Hi, Gang!

Clearly, everything needs updating around here.

Dystopian pressures in every facet of my own personal reality have been getting in the way.

In the meantime, when not preoccupied with bonding with Number One Daughter over old Glee episodes or escaping reality by making red beans and rice, or facing part of reality while ignoring another by mowing the lawn, have been reading.

Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter, Traci C. West [there's a review online by catholicanarchy; among others]

Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil, Emilie M. Townes

Keep thinking about Adorno, who I believe shares a methodological affinity with these authors.

[Adjunct teaching, Christian Moral Teaching, Christian Tradition, and Christianity and Social Justice, at Spalding, starting in August. Need to read up.]

The original grosbeak.

Hi, Gang!

Days have been dismal here, not just because of the non-stop rain and thunderstorms of the past week or so.

Just finished reading Empire of Illusion:The End of Literacy and The Triumph of Spectacle, by Chris Hedges. Either the book or Hedges, I can’t tell which, is “winner of the Pulitzer Prize.” I’m guessing Hedges, though, rather than this book, which was something of a disappointment. Empire of Illusion cites Debord less than one would expect from a book with “Spectacle” in its title (i.e., not even once – although he does have a nice quote from Adorno). It makes implicit arguments from the juxtaposition of chapter titles and chapter content, amassing lots of examples that are sure to outrage the good reader (well, I was duly outraged, naturally) and then allowing the outrage to bridge the chasms between argumentative and evidential connections.

It’s not that I don’t believe we are living in the end times of literacy – I live with a 12-year-old who can look at text without bothering to read it. It’s not that I believe US culture is something other than spectacle – that’s why I bought the book in the first place. But I think the problem deserves better analysis. It definitely deserves better than the concluding left-field paean to hope and goodness with which the book concludes. (“Love will endure, even if it appears darkness has swallowed us all, to triumph over the wreckage that remains.”)

It’s not that I don’t believe hope, goodness, and love are tenacious and ultimately victorious. (That ought to be obvious by now, daft as it is.) It is not clear to me that these things depend on literacy, though. They clung on for about a thousand years of western civ largely without that.

It seems to me they depend more on the hypo-literate, hypo-imagistic practices associated with positive human contact. Feeding the hungry. Tending the wounded. Wrapping blankets around the chilled and shivering. Barbara Brown Taylor, in An Altar in the World, another book I just finished reading, makes the comment that “the religion of kindness” is not such a bad one. That strikes me as a properly pragmatic, and also utopian, impulse. It’s also the impulse that makes me think it is too early to write off “America” or “our culture,” or whatever one wants to call this situation in which we find ourselves, as a lost cause – which seems to be the upshot of Hedges’ text. The future may not be bright, but “there is no discharge from the battle” even so.

So, on Sunday, having finished this edifying experience of literacy and having come to myself, as it were, I decided to celebrate new life by shelving the 50 or so books that had taken up residence on my desktop, and consolidating the file drawer of papers that had colonized the entire workspace and have been untouched since October, so as to liberate the surface of the desk. As luck would have it, the annual grosbeak chose this occasion to put in a welcome apearance. This may not be the same bird; he looks a little thin and bright compared to Grosbeak I; maybe he is a younger relative, taking over the freehold. Nevertheless.

We may have no peaches, after the week of freezing weather right at peach-blossom time, but the thing with feathers has not given up on us.

Plato as someone pretty likeable

Hi, Gang!

Thanks to Hessler34 for the quick question about why I dislike Plato. For one thing, the question and its placement made me notice that I am no longer a graduate student. !!! (So yes, the About page needs some editing.) For another, the question made me realize that I it had been a long time since I thought about that, so I didn’t have a quick answer for that question any more.

Nevertheless, and upon reflection, it seems less cluttered to put the answer here.

First, because I am trying to moderate my too frequent practice of issuing sweeping condemnations, I realize that it would be more restrained and accurate to identify things I dislike about, or rather in, Plato. “In” Plato, because presumably we are talking here about “Plato’s philosophy” or “Plato’s works,” rather than about Plato the individual, whom I have never met. (Another reason it seems wrong, after all, to say I dislike Plato.) Perhaps, in that imaginary place where people from radically different cultures and times meet, we would enjoy one another’s company – although I doubt it. I don’t imagine myself as the kind of person whose company Plato would have enjoyed, at any rate.

