Recently the Dish noted the forthcoming publication of the prayer journals Flannery O’Connor kept as a graduate student and fledgling writer. In a two-part essay, A.G. Harmon unpacks a number of Connor’s entries, including this one about her literary ambitions:
I want very much to succeed in the world with what I want to do. I have prayed to You about this with my mind and my nerves on it and strung my nerves into a tension over it and said, “oh God, please,” and “I must,” and “please, please.” I have not asked You, I feel, in the right way. Let me henceforth ask You with resignation—that not being or meant to be a slacking up in prayer but a less frenzied kind, realizing that the frenzy is caused by an eagerness for what I want and not a spiritual trust. I do not wish to presume. I want to love.
Harmon’s commentary:
O’Connor’s desperate calls for heavenly intervention are deeply resonant. Our pleas of please are all but screamed, as though God’s attention must be captured; as though he must be distracted somehow, since there’s no other explanation for the breathtaking speed with which the ever-towering failures come.
But what the writer speaks of here is that such tumult is not the right way to approach God on these matters. It smacks of a demand upon God, suggesting that his concession must be granted, given how deeply earnest the prayers are and how terribly hard the supplicant has worked.
Whether O’Connor was ever able to achieve the state she sought is unknowable, and moot, since her prayers were answered anyway. But it is the coupling of love with resignation that takes lesser souls like mine aback. That correlation—that if one loved more, he would not presume so much—implies that love allows for trust regardless of how things fall out; and trust does not exhibit itself in panic, in screams, in claims of desert.
Read Harmon’s second installment on O’Connor’s prayer journals here. Previous Dish on O’Connor here, here, and here.
Blue Is the Warmest Color, the Palme d’Or-winning film by Abdellatif Kechiche, continues to draw controversy for its NC-17 sex scenes. But not every theater is taking notes from the MPAA:
[The recommendation from the MPAA ratings board that “no children will be admitted”] is only, in the end, a recommendation, without legal or contractual force. And at least one theater has decided to flout it. The IFC Center in Greenwich Village — part of the IFC family, which includes Sundance Selects, the label that submitted “Blue” to the ratings board in the first place — will not turn away curious youngsters. In an e-mailed statement, John Vanco, senior vice president and general manager of the IFC Center … announced that “high school age patrons” would be admitted.
A.O. Scott, whose 14-year-old daughter viewed the film (twice), offers advice to parents:
You have your own rules, and your own reasons for enforcing them, and naked bodies writhing in ecstasy may not be something you want your kids to see. But in some ways, because of its tone and subject matter, “Blue” is a movie that may be best appreciated by viewers under the NC-17 age cutoff. It’s a movie about a high school student, after all, confronting issues — peer pressure, first love, homework, postgraduate plans — that will be familiar to adolescents and perhaps more exotic to the middle-aged. In spite of linguistic and cultural differences, the main character, moody, self-absorbed and curious, will remind many American girls of themselves, their friends and the heroines of the young adult novels they devour. The content of the film is really no racier that what is found in those books, but our superstition about images designates it as adults-only viewing.
Alyssa Rosenberg applauds Scott for “talking publicly about the value of introducing your children to challenging culture, instead of focusing solely and obsessively on the potential dangers”:
So often, pop culture’s treated as if its only possible impact on young people who consume it (and too often, older people, too) is deleterious. And it’s absolutely true that films, television, books, comics, video games, and even museum installations can be frightening, confusing, upsetting, and challenging.
But they can also provide flashes of profound recognition that make viewers, readers, and players feel less alone in the world. They can stun you with beauty, or wound you with ugliness. They can level you with humor. Loving something can provide profound connections to people who share your affection for it. And even when a piece of culture profoundly disturbs you, it can open up the world to you, and reveal big truths that you’d previously avoided. These are risks that are worth taking.
