EASE YOUR FEET IN THE SEA: ...is my favorite Belle and Sebastian song for a reason; Boy with the Arab Strap finally entered my consciousness not long before I made my first trip to the Outer Banks (it had been in my record collection somewhat longer than that), and I think of it absolutely everytime I have gone since, including this afternoon:

Ease your feet off in the sea
My darling, it's the place to be
Take your shoes off, curl your toes
And I will frame this moment in time
Troubles come, and troubles go
The trouble that we used to know
Will stay with us till we get old
Will stay with us till somebody decides to go
Decides to go...



Additional note: what's up with bands' websites that don't list the lyrics correctly? B&S have the first line of this song as "ease you're feet off in the sea;" and Dylan's site takes rather extreme liberties with some of his lyrics.

RANDOM NOTE TO MYSELF:

*I always seem to forget this (myth of Er, anyone?): finishing a paper always takes much longer than expected. Much, much longer. It's a real Achilles-and-the-Hare situation: as you approach the end of a paper, the things remaining to do expand exponentially. Related: I need to learn endnote, even when (as with this paper), I'm only working with a few texts. Citation is an unimaginable time-waster.

LINKS: Pajiba on Double Indemnity and Sunset Blvd., the latter including:

"--Wilder’s men are awfully consistent in their shamelessness--"

So true. And:

"DeMille also plays himself in a pivotal role in Sunset Blvd., waffling between his latent devotion to his one-time star and his reluctance to tie himself down to her. Norma visits DeMille to pitch him on Salome in a scene shot on the sets DeMille was actually using at the time to film Samson and Delilah. So, just to recap: Wilder’s movie had a scene between an aging star and her old director, played by an actual aging star and her actual old director, shot on sets the director was using in real life to make an actual film that had yet to be released. It’s damn near dizzying."

ALTERNATIVE HYPOTHESIS: Reportage on the subject of religion is frequently entertaining. This TNR piece is no exception. If one overlooks its central claim, the article is an interesting look into the process of growth in the spiritual lives of Christians: what makes an evangelical move to another form of Christianity? But instead, we get:

"While it's unlikely that the Orthodox Church--which, according to the best estimate, has only 1.2 million American members--will ever pose any sort of existential threat to evangelical Christianity in the United States, it is significant nonetheless that a growing number of Southern Baptists and Presbyterians and Assemblies of God members have left the evangelical fold, turning to a religion that is not only not American, but not even Western. Their flight signals a growing dissatisfaction among some evangelicals with the state of their churches and their complicated relationship with the modern world."

Well, okay. I mean, I'm fairly certain people leave churches for other churches all the time, and the causality involved is idiosyncratic and complicated. A little closer:

"But, at the same time, with its belief in the importance of saving lost souls, evangelicalism hasn't been able to completely divorce itself from modern culture--and, in the latter half of the twentieth century, it began to increasingly try to employ or co-opt aspects of the modern world in its efforts to lure "seekers" and others to the faith."

Alternative hypothesis: evangelicalism is entirely about trying to bring people to faith who previously have not had much (or any) experience with Christianity ('evangelism' and all that). Unsurprisingly, a number of them will not stay in that environment. For some, it will be matters of style and form (prefering liturgy and ritual to the more free-flowing evangelical/charismatic-style services), and for others, theology. Non-denominationalism, when it works, is a good thing; but people do have serious differences on questions of justification, works, interpretation, etc etc. It stands to reason that the more a person devotes themselves to studying these subjects, the more likely they are to develop firm opinions, and thence to seek out people who share their beliefs.

But even if the Orthodox church really was going to supplant evangelical churches, it still wouldn't be an 'existential threat.' From the non-denominational perspective, it's a conservation of mass. Evangelicals are orthodox, but so are the Orthodox, Catholics, Anglicans, etc. The differences matter, but they're all still Christians--and if going to another church helps the work of vocation, and sanctification, and adds something to the world Christian community, that's a good thing, not a bad thing.

(there's also something to be said about the 'anti-intellectualism' of evangelical belief, but that's another post for another day)

EXCUSES, EXCUSES: apologies for neglecting the blog (and correspondence) of late: the need to finish this conference paper has run into the ramp-up for the semester. I should again resemble a normal person (or at least a normal blogger) by the end of the weekend.

GOOD NEWS: The Yankees are not likely to be outscored by more than any other team tonight.

I hate it when they play the Angels.

STRANGE BUT TRUE: For reasons I don't entirely understand, writing feels less like doing work to me than anything else in the grad student stable of activities--even when, as today, I'm writing down as fast as I'm thinking. Perhaps this is because it's the least physical of all the things a grad student does. Even reading, you at least have the tactile progress of moving through the book, however slowly. Maybe I should start doing drafts by hand (I already do revisions this way, and not coincidentally enjoy them much more than the original writing).

