Jane Greenway Carr notes that “for an outsider genre, science fiction is pretty mainstream in the classroom these days”:
Common Core standards acknowledge it, along with its cousins speculative fiction and fantasy literature, as acceptable content in Language Arts curricula. Many of the current generation of professors in English Departments grew up watching Star Trek and The X-Files, including University of Maryland English professor Lee Konstantinou, who feels that science fiction novels and films help students to process big-picture questions, especially “risk, political conflict, and social and technological systems.” Konstantinou is a contributor to Hieroglyph: Stories & Visions for a Better Future, a recent anthology co-edited by Ed Finn, founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University, that goes to the heart of why I think teaching science fiction to more students can change the world: because science fiction productively embodies difference and illustrates emerging technologies, giving students enough of each so that they may interrogate these elements in both the fictional and the real worlds.
As a cultural cherry on the top of the #gamergate cake, Matt Taylor’s confession is hard to beat. Convicted merely of being a clueless dude, who just happened to have helped land a fricking spacecraft on a comet, his tears strike me as another sad product of our over-polarized, over-politicized culture.
This weekend, as I was drinking some great coffee in L.A., I was re-reading Alan Watts on my Kindle. In The Way Of Zen, one of his greats, he wrote the following:
It was a basic Confucian principle that ‘it is man who makes truth great, not truth which makes man great.’ For this reason, ‘humanness’ or ‘human-heartedness’ was always felt to be superior to ‘righteousness’, since man himself is greater than any idea he may invent. There are times when men’s passions are much more trustworthy than their principles. Since opposed principles, or ideologies, are irreconcilable, wars fought over principle will be wars of mutual annihilation. But wars fought for simple greed will be far less destructive, because the aggressor will be careful not to destroy what he is fighting to capture.
Reasonable – that is, human – men will always be capable of compromise, but men who have dehumanized themselves by becoming the blind worshipers of an idea or an ideal are fanatics whose devotion to abstractions makes them the enemies of life.
Our culture is full to the brim of these righteous ideologues right now. Why are we shocked that so much cruelty and fanaticism reign?
We had a big boost in subscriptions late last week, thanks to a reminder email we sent out to lapsed subscribers whose credit cards, by and large, had expired. You can join the recently renewed here – and get access to all the readons and Deep Dish – for a little as $1.99 month. A new subscriber writes:
Hi Andrew, saw you on Bill Maher Friday night and, as usual, I found myself agreeing with about 99% of what you said. (Don’t ask me what the other 1% is, I don’t know …). I’ve been reading your stuff for at least 15 years, and I find The Dish to be one of the best reads around. Even when I don’t agree with what you are saying, I find that how you say it is rational, well thought out, and almost persuasive. On Maher’s show, the one thing I strongly agreed with was … why does the U.S. have to go over and fight ISIS, especially after the failures we’ve experienced there? Let them fight it out.
I’m partly disabled, living on SS Disability and a small pension from Disney, but the $20 bucks I just spent is worth much more than that. Keep up the good work, and get back on Maher!
“to the unborn and waiting children” by Lucille Clifton:
i went into my mother as
some souls go into a church,
for the rest only. but there,
even there, from the belly of a
poor woman who could not save herself
i was pushed without my permission
into a tangle of birthdays.
listen, eavesdroppers, there is no such thing
as a bed without affliction;
the bodies all may open wide but
you enter at your own risk.
In an homage to his mother, Cord Jefferson considers the relationship between caring and bravery:
The world at large was frequently as resentful as my grandfather had been at my mother’s decision to marry a person with skin different from her own. There were the confused looks my family received in public, and, if my mother and I were alone, the strangers asking if I was her “real” son. There was the time an entire restaurant of white people in Mississippi gave us dagger stares for daring to eat breakfast around them. There was the time, after my mom and dad had divorced, that a potential suitor abruptly ended a date with my mother after seeing a picture of me, her brown son.
“You didn’t tell me your ex was black,” said the man.
“I didn’t know that mattered,” said my mom.
“Well, it does,” he said, and he left. …
When I think of my mother’s life up to this point, what I find most revealing is how much of the abuse hurled at her throughout the years came about solely because she showed care and love to the wrong kinds of people. Time and again, it was her openness to others that found her shut off from her friends, her church, her colleagues, even her own family. We seem to reserve a special rage in this world for those whose ability to be unafraid in pursuit of something new extends beyond our own. We begrudge them their strange friends and strange experiences under the guise that we find those things to be dangerous or unclean. But really we resent those people because their courage reminds us of how common and terrified we feel inside. Bravery is a virtue people revere in dead soldiers and then turn to disparage in someone extending her hand to a weirdo.
Nick Turpin photographed London bus commuters for his series Through a Glass Darkly:
The combination of rainswept windows and lamplight make for images that are like oil paintings – stunning flashes of colour that belie the sticky hell they portray. There’s both a detachment and an intimacy to the works that form the series, entitled Through a Glass Darkly (the title borrows from Corinthians). Nick describes the project as taking the approach of a street photographer, continuing his interest in “recording the way that we live and making as close to a document as photography is capable of”.
Turpin elaborates:
“I photograph people without interaction and the pictures are un-retouched apart from colour and contrast corrections”, he explains. “It’s amazing how much variety there can be in the pictures, the people, the weather, the age and type of bus all play a part, I even have a shot with blue light in the background from a passing police vehicle. The pictures are intimate glimpses of people during that strange time between leaving the office and arriving home when you are almost between two identities. The project also raises questions about voyeurism and public and private space.”
