The Hounding Of A Heretic, Ctd

When you’ve lost Bill Maher, you’ve lost a lot of people:

A reader writes:

I’m one of those lefty queer liberals you are always sneering about, but you are right about this one. This whole episode has the air of the lynch mob about it and I am disappointed with people.

Another writes:

I read what you wrote about your disgust with gay “fanaticism” and I couldn’t agree more.  I came out of a very cultish Christian church that hated women, gays and anything cultured, but I still consider myself spiritual (and Christian) and want to have a daily relationship with the Holy Spirit. Over dinner the other night, three other like-minded gays and myself discussed the schisms in the church, and how common sense was often jettisoned in order to tow the party line. And then we talked about how we don’t like how the gay community is doing the same exact thing.  We are all for gay rights and equality and acceptance, but at the point that we no longer have grace for anyone else’s viewpoints, we have become the very thing we abhor.

Another:

I am a Christian who vocally supported the rights of gays to marry for many years – and did so in rural Texas, where doing so actually meant you were risking something. Sorry to say now that I regret it. Not because it was wrong to support gay marriage, but because the gay community apparently will not extend to me as a Christian the same respect.  First it was wedding cakes and flower arrangements, now this. Not to be overly dramatic, but it seems I basically signed my own death warrant with respect to religious freedom.  I guess I was naive not to expect this type of blowback.

Sorry, guys.  From here on out, you’re on your own.

Another:

I work for Mozilla (please don’t share my name, although I know you have a policy of anonymity anyway), and I have worked closely with Brendan Eich for many years.

The part that makes me the saddest about this whole story was that the benefit for the equality movement was minimal at best, but the blow this strikes to the movement for an open and healthy Web could be huge. I so wish we had done better over the years at telling Mozilla’s story. (Did you or your readers know we’re a mission-driven, non-profit organization? It’s sad how few people do even to this day.) Brendan was our co-founder, one of our best minds, and one of the most passionate and committed members of the movement to keep the Web from being owned by powerful interests like Google and Microsoft. He was always scrupulous in his professional decorum, and despite a fierce ability to argue a technical or strategic point about Mozilla, I never once saw him treat anyone unfairly or with a hint of malice. But now I have to watch my Facebook feed fill up with stories of my fellow liberals high-fiving each other over the toppling of another ostensible corporate villain.

Another:

I am a married heterosexual, a believing Christian and a constitutional conservative who nonetheless voted for gay marriage (for the Nevada constitution) when it came up some years back. My lifelong best friend and long-time business partner is gay. We saw things differently, but he didn’t impose his views on me, and I didn’t impose my views on him.

As a supporter of the Constitution, I support any two consenting adults’ ability to legally marry, because I see nothing in the Constitution to prohibit it, and because I take the 10th Amendment seriously. In addition, and I guess this is the bottom line on this issue, I absolutely support the right of any individual to hold beliefs in and contribute to any legal cause, period.  It’s really nobody’s business – or shouldn’t be – what someone believes and supports – as long as he doesn’t take punitive action against those who hold a different belief.

I’m guessing that the liberal Left doesn’t see that they’ve created a precedent.  And there will be a backlash. Every time a gay activist tries to take a stand on a mainstream issue, he’ll now be vulnerable to charges that he’s a closet McCarthy-like bigot intent on crushing the rights and even the chances of gainful employment of those who dare hold different views. Those gay activists will be marginalized, at least by some, and to some degree.  What good does that do anybody?

Another:

I’m a gay man and I guess the most interesting point to me here is a little personal. Although I dislike the term “internalized homophobia” – it has always seemed to miss a necessary amount of nuance and complexity that goes with the whole experience – the fact is, over time, my own internal discomfort or feeling of awkwardness hearing, say, Ellen DeGeneres refer to her wife, or a man refer to his husband – has absolutely changed.

I’ll admit – I had some internal evolving to do too, don’t know how to quite describe it – sort of, feeling it to be remarkable that others were in advance of my own thinking, how could I have been so idiotic, and why (despite your book) didn’t I have the prior guts to even internally stand up for this notion, coming to the same defense of the issue where I am today.

That’s the nuance that’s missing from the stupid absolutism of the Mozilla situation.

Agreed. But when you have absolute certainty that you are right and that you represent goodness and your opponents evil, nuance is irrelevant. As is any semblance of toleration.

