Andrew Sullivan's Blog, page 94

At The Limits Of Language

Recently we featured a review of scholar and priest Rowan Williams’ new book, The Edge of Words: God and the Habits of Language. In an interview that explores its themes, Williams articulates the difficulties of speaking and writing about God:

One philosophical friend of mine, years ago, used to talk about what she called ‘tight-corner apophaticism’, that is turning to negative theology or language about mystery whenever things get difficult. That really won’t do. If you look at the really great figures of Christian thinking, like Augustine or Aquinas, or indeed Richard Hooker, you see them racking their brains over solutions and saying, ‘yes, this may be nearly it’, and ‘we need to say something like that’, and ‘okay, there’s a bit of unfinished business there’, but really that’s about as far as we can go. We’ve stretched every muscle, we’ve strained every resource, we have seen just a glimpse of how it might all fit together, but at that point we really do have to acknowledge that it is God we’re talking about, and therefore we don’t expect to have it tied up.

So Aquinas famously, in his old age – well, middle age, he did have a stroke – says ‘everything I’ve written looks like straw’. He just sort of broke. And Augustine can speak in his commentary on the Psalms about how our language is stretched out, pulled out, stretched like a string on an instrument, as tight as you can get, and then God touches it. Richard Hooker says, right at the beginning of his Ecclesiastical Polity, that ‘our safest eloquence is silence’. Although we have received revelation of course, although we can have confidence that we’re not talking nonsense, we just need that reminder that it is God we are talking about. Therefore whatever we say, more than in most cases of speaking truth, it has to have that extra dimension of openness.

A Story About Escaping Your Own Stupidity

A former cop explains how he became an unlikely legend at New York’s 1st Precinct:

Paul Bacon is also the author of the memoir Bad Cop. His website is here. Previous storytelling on the Dish here.

Love In The Time Of Sexting

After the celebrity photo hackings earlier this year, Jenna Wortham decided to explore “the way that our phones … foster intimate interactions that feel so personal and deep, despite being relayed through a machine.” She elaborates on why she started her “Everybody Sexts” project, which pairs illustrations of NSFW selfies with short interviews:

I think that everybody sexts. Not everyone sends nude photos, of course, for a variety of reasons. But many people I’ve talked to define a sext as anything sent with sexual intent, be it a suggestive Gchat exchange, a racy photo, a suggestive Snapchat, or even those aqua-blue droplets of sweat emoji.

I asked people I knew — and many I didn’t — to talk to me about sexts and the stories behind them, the risks, perceived and real, and why they did it, knowing that they could be shared beyond their control. Lastly, I asked them to share a nude that they had sent to someone. And so many people did, without hesitation, or requiring anything in exchange. I was floored by their openness, and the expanse of human emotions and experiences on display. What I discovered, mainly, is that sexting — like anything else done on our phones — was mostly just meant to be fun, for fun, grown folks doing what grown folks do.

How “K,” a 30-year-old writer in Chicago, describes her sext life:

I sent my first sext the very first second cell phones with cameras were invented. It was very posed — white sheets semi-covering artfully displayed boobs. Now, I send them whenever the mood strikes, or I feel like I look especially great. It has to be someone I’ve been seriously dating for a long time and someone who will be properly in awe of my magnificent everything. I would not send a nude to someone I was not in a trusted relationship with, and anyone in a trusted relationship with me knows better than to trifle with that trust.

I sent this [image] to my girlfriend in July, when she was off on tour with her band. She was sharing rooms with her bandmates every night and had zero privacy, and I wanted to torture her. She really, really liked it and sent me several desperate texts an hour for the rest of the day. This is the exact effect I hoped for.

Another entry:

S, 25

Cultural worker, Brooklyn

Q. Tell me about this image [seen above].

A. I sent this photo to my boyfriend, from his bedroom. He leaves much earlier for work than I do. I wanted to show him what he was missing.

Q. What was his response?

A. “Oh my lord.”

Keep reading here for more.