Daniel D’Addario agrees that teens “can handle some on-screen sexuality – and they might just be enriched by art.” Michelle Dean praises the film but questions whether its depictions of lesbian sex are realistic. For Stephanie Zacharek, the question is: “At this point, what reasonably curious person doesn’t want to see Blue Is the Warmest Color? But what’s going to happen when people trek out, revved up for lots of hot lesbian sex, and find something else?”
[S]ome will see Blue Is the Warmest Color as pure horndog bait, yet another degradation of the female image made by a guy with his dirty-minded camera. Others—more, I hope—will see a story about the universality of desire and heartbreak. Love will tear us apart again. For better or worse, that truth is more enduring than politics.
Richard Corliss calls the film “unmissable” and suggests other filmmakers take note:
Instead of wondering why there is so much whoopee in Blue Is the Warmest Color — and it’s actually not that much: about nine minutes in the nearly three-hour film — one might ask why there is so little in most other movies. Considering that sex is an activity almost everyone participates in and thinks about even more, it’s startling and depressing to think about how few movies connect their characters’ lives with their erotic drives.
The movie goes on for three hours without an emotional letup — it’s finally overwhelming. People who’ve been through a terrible recent breakup—or can conjure up the sense memory of one — should approach Blue Is the Warmest Color with care. It might not just open old wounds. It might show you wounds you didn’t know you had.
Ha! I read your post while sitting in a John Deere 4440 tractor, waiting for a truck driver to pull into the field so I can load him with corn. Having recently split with my extremely cool poet GF who lives in a loft studio three hours away in the Twin Cities, I admit to having considered the “rural singles” type website. It’s a little hard to explain to a woman why I have no time for anything but harvest, or planting, or why I now have a whole bunch of free time since it rained, when I previously said there was no way I was available for that thing she wanted to do.
I think I’ll take my chances on another city woman. It might be easier to find her with a Dishhead Match service. Put me down for a smart, literate, open-minded woman 40-60. Tattooed and/or pierced and willingness to drive on muddy roads would be a bonus. I can offer grass-fed beef and all the locally grown vegetables she can eat.
Accepting profiles here. Another reader quotes me:
“What’s missing [from dating sites]? One word: serendipity.” This is a common refrain among people of (ahem) a certain generation. Its only flaw is that it’s dead wrong.
Serendipity will always be at the heart of falling in love. All online dating does is compress the time scale so that there are shorter gaps between opportunities for serendipity.
I am a recent entrant into the online dating world. I met a wonderful person not long ago with whom I’ve found some unexpected and profound spiritual/emotional connections. None of the salient aspects of ourselves showed up in our respective profiles or in the algorithm that introduced us. And, prior to meeting this person, I’d been on plenty of dates with people who I guessed going in would be better matches. What was missing in those instances? One word: Serendipity!
Another is on the same page:
I adore you and your blog, but this bit: “What’s missing? One word: serendipity. Which is how I met my husband. I have to say it has a charm all its own – but it’s sooo retro.” is more than a little self-congratulatory.
Online dating is no more and no less than a way to meet people – just like bars, college, work, church, and every other way people have met their mates throughout the course of human existence. I would think that you of all people would recognize that it’s possible for serendipity to exist online – isn’t that pretty much your business model?
I tried both Match and EHarmony off and on for five years. Believe me, I exhausted the friends/family/church/school connections years ago; if anyone who knew me knew of a marginally appropriate mate, we were introduced. I’d join a site for six months, get frustrated, quit, then a year later realize I was still looking and join up again. About a year ago I got back on Match and a few months later met someone who is so freaking perfect for me that I can only call it a miracle. (We’ve also used the word serendipity, thank you very much.) And this wonderful man, my favorite person on the planet, proposed on Saturday. Yay!
You’ve met on a very personal, and occasionally intimate level, the biggest of the big in modern music. How did you do that?
I was in the right place at the right time with the right look and the right taste. Mick Jagger came up to Miss Mercy at a Burritos gig and said, “Please introduce me to your pretty friend.” That’s how I met Mick. Jimmy Page’s road manager came up to me at a Bo Diddley gig and handed me his phone number and said, “He’s waiting for you in room 605.”
