Author: Andrew Sullivan

Breaking Bread

BouveretLastSupper

Jennifer Phillips, an Episcopal priest, contemplates the reasons that all manner of people – from a curious Jewish woman to an uncertain immigrant family – have slipped into her New Mexico parish to participate in the sacrament of Holy Communion. Why she never turns them away:

All sorts and conditions of people are drawn to the rail for all sorts of reasons conscious and unconscious, in a great variety of states of preparedness and unpreparedness. There’s always lots of teaching going on to help form people in our sacramental life, but the plain truth is that the power of God in the liturgy touches, moves, transforms, and attracts people right then, and at the rail doesn’t seem a good place to question beyond “do you desire to receive the Body of Christ?”
 At the heavenly throne I’d much rather be explaining why I fed some people inappropriately than why I failed to feed some who hungered and thirsted for God and put their hands out; and I’d rather give an extra blessing with a touch to someone who is drawn forward than explain they should be satisfied with a general blessing at the end. Like grain, in full measure, poured out, spilling over into one’s lap, this love and graciousness of God in the sacrament of the altar.

On a similar note, Rachel Held Evans recently spotted the following passage from Sara Miles’s memoir, Take This Bread:

What happened once I started distributing communion was the truly disturbing, dreadful realization about Christianity:

You can’t be a Christian by yourself….Sooner or later, if I kept participating in communion, I’d have to swallow the fact of my connection with all other people, without exception….I wasn’t getting [communion] because I was special. I certainly didn’t get to pick who else was good enough, holy enough, deserving enough, to receive it. It wasn’t a private meal. The bread on that Table had to be shared with everyone in order for me to really taste it….I was going to get communion, whether I wanted it or not, with people I didn’t necessarily like. People I didn’t choose. People such as my parents or the strangers who fed me: the people God chose for me.

(Painting: Pascal Dagnan-Bouveret’s The Last Supper, 1896, via Wikimedia Commons)

Where Are All The Female Atheists? Ctd

More readers share their thoughts on the recent thread:

As a female atheist I agree with the reasons for our scarcity theorized by Susan Jacoby in the Humanist article you linked to previously. The source communities for atheism are male dominated, and politically conscious women are – in my experience with student activism at least – more inclined to tackle issues specific to women.

I would add my own supplemental theory, which is that women are the traditional transmitters of culture to the next generation. Whatever parent does the most caregiving is the most responsible for instilling in the children a code of behavior, and progress toward parental equity notwithstanding, that’s still mostly women. Because our society still equates morality and social cohesion with supernatural belief, I’m sure there are many women who start out with a neutral position toward religion but drift closer to it – and away from atheism – as a subconscious promotion of their children’s social acceptability. There is plenty of anecdotal evidence that believers often become more devout when they start raising children and I wouldn’t be surprised if that has a drag effect on the level of belief.

Another writes:

I don’t think that it’s the job of the atheist community to pick a couple of women from their ranks and “promote” them, whatever that means.  Atheism is not, sorry to say, a political movement where there are party bosses who can pick up some back benchers and give them prominent roles to advance their careers. Atheists are a herd of cats, which is really a problem on many fronts, including any kind of organized promotion of pretty much anything.

Another isn’t impressed with some of the high-profile atheist women so far:

My first memory of the term atheist was Madalyn Murray O’Hare on the Phil Donahue show.  I was probably around 10 at the time and remember very little of it other than a general impression of what an awful person she was and what a shame, since it would be nice to have a real discussion about the obvious fact that there is no magic man up in the sky.  That experience is probably not a significant reason why I am a deGrasse Tyson Agnostic (dTA) rather than an out-and-loud atheist, but if I were older at the time I saw it, and especially if I were a woman, I could see watching that and the audience reaction to her and just shutting up about religion for good.

Let’s Talk About Real Sex

The HBO documentary series Real Sex, which premiered in 1990, took an unusually candid approach to depicting sexuality on TV. Molly Langmuir presents a tribute and a behind-the-scenes oral history:

By turns bawdy, sexy, hilarious, and simply weird (though never not sincere), [Real Sex] filled in the gaps high school sex ed classes left, which turned out to be vast. Real Sex covered not only sex toys and polyamory, but the vaginal molds of porn stars, squirting demonstrations at swingers’ conventions, and workshops in which participants were prompted to dip their testicles in sprinkles.