Second, and worse, I have read less Plato than I probably should have to make that claim with the full force of self-righteous conviction. Perhaps I am wrong about Plato, and would find that out if I had a proper education. There is even some evidence in that direction. I liked the Symposium a lot, for instance, for the idea that love is the guide of knowledge and truth. However. I suspect that the experience of reading more Plato would be like the experience of studying Greek. That experience was something like this: intense hatred, which would gradually diminish to the point of my beginning to think that maybe, just maybe, this language was not so despicable and might be likeable somehow after all, until I would run across something else that would make me gnash my teeth, hate Greek with renewed intensity, and wish I could just take double Hebrew. It was at this time that I formed the mantra “The Greeks are the villains of western civilization.” [These are the ancient Greeks, it does not quite go without saying.] I expect this is how it would go with Plato.

Unfortunately, saying what I dislike is a lot less quick than asking what it is. Here is a list of some things I dislike about Plato, with a few thoughts on the first one. (I will try to add comments to the others in another post.)

Methodological over-valuation of analysis, with a consequent under-valuation of association. In practice, Plato uses associative methods. He relies on metaphor and allegory, for instance, to carry some of his points. (Think of the cave.) But the method that he holds up as the laudable exercise of reason is analytic, dividing phenomena into ever more specific and discrete phenomena, with the ultimate paradigm of knowledge being the capture of the essence – the isolate – of something. Insofar as he relies on non-analytic methods as well as analytic methods, without acknowledging this reliance, but rather presenting them as aids to analysis, he is dishonestly failing to give credit where credit is due. Insofar as he sets western philosophy on the track of thinking that knowing a thing means isolating it from its relations to other things, its web of similarities to and differences between other things, and its dynamics, he sets it on a track that leads to a life-denying understanding of knowledge.

The analytically separated and hierarchically organized treatment of Body and Mind, and the notion of the higher and lower faculties within the mind.

The idea that what comes later, or derives from something, is inferior to what comes before, or serves as the model for something. This may be more of a neo-Platonic notion, and I am taking it on faith from one of my instructors, but it is an idea with which I take issue. Subsequents or derivatives may be improvements.

The idea that the Forms/Ideas are more real than what we encounter in transitory life, and that the variations that constitute individual phenomena’s deviations from the Forms make them less real, and are, in a sense, faults.

The idea that art is a copy of something.

Hi, Gang!

I got the dates wrong on the 30 day fast (with prayer and action) that Sojourners Magazine is encouraging as something people can do to influence the Federal budget process and its “slay the poor” trajectory, so I have gotten a late start. But I am up to date now, and am glad to see that people with more readers are also participating.

I don’t really “get” fasting. I am also not sure that the Congressmen and Senators who need to be influenced here will really care that affluent Americans are voluntarily going without food in hopes that far less affluent ones will not have to go without so much of it involuntarily. As adolescent boys are wont to say, when you tell them not to drink out of the milk carton because it puts people off the milk, “Well, then, more for me.”

I do, however, get mobilizing people for action. So it seems to me the letters and other communications with the relevant legislators are the critical thing, here. The fasting and praying is a way of raising energy for that. I am considering sending letters to Todd Young at about the rate Shawshank wrote the prison commission for money for the library. That seems like a good example.

I also get the idea of making clear that there is not just one flavor of Christian, the flavor that thinks the Bible is God’s dictation, but has 15 minutes of blank space where Exodus 22:25-27 and Amos 8:4-6 and all the other texts that talk about justice for the poor were, and rather like it.

Gotta love 'em if you live with 'em?

Hi, Gang!

February was the cruelest month, and March was not really much better. I did apply for two jobs, after recuperating from HR and weathering the other mayhem and mortality that rocked our small world here. Think I am becoming addicted to sour mix. And then, there is the remarkable series of vignettes on Women’s [Church] History for Women’s History Month at that other blog.

Nevertheless, I haven’t been working hard enough.

Hopefully, all that is about to change.

