Month: December 2012

Minneapolis, Minnesota, 3.29 pm

When the novelist Philip Roth announced his retirement from writing, his former student Arthur Plotnik wrote, "I can't help feeling as if the Master — the patron saint of fiction for two generations — has let me down." Morgan Meis uses the comment to ponder how artists, in our secular age, have become the equivalent of saints:

How do you have saints without religion? It would seem a contradiction in terms. Not so, said the Romantics of the early 19th century. Let us, they suggested, put the artist into the role of the saint. To be fair, the Romantics didn't exactly consciously plan to secularize saints. But they did begin to speak about artists and to idealize artists in ways that resembled the way people used to speak about saints. "The artist alone sees spirits," Johann Wolfgang von Goethe proclaimed, "But after he has told of their appearing to him, everybody sees them." The artist, in short, has a special and heightened relationship to the world. The rest of us benefit from the wonders that only the artist can reveal. Likewise, the artist, many Romantics thought, has a special relationship to suffering. Everyone knows the trope of the Romantic artist in anguish. Lord Byron said, "The great art of life is sensation, to feel that we exist, even in pain." The saint who once suffered in the knowledge that suffering can bring one closer to God has been transformed into the artist whose suffering reveals the truths of our worldly condition.

I’ve known David Kuo since he worked in the Bush White House as Deputy Director of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives. When he was working there, he suffered a brain seizure while driving and, without his extraordinary wife, Kim, taking the wheels from him, they might both never have survived.

But they have. David was diagnosed with brain cancer and left the Bush administration, reflecting in his conscience on his work there. The result was a book, Tempting Faith, that came out at almost the same time as The Conservative Soul. We found ourselves estranged from modern Republicanism and united by faith in Jesus. Thus a friendship was born, and it’s one I have treasured deeply. We have talked together, joked together, laughed together and prayed together. And the cancer has come and gone and come back again. When I saw him last, he had difficulty walking very far. And then I got an email from him with the following news:

In the last four weeks two new tumors have grown. Both are in the same area as previous tumors. One is located directly on the motor pathway that controls my left leg. The other is at the front of the cavity created by previous surgeries. The news knocked the wind out of us, gave us vertigo. Frankly we are still spinning. In all the scenarios we could come up with this wasn’t one of them. My physical state, even taking into account the blood clots and bleeding brain, was on the upswing. Those sensory seizures had stopped. We were crushed. All the suffering from the surgery and it did nothing but weaken me? All the hope for the viral treatment and nothing?

He has helped me so much over the years in my own spiritual journey; and it would be true to say simply that I love him and am proud to have him here. Watch his previous videos here, here, here, here, here and here. Read some of his writing here.

ShortList collects their 50 favorite literary insults. From Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye:

I told him he didn’t even care if a girl kept all her kings in the back row or not, and the reason he didn’t care was because he was a goddam stupid moron. He hated it when you called him a moron. All morons hate it when you call them a moron.

From Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment:

He was one of the numerous and varied legion of dullards, of half-animated abortions, conceited, half-educated coxcombs, who attach themselves to the idea most in fashion only to vulgarize it and who caricature every cause they serve, however sincerely.

And from Shakespeare's As You Like It:

“I desire that we be better strangers."

Sheng Li visited the Ruoshui Mental Health Clinic in Shenyang, China, to photograph the practice of "death experience therapy":

According to 50-year-old therapist Mr. Tang Yulong, the clinic opened in 2009 and since then there have been more than a thousand people who have done the death experience therapy. The therapy costs 2000 yuan ($320) and usually lasts 4 to 5 hours, during the duration of which the patient is required to lie in a coffin while his/her relatives read “epitaphs” or give speeches nearby. The patient also needs to write down his/her feelings and share with therapists and family. Mr. Tang said that many of them burst into tears when they are “resurrected.” He believes it is an extreme but efficient method to make people realize the value of their lives.

Li interviewed a participant who described the effects of the treatment this way:

Mr. Yang told me later that for a few seconds he really felt as if he were dead inside the coffin, and his desire to keep on living became stronger. And when he heard his wife reading a letter to him, he cried. He said that it was so strange that when he was “dead,” he actually felt closer to his wife and loved ones.

(Video: A less elaborate and less scientific coffin therapy service in the Urkaine.)

