A little light culture: Moral mythology

Most of us imagine that we would have been the ones to have been different had we lived "back then". "Transport me back to 1831 and I would have grasped the human dignity in everyone and spoke out against racism." The truth is, almost certainly not. If you had been alive in the 19th century, you would have been a racist. If you'd been an adult in 1954, you would have had all the sexist attitudes of the era. If you'd been either a Protestant or a Catholic in the 17th century, you would have been baying for the blood of the others.

Which is all another way of saying: If you and I had been present at the crucifixion of Jesus, we wouldn't have done a thing to stop it and might well have cheered it on.

It's so easy to forget this and to transform history into an occasion for dividing the sheep and the goats. You can see that attitude at work in a post about the American South following Civil War that Ta-Nehisi Coates has up today. It's not any particular argument or factual claim that is wrong with it. It's the deep need to cling to history as the justification of current political attitudes.

Coates writes:

When Kushner says the Ku Klux Klan came out of an unwillingness to forgive the South, I don't know what he means. The Klan was founded in 1865. Johnson was still president. There was nothing "unforgiving" about his posture to the South.

Well, yeah, I can sorta see that. But I can also see how the Reconstruction could easily have been more generous and how that might have made a big difference. Kushner is perhaps wrong but her isn't crazy and the level of outrage Coates displays here tells us more about him than anything else.

Manthly Thor's Day Special: The monthly movie

This month's feature is not neo noir. It's a full-blown chic flick called Your Sister's Sister. No, the title isn't explained during the film. It centers on two women who are half-sisters, sharing the same father but different mothers.

The plot is complicated and not very credible. It features far too many scenes of people sitting down and having heart-to-heart conversations like people just don't have in real life along with some ridiculous twists and turns ultimately winding up with a happy ending that would have made Walt Disney puke but that many critics loved because it has two sisters, one straight, one lesbian and one wimp living together living happily ever after.

If you are an upper-middle-class white person, you will recognize the set up. A guy is still depressed a year after his brother's death. His best female-friend ( but not girlfriend) suggests he go up to a vacation home that she describes as "my father's". Now this is a situation rich with potential for unusual couplings and that is exactly what happens for he arrives at the cottage to find the second sister, a lesbian who has just broken up with her lover, and a bottle of tequila. Tequila is consumed and the two end up in bed.

The guy is a complete dweeb. He is angry, bitter, unemployed and he finishes in less than 40 seconds. It wasn't good for her. She seems surprisingly comfortable with this however.

The problem though is that it is impossible to see why any woman would find this guy attractive. When his bike breaks down later in the film, he has a temper tantrum that would shame a three-year-old boy.

Let me make a wild suggestion, though, that this movie isn't really about what it appears to be about. Just as a lot of teen horror movies are really about sex, this is really a movie about women remaining friends even in the face of sexual relationships which challenge best-friend-forever friendships because they are so much more intimate. There is a whole lot of complication and other stuff camouflaging the thing, but that is the real subject. And that is why it is such a pack of lies. In real life, best-friends-forever are always rapidly surpassed and supplanted by sexual love.

You can see why it hurts. When one ceases to be a child, one puts away childish things but it isn't easy to do so. It's not that you can't still be friends but the nature of the friendship changes. And it is that which this movie sets out to deny.

It's not a movie that attempts to confront any deep issues about this. It pretends to be doing so by creating all sorts of awkward moments but it never shows how people get over awkward conflicts. It simply says that this can happen and that then everything can somehow be made okay somehow. Exactly how that is is hard to say but it apparently involves lots of walking around the beautiful scenery outside the vacation home while acoustic guitar music plays on the soundtrack.

It's one of the marks of chic flicks that there is no real moral responsibility. The guy is not in a relationship with either sister. He's just a friend so there is no reason for the other sister to hold back aside from the obvious awkwardness that would come from such a situation (well that and her being a lesbian). So when the upset comes, it isn't result of any betrayal, for there has been none. No, the upset is because the first sister has long been in love with this man but has never said so out loud to anyone. This is tough on anyone but, on the other hand, we've all done something like this at least once and the relevant moral lesson is: you snooze, you lose.

