A Feast for Creeps.

There was a big discussion over the weekend at the League of Ordinary Gentlemen about sexism in George R.R. Martin's popular A Song of Ice and Fire books, inspired by Sady Doyle's review, in which she justifiably concludes that "George R.R. Martin is creepy." I'm posting a version of what I said in that conversation because I had to think pretty hard about why I continue to read these books despite reservations about the content.

These books contain some really disturbing stuff, and it's important not to play that down. If Martin doesn’t win you over somewhere in the early part of A Game of Thrones, the rest of the series is going to be quite a slog. It’s really important in these discussions to distinguish between “if you’re disturbed, you’re reading it wrong” and “this stuff is disturbing, though I think there’s a point to it.”

The way I read these books, there are two reasons Martin writes creepy scenes. First, he’s trying to undermine (or maybe even “critique”) the conservative impulse to revisit feudal societies. He’s constructing an outsized version of medieval Europe with a deromanticized and Machiavellian patriarchal feudalism, and it should be clear to the reader that this is a bad system. In A Feast for Crows, Martin lets a character speak at length about the horrors that war inflicts on common soldiers; at this point in the book, we've seen that war is no picnic for the nobility, but it's hell for the troops. So a major project of the books is to flip the common tropes of fantasy literature. (As a side note: it shouldn't be taken for granted that these books give any kind of window into actual history, but that's a post for another time.) This take on Martin is, of course, nothing new. And I think this explains why he’s set up the large architecture of the novel in the way he has.

But it doesn't explain why he writes specific sections the way he does. Specifically, there's a ton of stuff that's way more intense than it needs to be: why the incest? Why the sexual abuse? Why the cannibalism? And why in such detail? I think the answer to all these questions is that Martin, as a storyteller, likes to try to get away with really dark stuff, and that's the second source of creepiness in the books. So in one instance there's a subtle implication that a man secretly kills and cooks one group of his enemies, and then proceeds to serve human meat pies to another group of enemies. If there's some kind of political-philosophical statement being made in this passage, I'm missing it. More obviously, Martin uses one subplot to give his readers an inside view of the Viking-like rape-and-pillage culture of the Iron Isles. Even if the point is to show that a culture based on rape and slaughter is not the best society to live in, I find these chapters to be incredibly unpleasant!

So, for those of us who like the books, I think it’s good to talk about what Martin is really aiming at, and to figure out where his critique falls short. But even if there’s some plausible liberal-humanist explanation of every single creepy incident in each one of the books, (a) people who find these incidents off-putting would not necessarily find them any less off-putting if they understood the purpose behind them, and (b) the very fact that bloggers are dispassionately parsing out the dynamics of consent and abuse in some of these hideous fictional situations might be off-putting in itself. Not everyone will agree or assume that these books are worth reading. That might actually be a good thing. There may yet be some decency left in this world.

On what grounds would I actually defend Martin’s writing, given how uncomfortable it makes me at times? Primarily, I enjoy the density and complexity of the narrative. In the best sections of the book, the drama comes from a clash of plausible competing interests. Clues to various mysteries are planted thousands of pages before the reveals. (Think LOST, but less ad hoc.) In short, I find the story compelling in all the ways a big novel should be compelling. Which makes me think that if I want more of that sort of thing I should finally get around to War and Peace.

Gray areas.

In Salon:

Many react to the idea of someone having zero interest in sex as offensive. It goes against everything we understand about what makes the world go 'round, so it's an inherently confrontational concept. With this disbelief often come attempts to write asexuality off as a result of repression or sexual trauma (as of now there's no evidence of that). It becomes even more complicated for people to understand when they discover all the variation within the asexual community.

Is this discussion of "asexuality" where the notion of "sexual identity" really starts losing its usefulness?

What I'm seeing is that some people are finding that they don't fit any of the sexual identities on offer -- homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, and so on. They're are positing yet another sort of identity. And I'm sure this solution is helpful on some level, but I take the existence of the problem as an indication that there's something wrong with how we're using these ideas in the first place. So my reaction to this article is think that the framework of sexual identity is just not the best way to approach questions about "what intimacy is, what human connection is, and how you build that."

On the other hand, maybe modern people just don't have another framework available.

[Via The Dish]

The Influence of American Sea Power.

Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry argues against Ron Paul's foreign policy at The American Scene and Business Insider. In short (from BI):

From bases in Europe, the Middle East and Asia, the US military protects the world's shipping lanes, making sure the clockwork of the global economy runs smoothly and goods and oil can be shipped to and back. This is the part of the global American military footprint that actually matters, not the wars. These wars may be very bad ideas, but Ron Paul and his ilk don't just want to end those wars. They want to end America's global military hegemony.

