My First at No Tofu

One of the things keeping me from you is my weekly gig doing music reviews at No Tofu Magazine, a music and movie site. I scored the gig a couple of weeks ago, and it’s a good one. It keeps me in new music for free and gives me a byline — and deadlines. Deadlines are important. Without deadlines, I don’t write.

Here’s my first review. I cover an album by Josephine Foster called Graphic as a Star.

First things should come first: this is not a folk album. Josephine Foster is marketed as a folk singer, but the only thing folksy here is her use of an acoustic guitar. Acoustic guitars do not a folk album make. There are rhythms and rules to folk music – an earthy quality, a deep connection to a place and a people, hence folk. Josephine Foster is about as far from earthy as you can get. She’s subtle and ephemeral, and this record calls to mind a busker in the subway station or the singer at the coffeehouse show more than it does the excitement and violence of real folk music. All of which is to say the album is what it is, urban and contemporary.

Meanwhile, work is getting busy and my home connection remains spotty. But rest assured I remain vigilant.

An Exercise in Homesickness

I’ve lived in New York now for a little less than three months. I haven’t in those months much time to explore, and so I, with sorrowful reluctance, have to admit that I don’t know the city very well; from the JMZ station, I can see All Saints’ Church preening in the southern sky, while the twin spires of Most Holy Trinity decorate the north. This is Brooklyn, and its skyline is hotly contested by its churches, without the insurmountable competition of Manhattan-style towers. Manhattan, though, is where I normally go, or if I must venture deeper into Brooklyn, I go as a matter of habit to the Target store in Atlantic Place. Never as adventurous as I like to tell myself I am, I barely know my own neighborhood, largely restricting myself to the few streets in which I am directly invested, forming a quadrangle around Graham Avenue, my own street its southerly edge.

My time in the city being brief, then, and my life in it inexperienced, I haven’t found a single street that strikes with the same force as Monument Avenue back home in Richmond. I’m sure those streets exist – for a city this old and this big, with a population as diverse and a history as controversial as it possesses, there have to be such streets – but none of them have popped up before me with the same starkness Monument presents. I have found no places that scream with history and controversy and fire, none violent in their proclamations, none so fierce.

Monument is a pretty street, broad and well-manicured. One of those easy, ambling streets like the Champs-Elysees in Paris, it’s cradled on either side by Beaux-Arts and Queen Anne-style houses, elegant in their narrow slots. The yards are well-kept by fiat of a neighborhood association with powers rumored to be nigh-dictatorial and the sidewalks lack Richmond’s otherwise-pervasive cracks. Long stretches of road are not even paved at all, but surfaced with carefully-lain brick that’s a pleasure to see and a pain to traverse. By every account, it’s one of the prides of the city, along with the old-world cobblestone of Shockoe Bottom and the creepy-chic of Hollywood Cemetery, in which four presidents are buried if you count Jefferson Davis. I’m not sure if I should.

Occasionally, as you make your way down Monument, you’ll notice the reason the street got its decidedly-uncreative name: it’s positively littered with statues, primarily of Confederate generals. This city being the former Confederate capitol, it’s really only natural, a sort of perfunctory recognition of the past and the Lost Cause story. You know the story. It’s the story we grew up with, that the South may have lost the Civil War, but they died valiantly for their homes and families in defense of a cause in which they fervently believed: independence. It’s easy to see how naturally it fits into America’s own tale, with such grace it aligns as an antithesis of the Revolutionary War. Both were caused by threats to a region’s economic life, taxes in the one, the abolition of slavery in the other. And in Richmond – really through the whole of Virginia – this is really very hard to forget. It’s everywhere.

Any quick walk through the city’s old quarters fruit: here, where this Richmond Police Department parking garage stands, is where J.E.B. Stuart died in the home of his brother-in-law, Dr. Charles Brewer, of wounds sustained during the Battle of the Yellow Tavern; here is where the fire that destroyed the city was set by evacuating Confederate soldiers, leaving a smoldering corpse behind them; here is where Jefferson Davis lived, the so-called White House of the Confederacy, a small building lacking every grandeur one would expect from so damned high a name. This city is a corpse, really; hollowed out and repurposed, but a corpse all the same. It’s almost adrift in its history.

