A Conlang for Your Heart

Glossary
Conlang: A constructed language, or conlang, is a language whose features have been consciously constructed rather than developed naturally, as in most languages.
Asexuality: Asexuality is a sexual orientation (or something analogous to a sexual orientation) in which a person does not experience sexual attraction to anyone. Although many asexual people are aromantic--meaning that they do not experience romantic attraction to anyone either--not all are. People who are only minimally sexual, but not entirely asexual, are often called "grey."

One of the things that excites me about the asexuality movement is the attempt to create a new vocabulary for attraction. Many, if not most, of the ways we have learned to describe our relationships with other people are based on romantic and familial models, though we've generated a few others to describe sexual non-romantic relationships in the last few decades (friends with benefits, f*ckbuddies). And there are some institutional or quasi-institutional terms, too: mentors, sponsors, confessors. But there are few words or phrases for peer-to-peer relationships, and there are even fewer words or phrases for the kinds of bonds people have, irrespective of the particular activities that people do with one another. Asexual people, and especially aromantic asexual people, therefore have hardly a vocabulary at all to describe the different kinds of bonds they have with people. Making a new vocabulary is more urgent for aces, but it is useful for anyone who has informal non-romantic relationships . . . which probably includes pretty much everybody.

I encountered a "web of attraction" at the blog asexy beast. It consists of a spider's web with different points around the edge labelled with different kinds of attraction: sexual, romantic, aesthetic, platonic, physical, fantasy. The different components go unexplained, so we're required to use the author's commentary to try and make sense of the diagram. But I'm not wedded to the particular labels What was revelatory for me when I first saw the web was that all of these different kinds of attraction could be de-coupled. Until then I had been assuming that if I experienced a certain kind of attraction toward someone I really must be experiencing all of the others, since I had conflated them all. This became very confusing when my actual experiences did not line up: how can I be attracted to someone I don't find attractive? How can I be attracted to someone when I don't want to date them? etc. So long as I was grouping all types of attraction into one category and treating them as simply facets of a single experience, I was confusing myself. Seeing the web of attraction--especially in the context of asexuality--broke that conflation up for me. I have been able to make much better sense of my own experiences now that I am not reflecting on them with a limited vocabulary.

For instance, I am no longer especially confused or worried if I find a person attractive to the point of distraction but I do not have the slightest inclination to date that person: "thinks is cool" and "finds physically attractive" might be prerequisites to "wants to date" for me, but they are not sufficient, because "wants to date" is its own discrete and indivisible experience. But I'm simplifying a little--"finds physically attractive" isn't a single indivisible experience, either.

But of course different people will be experiencing different combinations of these forms of attraction, in response to different aspects of other people, so it will make sense for people to be developing their own vocabulary for their own use. The trick in making your own vocabulary is the danger that you'll try to project that vocabulary onto others (of which the problem asexual people encountered trying to explain themselves in sexual language is one example). I'm recommending that people make these vocabularies largely so they can explain themselves to themselves, and therefore it can be an entirely private language; however, teaching other people to speak your language could be helpful if you wanted to explain yourself to them and if you wanted to help them revise and improve the conlangs for their own hearts.

If you want to learn more about asexuality, I recommend checking out AVEN, the Asexuality Visibility and Education Network, and the YouTube channel Hot Pieces of Ace.

Although I have finished and posted this in response to a comment conversation at Unequally Yoked, I have been sitting on drafts of this for awhile.

Disguising Subversion with Love Stories

Romantic Subplot in The Hunger Games

Note: This is not part of my meta-ethics series. I just decided that I did not want to postpone publishing it until that series is done.

As I indicated before, I have recently seen The Hunger Games (movie, not book). One of the things that I found very surprising about this movie was just how subversive it is. Most supposedly subversive movies are either not very subversive at all (Avatar) or do a terrible, muddled job of subversion (V for Vendetta, oh my goodness). At least on the first viewing, The Hunger Games is much smarter than most of Hollywood's supposedly subversive movies, and it even takes a few potshots at conventional Hollywood storytelling--after all, it is about the use of media to suppress underprivileged populations. One of the most impressive instances was the movie's deliberate indication that the romantic subplot distracts from more important political questions.

(Here be spoilers.)

Combatants in the Hunger Games desperately need sponsors to help outfit them as the event proceeds, so the characters must be very deliberate about their public appearances. During the interviews before the Games themselves, Peeta says that he has a crush on Katniss. Katniss is angry that he would use her to further his own publicity, but their trainer Abernathy tells her that it has helped her publicity as well: it has made her desirable. Besides being a shout-out to Girard, this episode indicates that romantic feelings, whether or not they are genuine, are part of the proceedings. Instead of somehow transcending time and place, like we have pretended since Petrarch, love is subject to the society, culture, and ideology the lovers inhabit. Peeta's admission of love, even if it's true, is also an attempt at survival that is endorsed by the media spectacle and becomes part of the narrative that Flickerman, the interviewer and master of ceremonies, helps create. (Of course, he is probably working from a script, too.)

Abernathy latches onto this narrative device. What I find interesting is that another narrative device--Katniss' voluntary substitution of herself for her younger sister--is eclipsed by the romance narrative, at least as far as the publicity is concerned. I say publicity rather than public for a reason: Katniss' adoption of Rue as a surrogate sister certainly get the attention of Rue's district. What Abernathy knows--and likely what the Capital's propogandists rely on--is the fact that the romance narrative will provide explanations for potentially subversive behaviour, explanations that mitigate the subversiveness of it. So when Katniss and Peeta defy the authorities by attempting double-suicide rather than monomachy (and thereby trying to answer Peeta's question about dying in a way that shows the authorities that they do not own him), Abernathy is quick to use the romantic subplot to explain away this behaviour. He says that the pair "showed them up" and that there would be consequences: "This is serious. And not just for you. They don't take these things lightly." So Katniss and Peeta must act as though their behaviour was not about the power or authority, was not in fact directed at the Capital or about anything that might also concern the people of the poor Districts. In order to prevent the Capital from reinforcing that power with violence, they must act (cynically) like their actions are born of the sort of love that transcends time and place. Frankly, I was not sure whether to be impressed by this realization, or disappointed that Katniss decided to play along with the love narrative which disguised her more subversive motives. How much complicity should characters accept in order to survive long enough to fight that power?