Remarking on Bono’s recent faux-contrition over his band’s deal with Apple to push their new Songs of Innocence onto iPhone 6s and iTunes playlists everywhere, Paul Elie finds “the spirituality of U2” is to blame for the debacle just as much as any desire for relevancy:
Well before Nirvana perfected the soft-loud-soft song approach, U2 perfected the already classic secular-spiritual approach that might be called you-You-you – in songs addressed to a lover in the verses and to the crowd and/or a divinity in the chorus. (“Song for Someone” on the new record is the most recent example.) Bono sings to “someone” — his wife, or his friend, or his son, or to the listener; at the same time, he sings to everyone – everybody on the planet, in his own estimation – and to God or God’s surrogate, too.
That’s the essence of the spirituality of U2: the notion that we are, in the end, one people, one audience, with a common humanity and shared aspirations, which U2 has evoked for a third of a century in its frankly aspirational music.
But just as the aspiration to address everybody, speaking to us and for us all, is intermittently the hubris of various world religions, so it is intermittently the hubris of U2. “You know, they’re not punks – they want to play Madison Square Garden,” I said cleverly to a college DJ I knew after that spring-weekend gig [in 1983]. “Are you kidding? They want to be on up on a f—-in’ satellite playing to the f——in’ planet,” he retorted.
In The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Rod Dreher chronicles his decision to return to the small town where he grew up following his sister’s death from cancer. In an interview about the book, he reveals the Catholic saint who inspired the book’s title:
St. Therese, for your readers who don’t know her, was a Catholic saint, who died at age 24. Died young of tuberculosis in a convent in France in the late nineteenth century. She was a nobody. Came from a faithful family, but she was a nobody. Kind of a flibbertigibbet within the convent. After she died, the Mother Superior sent one of the nuns into her room to collect her things, and they found her writings there. They started reading them, and the scales fell from their eyes. They’d realized they had something extraordinary there within their own community.
Within thirty years, Therese was declared a saint and not just a saint. Pope John Paul II on her 100th anniversary of her death declared her a Doctor of the Church, which for Catholics means she was one of the rare saints that has the power to teach the essence of Christianity. She’s recognized as a great teacher. What did she teach? She was just a 24-year-old girl. She taught simplicity. She taught holiness through simplicity. She called it her little way. My sister was not a Catholic. She was a Methodist and not a particularly well-informed Methodist at that, but I think she was a saint because she showed how the simple life in an out of the way place can lead to greatness and to holiness.
That’s the encouragement I want to bring to people who read the book: don’t think your life doesn’t mean anything. God sees, and the people around you see. You never know what God is going to do with that. We’re all part of the great chain. That’s what Dante says too. You see over and over in El Purgatorio about the meaning of community, how Dante has to relearn this about how the chains of connection between the living and the dead, between the people in the community pray for us. What can I do for you? That’s something I’ve had to learn, not because I consciously rejected community, but it’s so easy to forget.
“The desert world accepts my homage with its customary silence. The grand indifference. As any man of sense would want it. If a voice from the clouds suddenly addressed me, speaking my name in trombone tones, or some angel in an aura of blue flame came floating toward me along the canyon rim, I think I would be more embarrassed than frightened – embarrassed by the vulgarity of such display. That is what depresses me in the mysticism of Carlos Castaneda and his like: their poverty of imagination. As any honest magician knows, true magic inheres in the ordinary, the common place, the everyday, the mystery of the obvious. Only petty minds and trivial souls year for supernatural events, incapable of perceiving that everything – everything! – within and around them is pure miracle,” – Edward Abbey, Abbey’s Road.
This week, Dissent unlocked three classic pieces by Irving Howe. In “Strangers” (1977), he explored how American Jews came to find a place in national literature, writing that “with time we discovered something strange about the writing of Americans: that even as we came to it feeling ourselves to be strangers, a number of the most notable writers, especially Whitman and Melville, had also regarded themselves as strangers”:
[T]he Melville book that we knew was, of course, Moby Dick, quite enough to convince us of a true kinship. Melville was a man who had worked—perhaps the only authentic proletarian writer this country has ever known—and who had identified himself consciously with the downtrodden plebs. Melville was a writer who took Whitman’s democratic affirmations and made them into a wonderfully concrete and fraternal poetry. If he had been willing to welcome Indians, South Sea cannibals, Africans, and Parsees (we were not quite sure who Parsees were!), he might have been prepared to admit a Jew or two onto the Pequod if he had happened to think of it.
The closeness one felt toward Melville I can only suggest by saying that when he begins with those utterly thrilling words, “Call me Ishmael,” we knew immediately that this meant he was not Ishmael, he was really Isaac.
He was the son who had taken the blessing and then, in order to set out for the forbidden world, had also taken his brother’s unblessed name. We knew that this Isaac-cum-Ishmael was a mama’s boy trying to slide or swagger into the world of power; that he took the job because he had to earn a living, because he wanted to fraternize with workers, and because he needed to prove himself in the chill of the world. When he had told mother Sarah that he was leaving, oh, what a tearful scene that was! “Isaac,” she had said, “Isaac, be careful,” and so careful did he turn out to be that in order to pass in the Gentile world he said, “Call me Ishmael.” And we too would ask the world to call us Ishmael, both the political world and the literary world, in whose chill we also wanted to prove ourselves while expecting that finally we would still be recognized as Isaacs.
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