Networking

Since I've been retooling the template, I decided it was high time to add a blogroll. And my, what a motley crew they are. I'm sure if I got them together at a cocktail party there'd be some great arguments.

Back to normal...whatever that is...

Blogspot let me have my template back, but I stuck with the manually-entered archive links to the left. Except -- whoa! -- when you click on them they're still mysteriously in the Chroma template. OK, whatever. So long as they're there.
UPDATE: OK, fixed that problem. Whew.

Scene stealing

Some folks from the office and I are going to see The Two Towers when it opens on Wednesday. I'm looking forward to it; the only thing that worries me is that if it follows the book, it has a giant spider in it. This could be a problem. But actually, giant spiders in movies don't bother me as much as you'd think. They're usually not very realistic, and blowing them up to human size actually isn't as alarming as shrinking people down to fly size Anyway, I know what happens in the scene, so if all else fails I can shut my eyes.

Actually, there's something else that's curious about that scene. I read the book about a year and a half ago, and when I read the spider part I realized it was very familiar. Just a few months before I'd read Edar Rice Burroughs' sci-fi novel Pirates of Venus (well, half before I bailed out -- it wasn't very good), and it had an almost identical scene. In both books (spoiler alert!) two friends meet a giant spider, and it attacks one of them; the other one valiantly fights off the spider with a sword, but returning to his friend, finds him apparently dead. He dithers about whether to abandon the body, finally deciding to stay. Presently the friend revives; it turns out he's only been paralyzed by the poison, not killed.

Burroughs' book came out in the 1930s, so he certainly came up with the scene first. It's hard to believe Tolkien plagiarized, though -- he was apparently a fan of Old English and opposed to everything since the Battle of Hastings, so could he have read tripe like Burroughs? Well, you never know what people's secret vices are. But maybe there are only so many things you can do with a giant spider in your plot.

It's a Gen-X thing

I think Dahlia Lithwick must be my age:

Out of nowhere booms the great, surprising "Luke-I-am-your-father" voice of He Who Never Speaks. Justice Clarence Thomas suddenly asks a question and everyone's head pops up and starts looking madly around, like the Muppets on Veterinarian Hospital.

OK, everyone knows the Star Wars reference, but even I had almost forgotten that Muppet Show skit. Remembering it this morning almost sent my coffee through my nose with mad giggling. Thanks, Dahlia!

Whoa, it's all gone blue!

If you're wondering why the template changed, so am I. I was mucking around trying to fix my archive problem, and screwed up the original template code so bad that I decided to change to another template and then change back so I'd have the original code. Well, Blogspot let me change, but not change back. And the archives it did not let me republish at all, so I entered the links in manually. So now you have full access to my past posts, but at this rate, I think I'm headed for Movable Type.

I told my wrath, my wrath did end

Do you ever wake up in the morning with a thought already in your mind, as if it had started when you were still asleep? This morning I woke up with a memory, ten years old at least. It was of a piece I heard on NPR, it must have been from Maureen Corrigan, who was remembering a scene from her childhood in Catholic school. The Pope was visiting New York, and the nuns took the students out to wait on the sidewalk for the papal motorcade to come by. It was winter, but the nuns did not let the students wear their coats, because "it was important that His Holiness see our green-and-white school uniforms."

While the students waited with chattering teeth, Corrigan saw the owner of the Jewish deli behind them come out and speak to one of the sisters, gesticulating fervently. Presently he went back into his shop and came out with cups of hot chocolate -- one for each student. "I didn't hear what he said to the sister," Corrigan recalled. "But I'm sure one of the words he used must have been meshugenah."

In my opinion, meshugenah is too kind a word for it. I heard this story when I was in college in Massachusetts, and I knew well what those northeastern winters are like. And why was it so "important" that their uniforms be visible? Why should the Pope care? Even if it is important, this seems like using children to suck up to authority -- to a rather demented degree.

Why was I thinking about this today? I think this might have followed from the exchange I read the day before between Mark at Minute Particulars and Peter Nixon at Sursum Corda. Mark criticized Peter's angry rhetoric last week at Cardinal Law, saying Catholics should show proper respect for the office of bishop, even if they disapprove of the bishops' conduct. Now, I've been reading Sursum Corda for a while and Peter always struck me as one of the nicest guys in the blogosphere, but he admitted he'd flipped out:

I think many of Mark's points are well taken. His ability to maintain detachment and take the long view of this crisis is a good thing. I have usually tried to do that myself.

