Monthly Archives: February 2007

Thursday Short Poem: Auden’s “A Walk After Dark”

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This week marks the 100th birthday of one of the 20th century’s greatest poets, W.H. Auden. I’ve already posted most of my favorite shorter Auden poems before, but this one has not yet appeared on a Thursday. (See here, here, here for three of my old favorites.) He also wrote what I always say is my favorite poem, the one I want read at my funeral: Runner.

Auden is not always an easy poet, but he’s accessible enough to have been widely loved by both critics and the general public.

A Walk After Dark

A cloudless night like this
Can set the spirit soaring:
After a tiring day
The clockwork spectacle is
Impressive in a slightly boring
Eighteenth-century way.

It soothed adolescence a lot
To meet so shamelesss a stare;
The things I did could not
Be so shocking as they said
If that would still be there
After the shocked were dead

Now, unready to die
But already at the stage
When one starts to resent the young,
I am glad those points in the sky
May also be counted among
The creatures of middle-age.

It’s cosier thinking of night
As more an Old People’s Home
Than a shed for a faultless machine,
That the red pre-Cambrian light
Is gone like Imperial Rome
Or myself at seventeen.

Yet however much we may like
The stoic manner in which
The classical authors wrote,
Only the young and rich
Have the nerve or the figure to strike
The lacrimae rerum note.

For the present stalks abroad
Like the past and its wronged again
Whimper and are ignored,
And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn’t have happened did.

Occuring this very night
By no established rule,
Some event may already have hurled
Its first little No at the right
Of the laws we accept to school
Our post-diluvian world:

But the stars burn on overhead,
Unconscious of final ends,
As I walk home to bed,
Asking what judgment waits
My person, all my friends,
And these United States.

The lines I always remember:

And the truth cannot be hid;
Somebody chose their pain,
What needn’t have happened did.

That’s right.

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A meme from Dan

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This meme comes from Dan, and since I haven’t done one in a while, thought I’d offer it up today.

1. What is the most fun work you’ve ever done, and why?

When I’m teaching a really good class, I often walk out of a lecture feeling exhilarated and energized. I’m lucky enough to be paid to do something that seems as much like play as like work. And when my sense of what I love to do happens to coincide with something that needs doing, as I think it does in teaching, that’s a happy thing.

2. Name one thing you did in the past that you no longer do but wish you did?

Honestly, I wish I read more novels. Now, the only time I read novels is on trips. I haven’t read a novel somewhere other than a plane or a hotel room in a couple of years. And every once in a while, to be very candid, I really miss drinking. I’ve been clean and sober for eight and a half years, but sometimes I still long for a special glass of something. I get great pleasure out of watching others sip really good wine, but sometimes, even after all this time sober, my own taste buds still dance in anticipation.

3. Name one thing you’ve always wanted to do but keep putting it off? Train for and run a 100-mile endurance race. Up until very recently, I would have said starting work on a book, but that seems to be coming along at last.

4. What two things would you most like to learn or be better at, and why? My wife is eager to have me improve my woeful Spanish. Whenever we go down to Colombia, she handles all the translating. She would like to raise our future children bilingual, and I will need to have some facility in casteleno if that’s going to work out.

I’d like to work on my singing voice. With work, it could be halfway decent. I have vague aspirations of someday singin’ in the choir.

5. If you could take a class/workshop/apprentice from anyone in the world living or dead, who would it be and what would you hope to learn?

I’d like to go to a running camp led by Steve Prefontaine. I’d like to take theology classes from John Howard Yoder. I’d like to have Pete Seeger teach me the banjo, and I’d love to sit in on a feminist theory course with Simone de Beauvoir.

6. What three words might your best friends or family use to describe you?

Devoted, mercurial, thoughtful.

7. Now list two more words you wish described you.

Patient, spontaneous.

8. What are your top three passions? (can be current or past, work, hobbies, or causes).

That’s easy. In no particular order:

Animal rights. I want to see an end to factory farming, animal research, and fur pelting. I am willing to commit time and energy and money to this cause above all others. I want to see us all embrace a radically new, cruelty-free diet and lifestyle.

