What I Read, and How I Did It

38 books total, which is quite a bit less than the 68 I read last year. But I have a feeling that I actually read more this year, just that more of my reading was consumed with short stories, excerpts, chapters, articles, plays (8 Shakespeare plays, for instance). I kept a partial log of all those, but it got exhausting after a while. The other part is that 19th century novels made up the largest bulk of what I read.

There are books here by people from England, Scotland, Japan, USA, Turkey, France, Germany and Australia. Only 3 were written by women. 21 were written in the 19th century, 11 in the 20th, 6 in the 21st.

The List
Sons and Lovers - D.H. Lawrence
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
In Xanadu - William Dalrymple
Cosmopolis - Don DeLillo
Palm -of-the-Hand Stories - Yasunari Kawabata
Hard Times - Charles Dickens
The Sailor Who Fell from Grace with the Sea - Yukio Mishima
Lying Awake - Mark Salzman
The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami
Kokoro - Natsume Soseki
The Language of God - Francis Collins
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Mountains Beyond Mountains - Tracy Kidder
South of the Border, West of the Sun - Haruki Murakami
The End of the Affair - Graham Greene
Daniel Deronda - George Eliot
The Aspern Papers - Henry James
The Turn of the Screw - Henry James
Other Colors - Orhan Pamuk
Our Mutual Friend - Charles Dickens
Middlemarch - George Eliot
Washington Square - Henry James
Great Expectations - Charles Dickens
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
The Mystery of Edwin Drood - Charles Dickens
Goldfinger - Ian Fleming
The Portrait of a Lady - Henry James
The Moonstone - Wilkie Collins
The Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Autobiographies - Charles Darwin
The Mayor of Casterbridge - Thomas Hardy
Wives and Daughters - Elizabeth Gaskell
Archive Fever - Jacques Derrida
Little Dorrit - Charles Dickens
On the Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Europeans - Henry James
A Fraction of the Whole - Steve Toltz

Top Ten (in no particular order)
Bleak House - Charles Dickens
Moby Dick - Herman Melville
On the Genealogy of Morals - Friedrich Nietzsche
The Way We Live Now - Anthony Trollope
Middlemarch - George Eliot
The Elephant Vanishes - Haruki Murakami
The Voyage of the Beagle - Charles Darwin
Rashomon and Seventeen Other Stories - Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Other Colors - Orhan Pamuk
The Aspern Papers - Henry James

There were very few books that were easy to eliminate off-hand this year. The quality of what I read was quite high over the year! I might do another post on book covers, since that's something that's become more interesting to me over the last year. If they were in particular order, Moby Dick would be at the top as the best book I read over the whole year. In part its because its such a strange book, but especially when I was reading it in the middle of a dozen other novels in the 19th century, none of which are very similar to it at all, at least in form.

After last year's list, I made a list of what I wanted to read in the next year. Out of the ten books/authors listed I only ended up reading Dickens (much, much more Dickens than I expected) and Cosmopolis by Don DeLillo. What about this year? First, I anticipate finishing Origin of Species, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Ecce Homo, and Discipline and Punish. But here are some other titles I have sitting on my shelves that I'd like to read this year :

2666 by Roberto Bolano.
The Yiddish Policemen's Union by Michael Chabon.
Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill.
Elizabeth Costello by JM Coetzee.
Underground by Haruki Murakami
The Octopus - Frank Norris
The Unconsoled - Kazuo Ishiguro.
All the Names - Jose Saramago.
Dona Flor and her Two Husbands - Jorge Amado.

Funny that the last three were on the list last year, too!

christianity, heroism, ethics

The highest priority in Christian ethics is to be a hero, to do something extraordinary and extraordinarily difficult. This begins with the altar call, which is a conversion from cowardice to heroism, weakness to strength.

The non-Christian is weak, constantly giving in to sin, continually unable to resist the desires of the self. The Christian life begins with that act of aggressive heroism, standing in the middle of a crowd of strangers, always as part of a minority of other heroic figures, and moving to the front of the stage where you are entered into the army.

Likewise, Christian ethics are always talked about with the taint of heroism: chastity and purity as total sexual abstinence, for instance. But hypothetical ethical situations are always made as extreme (heroic) as possible: if you went home one day and found a man raping your wife, would you kill him?! Will you sell everything you have and give it to the poor?! Would you go to hell for someone else? If God came to you today and asked you to be a missionary to cannibals in Africa, would you go? These questions are so absurd that even I couldn't come up with them on my own!

Christian ethics is a game to invent new sins which are even more precise and difficult to follow than the old ones. Is it a sin to burn music? Is anal sex a sin? Is it a sin to not give someone money when they ask? These questions are as useful--read, useless--as when someone asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" Of course, Jesus didnt answer the question, because there was no way to answer the question without assenting to the assumptions behind it, which were flawed to begin with. The question of whether something is a sin or not is the same, it is a movement towards heroism, towards making the self as strong as possible.

The same is true of analytic philosophy, which always analyzes takes a situation to the greatest extreme. I suppose this is to have the most distance, to see a situation with the greatest clarity possible. But how many of us are going to go home one day and find our wives or husbands or children being raped, and have the power to commit or not commit murder? Very few. The trouble is also in creating relationships between that extreme situation and someone punching me in a bar when I mouth off, or say something by accident. Treating them as the same, when they're not. Part of the problem with heroic ethics is, obviously, that they cannot incorporate the mundane lives that all of us live, we will always be disappointed that our friends are not being raped, because how are we to exercise our heroic ethics if a heroic situation does not present itself?

Incidentally, this is not just legalism. Legalism is only possible when its supported by the heroic ideal which tells people that they should be heroes. And I think that heroism doesnt need legalism, even if they fit together very well.

God is actually never depended on. Christian ethical heroism depends upon the strength of the self not of God. The assumption is that when the Christian "falls into sin," it's because they are not depending on God, not "finding strength in God." I suspect that to some degree the reverse is true, that erasing "sin" from a person's life is not God's highest priority, that giving people heroic situations to practice their ethics in is not God's highest priority, that God is quite willing for people to sin, having higher and better aspirations for their lives. I suspect that God does not want everyone, including all who follow him, to be Christians.

In any case, the solution for me is not to interpret the mundane as heroic but to do away with the heroic ideal altogether. As long as your priority is to be free from sin, there is no chance that you are "depending on God." But of course, I feel embarrassed to even use that sort of language, since I don't think that it means very much.

Similarly, I dont think that hypothetical ethical situations are good for anything, except for heroic boasting, or heroic self-deprecation.

representation and recollection

I've been thinking some about images and representations, especially those used in the church. For some time I've been uncomfortable hearing how an image or action represents something else. Specific parts of an image represent certain ideas or ideals.

I'm uncomfortable with this because of the distinction made between objects which represent something, and objects that do not. This extends to the interpretation of sections of scripture, when the language is looked at for metaphors and representations and symbols. This is uncomfortable to me because of the assumption made that there is language which is not metaphorical, representative, symbolic. All language functions in those ways, and trying to make a distinction between what language is metaphorical and what isn't is a waste of time.

I'm also uncomfortable because of the jumps made between the image, action, text, and what those things represent. The idea is that they really do represent something which is being discovered and pointed out, rather than a connection that is being made in the mind of the interpreter. The jump is still a jump even if the explanation and interpretation are made by the creator of the object, text, action. Meaning and object are not fixed together!

But I really do like artwork in church, I like texts and stories, I like traditional practices which supposedly represent something. But what I dislike is the explication of these phenomena.

What I would like to see is a move towards seeing all of those things as reminders, as objects which aid recollection. Being splashed with water does not represent our baptism, it reminds us of baptism. Communion bread and wine does not represent the body and blood of Christ, it reminds us of them (or actually is so). Texts dont represent reality or history, they remind us of it.

But what history are we reminding ourselves of? This is where I'm stuck, because I'm also uncomfortable with the idea that history or reality is out there just waiting to be discovered and grasped and represented as a whole instead of as fractions, which it is. Still, that's one of the benefits of thinking of these things in terms of memory rather than representation: all of us are aware of how fragmented memory is, and we dont have to pretend that our objects or texts or practices are complete.

translation

Another to do over Christmas:

Find a copy of Haruki Murakami's first novel, in Thai, buy a good Thai dictionary. Then overtime read and translate it (disclaimer: obviously not for commercial purposes, since as far as I know that's not legal). I've been curious to read it for a long time, since Murakami wont let it be translated into English, I'm also curious to see how my translation of the translation compares to English versions (which I know are out there...). The idea of translating it is a late addition, but I'm curious enough about translation to want to give it a whirl. It will probably be a religious experience.

Christmas Break

Things I'm going to do this break, in no particular order.