So here are some questions for Gobry: is the structure of the United States military really suited to this end? What's the relationship between shipping-lane protection and the Global War on Terror? And, most importantly, why don't Paul's opponents make this response in debates? (Forgive me if they do. I am not keeping track of the GOP primaries.)

This position isn't the usual one for the defenders of the status quo, because mere protection of global trade doesn't justify the US Military's current goal of "full spectrum dominance," that is, the ability to defeat any conceivable threat from any other power. If the United States only needs to be hegemonic enough to protect the global economy, there's still a lot of room to slash military spending.

And then there's this:

We're all for blasting illegal, unwinnable, endless foreign wars of choice. We're all for smashing the national security state that treats grandma like a terrorist if she wants to board a flight. We're all for howling at the insidious and wasteful military-industrial complex, and cutting the unsustainable Pentagon budget.

At the risk of being flippant, no we're not. What Gobry describes here is a minority position in US politics. I know of pundits who take this line: Ross Douthat comes to mind. But can anyone show me a politician who votes against wars of choice, the security state, and the military-industrial complex, but publicly articulates the importance of a pax Americana for world trade? I have a hunch that such a figure won't appear unless Ron Paul's brand of anti-imperialism gains enough momentum to frighten Washington.

Doctors of the Church.

I enjoyed this post on the Doctors of the Church, both for the content and for the creative use of text tools to convey information. It's hard not to mark a "dark age" between John Damascene and Peter Damian. Also interesting:

Some notable and influential theologians who very likely meet all the criteria but haven't yet received the designation: Gregory of Nyssa (whose absence is very noticeable), Epiphanius of Salamis, Jeanne de Chantal, Jean Eudes, Louis de Montfort, Bernardino of Siena, Veronica Giuliani, Birgitta of Sweden, Gertrude of Helfta, John Bosco, Lorenzo Giustiniani, Antonino of Florence, Thomas of Villanova, Ignatius of Loyola, Vincent de Paul.

Prescriptivism.

From David Bentley Hart at First Things, writing about English usage rules:

Everyone who cares about such matters engages in both prescription and description, often confusing the two. So does every dictionary. Everyone, moreover, knows words shift in meaning over time. The real question, at the end of the day, is whether any distinction can be recognized, or should be maintained, between creative and destructive mutations.

[...]

The analytic, lexically antinomian line is that, in themselves, words mean nothing; persons use them as instruments to mean this or that. But, conversely, persons can mean only what they have the words to say, and so the finer our distinctions and more precise our definitions, the more we are able to mean.

While this is about "usage" in the sense of language, there's also a lesson here for a certain breed of technology enthusiasts.

Two things from our newspapers of record.

1. John Wilson, editor of Books and Culture, has an editorial in the Wall Street Journal on faith and science:

   What is at stake in these disputes is not a choice between following biblical authority on the one hand or science on the other, as the matter is often misleadingly framed. Rather, we see rival theological commitments, rival understandings of how to read Genesis.

   I think this puts it nicely, though Wilson goes on to understate the consequences of adhering to reading Genesis as a literal description of the origins of the world. Young Earth Creationists have to explain how the scientific community gets things so wrong, and so it seems rather common to consider the scientific establishment as mendacious, incompetent, or ideologically biased to a terrifying degree. If the scientists are so bad at geology, how could they do any better on climatology? So while Young Earth Creationism is not essentially a "disdain for science," such disdain tends to follow.
2. In the New York Times, an essay on David Foster Wallace's prose style, and those on the internet who learned all the wrong lessons from it:

   I suppose it made sense, when blogging was new, that there was some confusion about voice. Was a blog more like writing or more like speech? Soon it became a contrived and shambling hybrid of the two. The “sort ofs” and “reallys” and “ums” and “you knows” that we use in conversation were codified as the central connectors in the blogger lexicon. We weren’t just mad, we were sort of enraged; no one was merely confused, but kind of totally mystified.
   
   [...]
   
   How we arrived at the notion that the postmodern era is the first ever to confront the tension between sincerity and irony despite millennia of evidence to the contrary is no mystery: every generation believes its insights are unprecedented, its struggles uniquely formidable, its solutions the balm for all that ails the world. Why so many of our critics are still, after all these years, making their arguments in this inherently self-undermining voice — still trying to ward off every possible rejoinder and pre-emptively rebut every possible criticism by mixing a weird rhetorical stew of equivocation, pessimism and Elysian prophecy — is another question entirely.

   That's a stew I like making more than eating. This is worth thinking about.

How influence works in Evangelical culture.

Ryan Lizza's New Yorker piece on Michele Bachmann set some bloggers to complaining about "strange inferences" and the occasional "stupid and dishonest" claim. My impression of the piece is that it's Lizza's well-intentioned but failed attempt to explain a subculture that baffles him.