Further complicating the thing is that the second sister broke up with her ex because this other woman wasn't interested in having a child. This fact trickles out only accidentally late in the movie because this second sister has been lying to everyone about everything. She, in fact, is responsible for the sole genuine act of betrayal in the film. She sees our wimp guy as a potential sperm donor and doesn't ask him to use a condom. When he brings the operation to a halt because he doesn't have one, she says she thinks she knows where to find one and slips off and then comes back and slips on. She won't let him put it on himself because she has taken a moment to poke it full of holes out in the hall.

If anyone has the right to be genuinely angry, it's the guy. But he isn't. Instead he goes to the first sister and tells her that the most important thing the relationship between sisters. He assures her that he simply does not matter and is so horrified at the thought that he might have been the cause of tension between the two women that he cries. Then he rides off on his bike and cruises around the island where the vacation home is located.

Sadly, he does not run into a gang of Hells Angels who do the world a favour by stomping his sorry ass to death and then feeding the carcass to crows. He does however have the aforementioned spittle-flecked nutty because his crappy bike breaks.

Meanwhile, the girls make up and the first sister offers to help the second one raise her child if she is indeed pregnant. (As always seems to be the case with chick flicks, the movie is pro-choice in the abstract but adamantly anti-abortion in practice.) The movie spends an entire fifteen minutes running time on this reunion. There is no real apology or any real facing of moral facts and there could not be because there isn't anything to apologize for. The only person who has actually been betrayed is out riding his bike around like he wasn't important enough to be allowed to speak or get involved. The two women, meanwhile, are not upset because of anything either has done to the other but because, well, because they are very upset.

They eventually calm down to the point where they can stand to be in the same  room with one another, although not speaking. And then, after a lot more acoustic guitar, the second sister apologizes to the first by saying, brace yourself, "Sorry". And that's it.

It ends with all three blissfully happy together watching the second sister pee on a stick and and they all wait to see if it turns blue.

Ta-Nehisi Coates on misogyny in Raymond Chandler

Over that the Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates has been reading Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. I think it's safe to say that Coates doesn't get Chandler but that is not necessarily a bad thing as he makes some really challenging points about other issues, particularly manhood and sexuality.

I think to understand misogyny one has to grapple with the conflict between male mythology and male biology. There is something deeply scary about the first time a young male experiences an erection. All the excitement and hunger and throbbing that people is there. But with that comes a deep, physical longing. Whether or not that longing shall be satiated is not totally up to the male.

That's a good place to go and Coates does a good job of drawing out the pain that comes with getting an erection when you don't want to have an erection. Read the accounts of boys who are molested by older men or women and you will begin to grasp the full horror of it.

That said, I think Coates goes a little off track:

Laugh now at the boy at the middle school dance, who gets an erection on the slow number (God help him if he has orgasm.)

Well, no. Because you always do get an erection when your thirteen years old and you have that first slow dance and, provided you haven't made poor wardrobe choices, no one need know.

Except the girl, of course. She always knows. She isn't stupid and when she feels the boy's erection grow against her stomach, she knows exactly what is happening. And I can't speak for everyone but I can tell you that in the slow dances I had in the years in middle school, I always got an erection and not once did any girl pull away or leave the dance. They all pushed more firmly against me once they were aware of it. The only ones who did not where the ones who never got close enough to cause an erection in the first place.

This is one of these things that most people know about but no one talks about. There were teachers at these dances who saw it as their job to separate couples who were a little too close but those teachers never let on they knew anything about any actual stimulating going on. And neither did the girls. That was one of the rules, you could do the slow dance if the girl said yes. Then you could get closer if she allowed you. And then ... but you could not mention the erection that you were both so aware of. That was right out.

The ultimate thrill was if she parted her legs so you could slip one of yours between hers and feel this intense heat on your thigh when it pressed against her crotch. And that, given that this was all you got in those days, was about as intense an experience as a young man could imagine.

(One of the things that was really intoxicating and really educational when you were learning about girls in those years was that the vast majority of girls would push back against your erection while slow dancing but never admitted it to anyone. This is a valuable lesson because there are always sexual things that most women do but that they don't let on to others, especially to other women. Sexual relationships trump all other relationships for intimacy with spectacular ease as a consequence.)

