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The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

Another grueling weekend in the Middle East, but some relief here at the Dish. Six posts worth revisiting: the perils of auto-correct; the dirty mouths of babes; Edmund White’s brilliant appreciation of friendship; visualizing Debussy; a religious history of the Great War; and an adorable nine-day-old white lion.

The most popular post of the weekend – by a mile – was The Worrying Vacuity Of Hillary Clinton; followed by Why Am I Moving Left?

19 more readers became subscribers this weekend. You can join them here - and get access to all the read-ons and Deep Dish - for a little as $1.99 month. Gift subscriptions are available here. One subscriber writes:

Celebrity is confusing. While your public persona seems so confessional, it’s easy to forget that I don’t actually know you. That what I think about you includes an enormous amount of projection. And that you certainly don’t know me. It’s the asymmetry, I think, that is so strange. Your persona speaks to me most days, through your writing, while you have received perhaps 10 emails from me, among god knows how many emails from 30,000 others.

Is it strange for you? It must be. How do you handle it? I hope that people respect your privacy and personal space, but you must have your share of unwanted encounters. Or are you one of the lucky few who is energized by such encounters?

The issue came up last weekend, when my girlfriend introduced me to Provincetown. She knows that I am a Dishhead, and that you are a Provincetownhead. On the ferry from Boston, she teased me about you. Asked me what I would say if we bumped into you. I said that of course we wouldn’t bump into you.

We got off the boat, and you were EVERYWHERE! Turns out it was bear week. Ten million beards, many resembling yours. Made me unreasonably happy to see your gathered tribe. And I see why you love the place itself. We spent all weekend walking, unmolested by celebrity, passing among the dunes from one unexpected oasis to the next, our souls sipping the serenity in each.

Beardless, both of us, yet happy.

May your private oases be safe and bright. May you and your husband take moments to be happy, despite all the troubles of the world.

See you in the morning.

(Photo by Mikael Colville-Anderson. See the poems it illustrated here.)

The Lie Behind The War

Katie Zavadski, fresh from a Dishternship, nails down a critical fact in the latest Israel-Hamas death-match. As the Dish has noted before, the Israeli government knew from the get-go that the murderers of three Israeli teens – the incident that set off this bloody chain of events – were not doing official Hamas’ bidding even in the West Bank, let alone Gaza:

After Israel’s top leadership exhaustively blamed Hamas for kidnap of 3 teens, they’ve now admitted killers were acting as “lone cell.”

— Sheera Frenkel (@sheeraf) July 25, 2014

This was confirmed by Mickey Rosenfeld, the police spokesman:

Israeli police MickeyRosenfeld tells me men who killed 3 Israeli teens def lone cell, hamas affiliated but not operating under leadership1/2

— Jon Donnison (@JonDonnison) July 25, 2014

So the entire swoop on the West Bank against Hamas, which soon escalated into all-out war, was based on a a false premise, uttered by Bibi Netanyahu thus: “Hamas is responsible, and Hamas will pay.” It’s worth recalling in that context that Hamas had recently been very quiet on the rockets front:

Fewer rockets were fired from Gaza in 2013 than in any year since 2001, and nearly all those that were fired between the November 2012 ceasefire and the current crisis were launched by groups other than Hamas; the Israeli security establishment testified to the aggressive anti-rocket efforts made by the new police force Hamas established specifically for that purpose.

Netanyahu saw an opportunity to hammer Hamas and punish the PA for cooperating with them. He took it. It disempowers both and makes an even more radical successor more likely. But if you assume that Netanyahu has no intention of ever coming to a peace agreement, a more radical Palestinian population helps justify that. Meanwhile, the core project of a permanent Greater Israel is advanced.

After watching this situation for too many years now, I have developed one key measurement: follow the settlements. Everything that happens is designed for their benefit. And that goes for the current ghastly carnage. It’s staggering what the Israeli government will sacrifice to advance the settlements.

(Photo: The dead body of Jalila Ayad, a Christian woman killed in an Israeli airstrike on her house in Gaza City, is carried to the Al-Shifa hospital morgue on July 27, 2014. By Mohammed Talatene/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images.)