By the way, you can reader unfiltered feedback from readers on our Facebook page.

Turning The Camera On A Hidden Shutterbug

A new documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, investigates the life and art of the professional nanny whose stunning photography was discovered only after her death in 2007. (The film’s co-director, John Maloof, stumbled upon Maier’s work when he purchased a box of negatives at a Chicago auction for $380.) In a review of the film, Erin Fuchs focuses on revelations of Maier’s dark side:

She was an odd woman. Maier always had a Rolleiflex camera around her neck and dragged her charges around Chicago’s seedy areas to take pictures. Those pictures often captured the weakest moments of their subjects, who included children weeping and a young boy who had just been hit by a car. Maier took one of her charges, Inger Raymond, to a stockyard, where she exposed the young child to the slaughter of livestock. …

Despite Maier’s odd and mean behavior, at least two of her former charges had some affection for her, as they put her up in an apartment near the end of her life. In her final years, Maier often sat in the park, mumbling in French, eating food directly from a can, and accepting old clothes from strangers.

Jillian Steinhauer considers the movie “standard artist-as-subject fare” but still appreciates the tribute:

Finding Vivian Maier isn’t particularly experimental or innovative in form, and suffers from a bit of structural scrambling when the narrative veers abruptly at one point. But it does a good and moving job of telling the story of Maier, which is the most important and interesting thing under discussion. Maier’s life was — if not tragic, then certainly sad. … She became — and the film emphasizes this to great effect — one of those characters her younger self would have photographed: a crazy old poor lady. “There’s a lot of eccentric people around here, and I just thought she was one of them,” says a former neighbor.

Haley Mlotek calls the film a “necessary documentary, and a necessary story”:

As a photographer, Vivian captured scenes, places, people — the elements of life that cannot be fixed, things that are either converted into memories that dim over time or discarded as unimportant and not worth preserving. As I watched image after image of Vivian’s work, I wondered if Vivian would have even called herself a photographer. Some interviewees in the documentary talk about her peculiar habit of calling herself a spy, giving fake names and false histories to the people she interacted with — a woman at a pawn shop, a man at the library — instructing them to call her V. Smith, Vivian Mayer, and other such versions of her real name.

Mlotek goes on to consider what Maier might have made of the attention her work now receives:

Vivian liked too-good-to-be-true headlines, the kinds of stories you can only see in newspapers and never in fiction: “Man Bites Dog,” that sort of thing. [Co-director Charlie] Siskel told me, when I asked about whether Vivian would have enjoyed being the subject of so much attention, that Vivian “knew a great story when she heard one. We would like to think this is exactly the kind of story Vivian would have appreciated. ‘Nanny takes 100,000 photos and hides them in storage lockers, but they’re discovered years later and she becomes a famous artist.’ That’s the kind of story Vivian would have liked.” I agree. But it’s not clear if that’s the kind of story Vivian wanted to tell.

Explore her work here. Previous Dish on Maier here.

The Connection Between Love And Death

Morgan Meis ponders it after viewing Rossellini’s 1954 film Journey to Italy, which follows an estranged couple through the ruins of Pompeii:

The real journey in Journey to Italy is a journey toward death. Ingrid Bergman’s character is confronted by death as soon as she comes to Italy. Death comes toward her from afar. First, death comes in the form of ancient statues in the museum. Then it comes in the form of a funeral procession that passes in front of her car. Death comes again in the form of the cult of death, and the people who live among the skulls and skeletons of the dead at Fontanelle Cemetery. Finally, death comes out of the ground, in the penultimate scene of the movie, as the calchi [plaster casts].

After Bergman’s character and her husband see the calchi, something unexpected happens.

The estranged lovers are able to see one another again. Their eyes are opened. Death, in the final scene of the movie, is transformed into love. This is not a romantic love. It isn’t born of passion or high feelings. It is a love between two people who have come to hate one another, and who have shared a shocking encounter with death.

