Quote

Ilana: "If you find weird things in your students' papers, it's probably because they revised them at 1:12 in the morning."

Applications

I have applied for a lot of jobs in Government Departments and in Departments of Political Science this year. One job, however, advertises for an "Assistant Professor of Government and Politics."

Quote

"This is my favorite of the five proofs." --my student, on Aquinas' third proof of God's existence (I love nerdy students)

Dim Sum

I love the "pillar" on the right corner of this house.

But this post is not about that pillar. But I don't have any pictures of Mr. Sayers' birthday brunch, so it will have to do. For Mr. Sayers' birthday, we went out for Dim Sum, which is, as far as I understand it, a Chinese lunch or brunch that's like tapas. The servers bring out carts full of little plates of food and you choose what you want to eat and you (in our case, 14 of us!) share it, by spinning a gigantic lazy susan. Mr. Sayers' brother said that Dim Sum is all about drinking loads of tea and trying little bites of everything. That's something that I can get behind.

What interesting food! And delicious food. Those were sometimes two separate categories: There were chicken feet and jellyfish and tripe; I tried them all! (The jellyfish were far crunchier than I expected.) And there were wide rice noodles that were amazing and rich egg custard quiches and loads of pastries stuffed with beets and beans and other sweet things.

When we were ordering little plates, they would stamp the table's card. We had no idea what the stamps meant, nor how much this was all going to cost. It was slightly scary (one of the other diners was so concerned that she came over and asked us what was going on). Upon receiving our bill at the end, we discovered that the price of the meal was so cheap that none of us believed it--we were all stuffed and couldn't eat another bit for something like $8.44  each.

Twitter

One of my students bought a local newspaper this weekend because Tocqueville told him to. It warms my heart.

Random Assortment, Religion Edition

~ This whole interview is wonderful, but what stuck out to me in it was minute 6 to 6:36. There is an old home video of Dolores (the actress-turned-nun) and Elvis goofing off. Dolores looks lovely and charming and vivacious and young and really happy. When the interviewer asks modern-day Dolores (I think this interview is from a couple of years ago) what she thinks looking back at that home video, she answers that that girl is probably more heavy and serious than she is now. This is such a poignant witness and is exactly what I've perceived in many of the nuns who I've met: they have such peace and joy. It makes me want to will more closely with what God wills so that I can have that sort of peace.

~ From an old interview with John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats on religion:

"[Q:] Satanist black-metal bands, occasional Old Testament references, the title Heretic Pride—there's a lot of religion around the edges of your work. Is that something that plays a role in your life or is it just fertile lyrical material?
[A:] I consider myself religious—I'm Catholic, both by blood and by tendency, and I mean "religious" in the sense of the word that occasionally makes Protestants uncomfortable: I like ritual and repetitive prayers, and I think a communal relationship with God is many orders of magnitude more important than "a personal relationship with Jesus Christ." I prefer being told what to do and how to pray. I don't think I'm smart enough or eloquent enough to write prayers that are worth God's time.
At the same time, though, I'm in the same boat that everybody else is in: In my heart, I doubt there's a God at all. Most of what most religions teach is utterly ridiculous, and besides, I'm a pro-choice feminist, so the Church that I love and which I'll never fully be able to leave is also my enemy.
I stopped going to church years ago and hardly ever go these days, and I won't take Communion when I do, because those are the rules. I'm as likely to pray the Hare Krishna mahamantra as I am the rosary. But I do pray, as devoutly as I can, even though I suspect we're just animals crawling on the surface of a godless earth. I do it because it gives me comfort and peace, even if that's illusory, and because I think that a prayerful mood is a powerful thing in the world and can be a real force for good."

This is such a funny answer! He loves religion--that's so incredibly rare; basically no one does these days. "I prefer being told what to do and how to pray." And yet he doesn't exactly want to be told what to do. And yet he still respects the Church enough to not take communion when he's there.

~ Free online courses. (I mean: not that I recommend college courses be online for college students BECAUSE I DON'T! But I'm thinking of the Aesthetics and Philosophy of Art class for my drive to and from campus...)

~ Here are a couple of recent blog posts on the big business ties to the HHS contraception mandate, an aspect that never occurred to me, and which I think it's practical and important to think about. I haven't written anything about the huge contraception debate thus far. I have a couple of thoughts: A) Religious liberty is absolutely the right ground to fight this fight; I don't think that we should discuss this in terms of the common good. It is an issue of religious liberties. To attempt to make it about the common good is a different discussion--it is to turn it into a philosophical rather than political discussion. This is not about banning contraception; it's about not forcing people to pay for something that their religion teaches is a moral evil. B) It's horrible that Rush Limbaugh expressed such ignorance and rudeness to Sandra Fluke (to which I thought Jack DeGioia had a pretty good response, calling people to civility, although I don't know if it's posted on the internet). Limbaugh's rudeness was particularly pernicious because it gives people the platform to say condescendingly that conservatives and Catholics and perhaps especially Catholic conservatives tend to know very little birth control and how it works. That makes me incredibly angry. C) The thing that this contraception debate has reminded me about is the fact that some commonly used forms of birth control not only prevent the sperm and egg from uniting, but can also, if that fails, prevent implantation. This is something that we should remember and discuss and about which we should educate people.