Gazing At The Stars And Finding God

In an interview about their forthcoming book, Would You Baptize an Extraterrestrial?, Brother Guy Consolmagno and Father Paul Mueller – both Jesuit priests who are planetary scientists at the Vatican Observatory – respond to a question about whether or not science “disproves” the Bible:

Guy: Science doesn’t prove. Science describes. The Bible isn’t a book of propositions to be proved or disproved; it’s a conversation about God. So that question presupposes a radically false idea of what science is, and what the Bible is.

Paul: We never ask if science disproves Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, though the play includes statements that are at odds with modern science. We never ask if science disproves Maximilian Kolbe’s self-sacrificing love, though his own knowledge of science would be seventy years out of date today. Lovers don’t look to science to prove the reality of their love. Why on earth would we want to go to science for proof of the reality of God’s love?

Their thoughts on how the Bible does – and does not – inform their scientific inquiry:

Paul: Science gets along just fine, thank you, without needing to make any reference at all to the Bible. But if you’re going to do science at all, you have to first presuppose that the natural world is somehow orderly and intelligible. Our expectation that the world is that way emerges from the Biblical creation stories. Of course the Bible also informs our moral framework for thinking about how to use our scientific knowledge – will we use science for domination and power, or for service and love?

Guy: Revealed religion helps me understand why I want to do science. Science – understanding this physical world we live in – is something everyone wants to do. It’s what an infant is trying to do when he wants to touch and taste everything in reach; it’s what a toddler is trying to do when she keeps asking, “Why?” I found the hunger for science in my students when I was a Peace Corps teacher in the third world. So, why? Why this hunger? What are we really hungry for?

It reminds me of what the German theologian (and Jesuit) Karl Rahner called the “wovorher” and “woraufhin” – the thing outside us we are looking for, and the thing inside us that drives us to look. Ultimately it is the hunger for God: God the Creator. When you understand that, it changes the way you do science. The temptation is to do science for honor or glory, or financial success, or tenure. But those aren’t the deeper reasons why we’re driven to ask why. And achieving them won’t satisfy that hunger.

(Photo of a monastery under the stars by Soren Schaper)

Heroes On A Human Scale

Dana Staves considers how reading Virginia Woolf’s diary helped her reconsider the literary giant:

Her final entry is unremarkable. But it’s her final sentences that broke my heart, that has haunted me for months to follow: “And now with some pleasure I find that it’s seven; and must cook dinner. Haddock and sausage meat. I think it is true that one gains a certain hold on sausage and haddock by writing them down.”

Sausage and haddock? She’s Virginia Woolf, she terrifies me and astounds me, and I love her, and her final written words to the world of her diary, before she took her own life three weeks later, is about sausage and haddock. The cook in me smirked, the way we smile over a bittersweet memory of loved ones who have passed. After all that, it’s sausage and haddock. It’s life. But the writer in me – the part of me that doesn’t always have food on the brain – stalled out.

We build up authors so that they become epic and mythic, each huddled away on their corners of a literary Mount Olympus, scribbling or typing. The place smells of coffee and books and anxiety. But in the end, they’re people, not gods. They’re people who must eat dinner and fear bombs and attempt to get a handle on cooking sausage and haddock. This is a challenge as big as writing The Waves or Mrs. Dalloway. Virginia Woolf was epic to me. But she was also just a person. She could no more fix my insecurity than fix her own.

Living With Loss

Ben Watts reviews the above short film, Where Do Lilacs Come From, which movingly portrays the perspective of a man with Alzheimer’s:

Writers are often told: “Write what you know”. For Where Do Lilacs Come From, [writer/director Matthew] Thorne did just that, ripping a band-aid off painful true-life events and dramatizing them for the screen. “I had a lot of memories from when I was younger of my dad losing his mother to Alzheimer’s,” Thorne said. “[Those memories] really became the genesis for the film — particularly the pain my dad went through. It was a very strange experience being reintroduced to your Grandmother every day as though she had never met you…You almost start to wonder whether that’s normal. I really wanted to tell a story from her perspective — what it might be like to live in a world where present and past don’t have a clear delineation.” On that front, Thorne excels magnificently, tapping into the dreamlike-quality of memory loss with precision. The extent of Chris’ Alzheimer’s is not apparent until Michael holds up a framed photograph and shows it to his father.