First, there is this good advice from The Chronicle of Higher Education about Writing. I know it is good advice because the fraction of it that I have ever put into practice, however fitfully and temporarily, has helped me. So, back to two pages a day.

Second, there is this self-promotional review of Russell Jacoby’s Bloodlust (forthcoming). Jacoby’s idea strikes me as particularly interesting because of the gender implications, which he recognizes. I don’t think he works them out in a particularly interesting way here, but maybe he does more in the book. I wonder especially whether the thesis that minor differences are more deadly than enormous ones confirms the wisdom of Irigaray’s emphasis on sexual difference — make the difference bigger and brighter, not smaller and less visible. It also frames or positions “violence against women” as the longest-running civil war in the history of the human race. The deadliness of that war would be another bit of confirmation for Jacoby’s thesis. The Uncanny Valley would seem to be a related phenomenon.

I suspect Jacoby is right, or at least partly right, and I wonder whether the problem is not very much related to the issue of who is going to determine who ‘we” are and what “we” are going to go about working for and how “we” are going to live. If someone is so other as to be outside the charmed circle of “us,” what they do is their own business. It doesn’t affect “us.” But when differences are minor, and yet consequential — affecting how the living room will be decorated, or how the children will be educated, or whether you and I are sharing an experience of communion (I add, because of the deadliness of the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre and the 30 Years War, and thinking of my professor Chris Elwood’s book The Body Broken) — they are, as Number 1 Daughter says, “up in my grill.” Personal. Matters of my own identity. People get deeply and personally attached to their own identities, and to specific cherished versions of those; matters of identity seem like matters of life and death. And maybe it is not so difficult to see why: if I am “A Person of Refined Taste,” and my partner plants a pink flamingo on the lawn, my existence-as-such is threatened. Let enough threats of that nature go by, and “Person of Refined Taste” is dead, probably with a garden gnome as her ignominious headstone.

(OK, in truth, I am the one who likes the flamingoes. But I admire them from afar, out of solicitude for my partner’s longevity.)

Being 'on fire' has some ambiguous connotations

Hi, Gang!

According to the stats monkeys, Utopaedia is “on fire.” (read all about it here)

This is just daft.

Nevertheless, I do appreciate the confirmation that I have good taste in graphics.

This is someone else's picture of a wild turkey, but there was a BIG one outside our window this morning -- that was exciting!

Hi, Gang!

As I have already told a few people, I am probably having too much fun at Camp Hip Replacement (aka Southern Indiana Rehab Hospital). I don’t know whether or not this means that the state of my joints is significantly related to my personality, or not. On one hand, I think I generally try to “make the best of it,” whatever “it” is; if I can have a good time in the hospital, I am probably one of those people who can have a good time just about anywhere, and my joints have little to do with it.

On the other hand, I have little doubt that over time, if joints deteriorate and there is nothing to be done for them, and they come to be the source of intractable pain for which there is no hope of future relief, that would wreak some havoc on anyone’s personality, mood and outlook. There were some days there before surgery that were about nothing but pain, that was getting worse and not better, and trying to accomplish something half-way human in spite of it. Making the best of that was a challenge; I was not winning.

Maybe that’s why I am having so much fun. I’m still in pretty much continuous pain, ranging from around a 2 or 3 out of 10 at best, and around a 6 or 7 out of 10 if I’ve been sitting at right angles on the edge of a dose of pain meds. But it’s a different kind of pain. I have good reason to believe that this pain is going to improve over time, and that if I do my exercises as prescribed, get the tight muscles stretched out and the weak muscles strengthened, and don’t let up, I will eventually get my whole body back to “normal” or something pretty close to it. THAT’S GREAT NEWS!

So it is maybe not “joints” specifically that are related to personality and mood, but pain and suffering generally, in my life most immediately and dramatically taking on the form of a severely osteo-arthritic joint, and then the sequelae of hip replacement surgery.

The idea of utopia is intimately related to idea of the relief or the conquest of suffering. So Camp Hip Replacement, it seems to me, lies in the direction of utopia — it’s far from utopia proper, but it’s on that side of the freeway. That may contribute to the fun of the place, too. The dream of a better world hovers around the place.