One of the interesting things about seeing this as a movie but not reading the book is that I had no way of gauging the not-especially-expressive Katniss's emotions. I could not tell whether she actually reciprocated Peeta's attraction or romantic feelings. (I understand that in the book it is clear she does reciprocate somewhat, but that's second-hand). In this state of ignorance, the romantic subplot seemed even more surreal, even more a ploy to survive the Capital. Certainly her sacrifices for Peeta were not much different from her sacrifices for Rue, for whom she would feel no romantic love. How the other movies treat her relationship with Peeta is now of almost no consequence: the idea that romantic subplot distract from real political subversion in the Hunger Games, and also The Hunger Games, and also, by extension, if you're willing to think it, most popular culture, is already in place. I cannot be sure how strong this effect would be in first person narration.

I want to clarify a few things: I don't think that genuine, non-cynical romantic subplots (or main plots) are necessarily bad. But I would, for a lot of reasons, like to see much more fiction that treat such relationships with more sophistication and more awareness of the problems they can produce, and I would like to see more fiction that does not treat romantic subplots as particularly important. I think The Hunger Games does a good job of showing some of those problems.

Girardian Rivalry

[I should be writing a final paper (mimesis in The Two Gentlemen of Verona) right now; the longer I put it off, the more I'll suffer for it. In a move that may seem counterintuitive, I am going to write a blogpost instead. I intend to write on an idea that I will be employing in my paper, which will with any luck bring my brain gently back on topic and help me get something done on this paper...]

René Girard is reasonably well known for his idea of mimetic desire, which states that we all want things because we have learned to want them from someone else. The traditional example for this is romantic or erotic love: A loves B because C loves B. This does not only produce particular relations between A and B; it also produces particular relations between A and C. That is, I have unique relationships with people whose desires I imitate, and with people who imitate my desires.

In Theatre of Envy, on the operation of mimetic desire in Shakespeare's plays (Girard claims that Shakespeare is exceptional because he's one of the few playwrights to understand that desire is mimetic and is therefore one of the few to portray it realistically), Girard spends the introduction and the first chapter discussing this dynamic: "Individuals who desire the same thing are united by something so powerful that, as long as they can share whatever they desire, they remain the best of friends; as soon as they cannot, they become the worst of enemies." Thus mimetic desire becomes mimetic rivalry. But it is not only that we inevitably wind up desiring the same things as our friends, or are friends with those whose desires we imitate: we are active agents in sharing desires. We want our friends to desire the same things that we do. Speaking of the eponymous friends in The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Proteus and Valentine, Girard writes: "Whenever they do not see eye to eye, our two friends feel that something is wrong; each one tries to persuade the other that he should reorient his desire in such a way as to make it coincide with his own once again. Friendship is the perpetual coincidence of two desires." The consequence of this effect is as inevitable as the effect itself. On top of friendship's first imperative (Girard sums it up as "imitate me") arises a second imperative, "do not imitate me." He calls this the "double bind" of friendship.

The idea of mimetic desire (and mimetic rivalry) is one we vigourously want to reject, says Girard. As a result, it is masked by assorted claims and ideas and discourses. It very rarely appears in our culture, and when it does it is always disguised. But it cannot be so easily gotten rid of. Short of embracing our mimetic desires and rivalries, we have two options: "total renunciation" of desire, or the production of some kind of monster or perversion. These monsters or perversion have the characteristic of producing new mimetic rivalries later on, or simply recycling the old one in some disguised way.

Girard of course goes on. He talks about learning to desire oneself from a besotted courter (Pheobe and Silvius from As You Like It is his example, and I will parenthetically add that his chapter is the best explanation for the title of that play that I've ever read); he talks about the role of the pander; he talks about alliances forged out of conflicts when the desired object is lost to both parties. But I will rest with this description of his idea for now.

*****

When discussing my paper with the professor, she said, "Be careful with Girard. He has a tendency to take over everything." I don't imagine she's wrong. Reading Theatre of Envy, I started seeing mimetic desire and mimetic rivalry everywhere. I know other people have made much of the idea. Eve Sedgwick's Between Men, one of the most interesting pieces of literary theory that I have never read, is a good example. Dr. Richard Beck from Experimental Theology has also used Girard's ideas (like this post). It also does a wonderful job of explaining how Betty and Veronica remain friends, and how they band together when defending their stakes in Archie against outsiders like Cheryl Blossom (you can see how I spent my childhood). The applications abound.

One of things I like about it is that Girard deliberately sets this up as a competitor to Freud's ideas. This is why I also like Lacan. It is not that I necessarily like the consequences of these any more than I like the consequences of Freudian incest and repression. Rather, I see how Freud's ideas can monopolize discourses and can form an ideological juggernaut which is hard to defeat. Freudian psychoanalysis has the tendency to be able to explain away any objection by describing any counterexample as a transformation of a repressed desire. Girard's ideas (like Lacan's) are nice because they provide competitors with the same insiduous powers of explaining-away. Any one alone is pretty scary, but competing with each other they become managable.

But, as I think you'll have noticed by now, I'm not too worried about this mimetic desire. I have read Theatre of Envy and I have found that it cannot take over everything after all. I see gaps in it. Friendship, for instance, is built out of differences as well as similarities. I generally want my friends to be pursuing different goals than I am, actually; I like being able to watch them do things I don't understand. And quarreling over trivial differences of opinion can be rather fun; one of the major let-downs of Lewis' heaven in The Last Battle is that everyone agreed (an ideal utopia for me would be a place where people could quarrel without taking it personally--I, at least, usually take it personally, and so can never really enjoy it as much as I'd like). And I have difficulty imagining who I am imitating in a number of my desires. I can't think, for instance, of anyone else who likes to eat limes; at the very least, I was eating limes before I met anyone else who did. A prerequisite for mimesis is that there must be an original, even if it is lost. That originary desire could not have been mimetic.

What I like, then, about Girardian mimesis is that it is helpful in understanding some things, and it breaks the hegemonic hold of Freudian psychoanalysis (for instance, by offering another way of explaining Oedipal complexes without making them universal) and certain strains of evolutionary psychology (rather than needing to explain how a particular behaviour--the desire for pale skin, say--emerged in early hominids, you could explain how it arose as a consequence of mimetic forces in this context, and therefore avoid universalizing a contextual trait). I do not think it accurately explains the whole picture, but it helps contribute to a set of alternative explanations which, I think, does a better job of describing the complexity of human psychology and sociology.

