juliannechat

My favorite political sign ever (because complexity)

...is at the end of this post. I admired that sign because it was true, it started by attempting to describe a complex point of view, then was edited as the situation changed.

Obviously the most effective political signs are simpler.

When I try to write about politics I become mired in complexity. 

Firstly I'm a privileged adventurer; my presuppositions are usually different from what people expect. Secondly, I'm balancing contradictory goals and opinions. Sara Ruddick and Jacques Ellul helped me understand that the way I manage my brain is OK, in fact sometimes necessary. People closer to me say, "You know how you get!"

So, here's the story of my favorite sign ever, as an example of how I get. 

Like David Foster Wallace, knowing both terms are problematic, I am both pro-life and pro-choice. I personally assume life begins at conception, even though not all kids successfully implant and grow, AND I fight for widespread access to all kinds of birth control including safe legal cheap abortions so each woman can make her own decision about this.

In April 1989 I took Amtrak from Boston to Washington for a pro-choice march.  

At the time I weighed 240 pounds. My daily life was car-free, with at an hour each day spent walking, so I didn’t expect physical distress. However, the marchers were asked to wear all white. Ask any fat woman who uses trains and buses whether she has a lot of white in her wardrobe ... nope ... but I scrapped around and found a calf length skirt (flowing) and a short sleeved golf shirt (stiff and scratchy) that were both whiteish. In the tradition of some of the suffragists, I made a purple sash to go over them.

My husband’s aunt put me up for the weekend. (In gratitude for her long friendship, in admiration of her gracious intelligence, her amazing children, her library, I am leaving her name out of this.) The day of the march was wet and rainy, so she loaned one of her late husband’s windbreakers, dark navy blue with the name of a CIA yacht club in white on the right breast.

At the time I identified as evangelical Episcopalian (more complexity) and so I started the day by taking a bus to the National Cathedral and attending the 8:15 Eucharist, a small service in a downstairs chapel. One of the Scripture readers was Sandra Day O’Connor, famous for many actions while a Supreme Court Justice, among them preserving the core of Roe v Wade while adding the "undue burden" language that increased the rights of states to restrict abortion.

During the Prayers of the People, we prayed for a positive outcome for O’Connor’s recent treatment for breast cancer.

Later, following the ushers' directions, O'Connor and I went up to the railing together and I took communion kneeling next to her. This is the Body of Christ, broken for you. We did not speak; the communion rail is not coffee hour and even at coffee hour I would have felt I was intruding, but I wondered whether she knew about the march or noticed the large stranger in shabby white (I had left the sash and windbreaker temporarily in the pew).

As for the rest of that long day: it was the kind of march where we did a ton of work to get contingents together with outfits and clever signs, stood near the Washington Monument for hours, and eventually walked past a bunch of Sunday-empty government buildings shouting slogans. The Park Police took a photo at 4pm and gave us credit for only half the people who were actually there, and the paid media barely covered it … but for many of the participants, the experience was profoundly meaningful. That sort of march.

I spent time standing, shuffling, and marching with various delegations, reveling in all the nuances of how people were expressing their opinions.

My favorite sign of the day said, in big block letters, Historians of 20th Century Astrophysics for Choice. Below that someone had added in pencil, “+ 1 Graphic Designer”.

Yes!

As an historian I know — as a person of faith I believe — that each of us matters and each of our individual perspectives needs to be represented. 

If that was your sign and you would like to have a reunion, please get in touch. And: thank you!

Links for December 1

World AIDS Day has come around again. On All Saints' this year MCC Portland let us fill the bulletin with memorials and I remembered once again David Wells, Evan McCall, and Barry Sullivan. They were handsome and loving and creative and you never got a chance to know them or their work.

Friends of mine have released MovieGoer, an app for social moviegoing (initally iPhone only) and I've tweeted about it. Here's Liz Gannes' announcement. The name makes me remember Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, a terrific Christian existentialist novel. (And moviegoing had a social aspect in the novel too.) So then I thought of:

• Eric Weiner's blog post (at Powells) about why it's hard to write about God
• Robert Fay (at The Millions) is looking for the next generation of good Catholic writers

He means "Catholics who are good writers"; they may or may not be "good Catholics" as well. Includes the provocative suggestion that DFW might have become more Catholic if he'd decided to live longer. Thank to The Rumpus for the pointer.