Teenagers. I have known for years that I am called to work with teens. There’s something about that age group that strikes a chord in me. As both a teacher and a youth leader, I feel called to devote myself professionally and para-professionally to teenagers and their emotional, intellectual, and spiritual development.

Running. I love working out, but there’s nothing, absolutely nothing, like running in the hills. Just little old me, a beat-up pair of Asics on my feet, a water belt on my waist, and the sound of my own breathing.

Write and answer one more question that YOU would ask someone.

What’s your biggest goal for the next ten years?

As Lewis said, “further up, further in.”

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Glenn Sacks, Jennifer Roback Morse, and another split in the anti-feminist coalition

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I’m committed to feminist values in both my public and my private life. But as I’ve written many times before, I have a wide variety of friends who don’t share those commitments, and indeed actively reject them. Most of my fellow evangelical Christians are suspicious of feminism, and I have a few acquaintances who are active in the “men’s rights” (MRA) movement that stands in vocal opposition to feminism.

There’s a common tendency among feminists to fail to draw key distinctions among our various anti-feminist opponents. That is often a mistake. While social conservatives and men’s rights advocates share a mutual hostility towards organized feminism, they often share little else. Most men’s rights advocates do not root their opposition to feminism in their faith, but rather in their own personal experience. (The stereotypical men’s rights advocate is a divorced dad who imagines he got a raw deal in terms of custody and child support.) Most men’s rights advocates, at least those in the largest MRA organizations, tend to be decidedly secular in their worldview.

I’ve often mentioned my warm association with Glenn Sacks, a leading “moderate” in the men’s rights movement. On his blog this week, Glenn points out one area of tension between social conservatives and men’s rights advocates. Glenn recently compared the plight of lesbian mothers and divorced fathers in child custody cases. (Glenn, like many in the men’s rights movement, is not particularly troubled by civil unions, not by same-sex couples adopting children. His focus on men’s rights doesn’t require a hostility towards widespread acceptance of homosexuality.)

Noted social conservative Jennifer Roback Morse took Glenn to task a couple of weeks ago:

I hate to disagree with my friend Glenn Sacks, but I think he has missed the boat in his recent comparison of lesbian “social” mothers with divorced fathers. Mr. Sacks, a prominent fathers’ rights advocate, is correct that in both cases, family law courts diminish the claims of people who want to maintain a relationship with a child. But he is very much mistaken in equating the validity of the two types of claims. And fatherhood is at risk, no matter how the court resolves particular disputes between estranged lesbian partners.

Glenn responds at his blog.

As someone who often enjoys some political rough-and-tumble, I’m rarely saddened when I see signs of fracture in the anti-feminist coalitions. And I think it’s vital that feminists and their allies take note of those areas where men’s rights advocates and traditional social conservatives break rank with one another. It isn’t helpful to the larger cause of women’s rights to see those who oppose those rights as monolithic. On the contrary, there is considerable strategic opportunity in exposing existing or potential rifts among various anti-feminist constituencies. It’s worth reminding our allies and our opponents alike that adopting an “enemy of my enemy is my friend” policy rarely turns out well.

We are some three decades into what Susan Faludi famously called the “backlash” against the gains that feminism has made for women. It has been nearly thirty years since the election of Ronald Reagan and the emergence of social conservatives as a potent political force in American politics. Despite the intensity of the backlash against women’s rights and against justice for gays and lesbians, we’ve made a hell of a lot of progress in the last quarter century. (Sometimes, I admit, I wonder how much more we would have made had the rise of the right been more effectively blunted.) And after so many years of staving off concerted efforts to undo the progress we’ve achieved, it’s understandable if we forget to differentiate between the various elements within the coalition that opposes the feminist project.

I spend a lot of time working with young men who are both largely ignorant about feminism and hostile to those aspects of feminism that they think they understand. I work to make the case to them that feminism offers much to men as well, above all the opportunity to liberate themselves from the burden of being the “sturdy oak”. And I spend a lot of time in irenic dialogue with conservative Christians, suggesting that radical egalitarianism in the household and in the public sphere may be more congruent with God’s plan than the traditional notion of separate, complementary roles.

