Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 276

The Monastery Of Prayer

In the wake of the Supreme Court ruling in Town of Greece v. Galloway, Morgan Guyton argues that “prayer as a pro forma function of ‘civic religion’” violates the spirit of Jesus’ teachings:

Nothing is more disrespectful to God than to use our supposed conversation with him as a way of leveraging our own legitimacy. … It’s not only cheap and shallow, but it actively sabotages the secret reward that God wants to give us through prayer. How can I have intimacy with God if my conversation with God is a public performance and an inner farce? There is nothing in the world like the rich intimacy that we receive from a true spiritual connection with God. And the way we gain this intimacy is when we pray in secret. Jesus did this over and over again in his ministry life: he would always retreat to a quiet place to pray.

To me, prayer is primarily about creating a monastery where we can sit and enjoy the presence of God. It’s awesome when we can share that monastery with other people. The world needs that monastery more desperately than ever in our era of spiritually alienating constant “connectivity.” … We can and should bring the monastery of prayer into public, but it must take the form of sharing a secret with others if they are to receive the secret reward that God wants to give them. If praying in public is about marking turf and standing up for the “rights” of “persecuted” Christians, then the secret reward is utterly lost. No inner monastery is created by a prayer that has been clipped onto the beginning of a secular meeting.

Our coverage of Greece v. Galloway is here.

Under The Influence

Kim Triedman, a novelist, ponders how writers pick up tricks from their reading. She recounts how taking a poetry class reshaped her work:

[A]fter reading a volume of poetry, I often came to my own work with something new – a rhythm, a tone, some pattern of usage – that hadn’t been part of my writing vocabulary before. Without even realizing it, through some subliminal process of absorption, my words began moving to a new kind of music. And each week, with each new poet I encountered, they were trying out a different dance. It was not conscious imitation; it was like a new way of hearing — of receiving other voices or harmonies and letting them filter down through my own process. Though most of those early poems weren’t altogether successful, each one represented a critical experiment in expression, allowing me to broaden and refine my own distinct poetic repertoire.

It’s an interesting phenomenon, this artistic give-and-take. As writers, we read and are enriched, see possibilities for language – syntax and rhythm, repetition and rhyme and enjambment – where before there were none. At times it is quite conscious: our attention is drawn to a specific mannerism or idiosyncrasy, and – recognizing it as such – we find ourselves playing with it in our own work.  More often, though, the transfer is subterranean: our work is expanded by the simple fact of our exposures, much the way a child’s vocabulary grows simply as a function of reading. The more we hear new things and see them in context, the more they become part of our own subconscious toolkits. It is at least some small part of what binds us together as writers: the ability to find beauty and novelty in other voices and to pass along something unique in our own.

Mental Health Break

Context is key:

These ladies are ADAM, a Dutch electronic dance music band who had a great idea for their latest video: To sing their single Go to Go while using a vibrator, trying to keep a straight face, the pleasure building up until they reached climax. Brilliant concept, perfect execution.

It’s great because this is actually what EDM is all about: To build yourself up into a frenzy and lose control while dancing. You can check their Facebook page here.

Dead Again: The Novel

Will Self is the latest novelist to sound the death knell for his chosen art form, linking its demise to the rise of the Internet:

There is one question alone that you must ask yourself in order to establish whether the serious novel will still retain cultural primacy and centrality in another 20 years. This is the question: if you accept that by then the vast majority of text will be read in digital form on devices linked to the web, do you also believe that those readers will voluntarily choose to disable that connectivity? If your answer to this is no, then the death of the novel is sealed out of your own mouth. …

I believe the serious novel will continue to be written and read, but it will be an art form on a par with easel painting or classical music: confined to a defined social and demographic group, requiring a degree of subsidy, a subject for historical scholarship rather than public discourse. The current resistance of a lot of the literate public to difficulty in the form is only a subconscious response to having a moribund message pushed at them. As a practising novelist, do I feel depressed about this? No, not particularly, except on those occasions when I breathe in too deeply and choke on my own decadence. I’ve no intention of writing fictions in the form of tweets or text messages – nor do I see my future in computer-games design. … [I]t is quite impossible for me to foretell what the new dominant narrative art form will be – if, that is, there is to be one at all.

