Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 175

Thanks and See You Later

by Freddie deBoer

I would like to thank Andrew, Patrick, Chris, and the entire Dish crew for the opportunity. (And the money.) It’s been a lot of fun. I want to thank the team here for making things so streamlined for me, particularly given that I sent like a dozen emails asking questions, and I want to thank Andrew for the chance to put my feet up on his desk. It’s been fun.

I also want to thank all of you, for the opportunity to invade your space for awhile, and for all the emails. Even the many, many cranky ones. I am not an easy person to know. I have pretty much been a take-it-or-leave-it, love-me-or-hate-me deal for my whole life, even as a little kid. So I appreciate your patience and your candor, and I’m glad to have had the chance to occupy your space for a little while. Writing, for me, is pathological in the simple sense. I don’t stop for long mostly because I don’t know how. This is about the only way I’ve ever found to distract my mind for long enough that it stops beating itself up, and so I have to thank Andrew and his team and all of you for the opportunity to seek that solace here. It’s my privilege. It’s my privilege.

As for the future, you can check me over at my website, although I reckon I’ll be pretty busy this fall. In the long term, I hope I still get the opportunity to speak to fine people such as yourselves, and that when I do, I tell the truth. Cheers.

The Bad Boy Of Belles-Lettres

by Dish Staff

Sam Leith ponders the British press’ vexed relationship with Martin Amis:

Has there in living memory been a writer whom we (by which I mean the papers, mostly) so assiduously seek out for comment – we task him to review tennis, terrorism, pornography, the state of the nation – and whom we are then so keen to denounce as worthless? In recent years his public interventions on everything from Islamist terror to population demographics have caused mini shitstorms; and critics seem to take a particular, giant-killing glee in slamming his fiction. Setting out to write a retrospective essay on his work and reputation, the implied title you find yourself reaching for is “in defence of … ” It’s as if, and in answer to some inchoate public need, we demand of Amis that he say things in public so we can all agree on what an ass he is.

Pivoting off of Leith’s essay, Emily Temple wonders why America has so few literary bomb-throwers:

As I read the article, I couldn’t help but be slightly jealous. It’s true that Amis is a singular fellow, but it seems like all of the real contemporary enfants terribles in the literary world come to us from overseas. Michel Houellebecq, Salman Rushdie, V.S. Naipaul, Will Self (just read this delightfully snooty Q&A), etc. Where oh where is the American Martin Amis? (The fact that Amis somewhat recently moved to Brooklyn is not relevant; he is not ours.) Is there a writer we love to hate? Or one who picks fights with equal glee?

No. You know who we’ve got? Franzen. Whiny, whiny Jonathan Franzen. Our hatred of him is there, but it’s utterly joyless. We don’t love to hate him. He just kind of pisses everyone off. And unlike their reactions to Amis, which are frequently ambivalent and all over the map, the critics pretty much universally enjoy Franzen’s writing – which leaves us arguing about whether or not he’s right about Twitter.

Revisiting Leukerbad

by Dish Staff

Teju Cole experiences a sense of communion while rereading James Baldwin’s 1955 essay “Stranger in the Village” in the tiny Swiss hamlet in which it was written:

I took a room at the Hotel Mercure Bristol the night I arrived. I opened the windows to a dark view, but I knew that in the darkness loomed the Daubenhorn mountain. I ran a hot bath and lay neck-deep in the water with my old paperback copy of “Notes of a Native Son.” The tinny sound from my laptop was Bessie Smith singing “I’m Wild About That Thing,” a filthy blues number and a masterpiece of plausible deniability: “Don’t hold it baby when I cry / Give me every bit of it, else I’d die / I’m wild about that thing.” She could be singing about a trombone.