The implication of the final scenes of Journey to Italy is, therefore, that genuine love has something to do with death or that death makes it possible. Love, in Journey to Italy, does not happen because two people are attracted to one another or find they have similar interests. Love happens because two people who are already married, and antagonistic toward one another, confront the full reality of death. Death opens the door to love. The calchi open the door to love. There is something, Roberto Rossellini suggests with his movie, about confronting the immediacy of death that makes a person, paradoxically, more alive. The person who is shocked into life by death is capable of love, since love, as Rossellini portrays it, is not a feeling so much as a commitment, a commitment to another human being made under the eyes of death. The calchi, surprisingly and finally, are not only emblems of death; they are the promise of love.

Meis’ passage brings to mind the following song from the Mountain Goats, from the album Tallahassee, themed around a despondent, alcoholic couple on the brink of divorce:

Is Literary Criticism An Art Or A Science? Ctd

The Dish aired arguments about the question here and here. Chad Wellmon deepens the debate, arguing that our discomfort with the digital humanities stems from literature having taken on an almost religious quality: “After the death of God, literature is a resource for self-transformation, and reading–closely, caringly, silently–is one of our modern liturgies.” But it wasn’t always this way:

Until the end of the eighteenth century, literature referred to everything that had been printed. It wasn’t until around 1800 that it was used to refer to a particular kind of writing. Only when there was too much literature did Literature become a distinct category. In 1803 Wilhelm Schlegel, a German Romantic and one of the first scholars of Literature, lamented the pitiful state of German reading and writing. Given the ready availability of printed texts, German readers no longer read with “devotion but rather with a thoughtless distraction.” To remedy this situation he invoked Literature as a particular kind of writing that had been filtered and sorted from among the surfeit of all that had been printed. What was needed to remedy the sorry condition of German literature and thought more generally, claimed Schlegel, was a normative, critical category that would separate the good books from the bad ones and help readers make their way through the proliferation of print. Literature was not simply a “raw aggregate of books”; it was a source of spiritual relief and discovery.

For some, the digital humanities threatens to interrupt this experience of Literature by reducing texts to an aggregation of data points.

These contemporary cultural anxieties echo similar anxieties that accompanied the desacralizaiton of other kinds of texts. Consider the double bind of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century British scholars of the Bible. With the profusion of apocryphal material and new scholarly methods, they pioneered forms of inquiry that many worried would undermine the divine authority of the Bible. The enumeration of 30,000 variants among various Biblical manuscripts by the Oxford scholar John Mill, claimed some, made the Bible seem all too human. Something similar happened when eighteen-century German philologists like Friedrich A. Wolf, flush with newly discovered information and refined techniques of philological criticism, suggested that the Odyssey was not the result of one author, Homer, but the product of textual accretion over time—just as biblical scholars had eventually concluded about the Old Testament. Similar to biblical scholars, Wolf thought that he faced a choice: he could either save Homer as creator and obliterate the text or save the text and destroy the author—a figure who had become a model for humanist education.

A Moveable Masterpiece

Above is artist Zsolt Ekho Farkas’s 3-D rendering of Gyula Benczúr’s 1896 painting The Recapture of Buda in 1686. Joe Berkowitz marvels that observing “this CGI masterstroke on your laptop is bound to stir up as much wonder as something you’d find hanging in a hushed room somewhere”:

The stunning three-and-a-half minute video above reveals the incredible detail in Farkas’s re-creation of Benczúr Gyula’s painting–and also transcends it. The video itself is a living painting, using subtle camera movements to let the viewers take in the true depth of field each figure in it possesses. Unlike the recent paintings we’ve seen with added movement, all that really moves here are tendrils of smoke that further clarify the spatial texture.

“This was my first time re-creating a painting, and the cause is a bit sentimental,” Farkas tells us. It started as a challenge from his wife. She dared Farkas to make a full 3-D version of a classic painting they’d seen in a booklet on holiday, and the Hungarian artist decided on using Gyula’s painting, which depicts Budapest’s recapture as Ottoman forces invade. After analyzing the painting and figuring out the character positions in the 3-D space, he had to create digital models for every person, animal, and object that appears in the image. By the time he finished texturing and planar projection, the image required 8.5 million polygons to support it.

Farkas documents the 10-week-long process of making the video here.

The Sacrament Of Friendship

Richard Beck argues that cultivating friendships, especially across class boundaries, might be “the most important thing the church can to do help lift people out of poverty”:

[W]hat I find lacking in many churches is friendship, a face-to-face, first-name-basis relationality between rich and poor. This is what is missing in many churches. Programs abound but there is too little friendship.