Pointing an Arrow

I'm going to direct your attention to a post by Ily of asexy beast, a blog about asexuality. This post discusses what romance is, and I think it's worth looking at. She contrasts romance with sensuality, drawing a parallel between them but also making a distinction: sensuality is about immediacy, romance about escape.

I want to call your attention to this blog generally, though, for a few interrelated reasons. First, Ily's voice is one little heard in our culture, and I think wholeheartedly that we should use the blogosphere for a way of sounding the depth (and breadth, but that metaphor doesn't work so well) of human experience and identity. This technology is unique in it's ability to publish and disseminate minority positions of all sorts. Second, Ily's insights into (a)sexuality and other relational stuff is helpful, I think, to anyone at all in understanding human experience. One of the biggest advantages of Ily's thinking is her ability to a phenomenon (say, romantic attraction) and pull it apart and show that it is actually composed of parts, and that these parts can occur on their own. (It's very helpful to realize that feeling strong affiliation and a level of physical comfort with someone of the opposite sex does not mean that you're romantically attracted to the person, for instance.)

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.

7 Quick Takes (62)

1. I watched some movies last weekend: Splice and Eve and the Fire Horse.

Splice is a Canadian bio-horror movie about a pair of sceintists who make designer organisms for a living. They decide at one point to (illegally) experiment with human DNA and create a human-hybrid named Dren. As Dren grows up, maturing in ways completely unexpected, she becomes harder and harder to keep a secret . . . and harder and harder to manage.

It's a pretty good movie, especially considering that it's Canadian-made; it's creepy, and builds suspense without much violence or gore for most of the movie. But about two-thirds of the way through the movie it gets disturbing, fast. Let's just say that the characters who made Dren have some issues themselves. And let's just say that inter-species sex will always be uncomfortable at best. (And I just got myself some weird visitors from Google again.)

Eve and the Fire Horse is also Canadian-made, about two girls, Eve and Karena, who live with their parents in Vancouver in the 1960s. Their parents have immigrated from China, and Eve (the protagonist) and Karena live in a hodge-podge world of "Chinese superstition" (what an awful name for that religious tradition, by the way), Confucianism, Buddhism, and poorly-understood Catholicism. It's in the style of Big Fish in some ways, with flights of imagination unfolding before your eyes. I suppose you would call it magic realism? Anyway, it deals with racism, family dynamics, guilt and grief, and spiritual life. I might write a proper review of it some day.

2. At church, they played Disney songs for hymns. If this interests you, I wrote out the service at this post.

3. I discovered Gerard Manley Hopkins this week. Some of his poetry was assigned in the class I am a TA for. Hopkins (1844-1889) was a Jesuit priest, and his sonnets are beautiful, rich, and complex; they require a good dictionary, and are worth it. I encourage you to take a look at them.

"The Starlight Night"

Look at the stars! look, look up at the skies!

O look at all the fire-folk sitting in the air!

The bright boroughs, the circle-citadels there!

Down in dim woods the diamond delves! the elves'-eyes!

The grey lawns cold where gold, where quickgold lies!

Wind-beat whitebeam! airy abeles set on a flame!

Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare! --

Ah well! it is all a purchase, all is a prize.

Buy then! bid then! -- What? -- Prayer, patience, alms, vows.
Look, look: a May-mess, like on orchard boughs!

Look! March-bloom, like on mealed-with-yellow-sallows!

These are indeed the barn; withindoors house

The shocks. This piece-bright paling shuts the spouse

Christ home, Christ and his mother and all his hallows.

4. I also discovered Erasmus Darwin's The Loves of the Plants. Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) was the grandfather of Charles Darwin and a celebrated botanist. His The Loves of the Plants is a poetic re-writing of Linnaeus' famous work in the reproduction of plants. Linnaeus analogized stamens and pistols as men and women having romantic liaisons, and Darwin followed suit in Loves. What Darwin did differently, however, was place agency on the female characters rather than do as Linnaeus did and put agency in the male characters. This work would be very very fruitful for gender studies on a number of levels, but one of the more immediately interesting is that female polyamory shows up time and time again:

Two brother swains, of COLLIN'S gentle name,
The same their features, and their forms the same,

With rival love for fair COLLINIA sigh,

Knit the dark brow, and roll the unsteady eye.

With sweet concern the pitying beauty mourns,

And sooths with smiles the jealous pair by turns.

[later]

With vain desires the pensive ALCEA burns,

And, like sad ELOISA, loves and mourns.

The freckled IRIS owns a fiercer flame,

And three unjealous husbands wed the dame.

An interesting formal note is that Darwin's footnotes, which explain the botany behind the poem, take up more space on the page then the poem itself.

5. I did a lot of picture-taking today, and I am exhausted from the walking. I really wanted to get the autumn colours in the Nitobe Gardens and on Wreck Beach. (Will upload shortly.)

For more 7 Quick Takes, visit the host of the carnival, Jen Fulwiler at Conversion Diary.

Love, Law, and Hate

or,
Concerning This Whole Prop 8 Thing

I must say from the outset that I always thought Prop 8 (for those who don't know, Proposition 8 was a California law that banned same-sex marriage that was somehow voted in with a majority) was a horrible thing. This is not just because it was yet another blow to the equality movement, but because it indicated that a majority of California voters did not have human rights in mind when they made their decisions that day. And this is California, too; it's not quite Washington, but it's certainly not Texas, either.

This means that I was enormously pleased when I heard that a judge has struck down the law. Of course the backlash was no surprise, and I don't give it too much weight. This is how a democracy should work: when the majority start being bigots, the strong arm of the law comes down and snatches their decision-making abilities away until they learn how to use it properly again. Who exactly governs this strong arm of the law is a trickier question, but it seems to be working now. What happens if it doesn't work will hopefully be a question we never have to answer.

Moving on... I was reading what Elizabeth Esther was saying about the issue, and simply had to voice agreement. If the comments were unanimously in her favour I would have just said, "Thank-you." The comments weren't all in her favour, though, and if you know me you'll know I had to contribute to the conversation. In my view, this is not an issue that concerns public safety or governmental structure (and it certainly doesn't threaten the sanctity of your own marriage), so it's not something that we have any place encoding in law. Further, fighting so viciously against same-sex marriage is driving people from the church, which seems to me to be something Christians should be more worried about than same-sex marriage itself. Finally, and most importantly, this issue is, at heart, about love.