But I just lost it last week. I'll freely admit that the latest revelations pushed me over the edge into a blinding rage that made me want to bang my head against my keyboard in frustration. Why these revelations in particular? Who knows? They were certainly no worse than some of the things we heard earlier this year. Maybe I just reached my personal tipping point.

Like Mark, I believe that the office of Bishop is one of God's gifts to his Church. It's precisely because I believe this that the actions of Law and other bishops who have concealed abuse make me so angry. Does the sacrament of orders confer grace? You bet it does. But as with all graces, the recipient must cooperate. Respect for an office becomes increasingly hollow if the actions of the officeholder himself continues to undermine that respect.

Now, I don't like to get involved in intra-Catholic disputes, since I am not a Catholic and never have been. But this made me think about the general Christian idea that anger is a sin. I understand anger is highly dangerous, but I also know it does not always lead to evil. I am sure the gesticulating deli owner was angry, and he probably did not say very nice things to the nuns, but his anger led him to give away his own merchandise to help others. I have no doubt who acted most Christlike in that story. And I am sure that Peter's love of his church, so apparent in the rest of his blog, fueled his rage last week. I'm not that angry at Cardinal Law, but why should I be? I'm not personally invested in him. Give me a little passionate anger in the face of child abuse, over bloodless obeisance to authority, any day of the week.

Making marry

A few weeks ago I blogged about Noah Millman's response to Stanley Kurtz's argument against gay marriage. (I can't link to my own posts, because of the !@#%ing missing archives.) I didn't respond to Kurtz's article itself, but Julian Sanchez did. He now regrets his nasty tone somewhat, and writes a more sober post on the legal issues. I agree that his tone was nasty, though I admit I cracked up at his lede: "Once in a great while, there comes an article so breathtakingly stupid, so heroic in its inanity, that as one reads it, even inanimate objects in the surrounding area seem to radiate intelligence by comparison."

Cooked

I haven't been covering the Trent Lott story here since folks like Josh Marshall are doing it so ably already, but certainly it's been the talk of my office. I tell you, there are folks in my newsroom who are the right of Attila the Hun, and they're all disgusted with Lott. "He's too comfortable hanging around with white supremecists," one editor remarked.

Indeed. But what's also striking is how many conservatives never really liked Lott to begin with. They put up with him, and now they see no reason to. Jonah Goldberg summed it up hilariously: "Regardless, Trent Lott only does two things well, freeze-dry his hair and say stupid things."

Now Lott is trying to apologize more abjectly, but I doubt that will change anyone's mind. The question is, are there enough other freeze-dried white supremecists out there to keep him afloat?

Give me smut and nothing but

In case anyone's getting tired of the high-minded philosophizing around here, take a look at the Bad Sex Prize. Not for actual bad sex, but for bad writing about sex. It's a hoot, but be warned: you may come out with fewer brain cells than you went in with.

The monkey in the middle

The world is still waiting for the sequel to Telford's God and nature post, so I'm still reading the book I said a while ago I'd be blogging about.

It doesn't really cover the topic I was questioning, but it does have a chapter on evolution and what it means for human nature. The chapter's focus is somewhat the opposite of what I was writing about; I was interested in the origin of evil while the author, Francisco Ayala, is concerned with the origin of good.

Actually, "good" may be too vague a term. He's considering the origin of ethics, which are not quite the same as goodness. He argues rather convincingly that human ethics are different from simple empathy or altruism, which can be seen in some animals. Ayala defines ethics by three traits that necessitate human-level intelligence: 1) the ability to anticipate the consequences of one's actions; 2) the ability to make value judgments; and 3) the ability to choose between alternative courses action. Those traits are innate to human beings, Ayala says, and so all societies have codes of ethics. The content of those ethics, however, is culturally determined. He compares it to language: everyone's brain is made for language so everyone speaks one, but there are many different languages out there.

It does seem to me that there is a difference between "animal pity" and ethics, which sometimes require you to do what you know is right even when your feelings tell you something else. This aspect of ethics cuts both ways, morally speaking: you can overcome your bad feelings by making yourself do good, but you can also overcome your good feelings, as when a misguided sense of duty leads a soldier to torture or kill innocents under orders. Yet there is a certain commonality to human ethical codes, at least the ones that I know of. They all involve some degree of subsuming self-interest to others, but the question is to what others. Family? Tribe? Race? Nation? Species? God?

Ayala doesn't really go into how this relates to Christian theology, though I expect Murphy will revisit it at the end of the book. One thing that's curious about his theory as that his second factor in ethics, making value judgments, or knowing good from evil, is what got humans into trouble in the Garden of Eden. It reminded me that in Telford's recent essay on the subject, he never quite explained why that piece of knowledge is the one thing forbidden. Telford explains the serpent's message to the humans thus: "In fact, you will die seeing and knowing the good and evil that God sees and knows. You will die with eyes wide open to what you have done."