Meanwhile, what about us female Protestants...maybe we're protesting too much? Check out Pat Schweibert's notes on Occupy Portland (reprinted from the MCCP bulletin, going up soon). I haven't had time to read this Gawker posting in full but the three founders who are being pilloried are all female. This doesn't fix racism or classism but it does show some women following Tara Sophia Mohr's Rule 5, "Be an arrogant idiot."

The funniest thing I read on The CMO Site so far today is from Joe Stanganelli: "I'm waiting for Facebook to come out with a search engine and call it FaceBook+."

I am a fan of the Fitness subreddit. Elsewhere on reddit, two OSU redditors who found they had the same physics class have had dinner. (Not linking to the karma-prank theorists. But I do appreciate how skeptical redditors are generally. It's like mental fitness, to go with the physical fitness.)

Since the shopping season is upon us:

• Does living frugally hurt the economy?
• The two biggest mistakes people make when starting to live frugally
• Rules for cleaning cashmere
• How to lose $2400 in 24 seconds by Kurtis Hough
• A map of the potential future of science (where humans should be investing more)

I've received my first comment spam in Norsk (Bokmål)! Unpublished it anyway, but still, it's a milestone.

I'm about to update my web presence (thank you Vicki Lind and Jessica Taylor in advance for your advice) and this blog's long burden serving as my "best web presence at the moment" may be lifted from its shoulders. It can't wait!

Bob Park has a point (as usual)

WHAT’S NEW   Robert L. Park   Friday, 1 Apr 2011   Washington, DC

1. APRIL FOOLS: A DAY LIKE ALL DAYS; TRUTH MUST BE SEPARATED FROM FRAUD.
I have no stomach for jokes today.  The truth is too sad, and the lies too numerous.

[you can read all of Bob Park's newsletters, and subscribe, here; they end with]

THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND.
Opinions are the author's and not necessarily shared by the University of Maryland, but they should be.

Cheap Complex Devices, ed. by John C. Sundman

Executive Summary: Cheap Complex Devices is of possible interest to e-literature readers, where e=electronic OR where e=experimental. And tragically funny.

Quotation: "Assembling itself into a narrative, the subject of Bees is Bees itself, a consciousness coming into being."

Obvious question: Does Bees have anything to do with the ARG I Love Bees? Answer1: Clearly not, since the novel preceded the game by several years. Answer2: Only in the sense that both of them use facts about actual bees as imaginative points of departure [1]. [Footnote numbers in square brackets.] (Item numbers in parentheses.)

You may know John Sundman as a legendary technical writer, or a blogger at wetmachine, or the guy who wrote so candidly about selling his self-published books directly to readers at Defcon. If you are attending this year’s SXSW you can hear more from him on the self-publishing panel. I now put all that knowledge aside and consider his novel CCD as it asks the reader to consider it.

The puzzle began when I tried to find the book on Amazon. Sundman’s commitment to his art extends to his middle name: each of his novels was published using a different one (appropriate to its content), which meant that I couldn’t click on any occurrence of his name and see his other works. However, a search on "john sundman mind over matter" led to all three of his currently extant books. Any female larva may become queen; this posting is one larva’s reaction to Sundman’s Cheap Complex Devices – Mind Over Matter Volume Red, hereinafter CCD [2].

The artefact/artifact CCD consists of a novel, preceded by an introduction to the novel, preceded by an introduction to CCD as a whole, preceded by a raft of epigraphs and dedications. On page 9.000023 the introduction-to-the-novel suggests stopping to read the novel at that point, before the reader’s mind has been contaminated by the information contained on pages 9.999999967 to 26.0000083 [3], and then returning to page 9.000023 to finish reading the introduction-to-the-novel. Since I have the oulipian merit badge (junior class), of course I played^H^H^H^H^H^H followed this direction.

