Because of another writing project, I am taking at least a month off of blogging at this blog.  I'll be back around Thanksgiving, or not.

I've reverted to draft all of the prior posts on this blog.  In December of this year, perhaps, I'll be restructuring my new media work here and elsewhere and don't want to have to think about that for the time being, nor do I want to have to manage comments on old material.  Thank you for your patience.  Until we meet again in pixels, or not.

I love shrimp tacos.  This image might have inspired a trip to Taqueria Guadalupana today.

“With oleographs?” you say. “Oh, what a pity!”

I've read this poem through several times since sancrucensis put it up, and each time I read it I like it more.  It is a perfect expression of its subject.  In it is a perfect rebuke of certain converty aesthetic puritanisms.

The poem is right there in the Collected Poems, but somehow I missed it when reading through Betjeman some years ago.  

It's been a long while since I've read any ethnomusicology, and I'm too lazy to look it up, but I sometimes wonder if there has been a study comparing Welsh and Russian male choral traditions.  Because to the untrained ear they sure seem to have some (superficial?) affinities.

Pew it stinks out there.

A lot is being made of the new Pew numbers out, showing continued declines for churches and the now one in five Americans who don't affiliate with religion.  One thing I see a lot coming from traditionally oriented Christians is the taking of the opportunity to yet again mock the fish in the barrel that are "spiritual but not religious" persons.

Every day when I go to work I get in the car, pass the JW Kingdom Hall on the corner of my street, then pass an Islamic center, then pass two decidedly health and wealth (you can tell from the messages on the signs out front) black pentecostal churches, and that is within a mile or so from my house.  I probably pass 30 or so churches on the way to work (12 miles - Memphis does have the highest number of churches per capita of any city in the country).  Sometimes I take an alternative route which runs me by 15 different churches than the usual route.  So let's call the total number of churches 45.  From what I know of these churches via things heard about them or their signage or their folks coming to my house and leaving literature and/or talking to me, I would rather my kids grow up to be "spiritual but not religious" than attend any these churches, with the possible exception of one of them.

In my adult life, I have visited many hundreds of parishes - Mainline Prot, Evangelical, Catholic, Orthodox, Quaker, Unitarian, etc.  I suppose I'd rather my kids grow up to be "spiritual but not religious" than attend approximately half of the parishes I have visited in my adult life, and that includes some particularly disordered Catholic and Orthodox ones.

Of all the bosses I've had in my life, the worst have been the practicing Christians, with the possible exception of one who was a mix of incredibly benevolent and patient and incredibly condescending and dysfunctional.  The best boss I've ever had is my current one - a philandering agnostic who brags about the number of abortions he paid for when he was in the local rich kid Evangelical high school.  The "spiritual but not religious" bosses I've had have generally been level headed and competent and fair.  My wife's best boss ever is a liberal Catholic - one of those most trad and conservative Catholics I know would rather not be in the RCC and one who sounds, when she talks about faith matters, like she is "spiritual and not religious"  -- she likes to "thank the universe" for things and send out "positive energy" and so forth.    Every Prot Christian my wife has ever worked for has been a royal pain in the ass.  So was the one Orthodox boss she briefly had (though that doesn't really count because he was a convert and his "boss style" was decidedly conservative Evangelical - he was also a monkabee who espoused the most overt antinomianism I've ever heard from an Orthodox in person, but when it came to running his business, whew - then he was all scruples and rigidity and micromanagement and dotting every i and crossing every t and yelling at you if you put too much mustard on the sandwich, and let me tell you, if my wife thinks you pay too much attention to detail and are anal about it when doing a job, you are one seriously fucked up freak).  My wife told me once that she plans on only working for liberal Catholics from here on out.  They drink a lot, they throw good parties, and they are generous.

We've shared this with my mother, and with a number of friends of ours, and sure enough, a sizable chunk of my friends seem to agree with my mother that "Christians make the worst bosses" (usually they mean by that Evangelicals, fundies, and other conservative Prots).

In every school setting I have ever found myself in, the "spiritual but not religious" folks were the sort that were more likely than the overtly hostile-to-spiritual-things or overtly religious to be reliable without being annoying.  Those that made a point of letting you know that they were practicing Christians were, 7 times out of 10, not the sort of people most of us would want to spend much time with, whereas most of the folks I have known outside of more alternative-ish (wannabe hippy - hippies younger than the age of 50 tend to be irritating as all get out) circles who self-identify as "spiritual but not religious" have been fairly easy to work with and get along with and benign enough in their spouting interpretations of life and the world, etc.

None of this is a proof of anything, of course, or an argument, or meant to sway anyone's opinion about anything.  It's just anecdotal ephemera from my life.  And it probably has something to do with why, when I hear the Pew numbers, I think, "well, of course."

Some post-Pussy Riot brand reconstruction.  I remember this Orthodox blogger who used to bitch and moan all the time about how this was the direction Orthodoxy was headed.  Maybe he was right.

the political economy of bullshit.

Not bad overall, but the first few minutes is a fine start for a talk of this nature.