So there, on Monument, there you see the statues. First, in Stuart Court, flanked by two churches, in the shadow of a white and graceful apartment building, is J.E.B. Stuart himself, who died in that parking garage. His pedestal is very informative, giving us his name, his dates, his accomplishments, so that we might look at this horseriding hero and know  exactly why he deserves a statue, tall and cast in bronze and forever gazing into the heart of the city.

Then comes Stonewall Jackson. There’s a little less on his statue. “Stonewall Jackson,” it reads, 1824-1863. He too is atop a horse, the classic equestrian. Dying as he did, he’s a bit larger than Stuart. This pattern repeats itself with Robert E. Lee (whose statue reads nothing but “LEE” as no further explanation is necessary) and Jefferson Davis and Matthew Maury. And then things get odd.

Facing away from the city, almost resentfully, is Arthur Ashe. Ashe was a tennis player native to the city, one of the all-time greats, who died of complications due to AIDS in 1993. It’s an ugly statue with an ugly history. Now, I have nothing against Arthur Ashe. I don’t know much about him — I don’t follow tennis — but if he deserved a statue, he certainly deserved an attractive one. What he got was a statue designed by a committee. It’s squat and uninspiring. Intended to celebrate both his tennis career and his literacy advocacy, it shows him standing amidst reaching children, in polo shirt and trousers, holding aloft both a tennis racket and two books. It’s sloppy symbolism; the reaching children (I suppose reaching after education) look more desperate than eager, and the looming racket is almost threatening. Ultimately, it looks like he stole these books from the children and is about to beat them senseless for trying to get them back.

I remember the mess trying to get this thing installed. There was endless debate over whether a tennis player deserved to be among these great leaders of men. Some criticized the irony of having a black man among Civil War generals. In the end the statue was installed, facing away from Richmond in protest (of what, exactly, isn’t explained).

Delays

I wanted to let all you guys know what the deal is here. I haven’t posted in AGES and it’s frustrating ME. You see, my internet connection at home has been out of commission for nearly two weeks. Since all my blogging is done from home, that leaves me completely unable to write here. I can get online at an internet kiosk at the laundromat, but that’s only for brief amounts of time considering how much it charges, or at the library, but it’s closed by the time I get home from work.

Since I can’t blog from work, that leaves this blog in a decided pickle: how do I give you guys the content you’ve come to expect from this excellent site? I’m not entirely sure. I’m contemplating some workarounds, but they’d require putting my friends out. So until then, patience please; this is more frustrating for me than it is for you, I guarantee it.

Conversion Stories

I set out to write a post about this article. I did not, in fact, write such a post.

It’s a pretty standard trope that all converts want to talk about is their conversion experience. I suppose that’s somewhat self-perpetuating; the first year of my Catholicism it was all anybody asked me about. For nonverts, it’s fascinating no matter what side you fall on; faithful Catholics heard the story, and rightly so, as something of a triumph, someone being convinced by truth; resentful Catholics heard it with an incredulous wonder, uncertain of what would make anybody jump that fence; Protestants heard it with a bit of suspicion, regretting they hadn’t gotten to me sooner. But all in all, conversion narratives tend to be popular because they lay out, piece by piece, what forced someone to make a decision many people try to avoid making at all.

Joining a religion is a profound commitment, especially when it’s something like Catholicism. The decision isn’t simply anything along the lines of choosing which of all the local church options you wish to partake, but instead a plunging into a particular community, saying “I choose this faith which means these people, for the long haul, in bonds that cannot be severed.” It’s choosing a society as much as it is a means to know God, and I don’t recommend ever doing it twice, because those are bonds you’ll be more or less forced to severe.