I am not making up the “camp” analogy. There are definitely elements of summer camp present in the experience. It is “time off” from work-a-day life. [With exceptions for crises! Maybe more about that another time.] Our time is structured; we have free time, and then we have individual and group activities, that include exercising and games, and small motor things sort of like crafts: physical therapy and occupational therapy. There is lots of colorful equipment. During the day, the two gyms, the inpatient gym and the outpatient gym, are full of people working on their programs in tandem with their therapists and assistants.

The physical therapists and occupational therapists have a number of characteristics in common with counselors. They need to be skilled in the activities so they can demonstrate and coach, and presumably are also skilled in knowing which activities a person needs to do, and how that is related to their physical condition; but they also need to be cheer-leaders: they are resolutely upbeat, cheerful and encouraging without being too pushy, but when necessary they become disciplinary; most of the therapists seem to have a real sense of call for this work, another point in common with counselors I have known; plus, they all wear polo shirts, track shoes, and lanyards.

The group activities director arranges something for just about every day: bingo, seasonally-themed competitions, group lunches with word games, movie nights. [I learned that the group activities program has something to do with the presence of "sub-acute" patients, which in turn has something to do with the facility's eligibility for Medicare placements. For me, it means I now have a small squishy koala bear and a planner as my winnings from last week's quiz lunch, and a set of thank-you cards and a magnetic refrigerator photo-frame from yesterday's. Plus I have met some of the other campers (er, patients). Everyone has a story.]

The meals are perhaps more dorm-like than camp like: heavy on the pasta, mashed potatoes and soft vegetables, light on the corn on the cob and bar-b-q. Then again, I have an atypical menu, because of being vegetarian, so there may be a little more bar-b-q than I think, on other people’s trays. We don’t have to report to the dining hall to eat, but we can, in which case there are more possibilities for conversation, and the questions are a lot like college dorm “what’s you major?” transforms into “what’re you in for?”).

And then there is the slightly Disney-esque quality of the inpatient PT gym, which has a whole side that looks like a stripped-down Main Street, USA, with a sidewalk, including ramp and curb; a grocery store stocked with food-facsimiles and a check-out lane; a life-like Victorian front doorway, with four steps and a landing; and a cozy, liveable apartment with a living room, kitchen/breakfast area, bathroom, and bedroom. The outpatient gym has a car in it, and a set of stairs with various surfaces (carpet, cement, wood). The whole point here is to be able to practice the Activities of Daily Living in more realistic surroundings, so that the adaptations we need to learn will be easier for us to remember.

We have bunk mates. Our families send us care packages, and cards. I have been taking “bucket baths” and washing my socks out by hand every night.

The only thing that is really missing compared to more traditional camp is the “nature.” Unless you want to count the human body as nature, which would make sense. Or our window, which looks out on an open courtyard, and beyond that a little woods. This morning, a very large wild turkey decided to put in an appearance. I would have taken a picture, but my cell phone just didn’t have the range. So that was this morning’s nature walk.

Taken on the whole, and all in all, Camp Hip Replacement has been a fairly pleasant quasi-vacation. (Thank you, God and Everyone!!)

Even so, the familiar homesickness that perennially accompanies camp is also beginning to trouble the edges of consciousness now. I am looking forward to getting on the bus for home.

a persistent representation of the drug seeker

Here’s what I’ve deduced about the rules that govern asking for pain medicine:

Patients (normal, good) are instructed to ask for pain medication so that they will keep their pain at a less bothersome level, like a “4″ or “5″ out of 10. Good patients will ask for what they need when they need it. (Corollary, patients don’t need to know what they have been prescribed to know what they need when they need it.)

Drug seekers (deviant, bad) want to take the maximum amount of pain medication they can. Therefore, drug seekers ask to know how much they are allowed to take, and when it is due, and drug seekers ask for what they are allowed to take shortly around the time it is due.

A patient who asks to know her dose is acting like a drug seeker; a patient who asks for the maximum amount of pain medication she is allowed to take shortly around the time it is due, is acting like a drug seeker.

Patients are encouraged to ask for what they NEED. The orders have presumably been written to make it possible for a normal person to keep from experiencing acute pain — which is sort of undesirable — so asking for what you are allowed to take around the time you are allowed to take it is probably what will prevent your pain from escalating (e.g., it might keep it at around a “4″ out of 10).