Rather than bore all of you, I will eventually transmit my detailed list of reader-reactions [4] to John personally. Instead, here is a high level reaction in a techwriterish form that – if it doesn’t completely avoid spoilers – casts them in a form such that they aren’t actually spoilers unless and until you’ve read the book yourself.

[here goes: OL]

(1) CCD contains sentences of terrible beauty that are also terribly funny [5].

(2) Huge chunks of it are structurally flawless.

(3) From the evidence of its language, Bees takes place in a slightly altered present. As a reader of science fiction, I admired the way the changes from my own reality became apparent. But I hesitate to encapsulate CCD within science fiction, since I think the alterations are subtle enough that one could read this for entertainment without bothering about them. Except see (6).

(4) The first page (first epigraph) begins to be explained on page 53.111111. From that point, my foremost ongoing question, as noted in my reading diary and cross-referenced with the dedication, came to be, "Is Amadou real?" Eventually I decided that Amadou was either real (from “reality”) or (because of the way truth emerges in fiction) realer-than-real.

(5) I can describe my issues with the ending of the novel in two ways:

(a) It goes off the rails.

(b) The writer (whom I am explicitly not identifying) switched from writing with his head to writing with his heart.

Re (b), perhaps it’s fairer to say that even though the head was still active, the heart took over. And although the heart sections moved and challenged me, I missed the crystalline perfection of the head-created sections. I had previously mentioned (at the end of this posting) that this review would actually be more about me than about the novel; wasn't kidding.

(6) I find myself in total agreement with the narrator when he writes on page 50.000963: “Pay attention.” [6]

(7) Once I finished the "novel", I returned to the "introduction". Page 30.000239 is the heart of a clever attack upon (takedown of?) another of Sundman’s own Mind Over Matter novels. Seemingly they’re all related in some yet-to-be-discovered (by me) fashion. They tell me that once you’ve experienced that uncut crystalline structure, it sets up a craving... "Not for me, they’re for a friend."

[/OL]

A novel that – (I don’t want to use the word "makes" but it’s the most applicable one here). This novel makes its reader take a stand, forced me to decide. Repeatedly. It’s far more than the stunt its introduction suggests it is. Thank you, John.

Footnotes:

[1] Note the way we USians celebrate most fervently that which is lost; as just one example, we began to romanticise "the frontier" (in 1902, by rhapsodizing over Owen Wister’s The Virginian) when all the land stolen from the First Nations had already been divided up and given out and the actual frontier was gone. Similarly, these imaginative celebrations of bees have appeared just as it has become clear the extent to which actual bees are on the ropes. Clearly this is another essay poking its way in here: down, Fang!

[2] Of the three, CCD is the one most worth purchasing in hard cover, because of the pleasures of the frequent changes in typography and the gonzo page numbering scheme, but the power of the text also comes through in the PDF. I enjoyed the many typographical games, with one notable exception: the extensive use of "ct" ligatures in the first section was arch, precious, and unsuited to the content (in Dorothy Sayers’ phrase, "clean out of the period"): each one hit me in the eye like a tiny fist. On the other hand, the joy of self-publishing is that one can do what one wishes, and most of the offbeat things this author has done are very engaging indeed. In early 00speak: whatevs.

Update from John: "...the ligatures were in homage to Donald Knuth, author of "The Art of Computer Programming"-- and father of LaTeX (or however you spell it). The book is set in a faux-Knuth typeface, and Knuth is overly fond of ligatures -- which drives many of his readers batty. Anyway, that's a pretty recerche allusion, but I thought you should know what I was trying to get at." Thank you John, and regardless of the way Knuth's lectures at MIT changed my life, I am definitely one of the readers driven "batty".

[3] Floating point errors are a key plot point, not to say theme.

[4] The first item in the list is: "p. 27: For personal reasons, I do not find jokes about Paavo Nurmi funny." See, you’re not missing much by not reading the rest of them.

Thrillingly, this novel spells “straitjacket” correctly. If there were bated breath in it, likely that term would also be correctly used and spelled. Read it now, people, before language morphs so much further that all CCD’s nuances become little more than static (QRN) and interference (QRM).