AND THAT'S THE TRIPLE-TRUTH, RUTH: Since it's approximately 700° outside today, I was reminded of the Sesame Street-YouTube Do the Right Thing parody. The only excellent movie Spike Lee ever made, and one of the few movies to seriously examine race relations in America without being preachy (which alone makes it remarkable): everyone, black and white, is kind of a jerk, and irresponsible when they should be responsible. And worth it for the character names alone (e.g.: Buggin' Out, Radio Raheem, Mother Sister, Mister Senor Love Daddy).

LINK: I heard good things from Camille about the Nickel Creek/Fiona Apple concert. Terry Teachout agrees. It's a shame they went through NC when I was up in Chicago.

FACT: Alex Massie, discussing, among other things, whether political journalists should be more like sportwriters, on the sports blogosphere:

"To give just a few examples: Bronx Banter beats the NYT's Yankees coverage every day... In college football, Brian Cook's Mgoblog does a better job covering Michigan football than any newspaper, while Sunday Morning Quarterback provides better and more useful college football analysis than ESPN and Sports Illustrated combined. The point isn't that these blogs are especially good, but that there are dozens more just like them. "

I think the last sentence isn't true: their blogs are especially good, because they hit the ideal point between passion for the subject and knowledge of it (and in this way, they strike me as more analogous to academics; this is part of the reason I like them. Brian from mgoblog famously pioneered the use of charts to explain third-down efficiency, etc: could there be any more obvious academic behavior than that?). The bad sportswriters Massie cites have too much passion without enough information or a sense of where to direct it. Political journalism (as I think of it) tends to be large amounts of information in need of analytic clarity, or facts conveniently arranged to support the conclusion one begins with. Hitting that sweet spot--in blogging, sportswriting, political journalism, academia--is a rare thing.

QUOTE FOR THE EVENING:

"'And above all--above everything else--do not lie.'

'About Diderot, you mean?'

'No, not exactly about Diderot. Above all, do not lie to yourself. A man who lies to himself and listens to his own lie comes to a point where he does not discern any truth in himself or anywhere around him, and thus falls into disrespect towards himself and others. Not respecting anyone, he ceases to love, and having no love, he gives himself up to passions and coarse pleasures, in order to occupy and amuse himself, and in his vices reaches complete bestiality, and it comes from lying continually to others and himself.'"

-The Brothers Karamazov Bk. 2, Ch. 2

SIGN ME UP: Back on Tuesday. Links of interest:

*Althouse: "I'm in the Fellini camp -- can we go to a place called Fellini Camp?" You can love her or hate her, but it's (artistically) satisfying how she responds to criticism in the most absurdist way possible (such as the run of Fellini-lolcatz, a phenomenon I generally don't understand).

*Tony Wilson, founder of Factory Records and the Haçienda (and so in-part responsible for Joy Division, New Order, the Happy Mondays, and early 90s British house), died Friday.

*More evidence that North Carolina is an odd place: the flower machine at RDU has a webpage, proof that absolutely everything is somewhere on the interweb now. (link: Julian Sanchez)

*Brian from mgoblog: Destroy Harbaugh; which contains an interesting discussion on why football players tend to do fairly well even if they get their degrees in 'easy' majors.

*On poetry and translation, from Moreover:

"If you ask me, Polish sure sounds good in English. It is perhaps a conceit of an English speaker, as well as a testament to the skill of the poets and translators, that I feel this way. I have not read a single poem by a Polish poet in Polish—or in any language other than English, for that matter. But I do know that a good translation makes the reader aware of what a poem means, and at the same time makes the reader aware that it is not English she is reading. In this way a successful translation is like walking through the streets of a foreign city and realizing that you can understand what everyone is saying around you, if only just barely."

Polish poetry has always struck me in exactly this way, but I'm not sure if I think it's true in general. If the poetry relies to a large extent on the words--the way the poet uses repetition or plays off repeated or mutated sounds and structures within the language--then these have a good chance of being lost in translation. If the poetry emphasizes the image or conceptual content more (as has been the case in the Polish poetry I've read, especially Milosz), then it should be easier to reproduce the style and effect on the poem in another language. The affinity between Polish poetry (and Russian literature, which has never appeared to lose much in translation as I've read it; or perhaps eastern European literature more generally, though I've only taken a few tentative steps here, so proceed cautiously) and English-speaking readership may simply be a reflection of a shared set of concerns: the poetry survives (or thrives) in translation because the content, or images, need no translation. Or perhaps this is just the measure of good poetry in any language.

EPIGRAM FOR A DISSERTATION:

"The real can be ordered by art without distortion; it cannot be systematized."