Twitter

I'm sitting in a coffee shop in Philly (yes, it's in your neighborhood, Sayers) and two full-grown men so far (by which I mean my age or slightly older) have come in with skateboards. Skateboards! What is this? Portland?

Les Anges du Peche

The National Gallery is screening the films of Robert Bresson, the French-Catholic filmmaker, which I highly recommend to my DC readers. I went to the first one, which was his first feature-length film, The Angels of Sin. I wish I were going to be in DC for the rest of them.

 

The Angels of Sin follows nuns at a Dominican convent established to minister to (and primarily composed of) women released from prison. Anne-Marie is a young woman from a rich, luxurious family who feels called to this convent and to a particular inmate named Therese. Anne-Marie is idealistic and naive--this translates in the convent into someone whose proud and strong-willed and not that obedient. The head of the convent likes Anne-Marie's impulsiveness and love for nature and beauty, but she realizes that it doesn't fit well into the life of the convent.

The end of the film is melodramatic. Actually, the whole time I had the sense that it was building to a melodramatic ending, one like A Tale of Two Cities, when Sydney Carton gives his life up for Charles Darnay.

What stuck out to me in the film was the parallel and inversion of prison and the convent. Women often went straight from one to the other. Also, Bresson repeatedly emphasized the importance of silence--it isn't the words that are important, the head nun says at one point, it is the silence. 

I also thought that the film was painfully honest about community life together--you see the nuns gossiping and getting frustrated with each other and talking back. This isn't nuns who I've met who at least appear to be overflowing with joy and happiness (I'm sure they have their struggles, too). These are nuns who have had quite hard lives and who are now adhering to a rigorous way of life.

A couple of the brothers I know from the Dominican house were there to see the film. I went to say hello to them after, but didn't get too much of a chance--in their Dominican habits, they were the celebrities there. Everyone else wanted a chance to say hello.

After the film, we peaked through a couple of the rooms upstairs. I was very excited by a couple of things. First, the self-portrait of Gorky and his mother that is an integral part of one of my favorite films, Ararat:

Notice the unfinished hands. Also, there are some of Joseph Cornell's boxes, which fascinated Elizabeth Bishop and which she imitated herself:

Aurora

In honor of the solar storm that's going on. I am dying to see some auroras. The thing is, it's wicked cloudy here, and there's a full moon, so the chance is low. But I could've sworn that the sky was green when I looked out earlier!

What is it? With cats in order to like them you're supposed to want what the cat wants (I don't like cats because I almost never want what they want--I want to pet them when it occurs to me to do so). I think it's the same way with God. You have to want what He wants. And though I can't understand it, I guess He doesn't want me to see the auroras tonight. Perhaps I need to move to Alaska...

The Way

I found this movie to be the most over-dramatic, nauseatingly poignant, strange movie ever. With the worst dialogue I've ever heard. 

It's a father/son movie directed and with a screenplay by Emilio Estevez, who plays the dead son, Daniel Avery, who shows up both in the memory and sort of in the present like a friendly ghost. The film stars Estevez's father, Martin Sheen, as his character's father, Thomas Avery. Tom flies to Spain to pick up his son's body when Daniel dies one day into walking the Camino de Santiago de Compostela. He decides to stay and walk the Camino himself while carrying his son's ashes. At the end, you receive a certificate that you completed the Camino de Santiago. Thomas has them write his son's name on the certificate. Oh the poignancy. Oh the meaning. It overpowers you. It's like the father helped his son finish walking the Camino.

Here are the good things/thing about the movie: it is about the Camino de Santiago, which is a pilgrimage in Spain, which I've been dying to walk ever since Elizabeth Bennett told me about it. It's like walking the Appalachian Trail. Only older, and more Christian. And in Europe. All things I approve of. One of the fellows who shares my mansion wrote her senior thesis on the Camino and walked part of it and interviewed people. She found that contemporary discussions of the Camino tend to downplay the religious aspect. I would like to walk it someday after I get my back functioning properly again.

Before he dies, the son invites the father to walk the Camino with him. The father refuses, because he's too busy being an eye doctor and playing golf. In the end, we see that his father has walked the Camino with him, since the ghost-son shows up calmly at various points. But mostly Thomas walks the Camino with a Dutch man who wants to lose weight (but eats a lot and occasionally does drugs on the trip), a Canadian woman who wants to quit smoking, and a crazy! writer who wants to get over writer's block. As nonreligious as their little group is, they all seem to have some sort of quasi-religious experience by the end.