“That’s Mom,” Michael says. “Wasn’t she beautiful?”

“She’s probably in the house,” Chris says.

“No. Mom’s gone now.”

“Oh,” Chris says, pointing to a man in the picture. “Does he know?”

Michael takes a deep breath, trying to keep his composure. “That’s you, Dad.”

Richard Rodriguez’s Multitudes

Pico Iyer marvels at the breadth and constant surprises of the gay Catholic Richard Rodriguez’s writing, noting that while his latest book, Darling, ostensibly is about religion, “it’s a central feature of his thinking that nothing—not even loneliness—is ever considered in isolation”:

[E]ven as the book with the ceremonial Catholic title Days of Obligation kept on referring to sex, so his new one, which purports to be about the desert monotheisms, calls itself Darling. Sometimes such gestures may strike readers as a bit much, but to his credit, Rodriguez does not try to link earthly and heavenly love as John Donne does, or to blend them with the abandoned ease of the Islamic high priest of Californian fashion, Rumi. Nor does he follow the familiar path of a gay believer wondering why the religion he serves so faithfully is ready to exile him for his sexual preferences.

Rather, this unpredictable maverick throws all his variegated interests into the mix and lets the sparks fly.

He’s irreverent even toward the objects of his reverence—“Is God dead?” he sincerely asked in his first book—and grave about those issues (computer technology) that others might be flip about. When fondly recalling the Sisters of Mercy who educated him, he suddenly turns to the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence, an order of gay drag queens whose wild impiety he’d once written against. Now, however, as he watches them rattle cans for charity and jolly along some homeless teenagers, he has to concede that good works can make even the most outrageous poses irrelevant.

Darling begins by asserting that it will address the world in the wake of September 11 and try to bring the writer’s Catholicism into a better relation with its desert brother Islam. Happily, it soon abandons that somewhat rote mission for a much more ungovernable and unassimilable wander across everything from the decline of the American newspaper to the debate over gay marriage, from Cesar Chavez to the world of camp… Rodriguez throws off a constant fireworks display of suggestions and reveals more in an aside than others do in self-important volumes. As you read, you notice how often Don Quixote keeps recurring, and death notices, and meditations on the “tyranny of American optimism,” each one gaining new power with every recurrence, and reminding us of how the pursuit of happiness leaves us sad. The overall mosaic is far more glittering than any of its parts.

Previous Dish on Darling here, here, and here. Check out my Deep Dish conversation with Richard about the book here.

Can The Christian Left Rise?

Elizabeth Stoker Bruenig finds reason to hope so:

If the Reason-Rupe and PRRI reports are right, millennials just might be opting out of the partisan approach to politics altogether, which means the partisan leash on religious constituencies might just be fraying. This makes coalitions like the faith and family left — which has commitments all across the political spectrum, founded in faith rather than political expediency — seem a lot more viable in the long run. In short, the weaker the partisan system becomes, the more nuanced the religious story about politics can become. And this means prime time for the Christian left to re-enter the political stage.

And what a smashing re-entry we’re set for, with figures like Pope Francis casually backhanding capitalism and corporate greed in graceful continuity with his praise of family life, solidarity and a culture of life.

At this very moment, different factions of the religious left are duking it out over Obama’s proposed executive order banning discrimination against LGBT workers on behalf of federal contractors, and though the diversity of the religious left might concern some, the big picture is that the religious left is a growing force for political influence. As time passes and the mantle of political participation passes from prior partisan generations down to millennials, we might see that influence continue to grow, re-invigorating some of the finest features of the Christian tradition: to resist categorization, pull hard for the oppressed and downtrodden and insist upon hope while coping with the realities of power.

But Michael Peppard is skeptical:

[M]oral attitudes and emphases associated with progressives are on the ascendant, but that does not necessarily translate into a “Religious Left” or “Christian Left.” Any comparison with the Religious Right (Moral Majority and Christian Coalition) of the 80s-90s must acknowledge how hard-won and onerous were the achievements of its leaders. Ralph Reed was one of the greatest community organizers of the 20th century.