-Mortimer Adler, quoted here

A NOTE ON RICHARD RORTY: Contingency, Irony and Solidarity baffles me, especially its fixation on being a good, 20th-century liberal citizen. The strength of his objection to universality appears to be that he thinks it's finally untenable as a philosophical position (where the force of the objection is how the argument seems to him). One need not be a believer to reject that--any liberal cosmopolitan has to do the same. To the extent that he describes the worries of a liberal who is trying to create a useful vocabulary for morality--well, that's not me. And insofar as he tries to describe the position of a believer (especially a Christian), what he calls the 'metaphysician,' he conflates the Platonic, the Kantian and the Christian. That's fine for his historical description, but it seems as though "no, I think that's wrong" does most of the work in resisting him.

I also, incidentally, think that Christianity (in the New Testament, at the very least) recognizes that redescription is a method that will be deployed against it, and the consistent answer it gives is that the moral status of actions in no way depends on what we think of them (and we have reason to believe our descriptions of our own actions will be self-deluding, at least sometimes).

And this passage:

"Ironists read literary critics, and take them as moral advisers, simply because such critics have an exceptionally large range of acquaintance. They are moral advisers not because they have special access to moral truth but because they have been around. They read more books and are thus in a better position to not get trapped within the vocabulary of a single book." (80-81)

reminds me very much of this:

Audrey Rouget: What Jane Austen novels have you read?
Tom Townsend: None. I don't read novels. I prefer good literary criticism. That way you get both the novelists' ideas as well as the critics' thinking. With fiction I can never forget that none of it really happened, that it's all just made up by the author.

...a position Metropolitan wants us to regard as faintly ridiculous.

LINKS:

*Film noir in post-war America. Generally, I don't get a lot out of noir-ish movies (exceptions: The Maltese Falcon, Sunset Boulevard). But I take that to be a function of the success of the genre: to the extent they feel clichéd or formulaic, it's because the pace, style, and narrative structures have become thoroughly assimilated into the American conception of storytelling.

*Jane Espenson on the Secret of Selling Sci-Fi. It's not much of a secret, but she is one of the sharper television writers out there (hers is one of the few voices I can identify regardless of the show or whether I even know she's involved in it).

Like most blogosphere triumphalists, I generally don't get my news from tv. Headline News has been on in the background for the last half-hour or so, and reminded me why that's the case: a healthy mix of the pointless, the voyeuristic, and the sensational.

And Barry Bonds at least half a dozen times.

LINKS: A few songs that have struck me recently:

*Mystery Jets, "Diamonds in the Dark": many have tried to imitate the Smiths, but it's hard to do better than "but you cut your hair/ and it ended there" (which must've appeared on a corner of Hatful of Hollow I've long since forgotten)

*Guided By Voices, "Cut-Out Witch/Man Called Aerodynamics" (this is the best youtube can do). This is turning into another indie rock summer, and "Do you think she can change your life?" is pretty arresting for a first line to a song (see also: "all men have secrets, here is mine," which appeared on the spine of a guitar magazine I bought way back when. Seeing it printed like that raised the level of seriousness above the way Morrissey tosses of the line in the song).

*Hem, "Half Acre". I've listened to Rabbit Songs about a dozen times in the three days I've had it--that's instant classic status, kids. Youtube, again, does not have "Stupid Mouth Shut," "Lazy Eye" or "When I Was Drinking," all of which are better; but this has ended up on the myspace pages of everyone I know from Michigan, and I don't think that's coincidental.

WEEKEND HIJINKS: On Sunday night, I was in the bleachers of Wrigley Field (way up in the back in right field) watching Tom Glavine win his 300th game (appreciation by the excellent Yankees beat writer Peter Abraham here). This was likely to be the most historic game I ever went to, so I made my friend stay until the end with me (we were not all-that-delayed in getting on the train as a result).

Also, it's not a Yankees season if Roger Clemens isn't getting thrown out of a game for hitting someone with a pitch as retaliation.

The joys of baseball in the summer are endless.

SO: I am still very much alive, internet absence notwithstanding, and do have several posts waiting for me to write them. But I am also on a vacation-within-a-vacation, so they'll have to wait until Tuesday at the earliest.

BRILLIANT: In Althouse's comments section, from a post on a particularly condescending Linda Greenhouse article:

"To you pitiful humans, it looked like a "seizure." But during those few moments, Space Agent Roberts entered a wormhole to make a 1,000-year roundtrip to his home planet to receive further instruction from the Interplanetary Council of Space Fiends. His last visit, 14 Earth-years ago, programmed him for his rise to power. His masters were well pleased with his progress, but it was only the beginning of their diabolical plan. Roberts has been sent back with a new set of instructions to prepare Earth for its ultimate fate. The changes in him are undetectable by mere mortals. Even his wife and children see the same "man" they knew before.

But there is one threat to his masters' scheme. One who through years of diligent study has developed the vision to see the truth. Today, she is a reporter for the New York Times, but soon, she will be Earth's only hope..."