(Illustration by Melody Newcomb)

Face Of The Day

For his series Shot Face, Tim Charles photographed people in the process of quickly downing booze:

Charles came up with the idea for Shot Face while out on the town with his girlfriend one weekend night. The photographer got a kick out of watching his girlfriend’s reaction to one particular round that night, and in the dimly lit bar, a lightbulb went off. … Charles said that roughly half of the participants in the series were friends of his. The other half, he explained, are people found on a casting website, Craigslist and Gumtree. Convincing friends to take shots, he said, wasn’t difficult at all… getting strangers to let you take photos of them while offering them alcohol, on the other hand, did seem a bit dodgy.

He elaborates:

The idea of going through a moment of temporary mental and physical discomfort to reach a potentially better end result is interesting and something I wanted to explore. Not only that, but doing a shot is probably one of the only times people will pull a somewhat ugly face in public and are stripped of any image of self we try to convey. This is instead often replaced with a pure expression of human vulnerability, sometimes demonstrated through a gag reflex! It was this fleeting moment of stripping all thoughts away apart from the battle with the shot that I wanted to capture.

See more of his work here and here.

The Power Of Playtime

Noting the release of a new Jacques Tati box set from Criterion, Michael Wood recalls a standout scene from Playtime:

Playtime settles down into the masterpiece it finally is at a very specific moment: the satire vanishes, and you realise the work is not about the folly of advertising and conformity but about the way we enthusiastically build worlds we can’t live in – and live in them.

Hulot meets an old army friend on the street. The friend invites him into his brand-new flat for a drink, and we witness the whole thing from outside. The flat is on the ground floor and the living room has a vast picture window, as if domestic life were a department store display. Hulot greets the man’s wife and daughter, and takes his leave when they are all set to show him a home movie. The film we are watching is a silent one at this point because of the glass, or silent as far as its action is concerned: we can hear the buses and cars on the street. Then the camera moves slightly to the right, showing the next picture-window flat, different people, similar scene. After a while the camera lifts to show the flats on the next floor, and we now see four pretty much identical apartments (and scenes) at once. The effect is of a split screen, four separate shots combined. But the screen isn’t split, this is rectangular, quadruplicated city life. Why are the people so happy here? Why aren’t they screaming, as Philip Larkin might say. For good measure … one of the inhabitants of one of the flats turns out to be the man Hulot has been trying all day to see in his glassy office. Now he meets him on the street when the man walks his dog, and they have the conversation they have been failing to have.

Overshare Of The Week

From Neal Pollack’s entertaining 1,700-word opus titled “I Shat Myself In A Lexus Press Car”:

My house was about 14 miles away, most of it on open highway. I turned on the seat heaters, along with Sirius XM Radio. The station, I believe, was “Willie’s Roadhouse.”

Something unpleasant hitched in my gut.

Huh, I thought. That’s weird.

Then it hitched again. There was a gurgle, and a churn. Suddenly, I felt a strong pressing on my abdomen. It was very strange. I had eaten a light dinner that night. At the movies, Ben and I had shared a bowl of popcorn, and I’d had a beer, but it had been a long movie, and I wasn’t full.

But there it was.

My stomach gave an audible groan. I felt a full-on descent in my colon.

Oh no.

I began to sweat. My exit wasn’t for several miles. The station began to play Your Cheatin’ Heart, by Hank Williams.

Your cheatin’ heart

Will make you weep

You’ll cry and cry

And try to sleep…

I tried to focus on the road, but it was hard. My forehead began to melt. My stomach churned like the fetid waters beneath an urban pier. Whatever had invaded my gut insistently pressed downward. It had to come out.

Please God, I thought. No.

You’ll never guess where this ends.

A Comedian Takes A New Direction

Jon Stewart’s directorial debut, Rosewater, is based on the memoir of Maziar Behari, an Iranian-Canadian journalist who was arrested while covering the 2009 elections in Iran. Behari spent 118 days in solitary confinement in Iran’s Evin prison. Michael O’Sullivan calls Stewart’s film “an impressive and important piece of storytelling,” and David Edelstein agrees:

In outline, Rosewater sounds earnest, one-note, relentless — something you’d watch out of a sense of duty. But it turns out to be a sly, layered work, charged with dark wit along with horror. The heart of the movie is the Kafkaesque relationship (if that’s the word) between Bahari (Gael García Bernal) and the interrogator-torturer whom Bahari dubs “Rosewater” (Kim Bodnia) for his distinctive scent. What happens between them has a dramatic fullness that’s rare in political filmmaking.