1. Read Thus Spake Zarathustra by Nietzsche and A Fraction of the Whole by Steven Toltz.
2. Make my top ten of the year list, as Luke just mentioned in a comment!
3. Watch the Sherlock Holmes movie once it comes out.
4. Gain weight by actually eating. This probably wont happen until I'm back in Thailand.
5. Revise a short story I've been working on
6. Eat fruit
7. Drive my motorbike around

over-valued

Coherence is overvalued and exists by ignoring a multitude of counter examples, excesses, and idiosyncracies. What I appreciate about Derrida is that he makes explicit what other writers try to hide, or are ignorant of. The desire for coherence is the desire to dominate something completely by knowing it completely, and requires violence to what lies outside of what is already explained. The mass accumulation of facts, treatises legitimating methodology, synthesis of information all disguise that there is never enough accumulation, that methodologies are always built on unjustified assumptions, and that there are a multitude of other ways information could have been synthesized. We are obsessed with truth because we are obsessed with our own selves and our own power!

Coherence ignores its own aphoristic energy by ignoring its gaps, by ignoring the jumps and assumptions between the points that it "connects," by creating a form of logic to be followed, when the form itself has no basis.

sermon illustrations

Last week I went to a certain coffee shop. I was there for a short time because I had to go to a library before it closed, but also because the coffee shop had a song on loop that played over 7 times in a row, and was still playing when I left. I went there again today, thinking that my experience must have been a fluke. The first hour that I was there, they once again played a song on repeat the entire time. I started to get a headache and become angry, could not concentrate on what I was reading. So I went downstairs to ask them to turn it off and found that the stereo was on the staircase, so I started pushing buttons and accidentally turned it off. Then the manager come to see what was going on, and I told him that I was getting a headache from it being on repeat. So he said he'd get a new CD, and I returned to my seat. But when he put a new CD on, he once again left the song on repeat, for the rest of the time I was there (maybe an hour). I only noticed when I went downstairs that the baristas can't hear the music on their floor, which is the only reason they must not have gone crazy by this time.

Last Friday I was walking to the bus station to go to Edinburgh, when I saw someone drop one of his gloves. I pointed it out to him, he said thank you, I went to the bus station. In Edinburgh at a museum, I lost one of my gloves, and found it at the reception because Brent had lost his hat and went there to look for it. Certainly, the two situations are linked to each other. Perhaps on his way to the bus, Brent saw someone drop a hat, and did not tell them? That is the Christian explanation, or at least a nice sermon illustration.

games

Some of my memories about games:

The night before my ankle got chopped in a hiking accident, my brother and Nathan (whose house we were staying at) played darts for quite sometime. I remember laying on the couch the whole time, but I don't remember if I was doing anything or not, or why I didn't play. I know I didn't want to be there (and had just decided the next morning to enjoy myself anyway when we had our accident).

When I was nine I played lots of ping-pong at Happy Home, the children's home my parents were working at. I remember getting better as time went on, but I can't imagine I was very good.

Before we moved to Thailand, my dad used to go to monthly pinochle parties, and it always seemed very intimidating. After years of good times playing with the Franciscuses, I got to go back to the states and play one of those nights. And I actually played very well, I think the old people were impressed. I felt like a hot shot that night.

Down at the beach, my friends always played Phase 10 in the mornings, and I never wanted to play because it took too long. But in the evenings I was happy to play speed scrabble with everyone.

A few times, my school had field trips where we bussed around Thailand for a week. We played lots of cards in the evening and on the trips. I was annoyed that people always wanted to play speed games rather than good games like hearts.

Sophmore year I would spend most of my Friday evenings playing video games by myself. My friends always asked me to watch movies, but I never wanted to watch movies. It was the time of the week that I could finally be by myself. It was good to have that time to myself, but I wish that I'd done more with them.

There have been many many nights that I was out late with my friends Zac and Caleb playing video games at LAN shops. Typically those were good nights. Strangely, though, the night I remember the most distinctly is the last time that I went out with my brother, Luke Wilcox, and Zac Franciscus (I think?) before Luke left for Australia. I remember it being very cold that night on our motorcycles going home.

(non)existence

I recently went to a lecture on Darwin by Pietro Corsi. After the lecture, someone asked Corsi a question about Dawkins, and he responded, "Christians love Dawkins: 'God doesn't exist!' he says. 'Yes he does!' they say. They love him!"

This reminds me of the controversies surrounding the Da Vinci Code a few years back, and the industry that surrounded it. Dan Brown's book provided a huge (if temporary) industry for Christian writers and speakers, and that gap is perhaps being filled now by responses to Dawkins et al.

I have been thinking some about the question, Does God exist? And I'm becoming more and more convinced (by myself) that it's not a meaningful question, or that there isn't much difference between answering 'Yes God exists' or 'No God does not exist.' Both answers provide the illusion that something meaningful has been established, but both answers work into the same logic, and provide answers based on the same criteria (generally evidence). The real winner in any debate over the existence of God isnt which ever argument seems to win (existence; no existence). The real winner is the logic and form of knowing that undergirds their arguments, that is reified even by responding to each others arguments as meaningful arguments. I'm not interested in these arguments over the existence of God precisely because I'm not interested in the logic behind them, or with the binary of existence and nonexistence, or convinced that there is a great deal of difference depending on how you answer that question. Along with this question we could ask if Genesis or the gospels are "historically accurate," or whether miracles really happened, or if Solomon wrote Ecclesiastes, or if a band sings Christian music, or whether Muslims go to hell, and in all of these cases those are the wrong questions to ask, and summarily any answer (usually an either/or) is the wrong answer. Answering the question without altering the question is assent to the logic behind it.

Another question to be added to this list is the question of right and wrong, and whether specific actions are/were right or wrong. Questions of right and wrong are always anachronistic, in the sense that the situation doesn't matter (I'm not sure if situational ethics are actually very situational). I want my understanding of the past and present to be much more sophisticated than a belief that history can be written as a history of right and wrong (often the Christian view of history). I'm much more interested in talking about utility: cause, effect, function, forces upon a system, including the forces working upon your system that make it impossible for you to agree with me, or me with you.

Most arguments are empty arguments in the sense that people are secretly agreeing with each other by validating the system of knowledge in use by the involved parties. In the cases where systems dont agree, the other party is written off as absurd or crazy. To this degree, when someone's belief changes because of an argument, they're not convinced by the other person, they're convinced by themselves.

interest

My question today is who benefits the most from the belief that the bible is the infallible word of God?

My answer is that the publishing companies benefit the most from the perpetuation of this belief (myth), and have perhaps even more interest in this than your average believer. Why? Because the myth encourages people not just to buy one copy, indiscriminately, but to buy multiple copies to compare to one another (to really discover what is really there). It also creates the paranoia that one doesn't have the "right" translation, that maybe this translation was good when I was fifteen, but now that I'm 22 I need to buy a more "literal" translation, or what I really need is something paraphrased, annotated, expanded. Without the belief that there is a real truth in the text that needs to be translated properly, the industry would never be able to support as many different translations in English as it does. What other text supports this many translations?

Part of the difference is that the bible has been translated into English more than any other work in a foreign language. But while I could name 15 different translations of the bible, I could name a maximum of two translations for any other work (Constance Garnett and Richard Pevear translating Crime and Punishment, for instance). The interesting thing here is that no one knows who translated the translations of the bible. Certainly, they're listed in the credits, but if anyone in my church could name one bible translator except Eugene Peterson, I would be shocked. The benefit of this (to publishers) is that it provides the illusion that something objective is being captured. The translator is hidden because we are supposed to forget that it is a translated work (and because there are usually a lot of translators).

Of course, money is just one type of benefit, and I'm sure there are many people who maintain their own power by perpetuating the myth. But I'm coming to see text as commodity, and more observant to the ways in which the object of the text is advertised and sold. It's unavoidable that text is designed to sell. Once again, lets think of bible versions, of which there is a huge plethora to supply any translation in any shape and format. Each is designed to interest a certain buyer, whether that buyer wants features or the illusion of the text on its own without features or commentary (the stark, leather covered "The Holy Bible" bible is just as designed to appeal, as it simultaneously claims to be avoiding all forms of appeal).

In what house are there so many copies of the same book? Everyone needs a personal copy of the bible.

This is significant to me in some ways because the rise of the printing press coincided with modernity and its conceptions of truth as objective, factual, literal.

tricks

Recent idea of mine: if I ever publish a book, I will also write and try to publish a review of my own book that totally slams it and points out all its weaknesses and urges people not to buy it. As one friend pointed out to me, this means that my critics would have nothing to say!

As far as my biography, I am worried about an absence: my correspondence. I am bad about keeping a clean inbox, but there's still so much I delete, and that others delete. How will my correspondence be preserved? Is it even significant enough for my biography? Is it well written? I suppose I can't win at everything.

I'm interested in the ways in which criticism and interpretation act as narrative. That is, there have been certain cases lately where I have read criticism on a book, then read the book, and been shocked by how little of the book's narrative was contained in the criticism. I've read the book and found a drastically different narrative than what I believed the narrative would be. This happens when I write my own essays, of course, because there's too much too account for. But it's interesting to me that criticism and interpretation is really a creative process that ends in a new narrative, more than it is an explication of "what is there." Of course, this is unaccpetable to anyone trying (for example) to discover truth "what it REALLY says" by interpreting the bible, since any interpretation alters the narrative itself, so they're no longer interpreting the bible but telling the story they want to tell (or feel obliged to tell).

