the remark just satisfied Bobby's need to be loyal to someone. [Creed does not want or deserve loyalty.] But Bobby had this loyalty to give, this eager violence of the heart, and he would smash his body to manifest it. Tradition, of course, supported his sense of what was right. The words were old and true, full of reassurance, comfort, consolation. Men followed such words to their death because other men before them had done the same, and perhaps it was easier to die than admit that words could lose their meaning.

The brackets are my summary of a longer passage; the embolding is my emphasis of sentences I love.

[Bonus round!]

8. I found this video on Facebook, and I was fascinated. It's a fanmade trailer for Riverdale, a fictional "gritty remake" of the Archie Comics. "Lux Aeternae" is likely responsible for 25% of my fascination with the video. My nostalgic and theoretical pull to Archie Comics is responsible for my 35%, and my interest in the genres of the dark remake and the movie trailer account for the remainder. I should warn you that, no matter your politics, something about it will probably offend you. Also, I should give a trigger warning.

9. Due to my nose-to-the-grindstone sentiment I expressed before, I will not be writing the posts I have planned. In response to Leah's post on transhumanism at Unequally Yoked, I plan to write a series of posts concerning the boundries of self. That is, what does and does not consitute "me." I intend to talk about somatic control, prosthetics, two-headed snakes, Judith Butler, and friendship. Do not expect this to be a simple or traditional account of identity; I want to write these posts at all in order to complicate the sort of naive delineations of self that I saw expressed in the comments section of that post. However, I must beg your patience on this matter, as my workload and lifeload not only demand that I abstain from writing those posts any time soon, but cease writing this one as well.

Please go visit Conversion Diary, the host of the 7 Quick Takes blog carnival.

7 Quick Takes (73)

1. I should not be doing this. I should be reading and editing a fragment of a novella for a friend so we can discuss it tomorrow. I should also be writing something new for tomorrow, problably a sonnet about silverfish. I should ALSO be reading Marlowe's Tamburlaine (both parts). Getting a start on Henry IV, Parts 1 and 2 might also be a good idea. As would preparing for my Reported Speech class. Also, there is an e-mail to an aunt that I ought to write soon. Not to mention letters to reply to. And, yet, all I want to do is write this blog post and then watch the events unfolding in Egypt.

2. If you are unaware of what's happening in Egypt, you should become aware of what's happening in Egypt. I've been watching Al Jazeera, and from what I understand, that is the only competitive source right now. None of the North American channels are worthwhile at the time I'm writing this. You can stream Al Jazeera live here. For those of you in the dark about what's going on, there's possibly a popular revolution right now in Egypt, and similar protests are going on in Jordan. (I say "possibly" only because it won't be a revolution if it doesn't succeed.)

3. I wrote a lot of letters this week. I'm still not caught up.

Last week I visited the Rare Books Collection at UBC with a class and read some authors' correspondences (Douglas Coupland, Dante Gabriel Rossetti). Suddenly letter-writing looks different. What if one of my recipients becomes famous and some embarassingly juvenile comment I wrote becomes part of a public collection?

4. As you might have read in my previous post, I got One of Us: Conjoined Twins and the Future of Normal out from the library. I have started to think that perhaps this is an area I should pursue. Anatomic and neurological atypicality are in many ways invisible minorities. Disability activism has some momentum, but disability is somewhat different from anatomic atypicality.

5. On Sunday I was recruited at church to help move a TV. I was recruited on the strength of being the youngest adult parishioner. It was another one of those unusual incidents in which I clearly was the strongest, most able-bodied person present. That is so entirely unlike my usual self-image that I don't know how to respond. (I helped, of course; I mean that I don't know how to respond mentally to people telling me I look strong, because I don't.)

It wasn't a bad move, though.

6. On the Saturday preceding I spent three hours helping organize the church library. We "released" a number of books "into the wild" because they were written at a time when a lot of churches saw things differently, especially concerning child-rearing, gender roles, and disability. There was a sort of catharsis to purging the shelves and boxes of that material. Most of the time we spent getting the books out of boxes and onto the shelves in numerical order. It was dusty work, but I was happy to help.

7. Wallace Stevens. We read Wallace Stevens in the class for which I am a TA. "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" is beautiful; if you have time, I encourage you to indulge in the luxurious language of "The Comedian as the Letter C." It's as rich as chocolate truffle. We also read some Marianne Moore. Are you familiar with her work? I like "The Fish." (Hint: the title is also the first line.)