Through it all, the mostly female team that produced the show experienced firsthand the almost absurdly vast array of desires that comprise human sexuality. “One of the main things I remember was how much we laughed,” said Katie Smalheer, who worked on the show for nine years. “We weren’t laughing at people; we were just laughing at how silly we can all be when it comes to sex — role-playing, dress-up, sex toys, dirty talk, strap-ons, corsets, striptease, mud play, latex. That was the essence of Real Sex, real people doing what turned them on, and having fun.”

Deb Wasser [street interviewer, segment producer, director]: The lawyers were very careful about what we could show.

They would examine it frame by frame. What a job. Then they’d come back to us and say, remove these three frames. Of course when we were out there filming people really having sex, they weren’t stopping and starting for the camera.

Lynn Sadofsky [line producer, co-producer]: It could feel a bit absurd sometimes. I remember one sex workshop where the participants were in the throes of whatever practice they were doing and I literally had to call lunch because the crew had to stop filming — we weren’t a union set, but we did basically follow union rules. Finally I just called, “lunch time.” I guess [the workshop participants] stopped. I guess they lined up for lunch.

Katie Smalheer [associate producer, coordinating producer, supervising producer]: There were a couple of segments toward the end that I remember clearly. Someone pitched us a story about these sex orgies and at first we didn’t do it because who wants to go to sex party and let you film them?

Turns out a lot of people. We ended up shooting this orgy, which was basically a costume party, or a masquerade, like in Eyes Wide Shut. There was even a woman who looked like Marie Antoinette with one of those skirts with the structure underneath. And they were good-looking people. By the end of the night, everyone had their clothes off and were fucking. At a certain point when you’re shooting vérité, there’s nothing for the producer to do. You just have to let the cameraman shoot. Patti and I ended up hiding behind this bookcase looking at each other, like, “What life are we living that we’re in the middle of someone else’s sex party?” People were getting fucked by other people’s husbands. A woman was in a dentist’s chair with three guys.

And it wasn’t horrible, either. There was something sexy about this.

Google Goggles

According to Gary Shteyngart, wearing Google Glass makes you seem more appealing to strangers:

My friend Doug and I hit Bushwick and Williamsburg. Everyone at the bar at Roberta’s restaurant wants a piece of me. “Ah, future!” a German man cries. “We saw you have the Google,” a girl from a group of visiting Atlantans drawls. “Can we try it awn?” And then, without warning, I’m talking to young people. We’re all squealing, full of childish zeal. We are rubbing up to the future, hearing the first gramophone playing scratchily in the distance. Doug knows a movie producer who recently got Glass and said, “This is as close as I’ll ever get to being a rock star.” When the velvet-rope hostess at the of-the-moment Wythe Hotel bar in Williamsburg stops to take a photo of me with her iPhone, I know exactly what the producer meant. This is the most I will ever be loved by strangers.

But:

Wearing Glass takes its toll.

“You look like you have a lazy eye,” I’m told at a barbecue, my right eye instinctively scanning upward for more info. “You look like you have a nervous tic,” when I tap at the touch pad. “You have that faraway look again,” whenever there’s something more interesting happening on my screen. To awaken Glass, one must tap at the touch pad or jerk one’s head; otherwise the device remains inactive, conserving its limited battery supply and allowing the user to remain perfectly human. At breakfast, I jerk my head up theatrically, and then use a new function which allows me to move around Web sites by holding two fingers to the touch pad and moving my head about, in effect turning my skull into a cursor. “Domo arigato, Mr. Roboto,” my wife says.

After a full day of Glassing, of constantly moving my eye up and down as if in preparation for the bifocals I will need when I’m older, I fall into bed exhausted. I want to take my Glass off, but there’s a tweet from Joyce Carol Oates in response to a tweet I posted of myself wearing Glass. Oates is more concerned about my choice of shirts in the photo I tweeted. “Did Rasputin wear a button-down collar?” she asks, questioning my identity. “Not the actual G.S., possibly.”

A video of Shteyngart experimenting with Glass is here.

A Bubbly Blooper

Champagne, as physicist Gerard Liger-Belair explains in Uncorked: The Science of Champagne, was discovered by accident:

Europeans … once considered the bubbling beverage a product of poor winemaking. In the late dish_champagne1400s, temperatures plunged suddenly on the continent, freezing many of the continent’s lakes and rivers, including the Thames River and the canals of Venice. The monks of the Abbey of Hautvillers in Champagne, where high-altitude made it possible to grow top quality grapes, were already hard at work creating reds and whites. The cold temporarily halted fermentation, the process by which wine is made. When spring arrived with warmer temperatures, the budding spirits began to ferment again. This produced an excess of carbon dioxide inside wine bottles, giving the liquid inside a fizzy quality.