Now, the point here is not just to linger on some erotic memories, although it is amazing the way these furtive experiences stay with you for decades. No, the point is that this whole game gets played out without anyone admitting it's going on. No boy in grades 7-8-9 could possibly admit that he had an erection while dancing with a girl and no girl in those years could possibly admit that they had willfully caused a boy to get an erection while slow dancing and that she enjoyed having this power.

But here is the thing, already in those years there are boys and girls who don't get it. Some are grossed out by it, some are so shy they are humiliated by it, and some never get asked to dance or accepted to dance with because they don't have the social skills to be accepted in the first place. (And that experience, not the getting of erections, is the source of most misogyny, as well as most man-hating coming the other way.)

And that is tremendously important. You are supposed, as I've already noted, to figure out that you don't acknowledge what is happening. But you are also supposed to grasp that when the dance is over, it's over. You don't, as some boys do, follow the girl like a lost puppy because you are so overwhelmingly swept up by what has happened. You also don't, as some boys do, brag about what happened. (And you live with the very real pain that sometimes follows without complaining too.)

Even more than that, you need to know how to play the give and take. You need to read her responses well enough to grasp just how far you can go. And when you misread her and she stiffens or moves away, you are supposed to pick up the hint right away.

Back to Coates,

Masculinity's central tenet is control—and perhaps most importantly, control of the body. Nothing contradicts that edict like erections. It unmans you, it compels you through sensations you scarcely understand. And it threatens to expose you, to humiliates you, in front of everyone. 

That's only partly true.  Masculinity's central tenet is control (and notice how Coates isn't at all bothered that he is being sexist here) but erections don't unman you. You can't control when you have an erection and you can't control when you don't. No, what unmans you is your own lack of self control after your erection has been stimulated by someone else, in this case by a young girl pushing her stomach up against it. That's the real test of control.

At that age we are all working out the game whereby we allow others to play games that get us heated up and the tricky social manœuvers that go with completely losing control. And even then it gets tricky. I knew both men and women in university who went gaga over their first sexual partner and proceeded to make complete fools of themselves because they were so wrapped up in their own feelings that they failed to see they were not reciprocated. (Which, if you think about it, is the lesson you are supposed to start learning back in middle school when the slow dance ends and the girl thanks you and walks away.)

But what about the other side? What about girls then women? Are they supposed to be learning any lessons about self control and about reading men's responses? Again, I remind you that Coates was not at all bothered by the sexism implicit in his claim that, "Masculinity's central tenet is control". As if femininity doesn't have to worry about these things. (One of the things that drives Chandler is that, already in the 1930s, our culture was liberating women from old strictures but failing to hold them morally accountable as any free being should be. The Sternwood sisters who run wild with no self control, while a little camp, were highly prophetic.)

The problem with the way Coates sees these things is that it's so atomic. Men, are like elementary particles brushing up against women and neither is supposed to have any understanding of how the other thinks. But that's nonsense, you can figure out what the other person is thinking without talking about it. Let's go back to that slow dance in middle school. You will earn a girl's contempt if you don't pick up on body language that is meant to tell you to back off a bit. But do you what is also true? You will earn the same, and quite possibly more contempt, if you fail to recognize and act upon signals to push a little further.

You can figure what is going on in other people's heads from observing them. And you can predict how they will react to you. You can't do it as consistently as you can predict , say, the response of billiard balls when they are hit by other billiard balls, but you can read people and respond to them on the basis of non-verbal clues. And that is a huge part of being a sexual adult when you consider how often the verbal clues you do get are simply not true.

Orchids
Chandler's portrait of the two Sternwood sisters is a misogynist but it's misogynist in a way that Coates might find hard to criticize if he teased it out a bit more. We see this right from the opening of the novel when Marlowe goes to meet General Sternwood who lives in an orchid room. The general has to live there because he has been unmanned:

'You are looking at a very dull survival of a rather gaudy life, a cripple paralyzed in both legs and with only half his lower belly. There's little that I can eat and my sleep is so close to waking that it is hardly worth the name. I seem to exist largely on heat, like a newborn spider, and the orchis are an excuse for the heat. Do you like orchids?'

'Not Particularly,' I said.

The General half closed his eyes. 'They are nasty things. Their flesh is too much like the flesh of men. And their perfume has the rotten sweetness of a prostitute.'