Suzanne Koven interviews Andrew Solomon about his new book on parents with dissimilar children, Far from the Tree, which contains chapters on "the Deaf, dwarfs, children with Down syndrome, autism, and severe disabilities, as well as transgendered people, schizophrenics, prodigies, criminals, and children conceived through rape." One essential lesson that his research taught him about his own experiences:

[B]efore I started on the book, I hadn’t drawn the distinction—which has become important to me since—which is between love and acceptance. You know, I feel as though when I was in the process of coming out of the closet it was upsetting for my parents, especially for my mother, and they weren’t very accepting of it. And I experienced that as their not being very loving. And actually, what I recognized writing the book, is that parents of children who have some kind of difference almost always have to struggle with it, and often manage to come through, and it’s their love that motivates them to come to terms with the strangeness or difference or whatever it is that’s extraordinary in their children. And having looked at all these other families I was able to say: Okay, my family didn’t throw me out, they didn’t want nothing to do with me, they weren’t actively rejecting. It just took them a while to get used to it.

And it took me a while to get used to it, too. We were all going through a process of accepting who I was. And there had never really been a deficit in their love. The deficit was in their acceptance. These were two separate things. And the deficit in acceptance was no worse than anybody else’s deficit in acceptance. So I just felt that by trying to understand, How does a family deal with a child who has an identity they at least initially experience as aberrant?—I could fit my parents’ behavior into a larger framework, instead of feeling that I was dealing with it just as itself, and adding layers of meaning to it that it didn’t have.

Laurie Penny criticizes the current campaign to regulate sex trafficking, despite the crusaders' "good intentions":

Laws regulating sex work are written, in most cases, by people who have never done sex work and who have no sustained contact with those who do. The most well-meaning legislation, designed to prevent the trafficking of vulnerable women and girls (vulnerable men and boys are expected to fend for themselves), often backfires, pushing the sex trade further underground and giving the police licence to punish and victimise women walking the streets or working together for safety. In the UK earlier this year, a cancer patient, Sheila Farmer, overturned a conviction for "brothel-keeping" – she was selling sex in a flat shared with a friend for their mutual protection.

In California, the controversial Proposition 35 has just passed, with the aim, again, of stamping out sex trafficking. As a result, women who are found to be selling sex may have to register as sex offenders and submit to internet monitoring for the rest of their lives, as may anyone receiving financial support from them, including their children.

She concludes, "In reality, sex work isn’t stigmatised because it is dangerous. Sex work is dangerous because it is stigmatised."

Maggie Koerth-Baker warns:

Nothing has been proven yet — most of the data comes from disembodied cell cultures and animal testing, which doesn't necessarily give you an accurate picture of what's happening in humans — but several studies over the last few years have drawn connections between lubricant use and increased rates of STD transmission. (It also looks like some lubricants might kill off natural vaginal flora — the good bacteria that live "up there" and make the difference between a healthy vagina and, say, a raging yeast infection.) Some of these studies have provided evidence suggesting that the ingredients in lubricants damage the cells lining the vagina and rectum — which would explain why those lubricants might facilitate STD transmission.

Lauren Wolf has more:

Right now, the Food & Drug Administration doesn’t typically require testing of personal lubricants in humans. The agency classifies them as medical devices, so the sex aids have to be tested on animals such as rabbits and guinea pigs. Rectal use of lubricants is viewed by the agency as an "off-label" application—use at your own risk.

Questions about lubricant safety arose nearly a decade ago when micro­bicide developers were testing whether the detergent nonoxynol-9 could block HIV transmission. Manufacturers had been incorporating the compound into spermicidal lubricants for years because of its ability to punch holes in the cell membranes of sperm. In 2002, however, a Phase II/III clinical trial of a nonoxynol-9 vaginal gel failed to protect women from HIV infection. Not only that, but the detergent actually increased the risk of HIV infection in the sex workers tested—women living in countries such as South Africa and Thailand who used the product three or four times per day. Lab work eventually revealed the reason for the paradoxical increase: Nonoxynol-9 is so good at punching holes in cell membranes that it not only bores into sperm but also into the cells lining the vagina and rectum.

Renate Stendhal reviews Marilyn Yalom's How the French Invented Love:

Yalom cites a recent statistic culled from a study in which a French and an American group were asked whether "true love can exist without a radiant sex life." Of the American group, 83 percent agreed with this statement; only 34 percent of the French agreed, Yalom writes: "A 49 percent difference in opinion on the need for sex in love is a startling statistic! This French emphasis on carnal satisfaction strikes tighter-laced Americans as deliciously naughty."

Another crucial ingredient of French love includes "the darker elements that Americans are reluctant to admit as normal: jealousy, suffering, extramarital sex, multiple lovers, crimes of passion, disillusion, even violence. Perhaps more than anything, the French accept the premise that sexual passion has its own justification. Love simply doesn’t have the same moral overlay that we Americans expect it to have."

(Photo by Flickr user Thomas D)