A counter-movement would need to show regular attendance, financial support, and tenacious action. A movement needs, in short, committed bodies—not just responses to poll questions or clicks on a social action website. The Religious Right still has way more committed bodies, people organized and reared through cohesive, structured communities. There is denominational affinity, some ethnic affinity, and perhaps more importantly, geographical concentration that leads to sustained cultural engagement.

Romantic Cringe-Comedy

A NSFW example of the genre:

Ivan Kander calls Dinner With Holly the “illegitimate love child” of Curb Your Enthusiasm and American Pie:

The style of humor, while scripted, feels delightfully improvisational. The characters in the film are flying by the seat of their pants, and the audience, in turn, is buckled in for the awkwardly satisfying ride.

The film’s natural, yet hilarious, style is no accident. The entire creative team is close in real life: Kristin Slaysman, who plays Anna, is director Josh Crockett’s girlfriend, and Bridget Moloney (the titular Holly) is Dan Sinclair’s Wife. Bob Turton, who portrays Rob, is an old friend from Northwestern. The film was shot over the course of two days in Dan and Bridget’s house, with the rest of the crew consisting of close friends and other former classmates (including DP Dustin Pearlman). That camaraderie definitely comes through in the film—only people this comfortable with one another could make their audience feel so uncomfortable.

Much Love

Polyamory is getting more popular:

Increasingly, polyamorous people—not to be confused with the prairie-dress-clad fundamentalist polygamists—are all around us. By some estimates, there are now roughly a half-million polyamorous relationships in the U.S., though underreporting is common. Some sex researchers put the number even higher, at 4 to 5 percent of all adults, or 10 to 12 million people. More often than not, they’re just office workers who find standard picket-fence partnerships dull. Or, like Sarah, they’re bisexuals trying to fulfill both halves of their sexual identities. Or they’re long-term couples who don’t happen to think sexual exclusivity is the key to intimacy.

Elisabeth Sheff, a sociologist who interviewed 40 polyamorous people over the course of several years for her recent book, The Polyamorists Next Door, says that polyamorous configurations with more than three people tend to be rarer and have more turnover. “Polys” are more likely to be liberal and educated, she said, and in the rare cases that they do practice religion, it’s usually paganism or Unitarian Universalism.

Polys differentiate themselves from swingers because they are emotionally, not just sexually, involved with the other partners they date. And polyamorous arrangements are not quite the same as “open relationships” because in polyamory, the third or fourth or fifth partner is just as integral to the relationship as the first two are.

Miri Mogilevsky praises Olga Khazan’s piece as “well-researched, balanced, and accurate overall,” but takes the opportunity to debunk some myths about the practice. Among them? “Bisexual people try polyamory because it’s not fulfilling to only date a person of one gender”:

Some do, yes. But this also ties into an unfortunate, harmful, and inaccurate myth about bisexual people: that they will inevitably cheat on you because they “need” to be with someone of another gender. Myths like these, in turn, contribute to prejudice and discrimination against bisexual people, who may face such hurtful attitudes both from the straight majority and from gays and lesbians.

For many bisexual people, the gender of their partner isn’t nearly as essential a factor as others seem to think it is. We maynoticeit, sure, but we don’t sit around thinking, “I’m very glad that I’m dating both Suzie and Tom because Suzie is a girl and Tom is a boy!” It’s just like you can be attracted to blondes, brunettes,andredheads, without necessarily feeling stifled and unfulfilled if you’re only dating brunettes at a given point in time.

The Dish thread “But What If Three People Love Each Other?” is here.

Typos Gone Tawdry

Autocorrect’s tendencies remain filthy as ever:

There is, of course, some legacy prudishness to autocorrect—the tendency, for example, of hell to become he’ll—but for the most part the global menagerie has, in its unflagging vulgarity, produced a linguistic corpus that skews blue. Where [patent inventor Dean] Hachamovitch did away with the scutwork, the new autocorrect introduces the slutwork and the smutwork. When one reads such hilarious-error collections as Damn You Autocorrect, one can’t help but feel skeptical. Some entries beggar the imagination; it’s hard to believe that Volvos could become vulvas as often as they seem to. But even if we assume a significant rate of fraud, we are forced to conclude—given that autocorrect draws from group behavior—that the unpublished typing of our society is more unpublishable than we ever imagined.

(Image via Damn You Autocorrect)