That is to say, Prop 8 and the voters who support it are saying that we have some right to determine how other people go about loving those around them. How can we claim to love others if we do not recognize that they feel love for each other? Perhaps God does not acknowledge that their love should result in matrimony, but that is for God to decide and for them to figure out. We (as humans, not Californians, because I am not from California) cannot support legal structures which say who can love whom and how. Of course the issue is not that simple, but I think we ought to be very careful when dealing with any issue so complicated and important as love.

But I would have let my opinions on this issue rest in my comment to Elizabeth Esther's post if another comment had not caught my eye:

In case you can't click on this to make it bigger, I will type out what this comment says:

Brianna said...

You are smart to recognize that many of the arguements the religious use
against gays and lesbians will eventually be used against yourselves.

I will eagerly vote "yes" on any future ban on Christiany or religion should
one appear in my country/region. (Posted August 5, 2010 at 03:20 PM.)

Once again this is something I should not give headspace to, but I reeled for about five minutes when I read Brianna's comment. I was about to reply with something fierce and not pithy at all, but I restrained myself. A large part of me hoped that my fears about atheist fundamentalism were unfounded. The rational part of me was in on this hope, since it seemed reasonable that there were not any or many atheists who actively sought the oppression of religious peoples. In all of my Internet travels, I had not encountered anyone who would use political means to prevent membership in religion. Now I have. These people exist. Or, at least, one does.

I desperately wish that we could dig ourselves out of hate: Christians who hate homosexuals and non-Christians, atheists who hate Christians, anyone who hates anyone. Can all my (few) readers please do me a favour? Can you try to practice love as fervently as possible the next few days? We need it.

(Also, I intend to read more queer theology when I get to BC. I hope that in posting this here I will have greater incentive to go about locating the necessary books.)

7 Quick Takes (XXVI)

[Note: for some reason, my spacing won't come out in the post in the same way that I have it in the draft. It's unprofessional-looking, but the most I can do is explain it here.]

1. On Saturday, as I'm sure you can see in my previous post, my folks and I went down to Conn Creek. It was breath-taking. I had to run into the variety store to buy some batteries for my camera, and I'm glad I did. They were disposable batteries, though, and were giving me low-battery signs for the whole walk.

2. On Saturday night, we watched Is Anyone There? This movie was not as funny as I expected it to be. As a matter of fact, minus the very end, it was fairly depressing. That's not to say it wasn't good. It just wasn't as billed.

3. I served again this past Sunday. The officiate told me that it was a morning prayer service, and Dave, the deacon, would not be serving that morning. She said that on such occasions the server usually didn't serve, though I could if I wanted to. I asked her who else was up there, and she said, "No one but me." So I served, as I didn't think she ought to be all alone. I have no objections at all to serving. I like the formality of bowing to the altar, of taking the offering. It's silly, but I feel childishly pleased to put the collection plate on the altar, to be the one who gets to do that. In Christianity, most of our sacrifices are abstract or interpersonal; I am fortunate to be able to make a more physical, ritual sacrifice when I serve. Nonetheless, I will be happy to sit in the congregation again for two Sundays.

Afterwards, I went downstairs for lunch and spent most of the time talking to Rob, the former-priest-now-bishop's son. Rob will be leaving soon. We discussed all sorts of things that you might discuss with a kid. Somehow I am bonding more with children at St. Thomas' than I am with adults. I don't know what this says about me. Even Kim, who is pretty much my age and extremely outgoing, is harder to talk to than Rob or Dakota, who are children. Sometimes I am absurdly shy, which I don't think anyone who knows me--especially from class--will believe or understand. Like many shy people, I hide it by giving firm handshakes, speaking confidently, and taking official-ish positions, such as server or DSC representative.

4. This week I helped run the Open Minds program at work. The programs coordinator was away on Monday, so we had planned for me to run it then. Her flight was turned back, so I had to run Tuesday's, too. By then the children (grade two/three students) knew me, so I stayed and helped for much of Wednesday. On Thursday the coordinator told them I couldn't really stay with them all week, as I had my own work to do. I did, however, attend their certificate ceremony. The programs coordinator had them hug her, if they wanted to, but I said nothing because I'm constantly paranoid about getting sued for doing inappropriate things around children. Not that I do inappropriate things at all; I just recognize that I could get frowned at for being hugged by a kid, you know? It's backwards, but that's the way our world works. But after shaking all of their hands when they got their certificates and saying goodbye, and group of the girls came up to me and hugged me anyway. This was sweet, of course, but also uncomfortable for me. For some reason, if I wouldn't be comfortable with a person being attracted to me, I probably won't be comfortable with them touching me. I don't know why that is. I am so neurotic.

I wish adults could show affection the way children do. I sometimes wonder if adults can still even feel affection the way children do. (Honesty check: replace "adults" with "I.") Probably not; affection is so muddled up with romance and eroticism among adults that we can get confused. You can't even go and call something a Platonic relationship because then 1) people assume you're trying to hide something, and 2) through contrast the possibility that it might at some point be something other than Platonic, while left unspoken, is nonetheless spoken. In drawing a picture of a candle-light, you must also draw darkness; by saying that a relationship is Platonic, you point out the existence of non-Platonic possiblities. So you're better off not saying it at all. And if you talk about friendship with people of the same gender as you, either people assume there's the latent possibility of homosexuality, or you have to use words like "buddy" or, alternately, "bromance." The possibility of real, non-ambiguous friendship or affection is all muddled up by either shying away from or parodying a homosexual relationship. As much as I support coming out of the closet, it seems to me as though homosexuality's publicity has broken homosociality. With children, it's so much more uncomplicated, or at least can be if these kids are anything to go by. It never was for me, but I have always been weird, and no more so than when I was a child.

That probably made no sense. Gah. It's not as though I haven't had normal, unambiguous friendships with guys and girls. I just mean that you can't articulate that without making what it is unstable. Any display of friendly affection is misconstrued.