It’s a different message to two very different groups, and the recent public split between Sacks and Roback Morse over the issue of lesbians and child custody indicates just how different these anti-feminists constituencies really are.

Note: In this thread ONLY, I’m permitting some push-back from MRA commenters. My new comment policy — one which bans those hostile to feminism — remains generally in place, but since I blogged about the MRAs specifically in this post, I’m letting them in here. Not any other thread. I will open up an occasional thread to them, but even then, basic ground rules of avoiding personal attacks apply.

Same shepherd, different paths: a note on the current state of the Anglican Communion

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One thing I tried to follow while on vacation was news from the Anglican Primates meeting in Tanzania. In a world at war, with the Darfur crisis spilling into Chad, the glaciers melting at a faster rate than previously imagined, tensions ratcheting up with Iran, a depressing and ongoing stalement over the Palestine question — with all of that on the table, the leaders of the worldwide Anglican Communion spent most of their meeting in Africa (a continent with a host of pressing human and environmental problems) focused on how best to rebuke the Episcopal Church USA for its consecration of an openly gay bishop and its support for same-sex unions. Priorities are clearly straight (pun intended) in my global church.

Here’s the BBC story. And read more coverage at Kendall’s.

This is not to say that sexual morality isn’t an important topic, and one that the church ought to discuss. But it ought to make all of us in the Anglican church sad, regardless of where we find ourselves on the issue of sexuality, that yet another argument over “pelvic morality” is distracting us from so many other vital concerns. We must ask ourselves the question: in spending so much time and energy discerning God’s will on the question of homosexuality, what other vital issues are we ignoring? How many lambs are going unfed because we’re too busy trying to disqualify some of the very shepherds who want to feed them?

I’m convinced that for most straight people, the issue of same-sex marriage is an attractive one over which to argue and debate. It’s why we like to argue about it so much in the church. Most other issues call us to personal repentance and transformation. Christ calls us to think differently about how we eat, about how we spend our money, about how we interact with our neighbors, about how we live so many aspects of our lives. But if we’re straight, taking a position on homosexuality (whether or not it’s an affirming one) is ultimately pretty damned cheap.

No straight person gives up anything when he or she comes out for or against same-sex marriage. So we progressive heterosexuals get to feel virtuous and brave for standing in solidarity with our gay and lesbian brothers and sisters; conservative straights get to feel as if they are “defending the Gospel” by trying to bar the ordination of gay clergy and the blessing of non-heterosexual unions. And whatever side we’re on, it doesn’t cost us much. The focus is off our own flaws, away from the logs in our own eyes. And so both right and left collude to make homosexuality the defining issue in the modern church.

But of course, for our GLBTQ friends and neighbors, this debate isn’t cheap. It goes to the very heart of their identity. And it is for the love of these friends and neighbors, my brothers and sisters in Christ, that I am willing to see a schism in the church I love. Unity is a good, but it isn’t anywhere near the highest good. To progressives, justice is a higher good than unity. To conservatives, fidelity to tradition and Scripture is a higher good than unity. If both sides can at least agree on that, then perhaps we can gently break apart the wider Anglican communion.

As my rabbi friend often says, “Sometimes divorce is a mitzvah.” I’ve often written that there are redemptive aspects to the end of a marriage, particularly when both parties become stronger and better people as a result. I believe that just as there can be both amicable and hostile divorces, there can also be amicable and hostile church schisms. While there’s still a chance to separate gently, with a mixture of regret, sadness, respect and relief, we should take that chance.

Our shepherd has told us he leads sheep from many folds; let’s let those who cannot be in our fold any longer follow our same shepherd on a different path.

Diving back in: a brief trip report

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It’s not even 7:00AM, and I’m wide awake, sitting at the computer in my office. I have stacks of finals to finish grading from the winter semester (the grades are due by tomorrow afternoon). I have stacks of syllabi for my spring semester classes which will get underway in about two hours. And I’m cruisin’ on about three hours sleep over the last two nights combined. Jet-lagged again.