Other reviews are more mixed. Esther Breger questions “whether Stewart can hack it as a filmmaker,” writing that the film is at its best when it employs humor:

The scenes between Behari and Rosewater also allow Stewart to do something he’s very good at—be funny. The interrogation process is both grueling and surreal, and Stewart has an eye for those absurdities. Behari’s “Sopranos” DVDs are treated as pornography when he’s taken into custody. Trips to New Jersey are automatically suspicious. And who is that Anton Chekhov mentioned on your Facebook profile? Midway through his confinement, Behari begins to distract Rosewater by appealing to the man’s prurient side, concocting deadpan tales of Western decadence and erotic massages. For his next film, Stewart should take things a little less seriously.

Thomas Hachard differs, suggesting Stewart “may have been too tasteful” in sticking to “predictable knocks against the kinds of insular interrogators and government officials that wouldn’t be able to recognize the Daily Show’s satire.” He criticizes the film’s disjointed narrative:

When Stewart features news footage of a debate between Ahmadinejad and one of his main challengers, opposition leader Mir Hossein Mousavi, or real video of the violence against those protesting the contested election results, the most serious concerns surrounding Bahari’s arrest come into view. But in other moments, Stewart takes a more dismissive approach, treating Bahari’s interrogator, for example, as an unappreciated buffoon looking for recognition from his superiors. In those moments, Stewart seems to want to turn these men into trifling figures, refusing to give them even the benefit of serious treatment. There are times, too, when the film takes a more broadly inspirational tone, addressing itself to Bahari’s resolute spirit — itself an allegory, it would seem, for Iran’s quelled opposition.

One can imagine a film that combined these various approaches into a cohesive story, but in Rosewater they’re blindly tossed together, and the result neither portrays the suffering of Bahari’s incarceration adequately nor lampoons the absurdities of the situation.

Brett McCracken agrees the movie fails to find a focus:

Stewart’s film champions the important role of journalists even as it laments the degradation of the profession. Are traditional journalists even necessary in a world of citizen reporting and organizing via cell phone and social media? Rosewater nods in this direction, but doesn’t take up the question thoroughly. Indeed, one of the weaknesses of the film is that it doesn’t have clear focus or commitment to going deeper into one particular question. Is the film about Iran? Torture? Family? Journalism? The cyclical nature of war, terror and violence? Rosewater is about all of this, but it may have been stronger had it chosen just one or two of these areas to more profoundly ponder.

And Rob Hunter zooms out:

Stewart’s film is attractive, well-acted and “important,” and his stylistic touches of visible hashtags and other social media shorthand make it very much a film in the now. But is it a film that will be remembered in a year’s time? Bahari’s triumph is real, impressive and relevant. Rosewater is a pleasant feature debut.

A Poem For Saturday

From Dish poetry editor Alice Quinn:

I’ve been reading The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010 for weeks and am mesmerized by the beauty and power, the humor, complexity, and charge of her poems, often bringing to mind the work of another great, canny contemporary poet, the Nobel Prize winner Wislawa Szymborska.

Toni Morrison wrote the forward to the book, and I’ll quote some lines I treasure. “The love readers feel for Lucille Clifton – both the woman and her poetry – is constant and deeply felt….Her devoted fans speak often of how inspiring her poetry is – life-changing in some instances….I read her skill as that emanating from an astute, profound intellect.”

Just months before her death, Lucille Clifton learned that she had been awarded the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in the Art by the Poetry Society of America. At the awards ceremony that spring, the poet Cornelius Eady, standing beside Lucille’s beautiful daughters, accepted the award on her behalf, reading remarks she had composed for the occasion.

Two of my favorite short poems of hers can be described as self-portraits – one of spirit, the other of fidelity to poetry. The first is “We Do Not Know Very Much About Lucille’s Inner Life”:

from the light of her inner life

a company of citizens

watches lucille as she trembles

through the world.

she is a tired woman though

well meaning, they say.

when will she learn to listen to us?

lucille things are not what they seem.

all all is wonder and

astonishment.