Drug seekers ask for more pain medication than they actually NEED. They ask for what they can get (e.g., a big dose of narcotic right around the time they can get it) just because they know they can get it, not because they NEED it (i.e., even if they are not having pain greater than around “4″ out of 10 – or who knows, maybe even less than that, really).

Someone who asks for the maximum amount she can take of a narcotic when her pain is at about a “4″ out of 10 is acting like a drug seeker, because she is asking for the pain medication she knows she can get, instead of asking for the pain medication that she feels she NEEDS.

So what I have learned at hip replacement camp is that my choice is between being indistinguishable from a drug seeker and maybe having less pain, or being distinguishable from a drug seeker by actually experiencing more acute pain before asking for more pain medication.

I officially take back what I told my daughter. Sometimes it IS a bad thing to be smart.

a form of involvement

Hi, Gang!

LOTS of new learning lately. It’s astounding how much a person can learn about herself, the human body, institutional dynamics, human beings in general and specific, communication, and cooperation when she has some major surgery. So while I haven’t been able to participate in work to the usual or fullest extent since having the long-awaited total hip replacement on Monday, I have been doing a lot of “finding things out” and “figuring things out” and “learning things.”

Maybe I will make a list of all these new bits and pieces of knowledge. Or not. But there is one that I have thought about a lot already, even though it is the one least related to the hip replacement . . . at least, not directly related. Indirectly, I feel the hip replacement is completely related, since it created the motivation to go ahead and chat online. Chatting online is something I normally shun, but this particular time, with nothing else to do between pt & ot sessions but lie in bed and suffer from the conversation deprivation that goes with that, it actually seemed inviting.

So we were chatting online, about cell phones, and texting, and plans, and that set of things. My friend said something like “I just really don’t need a fancy phone with a keyboard and all that, I just need some basic functionality” and I said something like “that’s exactly how I feel, too, really — except that I have this 12-year-old that I really want to communicate with, so . . .” So I got a phone with a keyboard, I learned how to use it, I learned some abbreviations, I do it, I text.

And suddenly my eyes were full of tears.

Because I instantly realized something. How much I love my daughter. And that under the circumstances, learning to text, and texting, was a specific, concrete measurement of that. I didn’t think of it that way at all as it was happening, of course. In fact, if anyone had suggested that there were some way to measure love, in that way — in a way that suggested that love could be “reduced” to a measurement — I would have gotten pretty argumentative. But it was suddenly clear that, of course, love can be measured in that other way that has something to do with demonstration, or performance. Some things just scream “I love you” — if a scream can be nonverbal. And this was one of those things. It was as if I had caught myself in the act of loving my daughter, precisely as much as I actually do, in a way I could recognize for what it is. In a way I could measure.

The only reason I learned how to text from my old phone was because Nod (Number One Daughter) would text me, all the time, from her iPod with some kind of free texting app she had tracked down. At the time, that was all she had to work with. The only reason I learned that it mattered to her, that it made it possible for her to communicate a little more, was because I read her texts, because I wanted to know what she wanted now, what she needed this time, what was going on with her. So then I automatically thought of getting the phone with the keyboard when I had to get a new one, because I was thinking I wanted it to be a little easier to answer those texts from Nod; and I easily began to think she probably needed a phone now, too, (even though we’d all agreed earlier that she’d get a phone when she was a little older) because I was seeing how she worked with this medium, and how integral a part of her world it was. I would never have gotten involved in this mode of communication at all if it weren’t for Nod.

Suddenly my eyes were full of tears because suddenly I recognized the difference between my friend and me, the difference between the perfectly possible me just like her and the current me who had gone this different route, the difference between “would just never have bothered with it” and “am into it,” was the measure of how important it is to me to be part of Nod’s world. And how important it is to me to be part of Nod’s world springs from nothing but the desire to be in the world that has Nod in it. The only word I know for that motive is “love.”

Hi, Gang!

The office desperately needs cleaning. It is so bad, it’s hard to know where to begin. The stacks have begun to grow stacks. So one of my immediate goals is to make a dent in the office clutter before the new year.