My wife and I went to Paris for Valentine’s Day. For years, I’ve had the audacity to call myself a world traveler (and a historian of Europe), but had never once set foot in Paris. (Except for a transfer through Orly when I was six, which most definitely doesn’t count.) I’ve flown over France plenty of times, and been to most of the nations that surround it. But for any number of reasons, had never been. And what better time to go than for Valentine’s Day?

It was a hectic trip getting there. We had redeemed miles with Delta to get ourselves to Europe; since it was a free flight, we had to show some flexibility in our travel plans. We left LAX early last Tuesday, flew to Atlanta, and then on to London Gatwick. We then had a car take us to the Ashford International Railway station in Kent to catch the Eurostar into Paris.

I’d bought non-refundable tickets for the Eurostar. The flight was due into Gatwick just before 7:00AM, and the train wasn’t until 11:00AM, so I figured we had plenty of time. Despite some lingering thundershowers, the flight from Atlanta took off promptly, and I figured we were set. Three hours into the flight, somewhere over the Atlantic, the pilot jars me and 200 hundred other folks out of a doze, telling us we’re diverting back to Boston to remove “some illegal cargo that had mistakenly been put on board.” (No one told us what the cargo was, though a flight attendant mentioned birds, of all things.) It’s always a bit nerve-wracking to be diverted, because a little voice always tells me that there’s actually something wrong with the plane, and the captain is just pretending it has something to do with cargo in order to keep us all calm.

Sitting on the tarmac at Boston Logan, I figured we’d missed the 11:00 Eurostar for sure. We frantically called American Express (I always book through their travel service), trying to reschedule, but by the time we got to a live person, we were forced to hang up the phone for takeoff. We landed in Gatwick just after nine, over two hours late.

Amazingly, our driver got us from Gatwick to Ashford in under an hour, in traffic, in pouring rain. We made the train with time to spare. (If you live in London or the southeast of England, you ought to be impressed.) In fact, the taxi service was so danged good I’m going to endorse them here.

Our brief stay in Paris was delightful. We were walking distance to everything, with a fine Eiffel tower view from our bedroom. We were able to walk everywhere (no taxis, no Metro, just feet), and I am eager to go back for a much longer stay. Even at my frantic pace, there was simply too much to see in two days.

Our Valentine’s night dinner was vegetarian, of course; our travel agent found us what claims to be the only Michelin 3-star primarily vegetarian restaurant in the world. (The website is all in French. I can read French pretty well, but can’t speak it to save my life. Arpege does serve some meat products — alas including foie gras — but it’s very easy to have a vegetarian, even vegan meal that meets the standards of haute gastronomie.) The meal lasted nearly four hours, and I was blissful throughout the entire time; my wife was awed that her hyperactive, fidgety husband was able to sit still and be cheerful and present for so long! We did the tasting menu, composed almost entirely of root vegetables prepared in the most unexpected and extraordinary ways. It was the longest, most delightful, and most romantic dinner of my entire life. Worth every Eurocent, even with a very weak dollar.

Last Friday, we flew directly from Paris to Exeter to visit my brother and his family. It was cloudy and wet most of our stay in Devon, but we had a happy time regardless. Lots of long walks along the Exe estuary, lots of good potato and veggie pasties.

I’ll try and post a few pictures in the Flickr account later today or tomorrow.

Oh, and as of this morning, I’m once again going off all diet sodas and artificial sweeteners. I’d been doing so well for so long, and then had a relapse last fall that ended up lasting about five months. As of this morning, no more diet Cokes. My students will not see any more giant mugs of cola; they will see lots of water and a regularly refilled coffee mug.

More on other things soon.

Another brief hiatus

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I’ll be away from the blog until Tuesday, February 20.  I’ll also be away from e-mail, phone, etcetera.

A very Happy Valentine’s to all — both to those who are celebrating that day, and those who are dreading the whole damn thing.

See you in just over a week.

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Grim times for the babes of ’67

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As I contemplate turning forty in a few short months, I’m noting it’s been a bad month for other famous folks born in 1967.

The first truly famous pop-culture figure from 1967 was the late Kurt Cobain; he died on the very same day in April ’94 that I was offered a full-time tenure-track job here at PCC.