I'm also interested in precision as an excess of information, and editing as a necessary economy of information. At times I feel obliged to explain myself or my thoughts as precisely as possible. Lately, I've been discarding this for the sake of communication, and as paring away excess information, where precision would be too confusing or counter to my purposes in communication. Partly this is in writing, but partly in just talking to people, telling people about my day, etc. Sometimes this means I alter the details of a story: it is confusing and disengaging to say I heard something from a friend who heard it from a friend, rather than saying that I witnessed it myself, or heard it from a friend. When it's actually important, I'll maintain the accuracy of where I received information/narrative, but usually it's not important. But I operate on the assumption that people are always on the point of not listening, or not reading, and feel the need to explain things in a way that is either entertaining or brief.

I also, I assume that no matter how precise I am, people still won't understand, so I might as well exaggerate and/or edit. I don't mean that to be dramatic about myself, but about anyone, everyone.

I've also noticed recently how little I talk about theology on here, whereas that used to be 90% of what I talked about. In part, that's just because I'm not thinking about it much, and in a lot of ways I don't know what use God or Jesus have in my life.

But in other ways I think it's because I don't know yet how to do theology, and that most of what passes for theology isn't theology, it's biblical exegesis (in Leviticus we see this...therefore God is _____ ). I think theology is supposed to be much more creative than that, and perhaps what we should learn from the bible is half what the writers say and half to do what they do, which is invent and create and discover, and to stop acting as if the bible is "truth" or that our own inventions are supposed to be truth and represent truth.

Part of what I'm also feeling is a reluctance to be an exhibitionist about God and "my relationship with him." Why is that something that anyone needs to know about? And how respectful is it to broadcast my thoughts, feelings, stories, opinions of God out to the world? And how arrogant is it to try to figure God out, like a math problem, or a trick?

interview

Here's an interview that I conducted with my brother, Zac Franciscus, and Jaci Wilcox right before they graduated, 7 years ago. I'm not sure how funny it will be to people who didn't grow up with them. Just think of it as fuel for my biographers.

Also, considering I just read Moby Dick and loved it, I thought their comments about the book were funny.

Alex: What's the stupidest thing you've ever said to a teacher?
Zach: Uh
Jaci: Oh boy..Hah, Alex
Zac: Alex is a geek.
Zach: I've never said 'Alex is a geek' to my teacher
Zac: I never said that to my teachers
Jaci: Neither did I
Alex: I'm cutting out the insults
Zach: I don't know, I don't think I've ever said anything mean to my teacher. I think I'm just a bright, shining… [Interrupted by Jaci]
Jaci: I'm a smart person, I don't say anything stupid to my teachers.
Zac: You mean teachers here, or ever?
Alex: Ever.
Zac: Um, I was in 4th grade and my teacher threatened to give me a report on rivers and so I smart-mouthed her and basically just told her I really didn't care. So she let the class vote on how many words it was supposed to be and I ended up writing a 1,000 word paper that night.
Alex: What class do you wish the school could have had?
Jaci: Uhhhhh
Zach: Home Ec.
Zac: [Laughs]
Jaci: Actually I really do wish they did had that one…
Zach: Oh yeah, me too.
Jaci: [Giggles.] [Unprintable]
Zac: He hasn't answered seriously and I'm still thinking. I'm going to hit you. Um.
Alex: Hey, Zac, I hear rumors that on the break you're gonna be teaching Home Ec. classes, is that true?
Zac: No
Alex: I can cut anything out I want.
Zac: Umm
Jaci: Heehee, and add anything that you want.
Zac: I…I wanted…I know I wanted something a little bit ago, just trying to remember what it was.
Jaci: I wish I could have done the woodshop class. I'm pathetic when it comes to practical things like that.
Zach: I would just like anything that would broaden my horizons.
Zac: I think I should hit you. Caleb, do your work.
Zach: Can we have the next question, please?
Alex: Fine.
Zac: Yeah, I abstain.[Giggles]
Alex: What was the best year here at the school?
Jaci: I think this one.
Zach: This coming year.
Zac: Yeah, so far for me, I'll agree with Jaci. Leave Zach out on his lonesome to be an idiot.
Zach: I dunno, having Luke around was good.
Alex: How about the worst year?
Jaci: Uh..Uh..I think the second year I was here.
Alex: Why?
Jaci: 'Cause I hated school.
Zach: I've never had a worst year because I've always loved school and all my teachers.
Zac: I need a knife.
Alex: How have you contributed to the school?
Zach: Being here.
Zac: I brought about the journalism department.
Jaci: I light up the room.
Zac: Only when she wears Christmas lights around her though, that's really funny, that's only when she's drunk. Wait, we're gonna edit this.
Alex: What do you guys think of the uniforms, are you planning to burn them when school's out?
Zac: If my mother wasn't giving them to the rest of my family, I, I would.
Jaci: I like our uniforms, I think they're way better than what some people have. But I would rather not wear them
Zac: I don't think we should talk to Jaci anymore.
Zach: I think uniforms are a very wise decision as they are culturally sensitive. It's good for the community to see us wearing them.
Alex: Alright, here's a serious one. What are you guys planning to go into, your plans for after school?
Zac: A building.
Jaci: I'm gonna do a [Discipleship Training School] and then apply for medical school.
Zac: I'm doing a [Discipleship Training School] then hanging out in Pennsylvania for two months then going into Journalism at Pitt.
Zach: I'm still kind of confused about this whole part.
Alex: What was the worst book you ever read here?
Zach: Moby Dick without a question.
Jaci: Moby Dick.
Zac: If I would have read it, I would most likely agree with them. Um.
Zach: You chose to read it over the Grapes of Wrath.
Zac: I haven't started it yet.
Jaci: Choose the Grapes of Wrath, do not read Moby Dick.
Zach: I agree, by all means.
Zac: [Chuckles] I want to experience the same pains as you so I can relate to you.
Jaci: There is two remotely funny parts in the whole entire book and they wouldn't be funny if you hadn't been reading Moby Dick.
Alex: [To Zac] Worst book, worst book.
Zac: What?
Alex: Worst book.
Zac: We're having a conversation, go away.
Alex: Worst book.
Zac: Um. I really didn't like Brave New World.
Jaci: That was interesting.
Zac: I thought it was pointless and depressing.
Zach: I loved it.
Alex: What kind of animal do you think the school mascot should be?
Jaci: A weasel. Actually, I don't think I've ever seen a weasel.
Zac: Mint.
Zach: You. You animal, you.
Zac: [Throaty growl]
Alex: What's the biggest stunt you ever pulled here at school?
Zac: I switched all the locker doors one day. Remember that at our old school it would happen a lot.
Zach: I didn't wear my uniform once.
Alex: Rebel.
Zac: You rebel, you.
Jaci: Uhhh..
Zac: Lock you up now.
Alex: Jaci's another one of those rebels.
Jaci: Yeah, I'm a loser. I didn't do anything.
Zach: However I was a uh, I was uh, at least I knew about it, I could have prevented Kevin from coming in and crashing the middle school party.
Kevin: Can I object?
Zach: No.
Zac: Be quiet, Canadian.

the accident

When I was 16 or 17, I played ultimate frisbee every saturday afternoon at a field several miles from my house. I would drive there on my motorbike and on the way home would often stop at the local market to buy dinner. One night I was going home, it must have been later in the year because it was getting dark early, and I bought fried chicken and sticky rice. Back on the highway, I stopped at a roundabout to turn around to go home. As I was waiting for an opening in the traffic I heard a crashing sound and looked behind me to see people and a motorbike flying through the air, and then skidding along the road at high speed.

I immediately pulled off the road and went over to the first woman, who was mostly delirious and scratched up, but probably not very hurt. I carried her to a roadside restaurant where some people cleaned her off with rags. She'd bled on my bag, and I think I had some on my hand, and thought about AIDS. In hindsight, it may not have been smart for someone like me (totally without medical training) to move her, but I don't think it did any real harm. I dont remember if there was a little girl, too, but I think there may have been. I left the woman with some of the Thais and went over to the second woman. By this time, there were plenty of people crowding around on the road and it was starting to rain. The second woman was bleeding from her head (none of them were wearing helmets), and there was a puddle as thick as ketchup around her head.

I must have had a cloth, because I remember I was going to hold it to her head to staunch the blood flow, but the Thais nearby stopped me, and I couldn't understand how we could all stand there and watch her bleed out of her head, and no one would touch her or help. I still don't know why, if it was fear of disease, or of touching a dying person, or of liability, or some medical reason, but I still feel ashamed that I didnt do more to help. Eventually an ambulance came and took them away, and I went home.

A week or two later I took some friends by and showed them where it had happened, and there was still a blood stain on the road where the woman's head had been. I haven't told this story to many people, not when it happened or since. I'm not sure why. I don't think of it very often, but I was thinking about it today for some reason.