When I was going through my Judaism phase — which was brought to mind by my recent reading of Lauren Winner’s Girl Meets God — I was forced to deal with this firsthand, if somewhat obliquely firsthand. I had not made any decision one way or the other regarding joining the Chosen People. It’s a funny place to be, that middle ground, and very painful; I would have difficulty praying at mass, not because I didn’t believe it, but because it represented a choice, a reaffirming of a bond with these people and this faith that I wasn’t sure I wanted to affirm. I had difficulty even contemplating any sort of future plans, unsure if these were people with whom my life would still be wrapped up in a year’s time. That’s how it goes, you see; it’s not that you choose to abandon these people, or that they choose to abandon you, but the most profound cord holding you to them would be severed. Conversations would become strained, awkward, distant. You’d move deeper and deeper into your new social sphere, bonded to these people in a way you’re not sure you’re still bonded to the others.

I remember a conversation in particular with my friend Erik during the height (depth?) of this period. He said “As much as I wouldn’t stop being your friend, this relationship with Jesus is probably the most important thing we’ve shared, and I’d hate to lose that connection with you.” The thing is that he’d be right. I did have people write me off when I joined the Catholic church. Even my dad was upset (he has to an extent gotten over it), but at least I was spared having entered from another religious body, and spared ultimately the difficulty and pain of leaving it for something else. Another conversion story to tell.

The thing about conversion stories is that, as much as they differ, they’re all ultimately the same: I was in a situation which for one reason or another didn’t satisfy me. I felt attracted to something other, and wondered if it might. I explored it, felt my way inside it, participated as much as I felt I could, and ultimately decided it meant more to me than what I was leaving behind. I’ve been involved in enough RCIA programs to know the basic tale. It’s how I felt during the runup to my conversion to Catholicism. It’s how Lauren Winner felt before she came to Anglicanism from Orthodox Judaism. And most disconcertingly, it had been how I felt about Judaism for three years, and still, to an extent, do. I know that Orthodox Judaism can never answer the questions of life to the same satisfaction that Catholicism can. Mostly I’m attracted for what I’ve called it’s deliberateness, and more than that, for it’s firm identity. How’s about that, eh? Nearly a decade into Catholicism and I’m still trying to figure out who I am!

So, no, I’m not planning on going anywhere. I’m Catholic for a reason, and that reason hasn’t gone anywhere. I can never turn my back to Christ, never abandon the Gospel; it means too much, and what’s more, it’s all true. It has written itself upon my heart deeper than I was ever aware, and that beauty can’t be cast off. But there are times I long for the mikvah; when that happens, I remind myself of my baptism, and think “What more could I ever ask for?”

A Moment’s Apology

It’s very difficult to find a way to balance work and my blog. I’m sorry I’ve neglected it. It’s not because I’ve had nothing to say but because I haven’t had the will to say it. I’ve been discussing with Nick Milne over at The Daily Kraken collaborating on a joint blog, but he suggested — and rightly so — it’d be better to have multiple people involved on it. It would allow us to be distracted and not worry that you folks out there aren’t getting the Random Thoughts Of Mine that you deserve.

It’s problematic, because it means I haven’t been writing. I’ve been thinking for damn sure about a great many things. I’ve taken up re-reading William Zinsser’s On Writing, I’ve been halfheartedly wrapping up my short story “Opal Honey of the Big Deep River,” I’ve been scripting Stronghold #4 and developing the stories for #’s 5 and 6, but none of that has amount to the serious work of my vocation — which is writing — and neither to the specific form I’ve opted to give it, which is this blog.

By my, my, the difficulty! I have such little time outside of work which I can give to this blog, and other things that require my attention. I suppose I could spend less time watching Star Trek and more time blogging. I suppose I could take a moment to shoot off a post in the morning between my prayers and my train. I could even put Fallout 3 away come the weekends and let Saturday or Sunday be a day I give, at least moreso, to writing. And yet, when I contemplate writing, I’m worried much more about my book or my short stories, having given a year to nonfiction and analysis. But those projects often paralyze me — “Opal Honey” in particular is not progressing the way I’d like it to — so I just sit there. Not writing.