The section on Francis Schaeffer is obviously the most egregious. For a Christian to express admiration for Schaeffer is not necessarily to endorse all of Schaeffer's ideas. Rather, it's to endorse his commitment to Christian engagement with culture, as contrasted with a fundamentalist shunning of the secular. That notion that a theologically conservative Christian could write about existentialism, hit movies, and art history was incredibly important for evangelicals in my father's generation. (I take a very negative view of the content of Schaeffer's contribution, and think his achievement consisted almost entirely in getting better thinkers to take up the issues he raised.)

Anyways, I'd say that neither the Lizza article nor Michelle Goldberg's related Daily Beast essay on "Dominionism" rings true when it comes to patterns of influence in the religious right, though my only reason for thinking so is personal experience with fairly conservative Christian schools, and with moderately conservative churches.

Though David Sessions is getting closer here, it's not just about the numbers:

Here’s the reality: Dominionism as a term or a school of thought is virtually unknown even to conservative evangelicals of the type who adore Bachmann and Palin. [...] It is difficult to overstate how fringe it is in its purest forms, how tiny the number of people who are aware of and embrace its arguments.

What's also missing in these articles is a solid analysis of the institutions of evangelical culture. Do these ideas have traction in the so-called flagship universities, like Wheaton? What about seminaries? Did Christianity Today take a position? How about the radio networks? Are the ideas popular in the Christian entertainment industry?

As an example of how that last question might be answered, Schaeffer's influence led Chuck Colson to push the notion of the "Christian Worldview," defined by Colson's organization as "a framework for understanding and interacting with the physical world, other humans, and the Divine." The Christian rock band Audio Adrenaline, in turn, included a song called "My Worldview" on their 1993 album Don't Censor Me. Listen at your own risk.

Does anyone sing about Dominionism?

Neither static nor stagnant.

I finished R.W. Southern's The Making of the Middle Ages, from which I've already posted a few excerpts on this blog. The book is deliberately restricted to Latin Christendom between 972 and 1204, which means it's about the rise of only one part of medieval civilization. (I'll have to read books on Germany and the Slavic countries some other time.)

But there's still plenty of good material on some of the most interesting events and phenomena of European history. For example, there's Prester John, legendary Christian king of a distant empire, about whom legends began circulating in the twelfth century. There's a recounting of the sad, strange Fourth Crusade, where crusaders trying to get to Jerusalem ended up conquering Constantinople, which was at the time the greatest city in Christendom.

The main part book is structured on a set of organizational transformations: the thickening of hierarchies in both secular and religious organizations, and the new intellectual rigor that helped make these shifts possible. There are also some compelling discussions on medieval ideals, the most stirring of which were the descriptions of the feudal conception of liberty (worth studying as a contrast to our modern ideas) and of the admiration of Rome as a spiritual capitol (which faded as the papacy assumed a more active political role).

This book would not make a good first dip into medieval history: it assumes a basic knowledge of major events (the council of Clermont, the Battle of Hastings) and personalities (Gregory VII, Bernard of Clairvaux) of the period. There are many fascinating details about the historian's work: for example, one source for comparing styles of monastic poetry is a scroll that a monk carried across Europe to collect eulogies on. I really don't know how it's regarded in the field these days, and would be curious to find out. The book is well-sourced and doesn't seem to be pushing any conspicuously modern ideologies. The Making of the Middle Ages portrays early medieval society as dynamic and imaginative: an age with its share of troubles, to be sure, but neither a static time awaiting technology nor a stagnant era awaiting enlightenment.

No, seriously, watch the throne.

OK, I think this is funny:

'Watch the Throne' (Roc-a-Fella/Roc Nation/Def Jam) is one of the first major hip-hop releases in years to avoid significant prerelease leaks--something that seemed virtually unavoidable in the digital age. [...] Jay-Z and West implemented an Internet-free recording space. While travel schedules had reduced much of the creation of 'My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy' to a series of emailed session tracks, Watch the Throne was recorded in-person in makeshift setups. Tracks were saved directly to password-protected external hard drives that remained locked in Goldstein's Pelican briefcase. At no point during the album's creation did works-in-progress reside on laptop hard drives. [...] Outside producers for the project, such as Q-Tip, the RZA, the Neptunes, Swizz Beatz, Hit-Boy and No I.D., were asked to appear in person to preview and submit potential beats. Email wasn't an option to send mixes; when West wanted to hear a track, he would demand that producers travel to his location to work on a track."

On the other hand, it worked. It was quite nice to hear a big new album all at once and recognize only the single.

Those melancholy children.

For a while, I was reading "3eanuts", a website that prints only the first three panels of old Peanuts cartoons. "Charles Schulz's Peanuts comics," the site's text says, "often conceal the existential despair of their world with a closing joke at the characters' expense." This was not always the case.