Another night, after a school dance, I was driving to a friend's house when up ahead I saw several motorbikes and a group of men on the roadside. When i drove past, I saw them dragging someone into the ditch by the side of the road. I stopped a little ways up the road, and they looked at me, but I didn't know what to do, and I was scared for myself, so I kept driving. On the way home, I went back and shone my light into the overgrown ditch, and looked around, but didn't see any bodies or any one. I still don't know what happened, whether they were helping their drunk friend throw up, or if someone was seriously injured or killed, and I witnessed them hiding a body.

a short history of (my) money

1 (0-12): the earliest memory I have of money is getting a 2 dollar allowance per week. My brother spent a lot of money on nachos, we both spent money on baseball cards. Mostly, I spent money on books, legos, and playmobile, or I just threw everything in a chest that I had. When I counted up my change, it was $30. Apparently for quite a bit of this time my family was pretty bad off financially. I never felt it or felt stressed about money.

2 (12-14): When we moved back to Thailand, my parents gave us (weekly) our age with a 10x multipler (12 years old meant 120 baht a week). Once again, I have no idea what I bought with my money. I went to LAN shops sometimes, bought some snacks, but I also saved a lot of my lunch/snack money. I always had money, never had to think about it.

3 (15-19): Saved even more money, but never felt like I couldnt spend. There just wasnt that much to buy. Kept buying books, fried chicken. Parents reimbursed me for gas. Took bus rides to other towns, went to movies, went to LAN shops till all hours of the night, gave money to strangers. I always had more money than all my friends, and never understood how they could be short when I felt like I wasn't careful at all but I always had money. Never bought clothes, if I did my parents paid me back.

4 (19-20): Moved to the states and got a job. Made $5-6000 in 2 months working at a JanSport warehouse. Became extremely conservative with money, especially because of college, when I barely had enough to make my spring quarter payment. Never went out to eat, rarely bought books except for school, never went out to eat, didnt go to the doctor at times I probably should have. Before this time, I never had to consider the cost of anything. Worked in the cafeteria. Over the summer, made $2500 working for a Lutheran parish that gave me free rent. Gave money to friends for things they cared about.

5 (20-21): No job, started going to coffee shops. My friends kept me in the dorms spring quarter by giving me $2000. Went out to a lot of coffee shops, sometimes out to meals.

6 (21-22): Started going to bars, eating out more, paying monthly rather than quarterly rent and food costs. Worked at the library over summer and school year, went out places a lot, bought books I wanted, went to Oxford (where my plane tickets were paid for me by strangers, $1000+ of tuition was given to me by strangers, received $7000 in scholarships I wasnt expecting and hadnt applied for). Still feel guilty every time I dont give money to those who ask for it and those in need: "Whatever you have done for the least of these..."

I generally live my life assuming that if something is good, the money will be provided. So far, that's turned out to be true, and I don't regret giving away any amount of money, no matter how ridiculous, to anyone, whatever they spent it on. I also think I've been damn lucky, or blessed, or whatever you want to call it.

travel writing

In which I start talking about travel writing and end up talking about how no one actually cares about what pictures are taken of.

I started reading Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle the other day, and was surprised by how little of Darwin there is in it. The Voyage is a memoir of five years of travel and research that he did aboard a ship (although he spent about 3 of those years on land), and in these memoirs he dives into biology, anthropology, history, and geology (and who-knows-what-else in what I haven't read yet). I'm interested in this on two fronts: first, how little there is of Darwin; second, how much this would fail if attempted today.

First: by reading the Voyage we would know very little about Darwin. He doesn't include anecdotes of his past or his own history, even though he is willing to talk about the lives of the people he meets. He subjects everything in his narrative to a level of observation that he never extends to himself. Darwin is in some ways the center of the text, everything is written by him and more or less about his experiences, but we learn about him not through anything he says about himself but by what he writes about everything else and the methods he employs to discover.

Here is where I swim a little into the deep end where I mostly have speculation without data.

Second: any travel writer today that attempted to make observations that are disciplinary in nature would not be taken seriously by academics or researchers. Biology, anthropology, geology, and history have solidified enough that there are acceptable methods and necessary bodies of knowledge to be able to enter into those discourses as someone who was something new and legitimate to say. So the plight of the travel writer is that someone else has studied much more in depth and systematically the things they are experiencing and observing, so that for a travel writer to make claims about social structures and customs doesnt have much weight. What's left then? The self and the experience that the self has. Without the ability to talk about what is outside, all that's left is the inside.

I'm also interested in this in correlation with photography and the development of the camera as a popular, affordable product. Most people (that I know) aren't good at writing about their traveling, and dont do it very much. Instead, they take a lot of pictures. But what is the point and what is the subject of these pictures?

One option is to use them as social commentary, but I think that just falls into sentimentality and essentialization. For instance, I show you all a picture of a Latvian man sitting on the sidewalk from my recent travels to Latvia, captioned with this: "Unemployment and poverty are sky-rocketing in Latvia." This sort of social commentary with photography is, I think, pretty useless unless it's backed up by actual research or by interacting with the subject of the photo, because what do I really know about that man, who am I to make him stand in for Latvian poverty?

So what is the point of photography? The dismal side of it is that most pictures are not unique. By that, I mean that anyone could reproduce the same picture by standing where I stood and pointing their camera at the angle I pointed. There is some level of personality in what is selected and edited, but it could still be reproduced easily. Not to mention (like someone was saying to Brent, Nate, and I the other day)...I don't know what I'm seeing. I can take a picture of hundreds of interesting buildings and alleyways and streets, but I don't know anything about them, so my selection might be informed aesthetically, but ultimately uninformed socially, culturally, politically. And the aesthetic is what most people compliment about other peoples pictures, the texture, definition, color, angle, balancing, etc. But noone would care about these pictures of the same objects if they were low resolution, pixellated, unbalanced, blown out. That is why I think that few people actually care about the subject/object of their own photography or other peoples photography.

In this sense, I think photography mostly points to the self, the one who took the picture, rather than the subject/object of the photo. Photo albums have very little to do with what is in the photos (stonehenge? who cares? there's a million better pictures out there). The function of photo albums and photography is to point to the experiences of the self: I went to Stonehenge, or Riga, and took this photo and edited it, even if I know nothing about what I'm photographing, and if the object doesn't matter to those who are viewing it. After all? Wouldn't people have the same level of appreciation of my pictures of Latvia if I claimed they were pictures of Lithuania, Estonia, Czech republic? Very few people would know enough to say that I was wrong, and no one would care in their aesthetic appreciation of it.

Perhaps this is the reason that I take absurd photographs and don't really care to put up photo albums, or to take pictures very often. The only pictures that are really interesting to me are pictures of human interactions and processes, pictures that couldn't be reproduced because no one could go back to the time/even/location of where it happened. Too bad my camera can't replicate those moments very well. And, I suppose it's really a false distinction to make between pictures of processes and pictures of still life: there is no still life, everything is a part of ongoing social, chemical, biological, economical processes, and is always changing. The idea of still life has to be scrapped!

But it's not all glass-half-empty, who says any of this is a bad thing? I suppose my instinct is to be angry about it, but I don't know that I have good reason to be.

thoughts on scholarship

In the last few weeks I've had to read (or skim) quite a lot of academic books written on various historical topics. What brings most of them together thematically is how poorly they're written. Most are composed of long paragraphs that argue nothing but quote extensively (sometimes multiple blocked quotes in a single paragraph) and list list list different things. They read like extensively annotated bibliographies, and often that's the most interesting thing about them: the primary sources they point to and, occasionally, other secondary sources. I've been surprised by how unconscious many of the writers are about their own methodology, the theory undergirding what they're doing, and how sparse their arguments are. Some of that might be surprising because most academic work I've read has been literary criticism or theory, and the argument is much more central there, theory much more common. Anyway, I suppose the quick retort is that I haven't accomplished anything good, so I should be quiet. Maybe so.

I did read an article by F.R. Ankersmit the other day, where Ankersmit was talking about over-production in history, and how historians need to stop investigating the past and start thinking about it. That's very appealing to me, even though uncovering new sources or discovering obscure sources also has its appeal.

other countries

First things first: due to demand, I've created an email address for my biographers. If you'd like to contribute to their efforts, please send images, stories, and memories to apm.biography@gmail.com. Your work will not go unnoticed.

I was reading earlier in an article on the heritage industry by Robert Hewison: "Steam is now safely part of the industrial heritage, let nuclear power adopt the same camouflage." This is something that's been on my mind lately, not so much energy, but the ways in which commodifying history hides the present, so that going on tours of 18th century prisons hides the presence of incarceration in our present states; touring Victorian warships disguises the ways in which the British (or American) military is being deployed around the world; displays of dead states hide the real and present states. This isn't my feeling about history as a discipline, not at all, but I do feel that way about the different exhibits I've gone to here. And I am really blind to the present, I have no idea about prisons and the justices or injustices that are taking place in them.