Well, that explains why humans would know evil by eating the fruit -- by having disobeyed they will have done evil. But the Tree of Knowledge supposedly yields knowledge of good as well. Perhaps this is simply saying that without evil there is no contrast to call "good," though it still seems peculiar that the story would consistently describe the tree with both -- mentioning good first, in fact. If knowing good from evil is an innate capacity that humans have evolved, as Ayala asserts, how does this translate to the Fall? I mean, like Telford I take this story to be a fable, not history, but even as a fable this is rather problematic. But I will keep reading, and see what turns up.

All you geeks out there, hear my cry

As some of you may have noticed, my archives stopped archiving on Nov. 16. Blogger claims the subsequent weeks do exist, and I keep republishing them and they keep not showing up. The best I can get from Blogger's help page is instructions to reset and republish everything, which I have tried to no avail. Do any other bloggers out there know what the frell is going on? Is this the dreaded "Blogger archive bug"?

Solaris

That was the movie I went to see Friday. I haven't read the 1961 book by Stanislaw Lem, but I saw the first film version a looong time ago, when I was about 13. I remember little about it; I had trouble following it, since the subtitles were rather incomplete (there was a lot of talking with no translating!) and it was the slowest film I've ever seen. So seeing the new version was really like seeing the story for the first time.

One interesting thing about the movie was that it was a sci-fi film that wasn't really trying that hard to be a sci-fi film. Although it had some neat space shots early on, it doesn't focus on the gadgetry nor does it tell us anything about what sort of future society we're operating in. Indeed, Earth seems much like it does now, except with a few touches that seem almost like shorthand for the future these days: video phones, collarless shirts. There's a ray-gun of sorts in the movie, but we don't actually see it used.

I expect that the director simply decided to be upfront about the truth in a lot of sci-fi: they're really stories of the supernatural with a high-tech gloss. In a lot of sci-fi the aliens are like magical beings from pagan lore, but Lem seems to be more ambitious. His alien is a planetary ocean, intelligent, creative, unfathomable, capable of interacting with humans in its weird way, but distinctly not human itself. It is a good picture of how God seems to a lot of people in the modern world.

More specifically, Solaris represents the afterlife, or the hope of one. The humans who visit the planet are themselves visited by their lost loved ones -- not ghosts, but fully embodied beings. The characters spend most of the movie trying to sort out if this is something good to be embraced or a delusion to be fought against, and in the end it still isn't clear. "There are no explanations here," says one character in a dream. "Only choices." Indeed. Is the hope for heaven a friend or an enemy? I have been wondering the same thing myself.

Technical issues

Sorry for the absence of posting. Saturday I was busy, yesterday I had a bad headache and just now I was dealing with technical difficulties with my modem. The fun never stops!

Speaking of technology, when I wrote my post about convergence on Friday I didn't realize Microsoft was coming out with its own Box That Does Everything, the Windows XP Media Center. Salon covered it today. Since this is Microsoft, its version of The Box is a PC, not the DVD player as I discussed in my earlier post. I kind of ignored PCs in that post, partly because they seem so bound to the desktop; Microsoft is trying to get over that problem by encouraging you to move it to the family room and hook it up to the TV. Having it connect to both a TV and a monitor resolves the problem of text vs. video viewing I mentioned before. The trouble with having them in the same room, though, is that you have a problem if you want to work on the computer while the kids watch TV. I suppose if these boxes become cheap enough they'll proliferate in houses the way TVs have, but it still seems to me that the reading/writing function and the entertainment functions of electronics may take a while to merge.

The Salon article also touches on something I mentioned in this post: the fact that the old huge-block-of-channels model of cable TV seems out of date. In fact, the TV industry feels threatened by the Media Center because it will make it very easy to download, buy and sell individual TV shows. But the idea of only buying stuff you actually want to watch seems like an irresistible idea. I just hope somebody figures out how to make money doing it...

The urge to merge

While sitting in a movie theater today, waiting for the picture to start, a friend and I were talking about technological convergence. (I'll blog about the actual movie later.) Back during the tech boom there was a popular idea that a single box would do everything -- Internet, word processing, audio, video, communications etc. Since the dot-com bust that hasn't been discussed as much, but to a certain extent it's still happening.