This is perhaps a good opportunity to remind you what orchids look like. Here, courtesy of Wikipedia, is a white orchid:

If you don't think of a diminutive term for a cat also used to refer to female genitalia when you see orchids , there is something deeply wrong with you. You may not choose to say it, for example if you are with your mother and grandmother at the orchid show, but you will think it and Chandler is counting on your making that association.

Coates correctly notes elsewhere that Chandler also trades in anti-gay remarks, although he fails to note that these are pretty mild by the standards of the era. I've been reading Death by Ecstasy by Dame Ngaio Marsh, published three years before The Big Sleep in my sick bed and she makes Chandler look gay-friendly by comparison.

And what should not surprise us as there is a huge homoerotic streak in Chandler. He keeps it safely sanitized of actual sex, but this fiction is all about male-male bonds. Over and over again these stories comes down to some relationship between two men and that relationship is an intense one with erotic overtones. (If you read the book as opposed to remembering the movie, the sexual tension between Marlowe and Eddie Mars in The Big Sleep is more convincing than that between Marlowe and Vivian Sternwood

They are also about war and that will seem even odder because Chandler hardly ever mentions the war. Anyone reading his books would never guess that Chandler fought in the first world war and experienced the sort of horrors that would make most of us crawl up in a fetal position and cry the rest of our lives. But, although he never talks about it much, that experience is what his writing really springs from. It's about the bonds that form between men doing difficult things together and there is an unmistakeable homoerotic undertone that goes with these interactions. The thing about Chandler is not that he makes anti-gay statements but that, in making them, he protests too much.

Jasmine's basement
A girl this time, not a flower. Back in grade eight, a bunch of us swam until dark then we went down to Jasmine's basement and danced. And a girl named Joanne Roberge agreed to slow dance with me. That was pretty much the sum total of our relationship but I'll never forget her. She had all the social skill necessary to make the interactions work. And she had other skills too ...

This was the song that was playing that night when I danced with her:



It sure beat trench warfare.

Going Galt with Country Life

Sick day today. I feel like crap and am confined to bed. The Lemon Girl has very kindly brought me the latest issue of Country Life.

You, or I in any case, can easily forget what a great magazine Country Life is. It's very well-written, chock full of good content.

It's easy to mock given that virtually no one can afford the country estates advertized on the opening pages and the tiny segment of the population who do buy such places are unlikely to go looking for a new house in a magazine. But this magazine, like most, is aspirational. The people who buy and read such things see the image that goes with the magazine as something to aim at. I suspect the vast majority know they will never have a large country estate with hunting and fishing rights for two thousand acres and most probably don't really want that in the sense that they woukld spend the money on other things if they had the money which, in any case, they don't.

But there is a style here and it is a style worth emulating, this second point is something that could not be said of The New York Times, People or Vanity Fair.

The owners of houses, meanwhile, get the pleasure of seeing their wealth and status advertized in a magazine. That, oddly enough, is actually at odds with the country-life life, which is private and dignified. The person who puts twelve million pounds to buy the place on page two would not want to advertize that they own it once they do but they will get some pleasure out of knowing that the place was listed in Country Life before they bought it.

For the rest of us, the life style offers a way of buying out of a degraded politics and culture in favour of something that is elegant and sophisticated and yet manages to not take itself too seriously.

My favourite bit so far is a write up about Archbishop of Canterbury had forced his workers to do penance for having the temerity to deliver straw in sacks instead of open on carts. This apparently offended the Archbish's aesthetic sensibilities and he forced the offenders to march about carrying the straw on their own backs. The editors show a fine sense of irony by including a sentence that begins,

The Archbishop's behaviour was evidently regarded by some as unforgivably high handed ...

Another image: Nude is naked

Yes, that is shameless bait for Google.

Here is the image for your contemplation. This man is neither naked nor nude but he is trying to make a statement about nudity. He isn't making the statement he thinks he is making.

That is a tine crop from a much larger picture. I think it constitutes fair use. This is the safe for work edition. If you want to see the whole enchilada, go here. I have a sneaking suspicion he didn't have to borrow the outfit for the day, that he actually owns that outfit.

San Fransisco has banned public nudity and this, naturally, has inspired a protest. Ironically, the protestors succeed in making a case for the ban in that there are so few of them and they are so obviously exhitionists.