Also, I am slowly, grumpily unfolding as far as T S Eliot is concerned. I may be approaching a position from which I could actual appreciate "The Wasteland." Maybe.

This blog carnival is kindly, excitingly, adjectivally hosted by Jen Fulwiler of Conversion Diary. Please pay a visit to her and the other participants in this carnival.

Bonus!

Grooveshark Playlist:

"Africa," Toto

"Dani California," Red Hot Chilli Peppers

"Welcome to the Jungle," Guns & Roses

"House of the Rising Sun," The Doors

"Stairway to Heaven," Led Zeppelin

"Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ya," Dropkick Murphies

"I'm Shipping Up to Boston," Dropkick Murphies

"Amazing Grace," Dropkick Murphies

"Nothing Else Matters," Apocalyptica

"Kyrie Elison," Gregorian Chant

"O come Emmanual," Gregorian Chant

"Cossack Dance," Tchaikovsky

"Marche Slave," Tchaikovsky

"Concerto for Two Violins," Bach

"Ich Ruf Zu Din, Herr Jesu Christ," Bach

"We Three Kings," The Irish Tenors

"Fairytale of New York," The Irish Tenors

"Mordred's Lullaby," Heather Dale

"Tarnished Silver," Heather Dale

"Only Time," Enya

"My! My! Time Flies!" Enya

"O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," Enya

7 Quick Takes (72)

1. Lots of photography. We've had snow, rain, and sun over the last two weeks, so I've had varied photographic opportunities. I will upload some of them.

2. I've been enjoying my classes. Reported Speech is a lot of fun, in the sort of way that fuses theory and grammatical technicality together in highly localized instances.

In my Research Methods class we visited the Rare Books Collection of the library, where we got to browse through old folios of Shakespeare; an old Milton; part of the best Alice in Wonderland collection in the world; the letters of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (but they didn't take out Christina's for us to see, alas); the archives (fonds) of Douglas Coupland; old versions of Burns. We also got to see inside the Vault.

And who could complain about a Shakespeare and Marlowe course?

3. Recently I have expanded my musical listening habits to include Tchaikovsky and Bach. I have Melissa to thank for Bach: I have Anna to thank for Tchaikovsky.

4. On Tuesday evening I went to an Ecumenical Service at St. Mark's Chapel. It's out of my diocese, so I would not have known about it were it not for Melissa, who invited me. It was ecumenical and so not especially Catholic, which I had expected and sort of hoped for. The chapel space was not what I had expected of a Catholic church; it was not especially ornamented, for instance. There were crucifixes instead of crosses, but some Protestant churches use crucifixes anyway.

5. On Wednesday evening I went to a Centring Prayer service at St. Faith's. It reminded me a lot of Buddhist meditation. (It's interesting to note that that's what I compare it to; I've had more experience with Buddhist meditation in my Religious Studies classes in undergrad than I have had with Christian meditative prayer.) I am a clear beginner, so it's not unexpected that I spent most of the time in the thrall of monkey-mind (a Buddhist term, but if you have any experience with any meditative exercise, I think you can figure out what it means).

What is perhaps more surprising is how long it took me to come out again. I wasn't exactly sleepy, but I was quiet, slow to respond, detached.

There will be other services like this one (2-3 times a month), and I shall likely attend them.

6. Last Saturday I went on a trip across Vancouver looking for materials with which to make a top-secret craft gift. First I went to the Public Library (not really for the gift, though I did take a look for books there that might help me), then to West Broadway, then to Richmond' Aberdeen Centre. This last I poked around a little bit; I was rather conspicuous as the only white guy under 45 in a fairly populated mall.

7. I am concerned about my career prospects. Somehow the job prospects are even worse than we thought they were. ("We" being the English grads. Most of us will not become professors, it seems.) While I haven't given up entirely on the goal of being a professor, I am both aware that I might not get that job after all and that I might not want it even if I got it. So I am on the look-out for new job prospects. I am giving serious thought to a Master's of Library Science (in which having another Master's is a very very good thing); I am also wondering whether there could be work in copy-editing/proof-reading. Finally, I spoke today with my priest's husband, who told me about church-related avenues I might look into.

Somewhat related to this, I am going to treat writing and researching as a full time job this summer. I haven't quite worked out the details, but I'm excited and nervous about this. It will be the first time since high school that I took a summer "off", but I will be very busy (I hope) producing a substantial amount of prose and/or poetry. I want to see if writing is something I can really do after all.