I was telling him how a while ago I interviewed the CEO of a company that makes components for DVD players, who was arguing that the DVD player would become that converged box. I think as far as entertainment goes, he's probably right. Already the DVD player is taking over the functions of the stereo; many players play CDs and mp3s nowadays. And some new players are capable of recording TV shows, thereby delivering the final death blow to VHS. (How this will compete with the TiVo format remains to be seen.) I can certainly imagine this souped-up player being the conduit for TV, movies, radio (both regular and Internet), and recorded music. Since music, video and computer files seem to be merging into one CD/DVD-type disc format, I can imagine that single disc being downloaded or recorded on in the main box and transported to walkabout players and car stereos.

As to whether this object will converge with the PC, I'm more doubtful. I've never tried them, but I suspect one reason set-top boxes never really took off is that TV sets aren't very friendly to text. People like video to be big, so you can sit a few yards back and watch, while text we like close up. And no electronic device has yet equalled the book in terms of reader-friendliness. I imagine that will get better with improved technology that will be less hard on the eyes. But my personal feeling is that text will be handled in a separate device from the audio/video box, and that device will be something like a laptop, since that's the most booklike format there is. You'd want some sort of connection between that and the DVD thingy, but I do think you want a separate screen.

Of course, who knows what future generations will want? I'm the lady who still has a record player, after all. But that's my two cents' worth.

Beauty and the beast

The Village Voice reviews a new book about female competitiveness. The Ani DiFranco line it quote ("Everyone harbors a secret hatred/for the prettiest girl in the room") reminds me of my roommate in graduate school. She was a former model, and when I mentioned this fact to female classmates, the general reaction was pity. "Oh my God," said one woman, "you must hate her."

I didn't see much point in that, and indeed, living with her made me even less inclined to envy her. Her romantic history wasn't any better than any other single woman's I knew; if anything worse, because as a teenage model she had unsurprisingly attracted a lot of predatory men. I was a bit more surprised that she had a similar problem with dating that I've always had -- she was good at being friends with men, so they tended to see her more as a buddy than as a romantic prospect. That sounds strange coming from a model, but knowing her I could see how that could happen. There was a lot of the stringy tomboy in her, aggressive and direct, and not much feminine mystique.

She broke up with her boyfriend, in fact, while I was living with her. We weren't close enough for her to talk to me about it, but obviously it was extremely painful. I remember tiptoeing around the house, trying to be inconspicuous, while I heard her sobbing in her room. Whatever advantage beauty may give to starting things, it doesn't make the difficult business of human relations any easier.

Actually, the one area where resentment did sometimes spring up on my part wasn't over beauty but money. She had been modeling since she was 12 or something, and had made ridiculous amounts of money at a young age. Life as a medical student was a serious downgrade that she complained about rather a lot, and I was not inclined to feel sorry for her since she was still living better than I had for about the previous five years. But I realized that the money wasn't all good for her either, because here she was in her late twenties and she would probably never have that kind of income again. Instead of moving upward like most of us, she was heading down.

She had gotten interested in medicine from volunteering in some sort of emergency service. She discovered not only that she liked the adrenaline rush of all the running around (not surprising, since her favorite hobby was skydiving) but that it brought her spiritual fulfillment that she had never experienced in the modeling world. She was not happy with med school, though, and had serious doubts about whether she would practice medicine. I thought that, in terms of the job, she would probably have been happiest as an EMT, charging into danger zones and saving lives. But she didn't know how to live on an EMT's salary. And so whatever I could have envied her for, it tended to be complicated by reality. Like most things.

Camassia downgrades!

After coming close to this a few times before, I've finally decided to cancel my cable TV service. This is partly for financial reasons: in the last few months my rent was raised and my ethical eating kick has jacked up my grocery bill, while my employer has frozen our salaries for more than a year. And cable in my neighborhood is costly: about $50 a month, and that's not even digital.

My TV-watching habits have waxed and waned over the years, but lately they've definitely waned. The blogosphere is part of the reason for this, not so much because of the time spent blogging (as you can see, I'm not the most prolific blogger out there) as the fact that I'm reading more both to find things to blog about and because of books mentioned by other bloggers. (A few days ago when Telford brought up another book he wanted me to read, I drew the line: I'm already reading three books because of him, I'm not taking any more till I'm finished!) Also, going to church has given me more to do and think about. So TV seems a lot less interesting compared to the other stuff that's going on. I'm going to miss a few things, but it's not worth the money to me any more.

The way cable TV works is so...20th century. This business of having great blocks of channels that you pay for en masse, some of which you're never going to watch, seems to go against the general tech trend of personalization and choice. The competition, what with satellite and digital, seems to be pushing things even farther in that direction -- bigger and bigger packages with more and more channels at ever-higher prices. They may cost less per channel, but past a certain point, how much TV are you going to watch?