James McQuade reframes the argument:

While the truth of Self’s proposition is hard to refute—writing this, I’ve checked my Facebook, Gmail and Instagram more times than I’d care to say—I don’t think what’s really at stake is the existence of the “serious” novel (there will always be people crazy enough to write them) but the existence of solitude, or portions of our day spent in profound concentration. It seems to me that human agency is often absent in discussions of how internet access is killing close reading and serious writing. As Self relates:

I switched to writing the first drafts of my fictions on a manual typewriter about a decade ago because of the inception of broadband internet. Even before this, the impulse to check email, buy something you didn’t need, or goggle at images of the unattainable was there—but at least there was the annoying tocsin of dial-up connection to awake you to your time-wasting. With broadband it became seamless: one second you were struggling over a sentence, the next you were buying oven gloves.

I find it strange that Self makes it sound as though he went from wrestling with a rather feisty sentence to placing an order for (probably overpriced) oven mitts without making the choice to do so, as if his life flash cut from the notebook toAmazon’s homepage. When we talk about the future of ‘serious’ reading and writing, the question that needs to be asked is how do we live with the incessant distractions, since the web isn’t leaving us any time soon.

Meanwhile, rolling his eyes at Self’s declaration, Daniel D’Addario collects a century’s worth of writers’ suggestions that the novel is in its death throes. The earliest:

1902: “[Novels] will be supplanted altogether by the daily newspaper… Newspaper writers have learned to color everyday events so well that to read them will give posterity a truer picture than the historic or descriptive novel could do.” –Jules Verne

Face Of The Day

Vincent Cianni photographs gays in the military:

In 2009, while listening to a radio interview, photographer Vincent Cianni was moved by the story of a mother whose son was in the Army and had been discharged under “don’t ask, don’t tell.” Although he wasn’t certain how he would create a series around the story, Cianni said the mother’s sense of love and pride prompted him to call her about contacting her son.

That initial call sparked a four-year project that took Cianni around the country interviewing and taking portraits of gay service members. His initial uncertainty about how he would develop the project eventually became a book, Gays in the Military, published by Daylight. Cianni began working on it while DADT was still policy, but the movement to repeal it was at its height, and he continued the project after the policy was lifted in 2011.

See more of Cianni’s work, and information about a book signing, here. Buy the book here.

Updike Upclose, Ctd

Adam Begley’s biography Updike continues to stir debate about its subject’s artistic merits. For the defense, David Baddiel:

He is the great poet of the ordinary life, of domesticity, of life as most people live it – as opposed to Saul Bellow, who writes mainly about life as deep-thinking intellectuals, academics and writers live it (and who was considered, mistakenly, a better writer throughout that time when the “Great Male Narcissists”, in David Foster Wallace’s phrase, ruled the literary cosmos). The problem for gravitas-chasing critics such as [Harold] Bloom and [James] Wood was that Updike writes small – and they mistook this for the size of his talent. “Small” doesn’t really do him justice. A better word would be “microscopic”: using the microscope of his extraordinary prose, Updike reveals and articulates the largest mysteries of life.  …

There is a problem with the way people read novels now, most obvious in Amazon reviews, in which readers consistently confuse whether or not a novel is good with whether or not they “like” the characters. Generally, readers imagine that if they don’t like the characters in a novel, it is a bad book. To make matters worse, whether or not they like the characters is usually based on whether or not the characters behave nicely. All of this is a disaster for literature and particularly for Updike, whose characters never behave nicely or, indeed, evilly – they just behave like people do, in a flawed way. “People are incorrigibly themselves” was his motto in creating his people.