5. I worked on grad school applications. Almost there!

6. My day-by-day Bible had a really interesting conjunction of Genesis and Gospel readings. Actually, this one's pretty cool. Got your Bible handy? Read Genesis 40:1-16 and Matthew 12:46-13:23. That was for January 19th. I have been waiting for a day's reading that has been so deliberate-seeming. The first day, opening with the first chapter of Genesis and the first chapter of Matthew, was of course connected, because both are about the beginning of the world in two different senses. This week the verses corresponded in a way which was less predictable and therefore more potent. I have a hard time imagining Joseph as looking different from Jesus, and I think this conjunction is one of the reasons. (Another is that I recognize that Joseph is a foreshadowing of Christ. But then, Samson is that too, and I don't picture him as anything like Jesus. I imagine him more like Hercules or Gilgamesh.)

Each night also has Psalm and Proverb readings, but these haven't yet been terribly connected to the other readings, except, again, on the first day. Proverbs begins with a call to listen and a promise of wisdom, so that kind of goes with the creation of the world and the genealogy of Christ.

7. I just finished reading lullabies for little criminals by Heather O'Neill. I am not inclined to profanity, and yet the response which wants to come from my lips is something like, "H**y f***ing sh*t, this book is good. G*d. Read this!" I have no idea where this blasphemy is coming from; even when I do want to swear, it's usually profanity and not blasphemy. I make a distinction.

If you're in the mood for the romanticization of urban homelessness, read this book. It's God in the Alley without Jesus, and fictional. [Edit: The "without Jesus" part isn't supposed to be a good thing or a bad thing. That's just what the book is. God in the Alley is literally about Jesus, and lullabies isn't. That's all.] Actually, I can't recommend it as highly as I would like because it's terribly depressing almost all the way through. In my opinion, the ending makes it worth it (I'll try not to spoil it any more than saying that), but it's a hard book to read. If you're feeling even slightly inclined to depression or melancholy--and, let's be honest, folks, that describes me when I get lonely, which is all the time up here--then this will be a very hard book for you. If I read this too soon before I went to bed, I'd be a bit miserable. Most of the book doesn't have the desperation you might expect, but that's only because it's hopeless. Desperation implies that you think there's a way out.

Anyway, if you're up for a challenging read, pick this up. It will be worth it. It's Canadian, which I approve of. And I met the author at uni and got the book signed, which I also approve of. Once you're done reading the book, read the author bio, too. That's a story in itself.

Jennifer Fulwiler is hosting 7 Quick Takes, as always.

And that's me for tonight. This hasn't been a cheery post, I think, though I certainly feel happy enough right now. I'm still happy about holding that giant millipede. I liked how his little legs moved.

Well, rambling thoughts end here. Good night and God bless,

Christian H

Thoughts on Three Books

1) Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca.

I started this a little while ago, and would put it down to read other books between chapters. It's not that I wasn't interested in it, but that I wasn't interested enough. The main character was interesting in her own flawed way, and there were a number of narrative quirks and preoccupations I found interesting--one of which, though the least frequent, having to do with my recent obsession with multiple selves. This wasn't enough, though. I just could not feel the stakes. I suppose part of it was that the back of the book led me to believe it was a ghost story, and it's not.

But then the novel began to gain momentuum, as they say. The novel is about the narrator, an unnamed early-twenty-something girl orphaned into the working class, who marries the wealthy Maxim de Winter and moves into Manderly, his estate. She, however, is his second wife; her predecessor is the late Rebecca--the very recently late Rebecca. The crux of the novel is that the narrator's dreams of an idyllic life are repeatedly blocked by the 'ghost' (though not supernatural) of the house's previous mistress. The narrator feels herself rivals with Rebecca on a number of accounts, and she finds she loses more often than not. It's interesting, but it wasn't as riveting as I had hoped.

Until, of course, the weeks before the Manderly Ball, the structural centre of the novel. As the plot progressed toward this point, I became more interested. I could see what would happen at the ball, but I could not predict how it would fall out. There was about to be a disaster, and I wasn't sure what the consequences would be. And after that, things moved quickly, and everything was of consequence.

I have two observations. First, it's one of those books that is good to read because it alerts you to other people's emotional or interpersonal situations: it's about wrong assumptions, about people trying and failing to connect, about despair and redemption. The narrator's situation is one which deserves empathy, notwithstanding her own foolish caused no small part of it. Second, it has pointed out to me a trend in our contemporary literature which perhaps prevents us from enjoying some of the 'classics.' We have not exactly revived the tradition of beginning in media res, because people don't like flashbacks any more. We are, however, beginning precisely where the exciting part begins in our literature. We don't tend to allow things to develop, to build up, to reach a climax. This is of course partly to do with the genres we now produce. Detective stories, political thrillers, spy novels, and the ilk in a way must begin with the violent and transgressive act which move the story. (Of course, Hamlet begins after the murder and it still builds slowly, but there is speculation that Hamlet was Shakespeare seeing how long he could drag out the Rising 'Action' without destroying the play--and in so doing he made something that worked. It made Hamlet's own deliberation, own internal torment, the focus of the play, with the piling of bodies being a consequence of this.) I think of course of Shakespeare's climb toward the centre: it is not until the climax in the third act that Turning Point, or exciting part, happens. Thinking about it, this is true of many 'classic' novels--Great Expectations, Wuthering Heights, and The Great Gatsby. We so rarely see this any more, this paced progression, and when we do run into it we get bored. It's not that we couldn't stick to it if we thought there was a promise of excellence, that this was a build-up. But we don't even think of that. We expect a novel to be homogenous, the same sort of pace and style straight through. How awful that would be, if all books ran like that! I think I enjoyed Rebecca so much more for it taking off then if it were the same throughout. The point where we, the reader, think, "Here we go," is worth it. In my opinion.

2) John Milton's Samson Agonistes.

Technically not a novel but a tragic poem, Samson Agonistes is Milton's portrayal of Samson the Nazarite after he is betrayed by Delilah, blinded, and handed over to the Philistines. Samson is a slave lamenting his poor fortune and discussing it with assorted visitors upon the scene. Also, this is a closet drama. Perhaps there are interesting things to say about a play which will never be seen and Samson's blindness (that just occured to me now, typing this), but that's not what I'm here to talk about.

I'm not claiming this reading is for everyone. It's interesting to somehow who has studied the Renaissance, of course, in that it discusses typical Renaissance preoccupations in new ways (fortune, publishing, women, manliness, love, nationhood, productivity). It was also be interesting to someone who is interested in disability studies, given that Samson in the narrative is blind--as was Milton, when composing it. But to your average person, what interest?