And it was there in the bath, with his words and her voice, that I had my body-double moment: here I was in Leukerbad, with Bessie Smith singing across the years from 1929; and I am black like him; and I am slender; and have a gap in my front teeth; and am not especially tall (no, write it: short); and am cool on the page and animated in person, except when it is the other way around; and I was once a fervid teen-age preacher (Baldwin: “Nothing that has happened to me since equals the power and the glory that I sometimes felt when, in the middle of a sermon, I knew that I was somehow, by some miracle, really carrying, as they said, ‘the Word’ – when the church and I were one”); and I, too, left the church; and I call New York home even when not living there; and feel myself in all places, from New York City to rural Switzerland, the custodian of a black body, and have to find the language for all of what that means to me and to the people who look at me. The ancestor had briefly taken possession of the descendant. It was a moment of identification, and in the days that followed that moment was a guide.

Losing The Narrative

by Dish Staff

Rachel Shteir, who calls (NYT) writing “daily frustration, not to mention humiliation,” mulls writers’ failures:

I remember the first time I felt like a bona fide failure as a writer. This feeling of nausea washed over me, but it was confusing because it appeared at the exact moment when I was supposed to be feeling success. It was when I finished my first book and realized there were some things in it that I hated, things that were made all the more hideous to me whenever people said, “You must have such a sense of accomplishment.” I asked a more experienced writer if she ever got over this nauseated feeling. She didn’t reassure me. “Oh, that never goes away.”

Every writer has subjects that are our “Moby-Dicks,” the ones we imagine will transform us, more than the others, catapulting us to some other more pleasant climate.

Instead, they sink us. Help, help, we cry, as we drift out to sea on a leaky lifeboat. Doomed.

Mental Health Break

by Dish Staff

Imagining a new soundtrack for Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life:

What’s Wrong With Anglophone Philosophy?

by Dish Staff

Roger Scruton offers a diagnosis:

Academic philosophers in the English speaking world still regard philosophy as Locke defined it in the 17th century, as “the handmaiden of the sciences”: it doesn’t explore the world beyond science but the limits of science, with the result that philosophy doesn’t really intrude into the public world. In the early 20th century were were caught up by the movement to form analytical philosophy, based in the study of logic, the foundations of mathematics, the syntax of ordinary language, the validity of arguments, something very formal. So when people have a big question, especially now since the decline of the orthodox religions, they don’t turn to philosophy for the answer but try to formulate it in whatever technical words have been bequeathed to them, and when a scientist comes along and says “I have the answer,” or even “there is no question,” they think “this guy knows what he’s talking about, I’d better lean on him.”

A War Poet In Palestine

by Dish Staff

Nina Martyris considers the enduring relevance of Siegfried Sassoon, who was stationed in Gaza briefly in 1918:

To read Sassoon on war is to read about Israel and Gaza today. After he left Palestine, he wrote a tightly crafted sonnet called “Ancient History” on the fratricidal nature of war, told through the allegory of Cain and Abel. Ironically, that same story of brotherly murder provided the name of Israel’s Operation Brother’s Keeper, launched to search the West Bank for the three Israeli teenagers whose abduction and murder sparked the ongoing clash. In Sassoon’s scorching parable, Adam stands in for the cynical old politicians who watch their young kill one another. Described as “a brown old vulture in the rain,” Adam ponders over the character of his two sons. He admires Cain, who is “Hungry and fierce with deeds of huge desire,” and despises Abel, “soft and fair – / A lover with disaster in his face.” Adam even justifies Cain’s murdering his own brother because even murder is more tolerable than weakness: “Afraid to fight; was murder more disgrace?” In the end, murder only begets murder, and the vulture finds both his “lovely sons were dead.”

What makes this poem a moral grenade is its self-awareness. Sassoon knew that there were bits of Cain and Abel tussling inside him. At the start of the war, he had been a soldier filled with bloodlust, and made quite a reputation for himself for his revenge killings of Germans. But he had also sickened of the slaughter and campaigned for it to stop. In Sassoon’s case, Abel finally won, but the current war, with its far more ancient and complex metabolism, is inevitably stamped with the mark of Cain.