My friend Alex tells me I need to take my own advice and give regular time to writing. It doesn’t matter what. My thoughts on cheeseburgers. A struggle to remember a crazy dream. The strange things the guy in the office next door shouts into his phone. Something. So I’m going to try and give that a shot at some point in the morning or in the evening. Till then, courage; keep me in your prayers.

The Unsurprising News

Duh.

By teeing up a public battle over abortion in thehealth care bill now before the Senate, congressional Democrats could be risking more than just the fate of the legislation.

Hanging in the balance are millions of Catholic swing voters who moved decisively to the Democrats in 2008 and who could shift away just as readily in 2010.

According to exit polls, President Barack Obama won the support of 53 percent of Catholic voters, a seven-point increase over the showing of the Democrats’ 2004 nominee, Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), a Catholic. Among Latino Catholics, who are often more conservative than their white counterparts on social issues, Obama did even better, winning more than two-thirds of their support, a 14-point improvement over Kerry’s totals, according to an analysis by the Pew Research Center.

Those gains will be at risk if a polarizing abortion fight takes place in the Senate.

“There could be political repercussions in the election. It could be harder for the Democrats to keep those Catholics voters they gained and they may put some of their members at risk,” said John Green, a religion and politics expert at the Bliss Institute at the University of Akron.

Veteran’s Day

EDIT: So, I’m an idiot. I had this thing about *Memorial Day*. My bad.

So it’s Veteran’s Day, and I feel the need to stir up the pot even at this late day. I’m sure many of you will hate me after this.

I posted the famous Wilfred Owen poem “Dulce et Decorum Est” instead of something like John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” because I think Owen has it right. The McCrae poem is hostile and violent in its memorializing the dead, demanding apocalyptic revenge, perpetuating violence for violence and blood for blood, lest the dead have died in vain. The key, though, is that in war, to die in vain means to die on the wrong side; therefore, of course, at some point, soldiers’ have died in vain. We can avoid this all we want by saying they died for a movement or an ideal or simply that the fact that they died makes them heroes who by definition didn’t.

McCrae wrote:

Take up our quarrel with the foe:

To you from failing hands we throw

The torch; be yours to hold it high.

If ye break faith with us who die

We shall not sleep, though poppies grow

In Flanders fields.

To me, that’s….vile. Dreadful. Let us go to war simply on the grounds that people have died in the war we’re in. What a way to thank our soldiers, by sending them into combat.  That’s the desperate glory that Owen talks about. As I’ve written before, we all want to be heroes. We all want to be worth a damn. We all want to matter. And the old call goes out — “It is sweet and proper to die for your country.” And rather than heeding the call of the Gospel to moral greatness, to the abandonment of self into the hands of God in the service of others, we grab our guns and march into righteous combat.

I know, I know, that there are times when war is necessary. But I’m so often struck by how many people find it desirable, something in which we should find glory, rather than something we should mourn and wretch at.

But that’s me.

Night.

Sweet and Proper

Bent double, like old beggars under sacks,
Knock-kneed, coughing like hags, we cursed through sludge,
Till on the haunting flares we turned our backs
And towards our distant rest began to trudge.
Men marched asleep. Many had lost their boots
But limped on, blood-shod. All went lame; all blind;
Drunk with fatigue; deaf even to the hoots
Of tired, outstripped Five-Nines that dropped behind.

Gas! Gas! Quick, boys! –  An ecstasy of fumbling,
Fitting the clumsy helmets just in time;
But someone still was yelling out and stumbling,
And flound’ring like a man in fire or lime . . .
Dim, through the misty panes and thick green light,
As under a green sea, I saw him drowning.
In all my dreams, before my helpless sight,
He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning.

If in some smothering dreams you too could pace
Behind the wagon that we flung him in,
And watch the white eyes writhing in his face,
His hanging face, like a devil’s sick of sin;
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie; Dulce et Decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Wilfred Owen, 1918

Science: Telling Us Things We Already Know, Part IV

In the latest scientific discovery, it seems God works in mysterious ways.