If you can get past the formal diction and the characters' tendency to frame everything in the manner of a formal debate, the interesting part is in the characters' emotions, of course. Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism is what clued me into the poem's interest in this respect, calling Samson, scream that he would tear Delilah apart if she touched him one of the most--I forgot what word he used, 'touching' cannot have been it, but it had to do with emotional impact, so let's say--moving scenes in all English literature. Samson is blind, and people are staring at him and he can't look back. Meanwhile, Delilah, his wife, the women he loved despite his family's misgivings, has betrayed him; he also knows that he betrayed himself in trusting her. She has returned to him and wished to make up, and in his anguish he cannot forgive her, even though he knows he should. When she tries to explain herself she winds up hurting him more. Samson's anguish is made less palpable by the Miltonic verse, but if you can read it and then picture it to yourself immediately upon reading it, the emotional stakes are high.

Milton has a tendency among the Renaissance poets, I think, to give his villians reasonable perspectives. This has led people who perhaps read more simply than others (and I'm not separating literary analysts from 'philistines' here but rather some analysts and some regular folks from other analysts and other regular folks) to say that Milton himself sided with his villians. They say that Milton's hero is Satan, not Christ, and I think in reading Samson Agonistes people might be tempted to say that Milton vindicates Delilah. I do not think this is ture. I have not yet read Paradise Regained, so I suppose I cannot speak, but from what I understand of it, it can put rest to any claims that Milton sided with Satan. The hero in this one is clearly Christ, and Satan is clearly the villian. This being said, a story is more interesting when the villians are not unreasonable. Consider Lewis' The Silver Chair. Many consider The Lady of the Green Girdle to be the most dangerous of Lewis' villians because she not only comes so close to winning (both the White Witch and King Miraz get further than she does) but because it is so clear that had she broken the surface, things would have been much bleaker and harder to overthrow than under either the Witch or the Telemarine. She, after all, is far more convincing, which we see in people's reactions to Puddleglum's speech: either they cannot accept his reasoning and end up believing the witch, or upon accepting it, they are actively relieved. And I mean the readers, not the characters. This moment is a strong one, one that lasts.

But back to Milton. I do not think he vindicates Delilah, but he does make her a more engaging character than he may have. I am still not sure how much the chorus' dismissal of her 'showing her true colours in the end' (as a traitor) reflects Milton's own attitudes towards her. It doesn't really matter in the end, though. The chorus doesn't quite have it right about her, after all. She did wrong, yes, but I can understand her, I can feel for her. I think that her last defiant speech to Samson, claiming she is proud of what she did, is a reaction to her rejection of her. I think that she really did want his forgiveness, that she truly was contrite. I can empathize with her on this. She made a horrible, horrible mistake, and now it's too late to go back. I, for one, feel bad for her. I, for one, forgive.

There are readers who wouldn't, who would say that you sow what you reap and that it's her own bloody fault, no complaining now. These are the people who don't sympathize with Northumberland in 2 Henry IV as he mourns his son's death; yes, Hotspur died because his father was a rebel and a coward and Hotspur himself was a rebel and rash, but his son is dead. This requires pity. The fact is, if people who screwed up don't get our pity, then we all deserve whatever horrors come to us and have no place lamenting to others. We have all made enormous errors that, if combined with bad luck, would have destroyed ourselves and those around us. We have simply been lucky, or good liars. All of us. Delilah made a mistake, and paid for it; her mistake may have been worse than any of ours, but it is different only is magnitude and consequence, not quality. So I say, yes, she is a villianess, but she deserves our pity, too. If we can get past the prose, I like to think Samson Agonistes shows us a pathetic (in the original meaning, "deserving of pathos") Delilah, but of course I realize that there are many, many readers who won't spare her their empathy anyway, because they are so in the habit of dispensing judgement.

3) Stephen Leacock's Sunshine Sketches of a Litte Town

I loved this book. The back described it as a blend of the idyllic and ironic, and I had thought that impossible. It turns out it was quite possible. It's about a small Ontario town after the turn of the century but before WWI. It's both grand and small; the very humble matters of Mariposa are elevated to historically-shaking heights. Leacock manages to blend affection and ridicule perfectly, such that the townsfolk's foibles are presented good-naturedly. I recommend this book to anyone at all. I would in particular like to hear what a city-person thinks of it; after all, I align myself with the rural every time. My perspective of this book would be different from someone else's.

This book, for the most part, sits in a timeless past. Leacock wrote the novel as taking place twenty years before its writing, before the Great War and the Depression he was writing from. I suspect that even for him it had a sense of idyllic history, of nostalgia, of the world the way it was. For him, it was the world as it was when he was a boy; for us, now, we have never seen the world this way.

At least, not in this time period. But small towns don't change much in their structure, except perhaps in becoming gradually more anonymous as times go by. One way or another, the small town of Mariposa is in ways similar to small towns today. In ways it's dissimilar, too, but if you watch Corner Gas or read books by Stephen King, you might already have a feel for the small town mentality. In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Corner Gas is a modern, televised Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town at heart. The point is, there is something timeless about Mariposa. It chugs on and on and remains virtually the same, while the urban 'important' world morphs yearly. The big, urban world may change as it likes, but I wonder how much of its change is sustained or generated by the actions of the little, rural world it ignores. Perhaps the election in Mariposa means nothing at all by itself, but the elections of all the Mariposas in Canada combined... well, I am forced to think that those matter quite a bit, really. Seen as a very small part of a very large whole, perhaps Mariposa is after all just as grand as it thinks it is.

Perhaps we all are.

Sexy Body, Disfigured Body

Aimee Mullins, who I have referenced here before, asked a question in her TED talk on her 12 pairs of (prosthetic) legs. Actually, she asked three questions. They are, "What does a beautiful woman have to look like? What is a sexy body? And interestingly, from an identity standpoint, what does it mean to have a disability?" I started to think about this over the course of about a week. Not only was I wondering about the answers to her questions, but I also had a few questions about her questions. I'll try to explore these with you here.

1. What is a sexy body? What is a disabled body?

The most obvious way to answer this question is to Google these terms. But I don't think you have to. I think you'll know what you'll find, especially in the case of the former. This won't answer our questions, though. Neither question--sexiness, disability--is easily answerable. Likely, neither is answerable at all, in the end.