I didn’t have to go after these people. I was in the GTOs, I had an all-girl group, I was hanging out with Zappa, and I was in the thick of everything in Hollywood. People wanted to meet us. Early on, of course, I chased the Beatles, I tried to meet the Stones—and I did meet a couple of them when I was with Captain Beefheart—but I was just in the right place at the right time, but with the right attitude and the right love of the music, and my appreciation of what these people were doing was completely sincere. …
Before your book the word “groupie” conjured an opportunistic…
It still does. I’m still trying to retrieve that word. My most recent book, Let’s Spend the Night Together, was about a bunch of other groupies. I’m still trying to set that word straight, because all it means is just a music lover who wants to be near the band. Period. That’s all it means, in whatever capacity. Sexual? Sometimes yes, but also friends, helpers, assistants, guides… we wanted to uplift and enhance these people who moved us so much. That’s all that a groupie is. They are music-loving muses.
Lux Alptraum profiles James Darling, who “isn’t like most up-and-coming porn performers”:
As it happens, he’s a trans man (meaning he’s a man who was born in a female body), and that greatly limits the amount of work he can get. Trans women looking to perform sex work have numerous options, but for trans men, it’s a different story. Unlike “t-girls” and “shemales,” who’ve long been pornographic staples, trans men didn’t enter the porn world’s awareness until the early 2000s, when pioneering porn performer Buck Angel debuted as “the man with a pussy.” To this date, Buck is the only trans man to ever have been recognized by any of the major porn awards shows.
More than six years after Buck took home the award for Transsexual Performer of the Year, the number of porn studios willing to work with trans men is still in the single digits. Major porn studios don’t know how to market transmale content, which appeals to an audience not targeted by more traditional genres of porn. The filmmakers who pick up the slack tend to be members of the queer community who are looking to create the content they’re personally interested in seeing. Most, if not all, of those studios are indie ventures with small budgets and infrequent shoots, making it hard for Darling to pick up regular work. If he shoots once a year for the handful of companies that are trans man-friendly, that’s about four or five scenes—enough to establish a porn presence, but not nearly enough to make a living.
In the meantime, Darling’s day job? Pizza delivery man.
Now that investors can put their money in athletes, bitcoin, and “motifs“, Kevin Roose declares, “the age of bullshit investments is back”:
Some of these bad ideas spring from the normal irrational exuberance that comes with an economic bounce-back, and the fact that many investors are more willing to jump into murky waters than they were in 2008. But there are other factors in play, too. The JOBS Act, for one, was a post-crisis law that was meant to make it easier for companies to raise money. … Thanks to the JOBS Act, there are now crowd-funding bazaars that make gambling in the markets as easy as picking a Spotify playlist. There’s also the newest West Coast fund-raising trend, the venture capital syndicate, which makes it possible for average shmoes with little to no market expertise to enter into highly risky investments with early stage start-ups, and which has put the sentence “Miley Cyrus could be the next big tech investor” within the realm of the possible.
Meanwhile, as Florida’s economy shows signs of recovery, Wendell Cox explains what made the state so vulnerable to the real estate crash:
Florida’s restrictive land-use policies (better known as “smart growth” or “urban containment”) helped inflate its property bubble to massive size, making its bursting all the more economically painful. Such growth policies limit urban expansion, prohibiting new housing except in small sections of already dense metropolitan areas. As Brookings Institution economist Anthony Downs argues, these policies can destroy the competitive supply of land, driving land prices up (other things being equal) as demand rises sharply in relation to supply. These higher prices get passed along to prospective homeowners in higher home costs—often made even pricier by various other regulations and fees. The rapidly escalating housing prices, in turn, create the potential for extraordinary profits for speculators—or property “flippers”—who, jumping into the real-estate market in considerable numbers, increase the excess of demand over supply, driving prices higher still, until a bubble begins to expand. It’s no surprise that markets with more restrictive land-use policies have much greater housing-price volatility, as research by economists Edward Glaeser and Joseph Gyourko has shown.