[5] In both senses of terrible, (a) "exceptionally" and (b) "catastrophically". Also, as I’ve suggested in my rant about technical writing, some of Sundman’s humor and sarcasm is most easily appreciated by readers who have themselves worked for a computer company. Or who have at least read Tracy the Kidder’s The Soul of a New Machine. But appreciation of most of it requires no more than a heart and a brain.

[6] Thereby echoing Simone Weil, David Foster Wallace, and several other writers I consider spiritual teachers.

Final note: I have excerpted the preceding opinions in my Amazon review of CCD. They don't let you use italics or footnotes or links, which is why I so very seldom review there.

Peter Gomes, 1942-2011 (a few good links and the "Gomes for Pope" campaign of 1978)

Here's a terrific Charlie Rose interview with Peter Gomes. On this day of Peter's death, it's interesting to hear how he describes his life's work, and which Scripture he wants on his tombstone, but also to listen to him argue that it's possible to reconcile evolution and the Bible, and pose the question that he believes we Christians should be asking ourselves.

In the interview he also argues for the good bits of St Augustine and John Calvin, and discusses homophobia among people of good will (who believe they are doing the right).

Peter was a handsome young man when he arrived at Harvard in 1970. I met him in 1975 when he was my "freshman advisor". Something I wrote (? but I had just turned 17 so I can guess that it was unformed) had made the Freshman Dean's office decide to find me an advisor who would not think my faith was bonkers.

When I arrived for my first appointment with Peter I found his outer office occupied by a woman pacing back and forth, with her arms crossed at her waist. She explained to me that she was possessed by a demon. Peter's secretary explained that he would reschedule our meeting. At WHRB even some of the non-Christian members appreciated Peter's sermons, and we organized a "Gomes for Pope" campaign in 1978 (the year of the two papal conclaves). When he came out as gay (although celibate) in 1991, in response to an anti-gay issue of a college publication, some of us changed our slogan to Gomes for Pope: Now More Than Ever.

I admired the way that although Peter was gay, it was not the most interesting thing about him. An interesting non-spiritual biographical detail is that he grew up in Plymouth (aka Plimouth) Massachusetts, and for a time as a young man (high school or college student) worked in the town library. One of his primary responsibilities was to answer letters from (white) people writing to find out whether they were related to anyone who came to the original colony on the ship Mayflower, or rather, whether a person who had the same name as an ancestor of theirs had had any kids. Peter admitted to having experienced a touch of unholy glee, especially when the letters were high-handed, in replying that so-and-so "had no known issue."

Over the years I have been privileged to hear Peter preach many times, and most of his sermons were tactically astute and prophetic and eloquent, all at the same time. (Fortunately we still have the ten books of them to enjoy and be challenged by.) During the tumultuous school year of 2001-02 I was, for medical reasons, able to attend Memorial Church almost every Sunday, usually sitting in my favourite pew next to the plaque for the four Germans (an opportunity to recall my Latin). I will never forget the sermon he preached on September 23rd, 2001. Bishop J S Spong was the guest preacher on the first Sunday after the towers fell (and his message was so much not what I needed to hear that a good friend, who had heard it on the radio, called as soon as I had left the church to ask whether I was okay; I'll write about that another time)...but in the sermon linked above Peter spoke for me and for so many others...

One evening in the late seventies, Peter was sitting beside a roaring fire with John Duff, Nancy Dart, and Mark Roberts, and my name came up (John told me later). And Peter told the others about how every time he saw me in the Yard I would have my coat open and flapping, and my muffler on the outside of the coat, as a Southern Californian who hadn't figured out how to dress for cold weather. (It was years before I figured out the muffler thing, and the first coat I bought "back there" wasn't right either - not even waterproof.) Over the years I have many times planned to write and thank Peter for his spiritual direction and catch him up with the many twists and turns my spiritual life has taken. Now that goes on the list of things I took too long to get around to.

Peter, I give thanks to God for your life and ministry. As Thomas More said (in Robert Bolt's play), He will not refuse one who is so blithe to go to Him.