The other is “the making of poems”:

the reason why I do it

though I fail and fail

in the giving of true names

is I am Adam and his mother

and these failures are my job.

We’ll feature her poems today and over the weekend.

“in the evenings” by Lucille Clifton:

i go through my rooms

like a witch watchman

mad as my mother was for

rattling knobs and

tapping glass. ah, lady,

i can see you now,

our personal nurse,

placing the iron

wrapped in rags

near our cold toes.

you are thawed places and

safe walls to me as I walk

the same sentry,

ironing the winters warm and

shaking locks in the night

like a ghost.

(From The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton 1965-2010, edited by Kevin Young and Michael S. Glasner with a foreward by Toni Morrison © 2012 by The Estate of Lucille Clifton. Used by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd.)

We’re Not Ready For This Jelly

Gwynn Guilford provides an overview of recent research into why “jellyfish blooms appear to be getting bigger, more frequent, and more destructive”:

Perhaps the most disquieting observation about the rise of jellyfish … has to do with new polyp habitats. A few centuries ago, when a jellyfish larva—i.e. a fertilized egg—looked for a surface to start cloning on, it had to make do mostly with the odd seabed rock or oyster shell. If a larva couldn’t find such a surface, it would be eaten or die out.

The odds of finding a place to settle used to be pretty long. But humans are bettering those larvae’s chances of survival. Bridges, ports, drilling platforms, ship hulls—these are just a few examples of miles upon miles of smooth surfaces that polyps are colonizing. Research published last year reported polyps of numerous species taking over everything from buoys to floating plastic cigarette packaging (paywall).

A study on moon jellyfish published in October offers a more direct link between booming coastal development and jellyfish blooms. The research team, which included the prolific Shin-ichi Uye and three other marine biologists, counted the number of baby moon jellyfish in a bay before and after a new floating pier was installed. The jellyfish polyps rapidly colonized the new pier’s underside, resulting in a four-fold surge in their numbers after the dock’s arrival.

Guilford goes on to clarify, “Though this latest research is building a strong case that man-made disturbances to the ocean are amplifying blooms, the lack of historical data on jellyfish means these links still aren’t certain.”

Previous Dish on the jellyfish menace here.

(Photo by Flickr user franzi ヅ)

Don’t Rule Out Ransom

Simon Critchley considers the US and UK policy of refusing to pay ransom to terrorists, noting that “governments like the Spanish, the French, and the Italian … have simply found other, more clandestine and covert ways of making such payments.” He notes that “the next move these [latter] governments make is simply to deny that such payments have been made”:

All of this suggests a moral dilemma: Is it better to (a) remain morally consistent, refuse negotiation and ransom payment to an allegedly evil organization, but watch your citizens get beheaded? Or (b) sign up to a principled agreement not to negotiate with “terrorists,” but then negotiate nonetheless, pay a large amount of money to release the citizens of your country, and simply deny the fact publicly?

In this case, I would argue that (b) is the best and wisest course of action. Consider the following scenario. Imagine that when the Spanish, French, and other governments began to negotiate with ISIS, the responsible parties in the UK and US did so as well. Based on what we know of the European negotiations, it seems likely that the lives of Foley, Sotloff, Haines, and Henning could have been spared. Also, Peter Kassig could be back in US and not threatened with a very likely beheading, and the voluble John Cantlie could hopefully return quietly to life in the UK. This would have required paying some money, probably quite a lot of money. Some reports indicated that ISIS had asked for 100 million euros for James Foley, but wasn’t he worth that much? European soccer players are traded for such sums. In October, the Pentagon reported that it had spent $1.1 billion on military operations since the offensive against ISIS began last summer.

In this way, the horrific spectacle of videoed beheadings of Western captives could have been avoided—executions that led to principled proclamations of the “pure evil” of ISIS on the part of David Cameron and Barack Obama and contributed in significant part to the subsequent, wildly expensive, and very probably ineffective policy of air strikes on ISIS in Syria. Absent these beheadings, the strikes in Syria might have been averted or at least conducted in a more covert, less febrile, and hysterical atmosphere.