And yet I wonder if that's a fair dichotomy to make, between commodified and uncommodified history. If there's a history article, journal, or book that I'm reading, it's because its publication was considered to be economically beneficial. This isn't to say that the writers are making a ton of money, because they are certainly not except in rare cases, or even that publishers are necessarily making a ton of money (I'm guessing, but not sure, that academic presses make less profits than popular presses). But, I would be shocked if anyone published what they thought wouldn't sell, and what would have no demand (hence, books go out of print). History, like everything else, has to be juicy and commodified, or it will never become public (unless the blogosphere erupts with historians). I'm not necessarily comfortable with thinking about everything in these terms, but I am becoming much more fascinated at the intersections between money, power, and knowledge, in all areas of knowledge (replace 'history' with 'science' in this last paragraph, and it would probably be able to stand up unrevised, for instance). Maybe for that reason, I'm becoming really interested in the publishing industry throughout its existence. even before the publishing industry, what has been considered to be worthy of replication and dissemination.

time is on my side

If I were to become a historian, and I almost certainly won't, I would be interested in writing history totally without references to dates or years, or calculated divisions of time. From there, I would refuse to call anyone by their 'name,' although this would lead to even bigger problems of reference and narrative. I'm more interested in time, and in writing history in this way as an experiment, to find how substantially different it is. Hundred Years War? Never happened.

Ironically, I have an acute sense of time and narrative in regards to my own life, and perhaps organize events primarily according to the year in which they happened. It always startles me when other people don't. I have no idea how other people organize memories.

In other news, I've been thinking lately of how disconnected I feel from 'the news' or world events at large, even more so than I did in the states. Over there, I may have only rarely read the papers, but I at least processed them at work, saw the headlines, heard other people talking about things. Here, I never even see newspapers, or anyone reading them. In London, they were more common, but it all looked like more tabloid news than news I'm interested in. It's not something I'm entirely comfortable with, but the chances are slim that I'll do anything to change it anytime soon.

Herman Melville wrote this in a letter to Hawthorne after finishing Moby Dick: "I have written a wicked book, and feel spotless as the lamb."

I never feel more at peace with God than when I am blaspheming him.

I have been meeting a lot of new people lately, and making a lot of jokes, which is pretty typical for me. It's always interesting to see which people get when and why I'm joking. Generally comments I make about the nature of reality, truth, identity, language, and knowledge are thrown out as jokes, to make people laugh, but are pretty serious. Ditto when I make jokes about being Jesus. This has been my habit for years and years.

Apparently I essentialize the self as a joke.

biography

I've been thinking about my biographers lately, and wondering what sort of materials they will have at their disposal to write my life. The internet makes archiving things so much easier, but it's also so much easier to erase things totally (at least I think it's easier to click a button than to burn or throw something away). Out of sympathy to my future biographers, I promise to never delete another email, or throw away any note or notebook or photo, never throw away anything that I've owned. Keep all receipts, bills, and bank statements.

This blog isn't about me, it's all about my biographers.

artifacts

Yesterday, I went to the British museum and looked at artifacts. There were many ancient things from all over the world but, to me, the most interesting artifact was the museum itself. Arguably, this is actually what's most important to everyone who goes there, who don't go to see Celtic spoons or Turkish tiles, they go to see the museum itself, and to be able to say that they went there. Viewing every gallery, the entire museum, is more important than any of the individual displays.

But, maybe that's just me.

Of the actual displays, I particularly enjoyed the pieces from persepolis. But, along with most of the other artifacts on display, I couldn't help but see on these objects the traces of imperialism and colonization.

there is no true culture

I dont believe there is such thing as authentic culture that can be discovered and described, authentic as in essential, or more true. For instance: food. It always puzzles me when people ask me whether Thai food tastes "authentic" or not, as if they judge whether or not hamburgers are "authentic" American. In that case, its either a good burger or bad burger, not a burger that is representative of American culture and cooking. That said, it seems like there are patterns of behavior among localized groups that can be generalized and described, but not as authentic or true.

Now that I'm in England, this is something I've been thinking about. Especially that culture might primarily be a commodity that is sold in souvenir shops, restaurants, sites, and books, or used as a strategy to sell specific commodities. I'm also interested in the ways that history is used to the same ends. London has many "historic" sites, but I wonder to what extent they exist as carefully produced and reproduced commodities. Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but its hard for me to get excited about things being authentic or historical when those terms are used primarily as selling strategies.

objectification

1. The other day, my brother's ipod was stolen out of his backpack when he forgot it for an hour in the bathroom of a bubble tea shop. I'm not sure what there is to say about this, I'm sure an easy route is to talk about depraved human nature, but I don't believe in that (or think it's very interesting, unless it's in a Cormac McCarthy novel, perhaps, which isnt the same animal). What's interesting to me is how the theft was anonymous, and yet I almost certainly saw the face of the person who stole it, and I wonder if they knew who they were taking it from, and if they saw my sister in law bring the bag out.

2. Quite often I hear advertisements or various media criticized because of the ways in which they objectify women, or turn women into objects. Maybe I just don't understand the ways in which the word is being used, but I don't think this is a very strong or illuminating criticism, because nothing can be represented without objectification, including the self. On here, I cannot represent myself or even use 'I' without turning myself into an object to be utilized and analyzed, where a part stands in for the whole.

But, that isn't to say the concerns about how women are represented are unfounded. However, I do think that some of the other criticisms are not backed very well. For instance, lets say that an advertisement is criticized because of the way that it not only turns women into objects but turns them into sex objects, or how representations sexualize women, or split the body from an inner self. But this seems like a projection of the response of the viewer to the image, rather than something that is inherent in the representation. Things are only sexual if they are perceived to be sexual. The criticism is a projection of the feelings of the viewer onto the object, rather than something in the object/image that is discovered and revealed.

In the same way, images are essentialized by the viewer/critic rather than the images being essentialist in themselves. For instance, I might criticize an image for how it turns women into sex objects. My claim is that the image itself projects a way that all women should be viewed, or a gaze that should be assumed when turned towards women. But once again this seems like a projection of the viewer rather than something inherent, when I say that an advertisement is making claims about all women, I am the one who is making that woman (or women) stand in for all women in all cultures. And that, to me, is sometimes scarier than the image itself, because then I am complicit, and even if I reject the totalizing/sexualized image, I replace it with a different essentialization, which I think is not very much improvement, if any.

That isn't to say that there are not real problems in advertising, or music, or videos or video games, only that many of the criticisms are not very self conscious about the methods of their criticism (and of course, I'm not talking about professional critics, just pop criticism that I hear from the people around me).

Anyway, I'm just using the issue of women and advertisement as an example, but it really bleeds into a lot of identity criticism.

decay

From Darwin's Plots by Gillian Beer:

"These examples show one of the difficulties on the path of evolutionary theory. It is a theory which does not privilege the present, which sees it as a moving instant in an endless process of change. Yet it has persistently been recast to make it seem that all the past has been yearning towards the present moment and is satisfied now" (11).

While I don't question her arguments in regards to biology, it seems that this does not necessarily transfer into other realms. The church constantly behaves as if the early church was the best model we have for what Christianity should be, and that the early Christians had better theology. Summarily, we try to discover what it was that they believed so that we can believe likewise, and sometimes it seems as if the arguments over what Paul did or did not mean when he said what he said wouldn't even be important unless we believe that what Paul and the early church believed is what we should follow. Similarly, that the early church best understood Jesus and what he meant in his teachings, and how we are to follow him. Are there any good or compelling reasons to believe that? Especially when the gospel accounts so consistently emphasize how much Jesus' followers didn't understand. That alone seems to be encouragement to press forward, rather than backwards, to discover new ways of meaning rather than trying to replicate old ways of meaning.

I think, also, that this quest for origins is accompanied by the idea that the world is consistently getting worse (more sinful), that there was a time (even in our own or our parents' own lives!) when things were better, more pure, and people really, genuinely followed god. We have to return, then, to the better time of before, we have to have revivals to bring back to life something that used to be alive.

I'm all about survival of the fittest, or maybe just of what Neruda writes, "Let us be weary of what kills, / and of what doesn't want to die." Extinction and death are important parts of life, and revival just means killing the new life. Let's be scared of anything that doesn't change.

In other news, in the library today I discovered an Un-American Activities in Washington State Report from 1948. It was transcript of various hearings of "Un-Americans," which translates to commies. I was proud of the English professor who refused to testify, and instead quoted Shakespeare and Plotinus at his interrogators.

some things used to be different

Recently, I read about various debates in Victorian biblical hermeneutics. One of the questions (that I think is still being debated today) is whether or not the bible can/should be interpreted as all other literature and writing is interpreted. 1) I hold pretty strongly that the bible being 'scripture' doesn't free it from the problems (and peculiarities) of all other writing. 2) No one reads literature as a set of moral lessons or instructions. Discourse and ideologies are examined, but narrative is not reduced (at least in literature studies) to attempts to discover how I should eat or who I should sleep with or live with (but of course writing has these political/ideological/moral conversations). But even if such lessons are prescribed, this doesn't transfer into prescription for how to live my life.