If I dismiss the ordinary — waiting for the special, the extreme, the extraordinary to happen — I may just miss my life. … To allow ourselves to spend afternoons watching dancers rehearse, or sit on a stone wall and watch the sunset, or spend the whole weekend rereading Chekhov stories—to know that we are doing what we’re supposed to be doing — is the deepest form of permission in our creative lives. The British author and psychologist Adam Phillips has noted, “When we are inspired, rather like when we are in love, we can feel both unintelligible to ourselves and most truly ourselves.” This is the feeling I think we all yearn for, a kind of hyperreal dream state. We read Emily Dickinson. We watch the dancers. We research a little known piece of history obsessively. We fall in love. We don’t know why, and yet these moments form the source from which all our words will spring.
On what makes writing “as necessary as breathing”:
It is in the thousands of days of trying, failing, sitting, thinking, resisting, dreaming, raveling, unraveling that we are at our most engaged, alert, and alive. Time slips away. The body becomes irrelevant. We are as close to consciousness itself as we will ever be. This begins in the darkness. Beneath the frozen ground, buried deep below anything we can see, something may be taking root. Stay there, if you can. Don’t resist. Don’t force it, but don’t run away. Endure. Be patient. The rewards cannot be measured. Not now. But whatever happens, any writer will tell you: This is the best part.
John Harris determines that the Smiths’ frontman’s Autobiography – the first page sung above, by voice artist Peter Serafinowicz – is strongest when it focuses on the singer’s upbringing and musical journey, rather than personal rivalries and legal battles:
For its first 150 pages, Autobiography comes close to being a triumph. “Naturally my birth almost kills my mother, for my head is too big,” he writes, and off we go – into the Irish diaspora in the inner-city Manchester of the 1960s, where packs of boys playfully stone rats to death, and “no one we know is on the electoral roll”. In some of the writing, you can almost taste his environment: “Nannie bricks together the traditional Christmas for all to gather and disagree … Rita now works at Seventh Avenue in Piccadilly and buys expensive Planters cashew nuts. Mary works at a Granada showroom, but is ready to leave it all behind.” And when pop music enters the story, he excels. … And then [musician] Johnny Marr pays him a visit, and his life takes off – while, in keeping with an unwritten rule of celebrity memoir, Autobiography takes a serious turn for the worse.
Boyd Tonkin calls the 450-page memoir a self-pitying screed, and ridicules Penguin for publishing it as a part of their “Classics” series:
The droning narcissism of the later stages – enlivened by the occasional flick-knife twist of character sketch, or character assassination (watch out, Julie Burchill) – may harm his name a little. It ruins that of his publisher. For the stretches in which in his brooding, vulnerable, stricken voice uncoils, particularly across his Mancunian youth, Morrissey will survive his unearned elevation. I doubt that the reputation of Penguin Classics will.
Mostly agreeing, Jessica Winter nonetheless sees moments of genuine insight:
Autobiography is at times so relentlessly whiny and misanthropic that it’s startling when Morrissey shares a flash of sober self-awareness. “Undernourished and growing out of the wrong soil,” he writes of himself circa 1984, “I knew at this time that a lot of people found me hard to take, and for the most part I understood why. Although a passably human creature on the outside, the swirling soul within seemed to speak up for the most awkward people on the planet.” That was once true—exhilaratingly true, true enough to save a life. But Autobiography only speaks up for its author, and never more than in his next line. “Somewhere deep within,” he confesses, “my only pleasure was to out-endure people’s patience.”
Oliver Lyttelton rounds up the “most Morrissey-y” passages. John Crace delivers a CliffsNotes version:
At school, I am the futile pupil brutalised by neo-fascist inquisitors who do not understand the subtleties of sublime rhyme. My only valent talent is for athletics, my event the 20-kilometre walk on water. Blood laced with disgrace flows from my hands, feet and side. “Oh, Steven,” says my Mother Mary. “What have you done to yourself now?” I feel forlorn in my crown of thorns. Death death death unbreath is all around me. Nancy laughs, her wild smile frozen for ever as a bus loses control on a pothole and crushes her against the grimey cor blimey door of the Rover’s Return. Gloria Gaynor sings I Won’t Survive. Life is thus.