First: sexiness. Or, if you prefer, beauty or physical attractiveness. (If you don't want to follow my reasoning, jump to the next bold point.) They say, "Beauty is in the eye of the beholder," and, whatever that person who originally minted this phrase meant, it has a truth different from that most people accept. Most people think it means that everyone has their own standard of beauty, which is of course somewhat true. However, there is another interesting element to this which I think becomes more clear if I say, "Beauty is in the mind of the beholder." Beauty is not, at least as we experience it, a quality inherent in an object or person. Rather, it is an interpretation of that object or person. People have said this before of all sorts of things, such as colour, but this is really a different matter than colour. A thing, of course, is not red itself. That is a psychological interpretation of the lightwaves we receive. But all things that we experience as red do reflect that particular wavelength. They are in a sense red after all.

In other words, our brains see a person and think, based on assorted qualities our sensory receptors pick up, "That's a sexy person." (If you want to hold onto an essentialist theory of beauty, you of course can. God or Platonic principles or what ever defines universal beauty can make a thing beautiful--truly, inherently beautiful--and then allow our brains to perceive that. Or, there is such a thing as beauty, somehow, derived from something, and it is to our reproductive advantage, somehow, to be able to perceive that, and we have evolved to be able to perceive it. The relevant point is that it's still a process that goes on in our brains.) In this sense, beauty is in the eye of the beholder--but that doesn't mean it's entirely subjective. To the extent that our brains operate the same, sexiness, even though interpreted, is objective; to the extent that our brains operate differently, it is subjective. The degree of difference isn't just genetics, of course, but also individual personal experience and cultural factors (and I'd argue that culture factors are way bigger than most people think). Anyway, the upshot is, 'sexiness' is partly universal, partly cultural, and partly individual. So we can answer 'what is a sexy body' in part, but only in part.

Now, there are all sorts of theories about facial symmetry and hip-waist ratios and things. I don't want to get into those, because I think that they are no more than contributing factors. A girl whose enormous, unibrow-laden, protuding forehead is perfectly symmetrical isn't going to win any beauty pagents. Meanwhile, I wouldn't say Helena Bonham Carter is the most beautiful woman in the world, but she's made it pretty well in Hollywood. But her face isn't perfectly symmetrical. Not at all. So I think we can say these sorts of things contribute, but aren't absolute.

I think here we need to fall back on what I said before. A lot of it is cultural. We are trained to think of particular people--often whole, 'healthy,' young, thin people--as beautiful and others as not beautiful. There was a time when overweight girls were considered sexy by some (Renaissance). There was a time when husky women were desirable (frontier, pre- and revolutionary Russia). There was a time when effeminate men were considered beautiful (ancient Greece, some Renaissance). Sickly girls also had a vogue (Victorian). It is true that some people we just won't find all that attractive anyway for biological reasons. But I don't think that's the case for people without legs. So long as we aren't actively repulsed by them, there's no reason we can't find them attractive. Listen to Aimee Mullins talk--just the first few minutes--on training repulsion.

That's not a real answer, but it's all I've got for now. I'll also note that I purposely trained myself not to be repelled by people with prosthetics and people with assorted facial disfigurations, etc. As a kid, I simply couldn't deal with anyone who looked 'disfigured' or 'deformed,' as I put it.

So what is disability? You'll notice I used "disfigured" in my post title. This is to emphasis a point: disability suggests a definition which rests on whether a person can perform as well as a typical person can in those tasks deemed part of everyday life. So we have people with missing limbs or people who are shorter than usual or what have you or blind people. This definition works well if you're only thinking of amputees, but it breaks down in other areas, at least if you want to talk about attractiveness. People with albinoism are not in any way less able to perform typical tasks, but they are often considered unattractive. Conjoined twins are often less able to do particular things, but they aren't always. Sometimes the only thing they are less able to do is to be alone, and I hardly think that counts. Aimee Mullins points out that people without legs are far from less able. They have now become more able. And then blind people, one of the largest demographics of people who are part of the disability--or different ability--activism movement, are often indistinguishable from sighted people, including in the realm of attractiveness. Disability is not the issue; it's 'looking weird' that is.

What definition can we use, then? Well, one possibility is, People who are visually atypical in some significant anatomical or pigmentational way, which is distinct from race, gender, or age. Another, less politically correct but I think more to the point, definition would be, People who would fifty years ago have been in a freak show, and now would be on the TLC network.

Where am I going with this? Good question. This is where: the fundamental question is, can a person who stikes us as so visually atypical also strike us as attractive?

Of course they can. If you care to, you can find all sorts of fetish literature about amputees and conjoined twins and human-animal hybrids (not possible yet, I know, but they would fit in this class if they did exist--and they were once thought to exist) and goodness knows who else. There is fetish literature about dragons doing R-rated things with luxury vehicles, so I guess we oughtn't be surprised.

But what about a 'normal' person, who doesn't have such fetishes? Well, I hope by now the pictures I've been putting in have answered that for you. There's no reason they can't, so long as we don't allow ourselves to be repulsed by them. And those fetishes may not be so off topic. I wonder if the forbidden-ness, the taboo, even the repulsiveness itself contribute to the fetish. If you look it up, people can be attracted to some pretty repulsive things. A Freudian analyst might talk a lot about the repression of certain disallowed desires being exagerated through a fetish. My point being, we might be naturally inclined to feel that these people are attractive--that these are sexy bodies--but we think we shouldn't feel so, and are as a result confused and repulsed. Consider the on-going cultural debate about whether the Medusa was beautiful or hideous. C. S. Lewis, for instance, calls the Medusa beautiful long before Cixous does. The classical painters painted her as such. And yet she's also a figure for ugliness--and disability.

Can a disfigured body be sexy? Sure it can. But we must let it be so.

2. Who becomes sexy?

And, of course, unless we find ourselves desiring that element which is different, the body must be sexy even without the disability. By now you'll likely have noticed that most of the people I've shown on here would have been attractive without their particular difference (or not, if you don't find them attractive). A 500-pound person will likely not be considered sexy, unless obesity turns you on. That's just a fact. And if a person is just generally what we'd consider unattractive, whether for cultural or hardwired reasons, then that they have a plastic arm isn't going to make much of a difference one way or another. If they could somehow grow that arm back, it won't help.

Which begins to put stress on Aimee Mullins implication that allowing the disabled to be beautiful is a victory. It seems that it's only a victory for those who are beautiful.

And I don't think this is going to push us into saying, Well, now that the legless are beautiful, people with distortions on their faces can also be beautiful. Because, I'm sorry, but by standard societal definitions, they can't. Not yet.