Attempting to turn writing into instructions, morals, ideologies to follow is disrespectful of text and author, and transforms the text into propaganda, or uses it for the purpose of propaganda. Similarly, trying to find an emergent discourse or lesson out of a text (what does the story of David and Bathsheba teach us? what does "The Bible" say about faith and deeds, etc) is really blinding. The bible is not the location of a single or coherent theology, it is many theologies. The bible is not the location of one coherent or systematic truth. What interests me more at the moment is thinking of the bible in terms of dialogue: each book with the others, with itself, with its readers, with other literature that has appropriated the bible and biblical narratives. And trying to find "lessons" in the bible is the source of the problem, it flattens the entire bible and the many voices found within.

Also. I've been thinking about history lately. I read an article on transatlantic literature in the nineteenth century last week, and one of the arguments being made was that the American writers in that time period were very concerned with the issue of history, precisely because their country was new and in this sense they had a chip on their shoulder compared to their european counterparts. What I see there, then, is deliberate rejection of ignorance of history in early US history. I don't know how widespread this was, but it is easy for me to see how this might have evolved into the current America (or American church). BUT, let's not talk about cause and effect, because that can be easily rejected, because I simply don't have evidence.

Instead, I'll say that I wish the church in America had more of a sense of and appreciation for history, especially hermeneutical history, for which interpretations that seem to be traditional and orthodox (the infallibility of the bible? "literal" creation story? etc.) are either new species of interpretation or were moot questions historically. Even more of an understanding of modernity, and conceptions of truth that were developed in modernity (perhaps post-modernity would not seem threatening to people if they understood that much of what is being rejected is not something that has been passed on from the beginning of the church or civilization or time, what is being rejected is a species of belief that is still relatively young, if powerful. But no one wants to study history: it's terrifying to learn that the present is not the same as the past, and is not always better.

And history is boring of course.

various

The imagery in most worship music is boring. This is because most Christians worship the Bible, and not God, and do not see a difference between representations of God and God himself. Consequently, imagery in worship music becomes rehashes of the Bible rather than anything creative or new (how many worship songs reference rising "on eagles wings"?). And, for the bible-worshippers, it might actually be considered a good thing, because to come up with something new is a violation of the idea that truth is timeless and so anything new is false. Fortunately, the writers of the bible did not see things this way, since they were constantly creating new imagery (while being intertextual and referencing previous imagery). Or, songs rehash other worship songs (how many songs have referenced Amazing Grace, for instance). Creativity is not spitting out verses from the bible. That's a not very articulate rant, but it's been on my mind for some time.

Here's a thought about facts: inasmuch as facts exist (and I'm not sure they do), facts in and of themselves are meaningless. Meaning is external to the fact (for instance, if we take it as fact that Jesus died, there is no meaning in that, we must examine the implications/interpretation of the fact to arrive at meaning). Meaning is always external rather than intrinsic and internal.

I was looking the other day at a portrait photo, and thinking about how creepy portrait photos are. I'm thinking of photos of a single person against a blank backdrop, and how the blank backdrop totally strips the event of any sort of narrative or history, and how much more I like photos that are set somewhere. Perhaps this is why I dislike flower and plant photography, too, because the close up could be of any flower anywhere, and there is nothing happening.

audience

I have been thinking lately about how important audience is me. Not necessarily thinking of a specific audience for x or y, but in imagining or finding the existence of an audience. Here's what I mean:

Lately I've realized how central an imaginary audience is to my sense of humor. Most of the jokes I make and strange things I do are not for the people I'm around, but for an outside observe, whether real or imagined. So most people just feel confused by my humor, whereas an audience would find what I do to be much funnier, and what I think I do that is funny is funny to me when I imagine an audience watching. This is something I'm discovering rather than something I've been aware of or conscious of.

Similarly, with writing. I've heard creative writers given the advice to write as if no one would read what they wrote, write for themselves. I function in totally the opposite direction. My work only gains quality if I assume or imagine that at some point, some one will read what I'm writing. My writing takes on clarity, focus, and creativity, whereas without an audience it would be sloppy and self-indulgent.

Similarly, with music and performance. I can never bring myself during practice to perform as well as I do during the real thing. For instance, in my Shakespeare class last week I had a performance in front of the class, and did better during the actual performance than during any of the practices. With music, I sing better and play more creatively in front of an audience than during practice.

And I think this is why I don't enjoy "theatre" more, even though on an every day basis I'm constantly acting, throwing up masks and tricking people. With theatre, the artifice is too apparent. If I'm going to be acting, it has to be for real.

tradition

Many people, when they're stressed or unsure, adhere to tradition. I've noticed in the last year that I am the opposite, that when I really need to find a way to relax myself, I break with tradition and habit of what I've done before. No better or worse, just the way it is.

Over the last year, though, I've become even more deliberately at odds with tradition, especially tradition and origin as a source of authority. In part, this is why Derrida's arguments on the futility of trying to find origins for words (as a source of authority) is very appealing to me. This has become especially frustrating to me in trying to play music with people this year. I generally don't think it's a relevant question to appeal to the way we've played songs before as the way we should play them. Or, the way they were written or recorded by previous artists.

In this sense, I don't think of any part of a song as stable, or something that must necessarily be kept. I don't care about maintaining the melody, or the chords, or the words, or the mood, or the tempo. Likewise, when I'm playing music by myself, I rarely play a song the same way twice, so that I'm not creating a new authoritative version even for myself. More interesting to me than tradition is the creative impulses people are feeling at a given moment, and the context that the song is being played in, rather than anything absolute about the song. Of course, I can appreciate those sorts of tradition questions just for the sake of efficiency, or trying to remember a specific part so that people aren't confused, but not for anything more. Anyway, that's just how I work best.

In the end, I just feel embarrassed doing the same thing twice.

humanism

Up until recently, humanism has been very appealing to me. There seems to be something wholesome and true about the notion of human value, about equality of humanity, about inherent worth in humanity that has appealed to me. Further, the idea of a human condition or experience has been appealing to me, especially thinking of Jesus as entering experiencing the human condition (and by human condition I don't mean "sinful human nature.") While this human condition or nature often means sinful to people, it hasn't meant this to me for some time. I've seen people as basically good, and I liked that.

But there are certain problems to humanism that I do think are worth considering. For instance, humanism has the capacity to conflate and disrespect human experience and suffering. It assumes a oneness in humanity that means I have the capacity, on some level, to empathize and understand your suffering, and you mine, and of a oneness throughout time. In other words, it confuses people with one another and makes their problems the same. Humanism in this way acts as a metatheory or metanarrative that subordinates individual narratives into one human experience. And I do think that's a significant problem.

To break this down even farther: humanism is variously loving and non loving, respectful and non respectful of humans. Right now, I don't know what to do with metan-theories or meta-narratives, or essentializing claims, and this means I don't know what to do with humanism. Although, to be honest, "humanism" is probably just a red herring. I don't actually care about "humanism," I care about how I am to see, know, and understand myself, the people around me, and the world.

3 years

I recently passed the 3 year anniversary of my return to the States. I'm not sure what to say about it except that it happened, and that I haven't been disappointed.

And this is significant to me because I've been thinking lately about disappointment, and how inevitable disappointment is in life, in work, in relationships, in projects, in conversations and situations. And yet, when I look back over my life this far, I'm not disappointed. Ultimately, I'm not disappointed in the education I've received at SPU, or the time that I've had here. Of course there have been disappointing aspects, as there have been throughout my life, but in general I feel like what has happened has been good. And yet, part of me is still attracted to inevitable disappointment, to the idea of being old and looking back on life with great disappointment. Maybe that will happen, perhaps not.

Three years is a long time.

objectivity

Many times in my life, I've heard pastors, worship leaders, and missions groups pray for God to eliminate them from speaking, leading, and acting, and leave only God's will. I've prayed this prayer myself, in regards to worship or my daily life. More recently, however, in the last year or so, it's begun to seriously bother me, and I want to try to articulate some of the reasons that it does. This isn't directed at anyone, I just want a place to articulate what I'm thinking.

1. It never works. When a preacher prays for God to let them only say what is from God, and that all their ideas and thoughts, whatever is of them, be erased, it doesn't work. Sermons are still shot through with the personal opinions, biases, and beliefs of the speaker. Similarly, missionaries act based on theory of how they should act, and this theory is their belief rather than something handed down from God, and worship leaders sing songs with bad theology that are inappropriate for the situation, and choose songs based totally on preference rather than the work of God. Incidentally, I think its ridiculous to assert that the introduction of subjective elements into a sermon have anything to do with sin, that a pure believer would be able to totally erase themself.