That's all. (I did 7 Quick Takes! Thanks to Leah and Cait for your concerns.)

Jennifer Fulwiler hosts this blog carnival. Please visit her for more.

2010 in 10 Books

Subtitle: Because I'm a Huge Nerd Like That

[Once I posted the first bit I realized that this post will be enormous when it's done. This is going to rival some of Jon's stuff.]

I don't usually get too worked up about New Year's Eve; the arbitrariness of it prevents my taking it seriously. That being said, many people treat it as a point of reflection on the last secular calendar year and since I love collective actions--especially on the Interwebs--I shall indulge in a bit of the same. Thus I shall do a review of the year in books. (I couldn't really think of any other topic and, anyway, I'm a huge nerd.) I will note that I recommend all of these books to everyone, provided you are a critical reader and not a mindlessly absorptive one. (I'm pretty sure you're the former.)


1. Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town

This was likely the first book I read in 2010. Leacock gives us an episodic account of life in a small Ontario town shortly after Confederation. The genre is emphatically a comedy. I loved it. It reminded me of my own country-boy roots and with my increasingly urban living conditions this is something I like. Perhaps the removal from the rural space was necessary for me to fully appreciate this book. The epilogue after all makes it quite clear that it is written for an audience that is removed from the small town but nonetheless remembers that life. I don't know how well this registers with people who have lived their whole lives in urban culture (though Cait likes it, maybe she can tell us why); for me, the sharp and almost accusatory nostalgia of the book's final pages forced me to become aware of my own urban position.

I can no longer orient myself as being in the country, in the small town. Fort McMurray--where I lived reading the book, where I am writing this--is not a small town. It's not a metropolis like Toronto or Vancouver and I know lots of people from metropolises (metropoles?) see anything smaller than Edmonton as a small town, but compared to most communities Fort McMurray is large. It's just isolated and lacks certain amenities. Kingston, the city in which I had most recently built a full life when I was reading this book, is no small town, either. Recognizing that I am more urbanite than hick was an odd thing for me and is something with which I am still coming to terms. I prefered thinking of myself as a hick than as an urbanite largely because I like thinking of myself as having an outsider's perspective.

The second lesson I got from this book is that one can mix idyll and irony. The narrator treats the characters--and perhaps himself--with a gentle mockery which makes you like them more, not less. This is important: we can still care for the characters in spite of, maybe because of, their faults. This book is built on this blend more than anything else. Humanity is flawed right through, but we're nonetheless likeable. What's important is that the narrator could have presented the characters as flawed and unlikeable, but instead chose to gently, caringly point out these flaws. That specific chosen perspective is an important one.

2. Wade Davis' The Wayfinders

The emotion of the posts that this book spawned should indicate its importance to my 2010. The import of this book comes on two levels.

First, the premise of this book is eye-opening and perhaps liberating: Davis thinks of non-Western civilizations as ones that have the same creative intellectual resources that we have but invested those resources not into the Enlightenment project but into other endeavours entirely. Most of his book explores different endangered cultures which exemplify his premise. I think this is a very important idea, not only in countering the ideas of liberal progress that run rampant through our culture, but also in giving us ways of re-imagining what our society could be like if we started doing things differently. In this respect Davis' book is one of hope, that hope that things can be different.

Unfortunately, opening one's eyes can be a painful experience. The reason Davis' book is hopeful, not complacent, is that there are a lot of things wrong with the world today. As a result, this book sent me into a week-long bout of hopelessness, nigh on despair, with the state of the world. The aftershocks are on-going. This book then marked the beginning of my rocky relationship with the entire idea of hope. I am still working on what kinds of hope are productive and what kinds of hope are deadly.

3. Madeleine L'Engle's A Ring of Endless Light

If The Wayfinders sent me into despair, A Ring of Endless Light helped me get back out of it. This is a young adult novel about a girl named Vicky dealing with death: the recent death of a family friend, the impending death of her grandfather, the deaths of animals (birds, dolphins), the death-seeking of a potential lover. The book is therefore also about love, the full spectrum of friendly, familial, and romantic. Vicky has three potential lovers, and so it triggered one of my theoretical interests (polyamory), but this was not the most fulfilling part of the book. The novel's treatment of love and death coalesce into an exploration into the role hope plays in a dark world.

It is this interest in hope that made the book important to me. I read it following The Wayfinders and this book was part of what pulled me out of that slump. Others will tell you that it's a beautiful book but to me in particular, at that moment, it was necessary. It has also been part of the context in which I have worked through ideas of hope. This is an on-going project, one I can date as beginning in 2010 but cannot date as ending there, as it has not yet ended.