And in many ways this call for friendship is both harder and easier than starting up a poverty program at the church. It’s easier in that you don’t have to save the world. You don’t have to eradicate world poverty. You just have to be a friend.

To be sure, you’ll be faced with issues regarding material want. But the needs of your friends will be expressed within a relational context. And because of the friendship you’ll be able to discern the legitimacy of the requests and, given your knowledge of your friend, how best to respond. And most importantly, the situation will be reciprocal. Your friend will be giving to you as well. Perhaps not materially, but there will be life-giving exchanges flowing back and forth.

So in many ways, being a friend is much easier than trying to save the world. And yet, it’s also much harder. Your life will get messier. You’ll have to struggle with how best to help your friend and those decisions can be heart-breaking at times. Volunteering a few hours at the food pantry or sponsoring a child in Africa is a whole lot easier and cleaner than making friends and opening up your life to the needs, demands and sin of others. To say nothing of how your needs, wants and sins will affect them.

Gracy Olmstead explains one facet of Beck’s argument – the way “weak ties” help us meet the various needs of those struggling:

Beck emphasizes the fact that “weak ties” in friendship are very needed. Why? Because our closest friends are usually insular groups, “bundles of sameness.” Weak ties—distant relatives, acquaintances from our neighborhood or past—are usually more diverse in their background, tastes, and employment. This wider “social web” gives us philanthropic ammunition: when you see someone in need, you don’t just bring your own talents and gifts to the table. You bring everyone you’ve ever met—”Bluntly, you might not be able to help this person in a particular situation but you might know someone else who can. In sacramental friendships you are bringing the gift of your weak ties.” …

Beck’s friendships of “weak ties” provide a hidden and important ingredient in the inequality discussion. Friendship is a diverse and beautiful thing—it’s a proactive, personal, and private solvent to a very large and public problem. It deals with the dilemma on a case-by-case basis. It reaches out via the various spheres and circles open to the people in question. Granted, it’s not a solid, comprehensive, quantifiable solution to inequality. But it is an important, and oft-ignored, piece in the giant solution puzzle.

Recent Dish on friendship here.

Quote For The Day

“Everything is in constant flux on this earth. Nothing keeps the same unchanging shape, and our affections, being attached to things outside us, necessarily change and pass away as they do. Always out ahead of us or lagging behind, they recall a past which is gone or anticipate a future which may never come into being; there is nothing solid there for the heart to attach itself to. Thus our earthly joys are almost without exceptions the creatures of a moment; I doubt whether any of us knows the meaning of lasting happiness. Even in our keenest pleasures there is scarcely a single moment of which the heart could truthfully say: ‘Would that this moment could last forever!’ And how can we give the name of happiness to a fleeting state which leaves our hearts still empty and anxious, either regretting something that is past or desiring something that is yet to come?

But if there is a state where the soul can find a resting-place secure enough to establish itself and concentrate its entire being there, with no need to remember the past or reach into the future, where time is nothing to it, where the present runs on indefinitely but this duration goes unnoticed, with no sign of the passing of time, and no other feeling of deprivation or enjoyment, pleasure or pain, desire or fear than the simple feeling of existence, a feeling that fills our souls entirely, as long as this state lasts, we can call ourselves happy, not with a poor, incomplete, and relative happiness such as we find in the pleasures of life, but with a sufficient, complete, and perfect happiness which leaves no emptiness to be filled in the soul. Such is the state which I often experience on the Island of Saint-Pierre in my solitary reveries, whether I lay in a boat and drifted where the water carried me, or sat by the shores of the stormy lake, or elsewhere, on the banks of a lovely river or a stream murmuring over the stones,” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Reveries of the Solitary Walker.

A Cuddly Curmudgeon

Stefan Kanfer’s tribute to Maurice Sendak underlines how the late writer-illustrator’s “favorite pose of curmudgeon” concealed a profound sensitivity:

Sendak became increasingly Sendakian in his last years. A triple bypass left him diminished, but not too weak to roar. Stocky, bearded, and glowering, the Connecticut Tevye railed against the excesses of technology, sentimentality, and commercialism.