Last week, Anna Nicole Smith (six months my junior, born November ’67) died.  Keith Urban (October ’67), now married to Nicole Kidman, has been in and out of rehab.  And two weeks ago, news broke of the unfortunate fall from grace of Gavin Newsom, the mayor of San Francisco. Newsom (born October ’67), whose career I’ve followed since he was first elected to the Board of Supervisors when he was barely 30, has confessed to having an affair with the wife of a long-time campaign aide.  He has also, like Urban, entered treatment for alcoholism.  I once thought he would be the first person younger than me to be elected president; that prospect seems somewhat less likely.

Other 1967ers seem to be doing fine.  I’m turning forty this year with Julia Roberts, Faith Hill, and my fellow animal rights activist, darling Pamela Anderson.  But for some reason, the sad end to Anna Nicole’s life and the tawdry revelations about Mayor Newsom have me lamenting the varied misfortunes of my fellow 39 year-olds.  Clearly, some of us won’t ever see forty, and some of us (like Newsom, who has also been dating a twenty year-old) seem eager to pretend that this momentous milestone isn’t happening to us.

As for me, I’m quite excited about my fortieth.  I think I’ll have a party, the first proper birthday party I’ll have had since I turned 21.  And don’t anticipate any falls from grace on my end!  But however eager I am to hit this milestone, I’m also spending at least a bit of time thinking about my fellow ’67-ers, and the various triumphs and tragedies that have befallen them.

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A note about race and manners

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A good weekend all around.  We went to see Venus last night; Peter O’Toole was indeed as terrific as advertised.  I enjoyed the film more than my wife did; as hostile as I generally am to older men-younger women romances, I bought the challenging, often squirm-inducing aspects of the story.  And I appreciated that it was surprisingly unsentimental.

I’m thinking this morning about handshakes, perhaps because I dreamt about them last night. 

Actually, I’m thinking less about handshakes and more about manners.  I grew up in a family in which manners were very much part of our civil religion.  “A gentleman always makes other people feel comfortable” was a central maxim of my childhood.  There was a good deal more about making others feel relaxed and welcomed than there was about “standing up for the truth”.  Our kind of people could hold a wide variety of views on religious and political matters, but OKOP always were raised to master the social graces.  (My dear uncle Stanley, a noted Communist and philosopher whose work is still widely read, regularly went to meetings of the radical left dressed impeccably in a Brooks Brothers suit.  He could betray his class,  but not his upbringing — if that makes any sense.)

In my childhood, we were regularly told that “if you have good manners, you can go anywhere.”  My grandmother told us that a gentleman (or a lady) should be able to have tea with the Queen in Buckingham Palace; a gentleman or a lady should feel equally at home on a stool in a dive bar in the Mission District.  “If you have lovely manners”, she told us, “you can go anywhere and fit right in.”  (I’ve sat on a lot of barstools in my nearly forty years.  I still await my invitation from Her Majesty, but my grandmother’s point is well-taken.)

I think manners popped into my head because I was also thinking about race, particularly after reading this article in yesterday’s paper about interracial relationships on television.  It’s an interesting piece about the ways in which the current crop of television depictions of interracial romances tend to minimize or even ignore some of the very real pitfalls that such relationships can present.

I’m married to a woman who is of mixed ancestry; she can “pass” for white, black, or Hispanic.  Our children, when they are born, will be a glorious mix: indigenous Colombian,  Jewish, English, Scots-Irish, Croatian, Nigerian, German, Flemish, Welsh, Czech, Spanish.  And I can’t help but wonder whether or not they will they will appear “white”.  My love, of course, is not conditional on race or appearance.  But I know that we live in a world where perceptions about race can still be very powerful. I know that we live in a world where “blackness” is still charged with significance.  And I know that if my children appear to be black, they may face a certain set of obstacles in the world that they will not face if they more closely resemble their European heritage.

What does this have to do with manners? In my family (which was entirely white in my childhood, much less so now), we were told again and again that “if you have good manners, people will welcome you anywhere you go.”  I’ve been to five continents and most corners of this country, and I’m happy to say that my grandmother’s words have proved true.  But I also know that folks around the globe notice my pale blue eyes before they notice my manners.  I have had friends very close to me whose skin is darker than mine and whose easy graciousness surpasses my own.  They have not always had the welcomes I have had. 