2. I think this posturing of eliminating the self also eliminates all passion from worship, action, and teaching. Witness what happens when, as a worship leader, you don't believe the songs that you're playing, or try to choose songs on some sort of objective criteria. It's a miserable, deadening experience. Similarly, it's incredibly boring to listen to people talk about things they don't care about. And, more than boring, it's not rhetorically persuasive or appealing (thanks lit theory for inspiring that thought). And I think that the one leads to the other, that trying to eliminate the self from faith experiences results in not caring anymore about what you do.

3. The only way I can listen to speakers and participate in ,and not go crazy, is to think of them as expressions of belief, not as statements of truth. I hear people pray those prayers, and then say awful things to the extent that if those things are from God, I want no part in God. And that's what makes those expressions interesting, is that they are provisional, they're never quite there. I don't go to church to find truth, or to find God, I go there to be with the church.

4. Where does this posturing even come from? Perhaps from Jesus, from his claim that the things he teaches are not his own ideas but have been given to him from God, or ultimately from his decision to go and die. Or perhaps from Paul, "I have been crucified with Christ and no longer live..." These are nice sentiments, but I don't believe that Paul's writings were handed to him by God, or that Paul and Paul's personal, subjective beliefs were eliminated from his writing. That is to say, I dont think that Paul's letters could have been written by anyone except Paul. That's something to be celebrated. If what Paul meant was that he's an empty vessel for God to direct and manipulate and erase, he was wrong. It didnt happen. Eliminate subjectivity and you throw out the Bible and the entire Christian tradition.

In part, this is a subset of a larger problem for me. I hear people admit that objectivity is impossible, but that it's something to strive for. Something in that feels off to me, but I don't know how to articulate it at this point. In what sense do they mean I should try to be objective? Is what these people mean by objectivity actually objectivity? People go crazy trying to be objective, because inevitably they are forced away from objectivity any time they choose anything. I don't want to go crazy.

covers

I've been thinking about book covers recently. Mostly what I've been wondering is whether classic books could be published with contemporary art work on the covers, and whether or not contemporary stories could be published with classical artwork. Or maybe the question I'm getting at is whether they would sell as well and whether people would take them as seriously. Does publishing a book with contemporary art work imply that a certain standard of writing, a certain way of ordering the world will be found within, and the failure of the two to synchronize would result in discontentment? In other words, would people feel cheated if David Copperfield was published with the same cover as The Savage Detectives?

This also, I think, has to do with "don't judge a book by its cover." In my experience, books should absolutely be judged by their covers. That is, covers and imprints are usually marketed towards a certain audience and with certain genres and standards in mind. Similar covers imply similar content and experience created for certain audiences. In general, I've found that when I dislike covers, I'm usually not very interested in the blurbs about the books, and often if I read them they end up being low quality, unenjoyable works. Then again, a lot of this has to do with layout, font, page and font size, paper quality, binding quality, etc. I suppose part of the argument is that David Copperfield published with two covers is actually two different books, and so it's impossible to equate or conflate separate readings of each.

In other news, I feel that my life is always a balancing act between production and consumption, where when I don't consume, I feel empty, and when I don't produce, I feel stuffed. There are times when I can't read anymore until I do something productive, especially writing or music, and times when I need to read because I've been producing too much. I feel like the general trend of my life has been tow

Publish Post

ards consumption of knowledge and information, but more and more I see it drifting towards production, or at least towards a balance between the two. I want to produce, and sometimes having to take in more and more just gets exhausting, whereas I don't think the same amount of information would feel exhausting if I were producing more. Hence this blog post.

o my sinuses

When I was growing up, I didn't pay any attention to the nutritional quality of the food I was eating. Not until I was 17 or so. I was, in general, very healthy and fit. Since then, as I've become more and more careful about what I eat, I get sick all the time. Additionally, I was eating food from all the street vendors in Thailand, while now I'm buying from supermarkets in the States. In other words, I need to start eating more junk food, sit around and play video games, and move somewhere warmer so I don't have to deal with all these little sicknesses.

I've been thinking recently about atheism. I wonder if more people become atheists because they can't find a use for God than from a lack of reasons to believe in God's existence. I wonder if much of the believing life is trying to find a reason to keep God around, to find something that he sustains or changes, to find some activity that he takes part in. This has become more and more difficult for me to do over the years, especially in my movement away from a morality and sin basis for understanding who God is: before, I believed that I needed God to be a good, moral person, but I don't believe that any longer. Why? Partially because I don't believe that morality is God's main interest in my life, but also just because most of the time where I do wrong or do right, God seems to be totally absent from the entire process. I don't want to invent uses for God and insert him into processes where he does not exist. That's lead me to better, healthier territory, but problem territory.

I've also been thinking about how much I hate people in general, and like them in particular. When I go around in life and see all the messes that people make, how inconsiderate, cruel, and irresponsible they are, I hate them. But when I come up against a single individual who makes a mess out of life, who is inconsiderate, cruel, and irresponsible, I often like them. Often, but not always. I think that what I hate is really an imagined person, a sort of straw man target that I mentally abuse, but who doesn't exist in reality (this is, arguably, how Jesus functions: he condemns the pharisees as a faceless, nameless mass, but he treats individuals with great compassion.) Or sometimes I bitch about people, in my head mostly, when they're not around, but then when I'm with them, whatever I'm bitching about doesn't seem to matter that much.

Contrary to contemporary Christian pop theology, I don't think it's possible to love someone unless you like them. Without liking them, you may be able to treat them with courtesy and respect, to make sacrifices for them, but I don't think it's possible to really love them when you dislike them. To like someone, I think, is to take joy in the essence of who they are, and without that joy, I don't think that love is possible. "Love the sinner, hate the sin," is also nonsense to me, along similar lines.

Let's not forget that justice isn't only about punishing those who do wrong, it's restoring those who have been wronged. When justice is talked about in the first sense, I am bored and repulsed. When it's talked about in the second sense, I'm excited. And, it is possible to have the second without the first.

Anger about the injustices in the world inhibits learning about those injustices and, summarily, inhibits the solutions to those injustices. Get angry once you know something.

I'm obviously writing my own book of proverbs.

trip

Tonight I'm sleeping in the living room of my house. I'm sleeping there because tomorrow morning I'm driving to San Francisco for a few days. I just washed my sheets, and I feel like my return home will be much more satisfying if I come home to clean sheets, so tonight I'm sleeping in the living room to not get my sheets dirty.

coincidence

Recently I received an assignment for one of my classes to write about what makes a story satisfying. My answer is that what feels like real life is satisfying, and for me that means a high degree of coincidence: random meetings, chance encounters, chaotic events that often are not purposeful or guided but lead to a meaningful end. That's how real life feels to me. Sometimes I think of this as God, leading life to a meaningful end, but I don't always want to or feel the need to take it that far. Sometimes coincidence is providence, sometimes it's just coincidence. When I look back on my life, that's what I see, a string of coincidences without which I would not be where I am today.

music

I'm insecure about my music. Not music that I've written (which doesn't exist, for the most part), but music that I like and listen to. I'm always very nervous about putting it on, no matter where I am. Mostly, my music isn't appropriate for any sort of social situation, except maybe travel. I listen to car music. For instance: Weezer. I couldn't put Weezer on during dinner time when I'm sitting down with housemates. Most of my friends listen to easy listening music that's appropriate in many situations. In other words, most people don't like the music that I like, and I feel nervous about putting it on. So, I usually just listen to music when I'm alone.

In other news, I've been wondering lately how much salvation is a universal process. As in, I am not fully saved until everyone else is also fully saved. Why? Because I don't think it's possible for any human to be fully "saved" while anyone else isn't. In fact, it seems that being fully redeemed, fully saved, fully human, would mean that it was impossible to feel that way. This is especially true if you believe in hell (which I don't). How can anyone be happy in paradise knowing that someone else is suffering eternally in hell? That seems to be the exact opposite of how humans are supposed to love and feel for each other. I also don't think it's a very satisfying solution to say that God will simply hide the knowledge from us...

domestics pt 2

Thinking back to how I grew up, I realize that I never lived in a messy house. There were certain rooms that were messy (my bedroom, offices), but the public areas were always kept very clean and tidy. Implication: do what you want with what's your own, but keep clean what belongs to everyone. Of course, there were times when I was forced to clean my room, but this was not robustly enforced by the time I had graduated. Not to mention I did a better job of it at that point. Similarly, my dad used to fine me and my roommate Toby if we hadn't taken a shower by 7pm. That also fell away. In any case, that's what I grew up with and what I prefer. Now, I don't like clutter and dirtiness in public areas, and don't like leaving my things in the public area of my house. And, I deal a lot better with clutter than I do with dirtiness. Clutter in my room doesn't usually stress me out, but when the sheets are dirty and the floor is covered in hair and my shelves are dusty (or my fan blades, in Thailand), then I like to clean.

Also, I think the ants in Thailand were a big part of growing up. Consider: if any food was left out, there would be ants on it within an hour or two, sometimes less. If food was left out, it would become stale immediately. Summarily, it's always very confusing to me when I see a bowl of food sitting somewhere in the house for days. That's a lot grosser to me than build up of hair in the drain, or the mold in the shower (until I think about it) or dirty toilets.