(Photo of Sassoon by George Charles Beresford via Wikimedia Commons)

Gay Love Comes Of Age

by Dish Staff

Kevin Fallon praises the new film Love Is Strange for its depiction of gay romance later in life:

So often when a film is made about a gay romance, the characters are young and promiscuous, or young and questioning, or young and in love, or young and trying to find themselves and their place in the world. Mostly, though, they are young.

But when George climbs into bed with Ben midway through the film and the two characters just hold each other, with all the comfort and feeling of men who have been in love for 40 years, it was a portrayal of a gay relationship that I don’t think I had ever seen before on screen. I can’t think of another example of older, settled gay film characters long into their lives that young gay people could look at and think, “One day I hope that my partner and I will be like that, like them.”

For all of the progress in depicting modern gay relationships in film now, there has never been one for people to aspire to in the future. We’ve seen men meet the men they want to grow old with, but we’ve never seen what it’s like when they actually get old. More importantly, that they can be happy.

Kinkysexuals?

by Dish Staff

Jillian Keenan argues that kink counts as a sexual orientation:

We don’t choose kink. Yes, there are vanilla people who, inspired by popular books or movies, choose to experiment with BDSM. (There are also straight people who choose to experiment with same-sex attraction, as anyone who went to college on a coast can attest.) And some people find BDSM later in life, don’t feel that it’s an orientation they were born with, and yet are full and equal members of the BDSM community (to the extent that such a thing even exists) in every way. But that doesn’t minimize the fact that, for a huge portion of kinky people, BDSM is not a choice, a hobby, or a phase. Kink is often so fundamental to our sexual identities that it has to be, at least in some cases, an orientation.

From the outside, “this thing we do” seems like nothing more than weird sex stuff. I understand that. But, from the inside, kink is so much more than merely physical. Our orientation is so deeply rooted that many of us feel we were born with it. For us, kink mixes language, ritual, trust, power, pleasure, pain, and identity in a way that can’t be captured by a stereotype. You know what else mixes language, ritual, trust, power, pleasure, pain, and identity? Love. Every kind of love.

A Dickish Move

by Dish Staff

Disney dudes’ dicks: what your favorite princes look like naked http://t.co/4YPdSRl3Zp http://t.co/peG1MRXZOX

— Jezebel (@Jezebel) August 18, 2014

Over at Jezebel, Tracie Egan Morrissey and Tara Jacoby have put together an illustrated guide to the Disney princes’ nether regions. Emily Shire is not amused:

[I]t is perturbing to see the site proudly revel in the double standard of giving their favorite Disney characters “idealized” genitals and the villains smaller, less “attractive” ones. To briefly indulge in a close-reading of the Disney prince dick descriptions (because what else am I going to do with my college degree in history and literature), Morissey perpetuates the same pressure on men to exhibit a certain physique that she critiqued Disney of doing to women. Of Cinderella‘s Prince Charming, she writes:

The perfect guy has the perfect dick: like eight or nine inches, thick—but not too thick otherwise it’s painful—rock hard with a nice throbbing vein. He’s groomed perfectly in a way that’s considerate of lovers without being too gay porn-y about it.

In contrast, Beauty and the Beast‘s Gaston—the asshole/villain—has “a small dick—very tiny—pube-less and uncut.” So smaller, uncircumcised penises are conflated with being a jerk and a loser. Jezebel also dabbles in some racial stereotypes by ensuring that Prince Naveen—the sole African American male in the collection—has the longest gentalia. It’s unavoidable (and unfortunately) noticeable because it’s the only penis that doesn’t actually fit in the image frame. … If a male-focused site, let’s say BroBible, drew The Little Mermaid‘s Ursula with, oh, a large labia and full-bush pubes to conflate these female genital characteristics with her negative personality, I doubt any writer at Jezebel, or any feminists, would find it humorous, or remotely acceptable.