I will teach my children many of the lessons I learned.  We will work on chewing with the mouth closed; we will learn to master increasingly complex table settings.  We will learn that the key to good party manners is not being interesting, but being interested.  We will definitely devote several hours to handshake instruction, teaching that firm, polite grip that avoids the twin disasters of the “dead fish” or the “bonecrusher.”  And if they’re like their father was, my children will find the lessons boring and exasperating at the time they are taught; they will come to be immensely grateful for them.  And oh God, how I hope that they will live in a world where whatever their outer appearance, those manners will serve them well and cause them to be welcomed wherever they go.

And just maybe, they’ll get invited to Buckingham Palace.

 

 

Revisiting the question of the “number”

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Have I been posting too much this week? I’ve been a bit on the prolific side. Perhaps quality is suffering as a result…

Jill and Jessica posted a little card with a graph (click on their names to see what I mean) that nicely illustrates the ancient double-standard about “studs”, “sluts” and the number of sexual partners it takes each sex to earn those very different labels.

In various ways, I’ve written about how we think about our sexual pasts. See here, for example, or here, or here. (Read them all, you might see a chronological evolution in my thinking.)

I’ve mentioned this before, but I have dear friends of both sexes whose sexual experience is enormously varied. I have two male buddies, both dear to me, who have each had but one partner: the woman to whom they are now married. I have two other buddies, also dear to me, whose “numbers” are reliably well into the triple digits. (One, who has finally settled down into happy monogamy, knows his exact number, and shares it so often I am tempted to greet him with “What’s up, Mr. 119?” The other friend has at least three times that many, and has long since lost count. He, unlike most of the rest of us who are committed these days, is still out there working his shtick. His number climbs inexorably higher.)

I have no intention of disclosing my number here. It’s obviously more than 1, and it’s less than my buddy’s 119, and I’m not going to so much as hint at where it stands. (I am happy to say it hasn’t moved in many years, and Lord willing, it never will.) I will say that I see no evidence that my straight, heterosexual friends who have an exhaustive catalogue of experience with different women have learned much about relationships or love as a result; I can say that my friends who have had rich and varied experiences with the same woman have taught me far more about how to be a loving husband. That doesn’t mean that an abundance of experience is automatically an impediment to intimacy, mind you! It just means that an abundance of experience doesn’t automatically lead to wisdom or sensitivity, either!

I only post today because I have a few folks in my life — of both sexes — who have told me recently that they wish that their number was higher. They daydream, from time to time, about what it would have been like to take more risks and more chances when they were younger and single. And I have other friends, again of both sexes, who still struggle with some shame around their number (dear Mr. 119 is not among them), wishing that it were lower, wishing that they could have some “do-overs” that would reduce the overall sum. I am happy to say that I am in neither camp.

Two categories of folks earn my rebuke. First those, like one of my friends above, who view their ever-growing number with pride. I don’t need my strong Christian faith to tell me that using other human beings to boost one’s ego is adolescent at best, pathetically narcissistic at worst.

Second, I have little patience with those who cling to the nasty, archaic slut/stud dichotomy, and use a woman’s “number” to try to shame her. One clear sign that a boy has failed to develop into a man: an obsessive focus on his girlfriend’s past lovers. Probing questions, pleas for reassurance, passive-aggressive displays of judgment and anxiety — these are indefensible. To quote myself:

A true lover can say, “Before there was an ‘us’, there was a ‘you’ and a ‘me’, and I will never use what you did in the past against you. I honor your right to have lived the life you chose to live before we were together, and I ask that you honor my right to my past as well.” True love focuses on the joy of the present and a shared commitment to the future; it seldom dwells on the past.

…from a spiritual standpoint, there’s a huge difference between holding oneself to a high standard and expecting that same standard from everyone else. A good Christian might well desire to be a virgin on his or her wedding night; it doesn’t follow that a good Christian has a right to demand that his or her spouse have an equally low level of sexual experience.