The last one a sculpture in front of his basilica in Assisi, which depicts that point in his life when he was in a very depressed state, having left the crusades because of a vision in which Christ tells him to leave the army and go home to await another vision.

The top photo reminds me of my father, who is a lover of birds.

burn baby burn.

Who knows who created this thing?  It could just have easily been an Obomber supporter.

I sometimes wonder if there is or has been any other modern nation whose people have found so many different ways to hate each other.  Why can't people be more like me and just hate the rich, and theology grad students (other than you, of course, dear reader), and people who play video games (other than Kyle H and Teena's family), and those jackasses who put Chimay in the fridge, and monkabee clerics (which is very distinct from monks, mind you), and the folks responsible for canceling the show Arrested Development?   Focus people, focus.

I don't feel like writing.





---because, after all, the center of the universe is Georgia.  I'm not entirely kidding.  Once, when in my high school library reading National Geographic because they had nothing worth reading which I hadn't already read, I read a long article on Georgia which convinced me that I was born in the wrong nation.  It impressed me enough that I have a daughter with that name (OK, I had a grandmother named Georgia too; whatever).

On that note, there are no religious images in this world which haunt me more than this one:

Righteous Lot.

spa Mass

I've seen this going around amongst Orthodox (first in blogdom, then on FB) who seem pleased at this example of Rome getting its act together.  The archbishop here is the man about to take over the helm of the San Fran RC diocese (its got him a bit stressed out).  He is a conservative, and the diocese is not, and this has created some spectacle.  Anyway, this video has folks moderately excited for some reason.  I'm not sure why.  The musical performance is so so, and the liturgy is spotty with a fair amount of awkward moments when the players don't seem to know exactly what they are supposed to be doing.  But it ain't a clown Mass I guess.  Though a spa setting seems pretty clownish..

I find it somewhere between fitting and ironic that this is being presented as an indicator of a healthier Rome.  This Mass took place at a Napa Valley resort spa.  The Meritage Resort and Spa to be exact.  According to the Napa Institute registration page, to attend the Thursday through Sunday conference of conservative American Catholics preaching to their choir, you had to pay $1500 to the Institute, in addition to accommodations and travel costs.  There was a group discount for conference attendees (probably 10-15% off), but the normal July rates at that spa are $322 - $702 a night for a room, so you have another grand a night to drop on a room, not to mention meals, drinks, and and so forth.  Do we even have to ask the question anymore - who is conservative ("neo-Cath") American Catholicism for?   Make fun of SSPX and other trad groups all you want.  Their conferences cost like $45 plus Super 8 accommodations.  I'd love to hear Mark and Louise Zwicks' take on this.

But more on this later, when I return to my current post series, and recollect the days when I met Tom Monaghan and his crew that has done so much to remake white American Catholicism.

R.I.P.

Eric Hobsbawm.  Guardian obit, Jacobin obit, [update: another Jacobin],with other (a few among the many) notices here and here and here.

This video captures something of the life of South Memphis.  My shop is on the train tracks that literally divide Orange Mound (South Memphis hood) from Midtown, and a lot of my coworkers live in Orange Mound.   The narrator is now attending Lane College, which is the HBCU in Jackson, TN where both of my parents worked (dad as a career counselor, mom as librarian) for a couple of years before they moved to Memphis.

Memphis has, to paint with a broad brush, two large swaths of "bad" ghetto (there are pockets of such across Memphis, and there are not so "bad" areas within each, so this isn't really accurate, but for the sake of simplification...) Orange Mound in the south, and Frayser in the north.  My brother was a cop in the South Memphis police precinct (Raines Road Precinct) for a good while, so I've heard stories both from the perspective of a cop and from the perspective of my coworkers who live there.  I live on the Raleigh/Bartlett border in the north, and have taken classes at the community college extension campus and spent a lot of time with coworkers in Frayser, so I know the North side better.  Plus my mom was librarian at the "worst" public elementary school in Frayser (and in the whole city, so it was said, they have since shut it down) for years.  Both Orange Mound and Frayser can be quite beautiful, especially in the spring when the flowers are in bloom, and later in the summer when the crape myrtles bloom.  Memphis is an interesting city in that there is flora everywhere, and as seen in the video there are pockets of "woods" throughout the city.  It's not all concrete.  There is something about the rolling hills in Frayser, and the large number of pine trees there, that I find quite peaceful.  The food (especially soul food and BBQ) in both north and south sides of the city is often sublime.  I'm attending a community BBQ some friends of mine in Frayser are putting on in a couple of weeks at a COGIC church there, and my mouth is already watering at the thought of it.