Tim Kreider praises John Williams’s Stoner as “a great, chronically underappreciated American novel”:
“Stoner” is undeniably a great book, but I can also understand why it isn’t a sentimental favorite in its native land. You could almost describe it as an anti-“Gatsby.” … Gatsby’s a success story: he makes a ton of money, looks like a million bucks, owns a mansion, throws great parties, and even gets his dream girl, for a little while, at least. “Stoner”‘s protagonist [William Stoner] is an unglamorous, hardworking academic who marries badly, is estranged from his child, drudges away in a dead-end career, dies, and is forgotten: a failure. The book is set not in the city of dreams but back in the dusty heartland. It’s ostensibly an academic novel, a genre historically of interest exclusively to academics. Its values seem old-fashioned, prewar (which may be one reason it’s set a generation before it was written), holding up conscientious slogging as life’s greatest virtue and reward. And its prose, compared to Fitzgerald’s ecstatic art-nouveau lyricism, is austere, restrained, and precise; its polish is the less flashy, more enduring glow of burnished hardwood; its construction is invisibly flawless, like the kind of house they don’t know how to build anymore.
“Part of Stoner’s greatness is that it sees life whole and as it is, without delusion yet without despair,” continues Kreider:
Stoner realizes at the last that he found what he sought at the university not in books but in his love and study of them, not in some obscure scholarly Grail but in its pursuit. His life has not been squandered in mediocrity and obscurity; his undistinguished career has not been mulish labor but an act of devotion. He has been a priest of literature, and given himself as fully as he could to the thing he loved. The book’s conclusion, such as it is—I don’t know whether to call it a consolation or a warning—is that there is nothing better in this life. The line, “It hardly mattered to him that the book was forgotten and served no use; and the question of its worth at any time seemed almost trivial,” is like the novel’s own epitaph. Its last image is of the book falling from lifeless fingers into silence.
That’s how Sam Kriss interprets the latest edition of the American Psychiatric Association’s signature publication:
This is a story without any of the elements that are traditionally held to constitute a setting or a plot. A few characters make an appearance, but they are nameless, spectral shapes, ones that wander in and out of view as the story progresses, briefly embodying their various illnesses before vanishing as quickly as they came – figures comparable to the cacophony of voices in The Waste Land or the anonymously universal figures of Jose Saramago’s Blindness. A sufferer of major depression and of hyperchondriasis might eventually be revealed to be the same person, but for the most part the boundaries between diagnoses keep the characters apart from one another, and there are only flashes. On one page we meet a hoarder, on the next a trichotillomaniac; he builds enormous “stacks of worthless objects,” she idly pulls out her pubic hairs while watching television. But the two are never allowed to meet and see if they can work through their problems together.
This is not to say that there is no setting, no plot, and no characterization. These elements are woven into the encyclopedia-form with extraordinary subtlety. The setting of the novel isn’t a physical landscape but a conceptual one. Unusually for what purports to be a dictionary of madness, the story proper begins with a discussion of neurological impairments: autism, Rett’s disorder, “intellectual disability”. The scene this prologue sets is one of a profoundly bleak view of human beings; one in which we hobble across an empty field, crippled by blind and mechanical forces whose workings are entirely beyond any understanding. This vision of humanity’s predicament has echoes of Samuel Beckett at some of his more nihilistic moments – except that Beckett allows his tramps to speak for themselves, and when they do they’re often quite cheerful. The sufferers of DSM-5, meanwhile, have no voice; they’re only interrogated by a pitiless system of categorizations with no ability to speak back. As you read, you slowly grow aware that the book’s real object of fascination isn’t the various sicknesses described in its pages, but the sickness inherent in their arrangement.
The Dish 