Last summer, New York’s Society of Illustrators paid homage to one of its greatest members with an exhibition that covered two floors. In addition to scores of Sendak’s sketches and finished artwork, the show included videotapes of his final interviews, most of them theatrically grumpy. Asked about e-books, he snapped, “I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book.” As for posthumous tributes, he wanted “no statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up on me, à la Hans Christian Andersen. I won’t have it.” When comedian Stephen Colbert asked him, “What’s it take for a celebrity to make a successful book?,” Sendak was ready: “You’ve started already by being an idiot.”

But these fulminations didn’t deceive the people who understood him. We knew that Sendak needed his hard carapace to cover a psyche as sensitive as a light meter. Without it, he would never have survived, let alone triumphed. We also knew that toward the end, he made his peace with life—and with death. Shortly before he suffered a fatal stroke in 2012, he looked back in unaccustomed tranquillity: “I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more. There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready.”

Previous Dish on Sendak here, here, and here.

(Video: An animated clip of Sendak’s notably un-grumpy final interview with Terry Gross in 2011)

Noah’s Arc, Ctd

Noah Gittell notices that a “new series of pop culture protagonists are not fighting the end of the world; they’re welcoming it”:

Take Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, which is at once an epic disaster movie and a penetrating exploration of the misanthropy that underpins the genre. How else to describe films that wring entertainment from the potential end of humanity? As played by Russell Crowe, Noah has a deep, simmering hatred for man even before God asks for his help. Civilization is ruled by rape and savagery; Noah, meanwhile, teaches his children to respect even the smallest flower.

Most disaster movies would end when the great flood comes and our hero saves his family. Noah lets the story continue and takes misanthropy to its logical endpoint. Once aboard the ark, Noah receives another message from God telling him that mankind is to end his with his family. Since his daughter-in-law (Emma Watson) is pregnant, Noah pledges to murder his infant grandchild, if she is born a girl, i.e. with the capability of repopulating the planet with humans. Mankind, we are told, is a failed experiment, a harsh assertion for a Hollywood movie.

David Sessions finds that such misanthropy isn’t reserved for Noah; his first response to the movie was, “I think the moral of the story was that God is evil”:

It’s not very clear here what the sins are, but we know that man is accused of a) multiplying and b) being violent. But as Noah’s family quickly finds out, they’re just as violent as everyone else. After watching the shocking goings-on at a nearby camp of Canaanites, Noah realizes he and his wife would kill them in a heartbeat to protect their children. Near the end of the ark ride, he’s become a raving madman chasing two newborn babies with a knife, and his two oldest sons are prepared to bring him to what would appear to be a very righteous end. (They kill Tubal-Cain instead, and after a dramatic knife-raise, Noah leaves the babies in peace.) Even if most of this isn’t in the Bible, we know that the reboot of humankind produced even greater achievements in multiplication and mass murder. So God killed millions of people because they were violent, and then saved enough of them that they could return to exactly that state? It’s not surprising that Aronofsky’s Noah comes to believe that humans are supposed to die out in the new world. Either he kills those babies, or God is cruel and insane.

And speaking of the end of the world, Joel S. Baden questions the way the film’s environmentalist message fits with the account of Noah and the flood in Genesis, arguing that of “all the stories in the Bible, the flood narrative is perhaps the least environmentally friendly”:

In the end, the deluge does nothing to wipe out the violence and wickedness that brought it about in the first place. It is God who changes, accepting that the human race is inherently superior to mere animals, and bloodthirsty at that: “Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat,” he says after the waters have cleared. “The fear and dread of you shall be upon all the beasts of the Earth and all the birds of the sky and all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hand.”

In fact, in the Bible, the motivation for God’s promise never to bring another flood is Noah’s sacrifice of some of the animals he brought with him on the ark. (The Bible tells us that Noah brought not only two of each animal, but seven pairs of the clean — that is, sacrificable —animals.) It is the smell of burning animal flesh that reminds God that humanity is worth saving: No other species cooks for him. That aspect of the biblical account is nowhere to be found in the film. There is no sacrifice at the end of the movie.

Though humanity makes no promise of better stewardship in the Bible, God makes a unilateral promise never to destroy the Earth again, no strings attached. Whatever we may do, however evil we may be, however much we destroy the planet, we need not fear wholesale natural destruction, says Genesis, in what can only be seen as the antithesis of the environmentalist message.

Previous Dish on the film here.