In general I don't like leaving my own things around the house. Usually when I go to bed, my things are either in my room or in the study room. This is more from paranoia than consideration for my housemates, though: if I leave books around, I worry that someone will spill on them or kick them and bend the pages. If I leave my computer downstairs, I worry about robbers coming in and finding it right away, or else that someone will step on it or drop something heavy. I assume that what's left in a public area is liable to be destroyed.

Living with seven other guys has also made me think about how much I hate doing things when people are around. I prefer cleaning and cooking when the house is empty. I don't like getting in peoples ways, and I hate feeling like I'm being observed. Also, when I lived by myself two summers ago, I was much more organized than I am living with seven other people. For example, I made my bed almost every day. In part, that's because it was a couch, not a bed, and I didn't want to have blankets on there when I came back and read in the evening. But, I think I just do well when I don't have to worry about getting in the way. Or, perhaps it's more that I hate being interrupted, and so I do things better when I'm alone because I don't have to worry about interruption.

In any case, I like living at my house.

souls

I no longer believe that I have a soul. Or at least one that is separate from my body and that will live on after my body is ead. I suppose this is the natural result of discarding dualism, but it's come as sort of a surprise to me. Part of it is probably thanks to one of the professors: "Christianity does not teach the immortality of the soul but the resurrection of the body." And, that is what I see when I look at the creeds and at the bible. I'm not really interested in the mechanism of resurrection (how will God resurrect those whose bodies have been vaporized?) and I don't know how useful it is to ask questions about those bodies (what age will my body be? etc, etc,) but that's where I've come to and I feel pretty good about it. Souls are a useful concept, but they have outlived their usefulness to me. And what reason do I have to believe in them in the first place?

Recently I have been wondering how well a person holds together. I'm in a fiction workshop this quarter, and people keep bringing up certain actions as contradictory, and therefore the character doesn't make sense or hold together. And yet...the contradictions they are criticizing are contradictions that are real and present in peoples lives, and probably actually aren't contradictions to begin with ("he thinks about serious things but also likes to have a good time"). Anyway, it just makes me think of how making sense of someone necessarily simplifies them, cuts out the anomalies to create a solid concept. Except this solid concept doesn't actually have basis in reality. I don't think that a person holds together as a stable form that can be known. People are gooey. And they don't have souls. Maybe these two concepts go hand in hand, that without the soul there is no unchanging aspect (specter?!) to a person that can be known, just a changing aspect. Perhaps belief in the soul as a stable component to identity that can be removed from the body hinders us from properly knowing each other.

In other words, everything begins to make sense once you believe in evolution. Thank God for Charles Darwin. I'm also beginning to approach Christianity and the bible much more as mythology. I prefer the term mythology to allegory or figure or metaphor ("Genesis should be read as figurative rather than literal"), because I don't think that figurative actually captures what is going on or how it was written. Mythology suggests that there is no difference between reality and metaphor, reality is metaphor and metaphor is reality. I'm becoming more and more frustrated with hearing people talking about Genesis as figurative, because they're still trying to apply a modernist framework of understanding to it, that it's okay to read it as truth if we read it as figurative with the understanding that it wasn't written to be scientific or historical. I think that reading is going most of the way, but not far enough, into mythology. People don't like mythology, though, because it makes them think of something primal, unsystematic, and arbitrary. And those are probably fair elements to pick out, but I do think that is missing the point (there is nothing more satisfying than to say that someone else is missing the point.)

Anyway, I don't want to come across as a bully ("you have no soul, you have no solid state, believe in evolution, stop reading Genesis literally or figuratively"). I don't think that you're intellectually lazy, or an academic invalid if you believe the things I'm whining about. Just consider...

matthew

I've been reading through the gospel of Matthew with group lately, and here are some of my thoughts and comments on little parts of it.

"So if you are offering your gift at the altar, and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother, and then come and offer your gift" (5:23-24).

Most of the time when I hear people talking about these verses, it's in the context of worship services. In that scenario, it means that if you come to worship and are mad at someone, you should talk to them before you worship. I don't think that's what it's getting at though. For one thing, I think it has to be read in light of the verses that come before it, which talk about words used that will drag you before the council and words that will put you in danger of hell. The point here is that there are words that you use that offend people, but there are things you communicate to other people that put you in danger of hell. This is the difference between me telling someone as a joke to fuck off, which might offend people around me, and me telling a person that I think they are a wreck and failure at life, where what I'm communicating is much worse even though I'm using tamer language. In this sense, I think we have to see the altar thing as what pleases humans and what pleases God (and really, a lot of the sermon on the mount is about that). So, I think what's going on here is that placing gifts on the altar is an act of piety that is impressive to people, but what God cares about is redemption and reconciliation with other people. I don't think that this is a hard and fast rule for whether or not you need to confront someone before a worship service, since I don't think that's always wise or loving, but is really done out of guilt and a desire to be pious before people (which is what this is against).

"So have no fear of them; for nothing is covered that will not be revealed, or hidden that will not be known. What I tell you in the dark, utter in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim upon the housetops" (10:26-27).

The first part of this verse, I've usually taken to be referring to sin and God's judgment: everything bad you have done will eventually be revealed. I don't think it's actually this particular verse that I'm thinking of, but almost identical passages either elsewhere in Matthew or in another gospel. In any case, that isn't what it's about. This passage is surrounded on both sides by talk about the two kingdoms (thanks, Bob) and about God being on the side of the disciples who are being sent out. Immediately before that verse it talks about how the "servants" will be maligned even worse than the "master" has been. So, what Jesus is saying is that what is covered (that they really do follow God, not Beelzebul) will eventually be known to everyone. In other words, it's a statement about identity and which kingdom they belong to rather than anything to do with sin or judgment, or a reason to fear. People say that these servants serve evil, but in the end God will say that they were part of his kingdom. The following verses talk about how important it is to not be afraid, which fits in just right with it.

Also, I've been noticing how physical Matthew is, and struck but how critical this physical side was to Jesus' mission. When John asked if he was the messiah, Jesus says that the sick are being healed and that good news is being given to the poor. He doesn't mention anything about forgiving sins (even though he's been doing that,) or about changes in peoples behavior and morals. Which isn't to say that those things are not important to Jesus, only that their importance has been exaggerated in contemporary interpretations (and thanks to Augstine!) Similarly, when Jesus sends out his disciples they are to heal the sick, cast out demons, and talk about the kingdom. The physical world is critical to Jesus' mission and the mission of his followers, and cannot simply be discarded as something that will pass away.

innocence

I've been thinking about innocence lately, and about people talk about it as a virtue, but what they mean by innocence is mostly ignorance. I don't think that ignorance is a virtue, and I have been thinking about what it means to be innocent, or why it is that I think some people are more innocent now than at other times that I've known them. People talk about children as being innocent, but I don't think that children really are innocent. I don't mean this in the original sin, depravity, born into sin sort of way, that children are born sinful and are therefore not innocent. Not to mention I've learned over the past year about how this image of innocent children has really only developed in the last two hundred years, and seeing its origins makes me much more skeptical and disgusted when people talk about childhood as the seat of innocence and virtue and imagination and nostalgia. I don't want to be a child, and I don't think that I was more innocent as a child. I want to imagine innocence being something that can continue even once people know, and that in fact requires them to be able to see reality clearly, rather than shying away from it. I don't know why I'm interested in redefining this word, but I am. I suppose I'm thinking of innocence as the capacity to see reality and still believe, to have hope, to have hope as an epistemology (thanks, Lindsey,) rather than a state of perfection or sinlessness or ignorance. I don't think that children know enough to really be innocent.

Who knows, maybe being an innocent is really just being dumb.

And...unrelated: rereading the story of "the fall" recently, it struck me that this story never mentions sin, and that the author of Genesis is interested in this story as an explanation of how death entered the world rather than how sin or evil entered the world (though sin is mentioned soon afterwards in the story of C + A). It's about the problem of death rather than the problem of evil. This is interesting to me, especially because I'm not really against death, or afraid of death, and because I don't think there has been a time in the universe when things lived and never died.

prayer

I haven't prayed, really, for about a year. Last fall quarter I prayed quite a bit, and it was such a traumatic experience that I really haven't taken it up again. By prayer, I mean setting aside a chunk of time to speak to God and to listen to him, which I think is actually a quite limited understanding of prayer. But I haven't prayed like that for some time, and I think that soon I might be able to again.

But what am I praying? Prayer lately has been thinking about those around me who are suffering. Most of the time I don't know what to pray. Everything seems arrogant or insufficient. I feel arrogant when I pray towards a certain solution or end, and I feel arrogant assuming that I know what would be a good or appropriate result for a situation in a person's life. So mostly what I pray is for God to have mercy on them, and on me*. This is really the only way I have been able to pray for months, praying for both the living and the dead.

This isn't mercy as in "they really effed up, now please don't destroy them," because that's rarely what I'm praying.