The primary downside to this book is that, like most of L'Engle's books, it made me self-conscious about my own lack of life experiences. Having hit fewer 'maturity markers' than a teenage protagonist is a bit depressing. I hope that my earstwhile readers will not have similar experiences reading it.

4. Walter Truett Anderson's The Truth About the Truth

I picked this up used in a Goodwill; I realized that I didn't really know what postmodernism was and thought remedying that would be a good idea. As it turned out I had been trained in postmodernism for four years at university and just hadn't encountered it as a coherent, labeled theoretical framework. That story is here, here, and here. I am not a postmodernist--I believe in truth, for instance--but I recognize that many of the insights that postmodernism has produced are relevant and important. Postmodernism has significantly changed how I view human identity and has been important upon returning to an English Department. This book not only helped me understand in retrospect exactly what it was I did in much of my undergrad, but it helped me understand the culture in which I will be studying and working for the next few years (at least).

I am not done with postmodernism yet; while I do not agree with the whole package, it has importantly impacted by ongoing thinking. Expect future posts clarifying this.

5. John Milton's Paradise Lost

I was surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. (I'm classifying it as a book, even though that designation doesn't quite work.) I was supposed to have finished reading it a long time ago and decided that it was time. Theologically it's iffy but poetically it works fairly well. I am still confused about the number of pro-Satan readings I hear people produce; having read it straight through now I agree that Satan is a charismatic and understandable villain, but he is nonetheless a villain. What is fascinating is Milton's ability to remain ambiguous about the Ptolemaic versus Copernican universes while elaborately describing the world. Beyond which it's beautiful poetry.

I include PL not only because I finished and enjoyed it, but because I recognize it as one of the touchstones of our current culture. Its vision of the Christian universe has had a lasting impact on societal and cultural understanding of religion (which is ironic, considering it's theological iffiness), and its images have been revisited and revised in subsequent literature. If anything, it has reminded me that drawing on the ideas and images of predecessors is an honourable, perhaps necessary, literary enterprise. Whether or not it has all been said before, it can still be said again, differently. There is still room for poetry.

6. Azar Nafisi's Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books

If you ever thought reading fiction is unimportant, you may want to read this book. It is non-fiction about how reading fiction is important, especially when the going gets tough. In these memoirs, Azar Nafisi recounts her time as a professor of English in post-revolutionary Iran teaching students, including and particularly a group of young women, how to read the classics: how to read them critically, yes, but also how to learn from them. Thus the novel is divided into four sections called "Lolita," "Gatsby," "James," and "Austen." She deals with the intersections of the attempt to control others' dreams and censorship, the intersections between the refusal to accept uncertainty in fiction and the refusal to accept uncertainty in personal beliefs, and the intersections between the failure to understand characters and the failure to empathize with real people. Nafisi's life, the other characters' lives, and her observations on Iran are captivating enough to make an interesting book, but the moral strength of the book earns it a place on this list.

If you have read some of my past posts about fantasy or the suspension of disbelief, you will recognize some similar themes. This book has impacted my thinking and has rekindled my faith in the power of and study of literature. In case you were unaware, it is all but a professional requirement that students of literature agonize over their own relevance. Reading Lolita in Tehran has convinced me all over again that reading fiction matters.

7. Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics

When you move from a high style or theme to a low style or theme, it is called bathos. That is what's happening with Book #7. Where Nafisi's book was inspirational, McCloud's book is fun, interesting, at best instructive.

McCloud's Understanding Comics explores sequential art, the technical term McCloud gives for comics and graphic novels. His interest is not in superheroes, though; his interest is in the form itself. What happens in the gutter (the space between panels)? Is there a difference between realistically-rendered characters and cartoon ones? How does sequential art relate to other forms of art?

McCloud's Reinventing Comics digs into much more technical elements of drawing, panelling, inking, etc., but even in this he is often very theoretical and many of his concerns apply to all artistic production. Thus if Understanding Comics is more interesting to people who are interested in comics (or the rare duck like me who is interested in genres generally (haha! PUN!)), Reinventing Comics has something to offer anyone involved in the production of narrative art. It is in this book that he also unveils an idea about artistic motivations, which he calls campfire. I began exploring that idea and, to those interested in that exploration, I do intend to finish it sometime. Maybe.