Today, I took down the accumulated notes that I had taped to the wall over the computer during the course of writing my dissertation. If I keep them they will be clutter — and I’m trying to reduce clutter! – but they have sentimental value – so it doesn’t feel quite right just to throw them away – so I’m archiving them here. They include:

• a flow chart of the chapters, with subsections, that bears very little resemblance to the finished version [in particular, it still has a ch. 2 that deals with suffering & threats to utopia; what makes utopia seem hopelessly impossible; the extent to which the problem of 'fallenness' is transposed into a secular key in the axiom of no prelinguistic consciousness of objectivity, the problem of constitutive subjectivity, alienation, etc.]
• a short statement from approximately the middle of the project summing up a perspective on utopia (“utopia intrinsically constituted out of suffering and imaginative resistance to it; because of this, ideas about the possible config. of utopia – like art works – contain traces & effects of social forces and ideas abt. their overcoming”)
• an insight about Irigaray I had written in an e-mail to my director, that I was afraid I would forget (“I want to say that Irigaray is working out a specific Bakhtinian chronotope that is ‘between-two’, where the ‘two’ are irreducibly different subjectivities not separated in themselves from their specific objectivities. This differs from, though it is related to, Adorno’s ‘no-man’s land’ and ‘non-Being’ — specifically in the explicit incorporation of sexually different subjectivies. (Of course, this — the sexually different — is Irigaray’s whole project in a nutshell. But it relates to utopia in that it is the source of the constitution of the utopian space-time she envisions — although she explicitly says it’s NOT utopian. Lucky me.)
• a statement about discourse: “Utopian discourse is a discourse of imaginary overcoming — the assertion that an alternative is at least thinkable, and if thinkable, then potentially potential — the potential to not not-be that becomes critical, that brings things and arrangements into existence, that differentiates. It could be, or not: but can it not not-be?
• a set of questions about suffering: How do we think about the end of suffering? — in what terms, in what images, on what time scale, in what practices, in what place
• a definition of utopia: “utopia: a representation of a world of suffering overcome (that representation might be literary, linguistic, ‘conceptual,’ visual-artistic, poetic, etc. — eventually it’s conceptual and imagistic, imaginary — that makes ‘utopia’ a pretty unstable symbol

The big one is the one I typed up in large print and printed on colored paper when things got very bad one day:

I’m actually pretty smart. I’m also capable of working very hard.

I care about this very much.

I am reasonably confident I know more about the topic of my dissertation than anyone on the committee, although there is much more to know. I am not claiming to know everything, or even to be 100% correct; I’m reporting my current level of understanding and observation.

This topic is well worth caring about. It seems abstract, but it is related to a practical, everyday issue that affects me and many others. It is directly related to how people begin to think of how to ‘change the world for the better,’ whatever the context.

My work may not be perfect, or THE BEST, but it is what I can do. It’s a decent start. Interested others might be able to advance it.

Eventually all of it went unconscious. At the time, every one of those sentences was a direct rebuttal to something going on in my head that I had to fight off daily (or more often) before I could get any work done. In the end half the project, at least, was overcoming the conviction that I couldn’t do it, and that if I did manage to do it, it wasn’t going to have been worth doing in the first place, or was going to be so INADEQUATE that anyone who actually knew the difference between good and not good would roll their eyes in contempt. The adage that the best is the enemy of the good (or perhaps more precisely, “the good is the enemy of the done”) definitely applied in my case.

Number One Daughter, her BFF, and I went to see The Voyage of the Dawn Treader last night. In that film, evil takes the form of a pervasive green mist (maybe someone’s idea of “the powers of the air”?) — or, it takes on the form of whatever concretizes some frightful imagining. Its modus operandi is to confuse, distract, dishearten, terrorize — so that its opponents will give up the fight. Not giving up is the critical factor in the triumph of good over evil.

I don’t imagine The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is “really” about finishing one’s dissertation. Knowing C.S. Lewis, I suppose it might “really” be about “the Christian life.” Nevertheless, it seems to dramatize a relevant insight or two with respect to dissertations and other projects of that kind: One’s own fantasies can be one’s fiercest opponents, and not giving up is the critical factor.