Speaking of tech trends, I'm keeping my cable modem. Now there's something that's worth the money.

Muscular Christianity

The woman on the cross-trainer next to me at the gym today was reading the Book of Mormon while she worked out. Gotta love L.A...

Paterfamilias

Nice article about modern fatherhood in First Things. It makes a good point about working mothers:

In the premodern world of the traditional family, life was predominantly agricultural. While the mother cared for the young children and supervised the chores of her older daughters in the home, the father worked in the fields along with his older sons, usually within walking distance of the front door. The nuclear family would come together for meals and social gatherings, frequently joined by members of the extended family who, when they did not reside under the same roof, usually lived nearby.

For most of us, things are very different today. For all the hype about “telecommuting” in the 1990s, the fact remains that the overwhelming majority of people travel outside the home to work—a journey often involving a substantial real-world commute. Moreover, most Americans now live in suburbs, far away from extended family members. Ever since the 1950s, a woman choosing the life of the stay-at-home mom has faced the prospect of isolation far more profound than would have been typical in earlier times. After her husband walks out the door in the morning, she is usually left alone with only her child for company. Such a life is hardly traditional; nor is it, for many women, appealing. And understandably so.

For all the talk about the newness of women working outside the home, it's almost as new to have men working outside the home, at least in large numbers. I don't envy the lot of the premodern woman, but it does seem like the industrial age put more distance between husbands and wives than ever before. It's not so surprising that some women wanted to go out where the men are, and that some even came to see men as an alien tribe whose interests were opposed to theirs.

The ghost in you

By email, Telford also answered my question about the difference between an immortal soul and an eternal soul:

Oh, and the immortal soul of Origen (like the Highlander) can't be
destroyed. It is preexistent and not necessarily related in any
important way to the body. The eternal soul of Augustine and much other
Christian tradition is a creation whose end is physical embodiment and
whose eternity depends on God's grace. Immortal souls, no. Eternal
souls, maybe. I myself tend towards holism: my 'soul' is linguistic
shorthand for my 'self', which seems to be entirely material. When I
die, I'm nowhere but in the casket until resurrection day. Anabaptists
called that 'soul-sleep'. It solves a lot of metaphysical problems (but
not all).

I encountered that idea only recently, and it makes a lot more sense of Judgment Day than the usual version. If everybody's assigned to heaven, hell, purgatory or whatever upon death, what's the point of doing it all over again? But it does put a different cast on "resurrection." Since the bodies of most people who've ever lived have dissolved into the biosphere, the dead wouldn't be so much raised as re-created. They would be brought back into existence from nonexistence. Somehow this reminds me of the Star Trek episode where Scotty gets rematerialized 80 years after he disappeared in a transporter accident. But I digress...

Speaking of the body/soul question, Minute Particulars wrote about it again today. (This is what I love about the blogger geeks I hang out with; you want an analysis of the Aristotelian dualism and transmigration of souls in a comic strip, MP is your man.) I assume that as a Catholic he follows the eternal-soul model, which is still a bit murky to me. Like Telford he opposes body-soul dualism, but in this post he refers to "the soul separated from the body and then subsequently informing a glorified body." I gather this is the Catholic interpretation of St. Paul's lines: "What you sow does not come to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be, but a bare kernel, perhaps of wheat or of some other grain. But God gives it a body as he has chosen, and to each kind of seed its own body...So is it with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable; what is raised is imperishable." (I've moved on in my NT reading to the letters of St. Paul; more blogging on that later.)

Despite being an anti-dualist, MP believes there is a soul that can be transferred from one body to another. Telford, I assume, would regard the creation of a different body as creating a different person, but one that is related to the former person as a plant is to its seed. What this means exactly I don't know, and what this means for the damned I really don't know (these seems to me to lead logically to annihilationism), but I haven't got to Revelation yet, so I'll hold off.

Said the spider to the fly

Telford has part one of his response to my weird dream post. Obviously I have to wait for part two before I can respond, because he hasn't really addressed the core question yet. But I do want to point out that, at least among the scientists I've read, the emphasis on savagery isn't as monolithic as he makes it sound. There's debate about this between scientists as well as between scientists and theologians. In fact, there's always been a bit of Rousseauian romanticism among zoologists, particularly studiers of the great apes.

That's why I was careful to avoid using language like "struggle for survival," or speculating overmuch about the past. You can get carried away with that sort of thing. But one thing that was striking about the spider dream was that it was so terrifying and yet it depicted something so ordinary. It's the sort of thing you can see happen in your own house. So why could I not bear to look?