8. The Book of Alternative Services

I borrowed this from St. Thomas' in Fort McMurray. I may have taken it with me to Vancouver. If I did not intend to return it this might bear some resemblance to theft. Which would be ironic, right? (There's a scene in M*A*S*H where Father Mulcahy discovers Klinger has been selling him stolen Bibles. I tried to find it on YouTube but no luck. Sorry, folks.)

To those not in the know, The Book of Alternative Services of the Anglican Church of Canada is the standard book for Canadian Anglican services. It contains the responsive readings that characterize any Anglican service; the BAS is important in churches that do not use projector screens because this is how the congregation knows how to respond during certain parts of the liturgy. This is especially true of seasonal events and prayers, as congregation members could not possibly be expected to memorize responses they use once a year. You can get a PDF of the full text here.

My first encounter with the BAS was in St. Pauls' Lutheran Church, the swamp church I attended during my elementary school and high school years. After Confirmation (grade 8), however, I stopped attending services upstairs and stayed downstairs to teach Sunday school. In university I went to a non-liturgical church, so it wasn't until I attended St. Thomas' that I encountered liturgical services again. While a child I respected but did not understand or appreciate liturgy. I was afraid of getting things wrong; it seemed like it was all rules for their own sakes. I found that I missed liturgy in university, especially as the sort of church I went to had unspoken expectations (which are even worse, in my opinion, than written ones). It was therefore with great relief that I discovered St. Thomas had responsive readings, albs, acolytes, and coloured vestments. It was like coming home.

At the end of 2009 I began training to be a server, but I did not borrow the BAS until 2010. I borrowed it so that I could better learn my role as a server and I also thought about using my literary analytical skills on it, but instead I have mainly used it like a book of poetry. For some reason I love reading the Penitential Rite (page 46 of the PDF I linked to); I can say it from memory but I still read it from the page, savouring its rhythm. (OK, I'm weird.) Perhaps part of my appreciation of it is that I know it is all true when I saw it; it is a performative truth.

This is not why I include this book in the list, though. I include it because I am finding myself more and more in love with liturgy. It is a complicated love, for sure; I do not know absolutely that it is enough, or that I understand how to use it to approach God as fully as I would like. But it offers a lot. I find narrative, symbol, and structure powerful tools and liturgy uses them well; I find liturgical language is beautiful and can reveal the beauty of God; I find the communitarian elements of corporate speech and act also useful during Communion. (I am using "Communion" over the more typically Anglican "Eucharist" to make a etymological point.) The BAS is the crux of my liturgical experiences both in St. Thomas, Fort McMurray and St. Faith's, Vancouver, and this is why it makes this list.

9. Bernard Shaw's Saint Joan

This play, about the revolution, trial, and death of Joan d'Arc, was assigned to the class for which I was a TA last term. I had never read Shaw's plays before, though I had seen Caesar and Cleopatra at the Festival. I found Saint Joan to be a quick and enjoyable read; it is also substantial enough for an English major like me to have fun with. Given that I was teaching the text to the class, after the professor for the class gave it a lecture, I decided that that's what I would do in discussion: we would have fun with it.

I went in early and arranged the room so that in the midst of the tables was a set, with chairs and tables set up according to the stage directions. When the students came in, I cast them in roles and we played out Joan's trial. It was one of the best classes I had; I had many volunteers to read the parts and there was no problem getting the non-actors to comment on the action. Every so often I would stop the play and we would comment on what just happened, focusing on specific characters and asking them to describe how the stage itself impacts their character's emotional state and so forth.

Saint Joan is a fun, quick, and easy read, but it's substantial enough to hold one's interest (or at least my own). In it Shaw is not interested in the truth of religious claims, but in how religion and politics intersect on the social stage. That in and of itself is an interesting literary choice. Like Shaw, I consistently had to separate the truth of religious claims for how religion operates with texts. This wasn't a challenge insofar as I never want to proselytize but it was a challenge insofar as I was wary of students misreading atheist propaganda into the assigned readings (many students of many backgrounds did this; it seems that to lots of students, whether Christian, atheist, or agnostic, there are unrecognized athiests hiding in the canon). But it's not why I include it on the list. I include it on the list as one success as a TA. It changed the dynamics of the class and it got us on our feet. It was fun and critically detailed. You can't ask for much more than that.

10. Linda Medley's Castle Waiting Vol. 1

With the exception of the largely unplacable Book of Alternative Services, this list has been chronological--until now. If I were to insert Castle Waiting Vol. 1 properly, it would have to precede Paradise Lost, the reading of which I interrupted to read this graphic novel. However, this book may have been the most important and therefore deserving of the capping #10 spot, and its direct influence continues into 2011, which also justifies its placement at the end of the list.