Just so you can believe me about how bad the dialogue is:

"And after Santiago. Home? Back to the real world?"
Thomas: "If you want to call it that."

Thomas to the ghost of his son: "I came here to bring you home. I don't have anything to take back." (Because he sprinkled his son's ashes all along the Camino. That's right. He sprinkled his son's ashes all along.)
Daniel Avery, the ghost-son: "Yeah you do." (Meaning all of his moving experiences on the Camino.)

Sad father: "He [his son] wanted to see the world."
Sad father's secretary, with a meaningful smile: "And he did."

Son: "You don't choose a life, dad; you live one."

Bill Cunningham New York

I've never fallen in love in an hour and 24 minutes before. But really, he's charming and chatty and friendly, constantly laughing or smiling, except when he's intensely working. He is insanely frugal and hard working--he's almost monk-like about his work. And he's 83 years old! Remarkable, no? He reminds me a little of our dear JVS. 

I love the Sartorialist and Garance, who are indebted to Bill Cunningham, who was basically the first street fashion photographer ever, so I thought I'd better see this documentary. It was better than I could have ever imagined. It is an extended and personal introduction to a remarkable man, and to the world in which he moves, which includes quite a number of crazy characters. I watched it two nights in a row, and the next night I was at a small gathering where I suggested that we all watch it together. That idea was nixed, though.

Bill Cunningham's unique living situation holds the film together. He lived for most of his life in a little apartment above Carnegie Hall. The apartment had no kitchen nor bathroom; his apartment was almost entirely filing cabinets loaded with pictures. Many other artists also used to have studios and apartments above Carnegie Hall, but they were, one by one, moved out. Now, the city was attempting to turn the apartments into office space and relocate the only two remaining occupants, Bill Cunningham and his neighbor, 96-year-old Editta Sherman, a photographer and personality. What a lady! At one point, she starts trying on and modeling some of the hats that Bill Cunningham used to make and sell (to even people like Marilyn Monroe!), before he became a street photographer. The poses that Editta strikes are too cute, wrapping scarves around her neck to complement the hats. Editta also, at one point, charmingly asks why the film isn't about her. At the very end of the film, Bill Cunningham moves out of his old apartment and into a new one.

Clearly, Bill Cunningham's life is almost entirely about photography: he takes pictures during the day on the street, and in the evening at society events. He is on his bike constantly, looking for people to photograph. (He's had 28 bikes stolen in New York over the years.) He dresses very simply in collared shirts and sweaters and bright blue jackets, which he buys for 20 dollars in France where they are sold as the street cleaners' uniform. He loves them because of their pockets, and even wears one when he receives an award at Fashion Week in Paris. He doesn't want anything fancy, which is ironic, given that his passion is looking for and taking pictures of people who are dressing incredibly fancily themselves. He's no-nonsense in the way that he clothes himself--in the opening moments of the film, we see him duck taping his rain poncho so that it doesn't leak! He also barely cares about food. It's definitely 87 octane for him.

He has been photographing the same people for forty or fifty years. He knows them well and they love him. He looks so happy and engaged when he's taking pictures. The film shares with us some of the people that he photographs. One ambassador, or something, from Nepal, models his crazy wardrobe. At one point he says, "This used to be my old sofa--the jacket. And my pants used to be the ottoman."

The documentary is comfortable and unpretentious, like Bill Cunningham himself. From time to time, you hear the filmmaker asking questions from behind the movie camera. Toward the end, the filmmaker questions Bill Cunningham about his personal life. He's never, ever had a relationship, he tells us--he simply hasn't had time (he really is monk-like!). He maintains that photography "is not work; it's pleasure!"

Then, the filmmaker also asks him about his religion. Bill Cunningham has previously mentioned in the film that he goes to church every Sunday. He tries to downplay it--"It's no big deal; I go to repent." But when the filmmaker asks him about it at the end of the film, for the first time Bill Cunningham becomes emotional. He borders on tears and takes several moments to compose himself. He doesn't say much, except that church is very important to him. Goodness, it's hard to explain it, but it brings me close to tears even now recounting it.

One of the people that Bill Cunningham has photographed over the years is a man who wears dresses. Cunningham had to push and push for the Times to publish the photographs. One interviewee says that this shows Cunningham's egalitarianism. And it does. Cunningham is not an elitist--he is concerned with beauty, but particularly with how real people wear beautiful things. He is unconcerned with fashion that real people can't wear. But he's not just an egalitarian. Photography is his way of highlighting the individual who distinguishes himself from what Cunningham calls the "cookie-cutter masses." He is interested in fashion on anyone, but he doesn't think that everyone is equally fashionable. He looks for those people who stand out in the crowd. He sees fashion as crucially important--he says that it's the armor people use to survive the reality of everyday life. He says that you can't do away with it, that that would be to do away with civilization.

Wake Up and Smell the Roses

I love this little girl's intensity when it comes to smelling flowers (Eastern Market).