I want to make another point, however. Remember the topless protests of a few weeks ago. Most of the women in that protest wanted the right not to flout their sexuality but the right to hide it. They just want to treated the same as men and they hoped to be ushering in a  world where women could walk about without bras and no one would look at their breasts in a sexual way.

This puts them in an odd position of arguing that their breasts are not sexual even though it was painfully obvious that they knew that they are sexual. The irony was that the only woman who looked comfortable in the photographs was the one who was obviously an exhibitionist.

But look at our friend above. Notice how he has to be in a role to do this. He is in costume and wearing make up. And not just any role but he has to be a in a sexual role. If he'd worn a clown suit with a cut out to expose the right bits the message he would be sending about his sexuality would be far different. Likewise, if he had just stood there naked.

Nudity works for him because it is sexual just as it worked for the exhibitionist at the topless protest because it was sexual for her too. There are, of course, other reasons to get naked but they are pragmatic reasons—medical exam, take a shower, change clothes. To get naked to express yourself is to express yourself sexually. Which is why laws against public nudity make perfect sense. Once you allow public nudity, you allow public sex.

And you may say, "And what would be wrong with that?" Well, you don't have to agree with me but pause to consider the larger social consequences of taking intimate things and making them public.

A little light culture: Stir-up Sunday

This Sunday, November 25, 2012, is Stir-up Sunday, that is to say it is the Sunday on which you make your Christmas pudding.

Christmas pudding dates from the era before central heating. I read somewhere once that in 1900, the average male spent 11 hours a day outside. Not outside the home but outside. And he generally spent it doing physical labour in the cold and often working while wet.

And all this in a day before modern insulating materials. Back then a winter coat was made of the same but a thicker cloth than a summer one. It was much heavier.

If you think about that a bit, it's easy to see why plum pudding is so rich.

Nowadays, we don't need that richness. But we make and eat Christmas pudding as an act of communion with all the generations of our families who celebrated Christmas before us. Christmas, like any feast that deserves to be called a feast, is a conversation between the living and the dead. It's not a time to be making up new "traditions" because we want something that "speaks to us".

Think about your grandmother and her grandmother and what they did and saw and what they enjoyed and suffered. Do it even if you didn't or don't particularly like them. Then stick a wooden spoon in the pudding and stir it along with them. It's hard work, plum pudding batter is thicker than concrete mix.

The "stir up" part comes from the proper collect of the last week of the liturgical year. We never hear it on the last Sunday anymore because the last Sunday of the year is now always Christ the King which has its own proper collect. It is heard at the regular mass during the rest of the week.

The word "Collect" has an old meaning "gathering". We gather together and we gather ourselves. If you've read enough novels from the late 18th century and early 19th century you will have read a passage where someone loses their cool and is advised to "recollect" themselves. That may not make sense to you because we now use "recollect" to mean "remember" but it meant "pull yourself together" back then.

The collect is a pulling together and it is part of the introductory rites of the mass. It is, in fact, the last part of the introductory rights, which is to say that it is the end of the beginning. And this particular collect begins with the words "stir up" in which our ancestors had the courage to see a divine plan. They concluded that this was a sign that we should make that day the pudding with which we will celebrate the la vita nuova, the new life, a few weeks from now.

As a sign! Think of the courage it takes to see a sign and recognize it as a sign to change your life. You could just dismiss it as coincidence that the words "stir up" appear just at that moment. If you want to live in a world where such things don't happen that is.

Here is the translation of the collect we use today.

Stir up the will of your faithful, we pray, O Lord,
that, striving more eagerly
to bring your divine work to fruitful completion,
they may receive in greater measure
the healing remedies your kindness bestows.

That is the new translation but the prayer goes back centuries. Dante, Frances of Assisi, Paul Claudel, Jane Austen, and Evelyn Waugh all hear this prayer. So did your great grandmother. And then she went home and made her pudding and made everyone in the house come and stir it.

She did that because it was considered good luck. And it is. Not in the sense that you may win the lottery or find love but because you will connect yourself to others both living and dead by doing it.

Manly Thor's Day Special: Saint Cecilia

Today is the memorial feast of Saint Cecilia.

Deep waters cannot quench love,
nor floods sweep it away.
Were one to offer all he owns to purchase love,
he would be roundly mocked.