The Dead

Last night, in the Commonwealth of Virginia, John Allen Muhammad was executed by lethal injection. Muhammad, you might remember, is the infamous Beltway Sniper, who terrorized a large swath of Virginia, DC, and Maryland in 2002. I remember it very well, living in Richmond at the time, because he came as far south as Ashland, about fifteen minutes from where I was living, and school was closed for two days in absolute terror of kids being picked off at their bus stops. After our “sniper days” ended, I still walked nervously in the dark to await the bus, afraid the bullets could come at any moment. That’s a pretty weird goddamn feeling, and I will never, ever forget it. But at least I lived; others were not half as lucky.

And so he was caught, tried, sentenced, and executed. He died without remorse, maintaining his innocence, and went silently to his death. It was almost defiant. Remarked one witness, “They both [Muhammad and teenage accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo, who was a minor and thus will not be executed] committed the same crimes. No, I don’t feel any closure. I mean, it’s … it … nothing changes.”

Nothing changes.

If I may adhere to my blog’s tagline a moment, and find God in the geekiest place, this reminds me of an exchange from — you guessed it! — Deep Space Nine, the episode “Duet”. Major Kira has captured a Cardassian war criminal, the infamous Gul Darhe’el, who ran a brutal labor camp during Cardassia’s occupation of Bajor, renowned as it were for the murders committed under his watch and per his orders. Intent on seeing the man die for his crimes, he waits in his cell and mocks her. “Let them kill me. Don’t you see? It doesn’t change anything! Kill me. Torture me… it doesn’t matter. You’ve already lost, Major. You can never undo what I’ve accomplished. The dead will still be dead!” And it’s as true as anything he says. The dead will still be dead.

That’s the  sad reality. It would be damned nice if killing the guilty could undo what they’ve done. It’d be damn nice if we could bring back every murder victim, undo every rape, resuscitate the bodies found under Gacy’s floorboards using the drops of life wrung from them. But we can’t. The past is done, and cannot be undoable. It lives in our memories and stalks us in our sleep and makes us fear for the future. We can’t fix things like that. So we settle. We settle for revenge. They hurt us, and now we’re going to hurt them. It is, in its way, justice.

But Bishop Loverde of Arlington — no heady liberal — responded to the upcoming execution in a characteristically pastoral way.

Because each person is created in God’s image and likeness, each person retains an intrinsic human dignity — even someone convicted of a heinous crime. This dignity is what leads the Church — while acknowledging the legitimate defense of individuals and society — to teach that the death penalty cannot be justified when a government has other ways to protect its people adequately against an unjust aggressor:

If non-lethal means are sufficient to defend and protect people’s safety from the aggressor, authority will limit itself to such means, as these are more in keeping with the concrete conditions of the common good and more in conformity with the dignity of the human person. Today, in fact, as a consequence of the possibilities which the state has for effectively preventing crime, by rendering one who has committed an offense incapable of doing harm — without definitively taking away from him the possibility of redeeming himself – the cases in which the execution of the offender is an absolute necessity “are very rare, if not practically non-existent” (Catechism of the Catholic Church, no. 2267; Evangelium Vitae, 56).

In solidarity with this teaching and with the consistent appeals made by Pope John Paul II and Pope Benedict XVI for an end to capital punishment in modern society, we are called to choose hope — hope in the redemption of an immortal soul – over the despair embedded in the death penalty. If the woman had been stoned, she would not have had the opportunity to “not sin anymore.” And so, despite the initial reactions we might have in seeking revenge, we must not opt for the death penalty.

And that’s true, too. I spent some of yesterday praying for Mr. Muhammad, that he’d admit and seek forgiveness for his crimes, that he’d be shown the mercy none of us deserve, but that all of us have been offered: freedom from death and entry into life.  Because nobody is irredeemable, and we are called to choose hope. And hope can have no place in a death penalty regime, where we make the decisions Christ alone can make. Life and death are not and should not be in our hands.