In the very first Peanuts strip ever published, a boy and a girl sit on a step by the sidewalk. The boy says, "Well! Here comes ol' Charlie Brown." As Charlie Brown walks by (not yet wearing his famous jagged-stripe shirt), the boy says, "Good ol' Charlie Brown. ... yes, sir!" In the third panel, Charlie Brown has left the frame. "Good ol' Charlie Brown," the unnamed boy trails off. Then, with a look of fierce disgust: "How I hate him!" Already, young children hide their contempt behind a facade of collegiality.

In the second strip, a little girl reflects on the niceness of little girls for the first two panels, punches a baffled Charlie Brown in the face in the third, and skips along again in the fourth panel, untroubled by the gap between her actions and her assertions. The third strip depicts the same little girl dumping water on a flower-carrying Snoopy, ruining his flower and leaving him wetly sad. Even the simple act of watering flowers can become a vehicle for cruelty.

In early Peanuts, despair is the closing joke.

Maturity as romance.

In a Beliefnet article entitled "How to Fall in Love with Yourself," a woman named Christine Arylo is interviewed her approach to a fulfilling life.

Eventually, she learned to listen to her intuition and it led her to a revelation.

"I was with a good friend of mine -- a girl who had just gotten divorced and was miserable," she says. "She was trying to find herself and couldn’t. We were dancing in the living room to Frank Sinatra. All of a sudden, it just hit me. I looked at her and I said, 'You need to fall in love with yourself.' It was like the universe said this to me. I’m the one that’s going to teach women how to love themselves."

[...]

Through her spiritual journey that continues to unfold, Christine Arylo’s message remains the same and it springs from the vows she made to herself: "You really have to love yourself first. Honor yourself first. Trust yourself first. You have to develop a partnership with yourself first."

It seems that there are a good many people who can only conceive of a healthy interior life in the terminology of romantic relationships. Which is fine if it helps people become better people, and apparently it does, but talking about a "relationship with yourself" makes it hard to question the concept of the romantic relationship, which is probably the source of the problem in the first place.

On the other hand, there's Kierkegaard: "[t]he self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self."

Abbottabad.

I was pleased to see that the August 8th New Yorker had a long feature on the Bin Laden raid. I wasn't disappointed on first read. It was detailed and riveting, and I recommended it to friends.

Weird to find out that the author didn't speak to any of the SEALs who went on the raid. I thought that was the whole hook of the piece, especially since there's a sentence about the account being based on the SEALs' recollection of the raid. Turns out he means an account based on accounts of the recollections.

I've got a lot of goodwill for the New Yorker, but I wish this had been more straightforward.

A judgment I'll never be able to make for myself.

Ambitious writing in the eleventh century is nearly always obscure, full of heavy pedantries and strange words--the relics of the learning of a former age. Clarity was a quality achieved by the best writers of the eleventh century, but it was achieved with difficulty: we can appreciate the difficulties when we try to follow the arguments of so accomplished a writer as Berengar of Tours. He lacked the vocabulary for subtle argument and the writers who aimed at stirring the emotions lacked the art for doing so. Of course, limitations of language can themselves be a source of strength, and St. Anselm (alone among the writers of his century) was the master of a language equally capable of conveying profound and subtle argument as of expressing the outpouring of an intimate devotion. But his language could never form a model for others: it was a mirror of his own mind and sensibility, a finely polished language of carefully cultivated art. It was not a popular language.

-R.W. Southern, The Making of the Middle Ages. New York: Hutchinson's University Library, 1953. (215)

I look at my plans, and there's no place in them for learning to read eleventh-century Latin and making judgments about style. Of course, the road may swerve, and so forth.

I'll note that Southern's not the only one who likes Anselm's style.

Good advice.

Strictly speaking, the first sentence is not true, but this is still really good advice:

There is no such thing as being too into something. There is such a thing as being into it in a way that feels selfish and uninclusive. Always be focused as much on your date as on your interest. Always make an effort to give him/her a chance to participate in the conversation. Always allow him/her to ask questions — and ask questions of your own. As Smolinski says, “Be an enthusiast, not an obsessive.” Enthusiasts share their excitement. Obsessives hoard it.

Eagleton at Duke.

David Sessions scored an interview with Terry Eagleton and (for some unexplained and probably inexplicable reason) sat on it for months. But it's up at Patrol Magazine now. I'd just like to point out the possibility that Eagleton might have missed a joke at my alma mater's expense:

I once arrived at Duke to teach Marxism and they said, “If you teach Marxism here they will flock to your classes, you won’t even be able to get in the door. If you teach it five miles down the road, they’ll shoot you through the head.”

I don't think this is really a UNC joke, but that "five miles" gets you most of the way between campuses.