There is a heaviness in the aesthetic of Memphis that is hard to describe (and by "Memphis" I mean real Memphis, not East Memphis, which is Disneyland Memphis for rich white people).  Part of it is the anatomy of summer here, the visible weight of the humidity - that great oppressor.  Part of it is the goddamn brokenness of everything here- govt, roads, schools, neighborhoods, businesses, churches - anything you need to work for you doesn't here.  There is that hauntedness and a woundedness seen in many of the souls who grow up in or next to the sorts of hells noted in the video.  There is that completely disarming mix of hopelessness and mirth seen.  There is the always lingering possibility of violence (that is everywhere in this city - I never, a dozen years ago, would have thought if possible that I, former Catholic Worker, would become someone who didn't leave home without gun and knife).   But, despite and because of that heaviness, there is the singing shown at the end of the video, there is a palpable joy to be found in South and North Memphis that you notice if you stick around long enough, longer than the ghetto tourism of white Christians from East Memphis (or its satellites in trendy Midtown neighborhoods and Mud Island) or eastern suburbs churches doing pat-themselves-on-the-back projects on the occasional afternoon.  It is a joy that makes no sense, and it certainly isn't a joy that makes everything OK or worth it.  It is a completely useless, gratuitous joy, the existence of which makes one wonder at the absurdity and beauty of human beings.  

This resonates.

I think the article may somewhat overemphasize the change in locale (though my old ethnography prof would tell me never to underestimate that) and de-emphasize the easily dangerous effects of breathing and meditation techniques.

I especially noted this part:

These meditation techniques are "designed to completely psychologically rearrange you," says Paul Hackett, a lecturer in classical Tibetan at Columbia University. In a foreign setting, that kind of experience can be even more traumatizing, especially when you take into account the way some Westerners in India tend to snack at the country's spiritual smorgasbord—a little Ashtanga yoga here, some Vipassana meditation there. "People are mixing and matching religious systems like Legos," Hackett says. "It is no surprise that people go insane."

Indeed.  I think this strikes at what I was trying to get at years ago when talking about the WASP girl with the last name Smith who just got home from the latest Sex and the City movie, having listened to K-LOVE on the drive home, with prayer rope on her wrist, and books by some Athonite elder and Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Kahlil Gibran next to her bed.  Not that some absolutist hegemony of interests and entertainments is desirable (or healthy), but that the spiritual smorgasbord you can get in America is also (grant it to a lesser degree than what we read of in the linked to article) going to pull a person in a number of different directions, and this can really, to put it in the language of kids these days, fuck you up.  But of course the real analogy is with those spiritual addicts we've all met who, with furious urgency, go from one spiritual experience to another, spiritually high as a kite initially at each one.  I've seen more than a few monkabees with the same look in their eyes as seen in that photo of Jonathan Spollen "3 months ago."  It strikes me that one indicator of "sanity" in a religious institution is not having many gurus who lead these poor souls on, and trying to make impotent the gurus that they inevitably have.  [Where you have clergy in any number, you will have people who think and/or intuit themselves to be gurus.]

Gurus are always a bad idea, worse is the desire to become one.  Or, if I might borrow the language of Arturo and Delegado Cero, there is no spiritual vanguard either.

Just learned that Eugene Genovese died.  I met him once (and his wife on another occasion).  And I spoke with the man a number of times when I was at Loome's and once thereafter, and found both he and his wife to be interesting people, if a bit too well bred for my blood (yes, Eugene had been raised working class Italian-American, but he married well, and conveyed an appreciation for having arrived).  His Marxism has always been something of an enigma to me - clear as day in most of the texts (until the early 90s or so anyway), but in personal relationships he began distancing himself from other Marxists fairly early on.  There is an uncanny simultaneity in Eugene Genovese of speaking clearly (and I think accurately) about pathologies within the master classes of the antebellum South and admiring them, sometimes for reasons quite related to those pathologies.  I haven't made it through all of the later Genovese work yet (I own and have read most of but haven't completely finished Mind of the Master Class), and I still don't quite know what to make of the man.  As some of you may recall my long post years ago on the Southern Agrarians, my studies of those men led to a perplexity as to why so many traditional conservatives find so much promise and substance in them, and Genovese's later devotion to them strikes me as not just odd, but downright bizarre given much of his analysis of the American South.  I can generically appreciate lifelong Genovese's anticapitalism (he never dropped that, and in certain respects seems to have made his anticapitalism a more personal matter after embracing a Catholic anticapitalism) and disdain for liberalism, but it has never been clear to me where he thinks his turn to a Southern inspired traditionalist conservatism got him (in terms of a workable political philosophy and a useful lens via which to "deal with" late modern America).  That said, his work on slavery and, in particular, white intellectuals in the American South, is required reading and has been formative in my own coming to (generally acrimonious, at least when it comes to whites with money) terms with the South.  I just can't find the sympathy for paternalism that Genovese did.  In any event, the man was a class act, could be remarkable funny with his dry wit, and spoke to a 20 year old nobody at quirky old bookstore in Minnesota as if that nobody's opinions mattered.  Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine.  Et lux perpetua luceat ei. Requiescat in pace. Amen. [Sorry, per the thread below I learned that Genovese worked with Doug Wilson and plugged Wilson's work later in Genovese's life.  No prayers for Genovese then, as he is obviously in hell.]

There are some interesting articles on Genovese's legacy in radical thought here.

I also enjoyed reading this reflection by Paul Gottfried that remembers Genovese and Christopher Lasch and is well worth reading.