[I recognize that someone will come around with the argument that, if you fall in love with someone who is unattractive because of their personality, you will begin to find them physically attractive by magic, almost. I am absolutely sure this is true. Love is magic. I think we can also agree that that is beside the point. We already said we're not talking about the subjective. We're talking about quasi-objective attractiveness, in as much as it exists.]

So, if only some disabled people get to be beautiful, why should we value it at all?

3. Why sexiness?

Two reasons.

First, that there is no reason we can't bestow a privilege on some when we are unable to give it to all. It's not fair, but it would be ridiculous not to push for empowerment when not everyone in the demographic will be able to share it. It would be like saying, Let's give women the right to an education, and then someone saying, No, you can't, because those women over there are too old to start learning new things, and those women over their are so mentally handicapped that they wouldn't benefit from that education. (They have advanced learning disabilities or something.) It makes no sense.

And sexiness can be empowering. As much as people talk about beauty being a limit for women in some fields, I'd suggest you try being really downright unattractive before saying that. If you think you aren't taken seriously when you're pretty, at least people listen to you (or pay some sort of attention to you). At least people don't openly mock you for how you look, which I've seen happen.

Second, if we see some disabled people as attractive, we might be more willing to think of them--and by extension their whole demographic--as people. That is, we might think 'disabled person' over 'disabled person.' Grammatically, that is rendered 'a person with a disability,' which is the language differently-abled activists are pushing for. Hopefully, if we see a really hot albino guy walk down the street, we're less likely to think of people with albinoism as 'freaks.'

4. Why not sexiness? (I'll tell you.)

Notwithstanding what I've said so far, I think there's still a problem a number of problems, and I'm likely missing some.

While we're busy training ourselves to think of some disabled/differently-abled/disfigured/anatomically-or-pigmentally-atypical people as attractive, we're simultaneously training ourselves to think of being attractive as an important goal. That is, we're educating ourselves in the culture that worries about how people look in the first place. We're not breaking out of the system which discriminates by appearance. And before Jon breaks in here, I'm not talking about the movies. Whether we agree with Jon or not on cinema (and if you don't know Jon or what he thinks about cinema, don't worry about it) doesn't matter: I'm talking about real life here. I think it's fair to say that while enjoying an attractive person's appearance is not culturally destructive, discriminating based on it is. So we need to be careful when worrying about who is sexy that we don't by mistake brainwash ourselves into thinking that sexiness is somehow more important than, or even worse a contributing factor in, a person's humanity and their right to respect and compassion.

I revealed a particular issue earlier indirectly. There is a sort of thin edge where people who are too attractive aren't taken seriously and people who aren't attractive enough are avoided or ridiculed. Even if you found that happy medium, it would only be successful in that context; presumably, you'd be still unable to compete with those who were 'too attractive' in the other context when it comes to romantic rivalry, etc. In the end, the only thing we can say for sure is that we don't want to be in the lowest half of the attractiveness food chain. The hope, of course, is that we can somehow get out of this scenario, but if that is possible (which you might have cause to doubt), we certainly can't do it if we're at all worried about whether we're sexy when have a disability.

And then there's the issue of encouraging lust. At this point some of my readers will likely be thinking, Uhp, he's playing the prude card again, and from those readers' perspectives that would be somewhat true. There are a number of reasons why I think encouraging lust is problematic, but since some of them are religiously derived I won't fool myself into thinking that they'll be persuasive to someone outside of that context. I want to clarify here, though, that I'm not condemning the experience of physical desire. In the right situation, physical desire is a good thing--and that's biblically supported, in case you were unaware of that. But, at least from a Christian perspective, there is a problem with putting all this focus into making yourself (as a person with an atypicality of some sort) sexy, into discerning who is and who is not sexy, into allowing/encouraging/forcing yourself to feel physical attraction toward a person with a disability; the problem is the encouragement of an over-active libido. In our culture, there's already that threat. We don't need to fan the flame. But I think you can make secular arguments against allowing ourselves to be too sexually active, having to do with destroying our relationships, driving our desires into unattainable fantasies, and hampering our abilities to be romantically and sexually loyal to our partners. I haven't developed these arguments largely because I haven't seen the need to on a personal basis. They exist, though. I've heard about them.

(And in case you're thinking that I'm thus a hypocrit for writing this at all and for putting up all these pictures selected for their ability to arouse you, I say this: you're likely right. I do hope I'm making a point in all this that transcends that, but that's not to say on some level I'm not doing this just so I can think about pretty girls. The naked vanities, and everything, right? My only answer can be, "Orges and onions.")

This, then, is the crux of the question I have about Aimee Mullins' question: If we do allow that a disabled body can be a sexy body, then we are forced with a particular dilemma, which is between choosing the short-term empowerment of sexiness at risk of keeping ourselves in a destructive and discriminatory culture, or striving for other forms of empowerment which have concerns like ability and accessibility, added perspective, inherent worth, compassion, and meaningful relationships. Do we feel that worrying about sexiness as empowerment is in the end empowering, or does it just cause more problems?

There are some further lines of inquiry which are pertinent, but not so directly related that I will give them the space here (as I've so clearly gone well beyond the reasonable length limits of a blog post). You'll notice one of my photos is of an African-American woman who has albinoism. There is no way to discuss her attractiveness without bringing up race--is she beautiful because she is 'white'? The on-line discussion about the attractiveness of the Hensel twins (a pair of dicephalic conjoined twins) has, if not been exhausted, at least been exhausting. The first picture shown on here is of a prosthetic designed to be and marketed as 'sexy.' It avoids what is apparently called 'the uncanny valley'; that is, things which are close enough to looking real to sometimes 'trick' us but not close enough to really convince us are uncanny and make us uncomfortable, and the designers tried to avoid that when making this arm. Other designers strive for something verisimilitude instead, as you can see in other images. The point, then, is that whatever we decide about the moral worth of this question, in the end we cannot stop at the general principle but must then begin to untangle it on a specific level--race, uncanniness, privacy and individuality. These questions are not inseparable.

Which would be a perfect segue into the one problem I have with the feminist movement (Jon and I have discussed this), which is that there are so many other facets to identity that to focus on gender alone for your emancipation seems like a case of poor resource management. But that is getting off-topic and must be saved for another post. This one is way too long as is, and I need to go to bed.