But Jeffrey Meyers writes off Updike’s work, insisting his “prose sometimes seemed as if it had been written on a typewriter by a typewriter”:

Updike’s New Yorker reviews of literature and art were high-grade book reports with very little penetrating analysis, designed to be easily digested by his middle­brow readers. Mary McCarthy and Gore Vidal were more perceptive and amusing critics and, compared to Edmund Wilson and George Steiner, Updike was a dwarf among giants. …

Updike’s long career combined the blandness of the tranquillised 1950s with the narcissism of the Me Generation. In a brilliant, hilarious review in 1998, David Foster Wallace said that Updike’s principal character Rabbit Angstrom is “symptomatic of the prison of self-absorption and egoism that afflicted so many Americans”. He memorably called Updike “just a penis with a thesaurus” and, referring to his enormous output, asked, “Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?”

Updike’s novels are not nearly as good as those of Saul Bellow and Vladimir Nabokov and his tame non-fiction does not match the coruscating essays of Norman Mailer and James Baldwin. In the end, for all his cataract of words, Updike not only failed to transcend the superficial and vacuous New Yorker values but also came to embody them.

Previous Dish on Updike here and here.

Moms Deserve Better

Rebecca Mead blasts the “World’s Toughest Job” viral ad for “selling the myth of the ideal mother”:

In this case, the ad condescends to mothers: the apparent praise, delivered by a smarmy middle-management type, exaggerates the work of motherhood to the point of caricature, ringing insincere. (I’m reminded of the boss who publicly praises his assistant, saying, “She does all the real work!” Then why don’t you pay her the real money?) It also devalues women’s achievements outside the home, suggesting that the proper and natural route to female satisfaction runs through motherhood. Like many ads, it dismisses fathers, whether single fathers, gay fathers, or fathers sharing equally with female partners in childrearing.

This depiction of motherhood isn’t merely annoying. It offers cultural cover for attitudes that do real damage to women, men, and families, reinforcing baseless perceptions of women as less reliable in the workplace, low expectations for fathers at home. (If these are skills specific to moms, dads are necessarily secondary parents; despite some progress, fathers, on average, still spend less time on housework and child care, and more time at leisure, than mothers.)

A Short Story For Saturday

April Ayers Lawson’s “Virgin,” from the Fall 2010 Paris Review, begins this way:

Jake hadn’t meant to stare at her breasts, but there they were, absurdly beautiful, almost glowing above the plunging neckline of the faded blue dress. He’d read the press releases, of course. He recalled, from an article, her description of nursing her last child only six months before her first radiation treatment. Then he noticed she wasn’t wearing a bra.

What did they have inside them: saline or silicone? And how did these feel, respectively? He probably stared too long. (But how could she expect people not to stare when she wore a dress cut like that?)

She’d noticed.

Had his wife noticed? Doubtful. She noticed so little about him these days.

Read the rest here. Previous SSFSs here.

The View From Your Window Contest

You have until noon on Tuesday to guess it. City and/or state first, then country. Please put the location in the subject heading, along with any description within the email. If no one guesses the exact location, proximity counts.  Be sure to email entries to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Winner gets a free The View From Your Window book or two free gift subscriptions to the Dish. Have at it.

Tweets You Can Trust

TweetCred is a Chrome extension that ranks the credibility of tweets – a handy function for newshounds in event of a crisis. But, in a review of the product, Adrian Chen concludes that improving Twitter’s “credibility will take more than a browser plug-in; it will take a community effort to combat built-in incentives that encourage quick, thoughtless information sharing”:

A relatively small number of verified journalists set the pace for Twitter during breaking news events. Twitter, as part of its lucrative cultivation of media companies, created a two-tiered system to boost the signal of favored users. It stands to reason, then, that Twitter has the justification—some might even argue the obligation—to de-verify users if they recklessly tweet false information. This might be messy in practice, but the judicious de-verification of even one high-profile journalist would probably be enough to send a message to the rest.

There’s one other motivating factor that could ultimately outpace any algorithm: shame. As the worst of the Sandy photos were debunked, Twitter was seized by a giddy spasm of relief and a sort of collective embarrassment. Many of the same users who had just hours before breathlessly shared the photos now shared even more absurdly fake photos with good-humored chagrin. For those who passed along fake photos, the embarrassment from that one turbulent night has stayed thousands of ill-considered tweets and retweets. And, unlike Tweetcred, shame works on every browser.