In 1668, the Catholic Church called upon a monk by the name of Dom Pierre Pérignon to finally control the situation. The rebellious wine was so fizzy that bottles kept exploding in the cellar, and Dom Pérignon was tasked with staving off a second round of fermentation.

In time, however, tastes changed, starting with the Royal Court at Versailles. By the end of the 17th century, Dom Pérignon was asked to reverse everything he was doing and focus on making champagne even bubblier. Although historical records show that a British doctor developed a recipe for champagne six years before Pérignon began his work, Pérignon would come to be known as the father of champagne thanks to his blending techniques. The process he developed, known as the French Method, incorporated the weather-induced “oops” moment that first created champagne—and it’s how champagne is made today.

Previous Dish on the bubbly here and here.

(Photo by Flickr user Peter)

Porn Sex vs Real Sex

Illustrating the distinction with food items:

Mark Wilson sees the educational merits of the video:

[I]t’s not just silliness for silliness’s sake; this clip is well-designed sex education. By coupling innocuous foods with taboo topics, the presentation drops our inherent prudishness and becomes an analogy that anyone is comfortable relating to. And maybe more important, it’s refreshingly funny. Imagine if they showed this intentionally hilarious video in schools (to encourage real laughter) rather than unintentionally hilarious dry alternatives (that just encourage nervous laughter).

Drinking And Drafting, Ctd

Modern Drunkard catalogs the novelist Carson McCullers‘ astonishing drinking regimen:

Attending a ferocious flurry of cocktail parties thrown in her honor, she took no small amount of pleasure in shocking the gathered intelligentsia — not with boorish behavior (she was generally quite shy), but by showing them how much booze a young lady from the South could put away. Carson possessed a prodigious capacity for liquor and reveled in sending large proud Yankees staggering home while she drank deeper into the night.

Carson liked sherry with her tea, brandy with her coffee and her purse with a large flask of whiskey. Between books, when she was neither famous nor monied, she claimed she existed almost exclusively on gin, cigarettes and desperation for weeks at a time. During her most productive years she employed a round-the-clock drinking system: she’d start the day at her typewriter with a ritual glass a beer, a way of saying it was time to work, then steadily sip sherry as she typed. If it was cold and there was no wood for the stove, she’d turn up the heat with double shots of whiskey. She concluded her workday before dinner, which she primed with a martini. Then it was off to the parties, which meant more martinis, cognac and oftentimes corn whiskey. Finally, she ended the day as it began, with a bedtime beer.

Recent Dish on the subject here.

(Hat tip: The Paris Review)

Keroauc And Mom, On The Road

In 1965, Jack Keroauc narrated his travels with his mother (“Memère”) for the May issue of Holiday. He describes their journey to New Orleans:

There’s hardly anything in the world, or at least in America, more miserable than a transcontinental bus trip with limited means. More than three days and three nights wearing the same clothes, bouncing around into town after town; even at three in the morning, when you’ve finally fallen asleep, there you are being bounced over the railroad tracks of a town, and all the lights are turned on bright to reveal your raggedness and weariness in the seat. To do that, as I’d done so often as a strong young man, is bad enough; but to have to do that when you’re a sixty-two-year-old lady … yet Memère is more cheerful than I, and she devises a terrific trick to keep us in fairly good shape—aspirins with Coke three times a day to calm the nerves.

From mid-Florida we roll in the late afternoon over orange-grove hills toward the Tallahassee and Mobile of morning, no prospect of New Orleans till noon and already fair exhausted. Such an enormous country, you realize when you cross it on buses, the dreadful stretches between equally dreadful cities, all of them looking the same when seen from the bus of woes, the never-get-there bus stopping everywhere, and worst of all the string of fresh enthusiastic drivers every two or three hundred miles warning everyone to relax and be happy.

Sometimes during the night I look at my poor sleeping mother cruelly crucified there in the American night because of no-money, no-hope-of-money, no-family, no-nothing—just myself, the stupid son of plans all compacted of eventual darkness. God, how right Hemingway was when he said there was no remedy for life.

(Hat tip: Longform)