Castle Waiting is about the eponymous castle, in which a number of adventures happen. At first it follows the story of Sleeping Beauty in an extended prologue, but following this the story changes signficantly: Castle Putney is all but abandoned and becomes Castle Waiting, a sanctuary for assorted runaways and misfits. The story travels with Lady Jain, pregnant and battered, as she flees her husband and her reputation to the legendary refuge. Upon her arrival, the story shifts again, becoming a catalogue of the daily adventures and exchanges of the Castle's residents (Rackham the anthropomorphic stork, Simon the large and simple boy, the heartbroken Iron Henry, Sister Peace of the Order Solicitine, the reclusive and perpetually masked Dr. Fell, numerous Poltersprites...), as well as the long biographical tales Sister Peace tells involving bearded women, a travelling circus with gypsies and giantesses and conjoined twins, a woman martyr and her developing hagiography, and a greedy mill owner. It deserves the description on the back of the book: "A set of linked nouveaux fairy tales, this graphic novel extends the story of Sleeping Beauty into a modern, feminist Chaucer."

I was visiting my brother while he worked on his group film when his girlfriend and co-animator lent me her copy of the book to read between scanning for them and going on sushi-and-juice runs. I loved it immediately and the book stayed in my mind thereafter. When I got to Vancouver I decided I wanted to own it and promptly took the opportunity of numerous Chapters to make that happen. I re-read it.

The first reason that this book is significant is that it told me in no uncertain terms that you can have a successful fantasy (in this case more fairy-tale-esque, but the line between the two is indistinct if extant) book without making it an adventure story with wars and monsters. That's not to say that the book is without suspense or risk, but rather its emphases are friendship, community, redemption, sanctuary, and storytelling. This book is a powerful reminder that fantasy can be a lot more than it usually is. Which is to say, Castle Waiting has changed my idea of what sorts of things I would like to write.

The second reason that this book is significant is that I lent it to Melissa. She loved it as much as I did and we spoke about it for some time, speculating what would happen next, what fairytales all of the characters came from, and so forth. I also recommended it to Cait and to Julia, a friend from back home. If I recall correctly, Cait also liked it. (Did I get that right?) And then, just before I returned home for Christmas, I lent it to The Rev'd Paula +, the priest at St. Faith's. (I found out today, Jan 9, that she loved it--as did Owen, who I presume is a child.) I bought my brother's girlfriend Vol. 2, which my brother bought me for Christmas. (Melissa is currently reading my copy of it and has lent me a book she got for Christmas. So it goes into 2011...) This book has become, though repeated recommendations, lendings, and givings, a social nexus connecting me to a large number of people spread over significant geographical distances. The people it has connected me to are also very important to me and it has helped strengthen those bonds. I think, given the themes and mood of the book, that Linda Medley would be pleased.

Honourable Mentions: Jane Austen's Sense and Sensibility and Persuasion; Heather O'Neill's lullabies for little criminals; somebody or another's Saturday; Michael Ingham's The Mansions of the Spirit: The Gospel in a Multi-Faith World; Coetzee's The Life & Times of Michael K; Gruen's Water for Elephants; Kostova's The Historian

Some Thoughts on the Decision to Review 2010 by Means of Books

With a few exceptions, reviewing my year through books makes me look like a shut-in who has no friends. I would like to say this is untrue, but I think the specific books chosen makes clear that it was true and stopped being so. I only have three books that relate to my time in Vancouver, and two of those are more related to my time in Fort McMurray. (I have also lent The Wayfinders out, but it has played a far less important social role than Castle Waiting has.) This is directly related to the sorts of books I read in Vancouver: I read assigned material. The syllabus is often interesting and mentally enriching but it does not impact my life in the same way these ten books have. (In fact, the only one that made the Honourable Mentions is Coetzee's.) More importantly, however, books in general have not impacted me as much because people impact me more, and you can see this in the final three books. The first (or eighth) is liturgical and concerns my place within churches; the second (or ninth) was assigned and concerns my role as a TA; the third (or tenth) became a social artifact and concerned my relationship with friends. We thus see a shift from introverted significances to extraverted significances in the books I have chosen, and I think that is reflective of 2010 itself.

Next year, perhaps, I will be able to offer you 2011 in 11 somethings other than books.

Or maybe I'm too much of a bookworm for that to ever be likely.