Category Archives: personal

literature, personal

The Beginning

As I intimated at the end of my 10 Books post, I do have some thoughts to share about Chaim Potok’s novel In the Beginning.  It started off slower than his other novels, but I ended up loving it just as much as I have the others.  Perhaps one of the reasons it took me longer to get into the book is that I find I read books in smaller and smaller chunks at a time.  I rarely have the luxury to sit down and become fully absorbed in a book and read 100 pages at a time as I did in earlier days.  Now I have to prioritize more which books I even pick up.  I find that I set down a book much quicker than I used to.  I used to try to finish nearly everything I started.  These days, not so much.

In the Beginning is the story of David Lurie, a boy born in the Bronx to Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe.  David is a bookish and sickly little boy.  He has problems with a local bully who hates him because he is Jewish.  Because of its historical setting—it starts in the late 1920s before the stock market crash—I knew some of what to expect.  It was a Depression-era story, followed by World War II.  I knew about some of the American anti-Semitism of the time because of Philip Roth’s alternate history novel The Plot Against America.  But I still cried when the narrator and his family find out the full extent of the Nazi atrocities against Jews.

Like the other Potok novels I’ve read, it’s a book about fathers and sons, and the inevitability of conflict.  They’re all told from the perspective of the sons.  In this novel, the conflict stems from expectations, as it often will.  Before coming to America, David’s mother had been married briefly before to his father’s brother.  They had no children before he was killed in a pogrom—an organized anti-Jewish riot, often a massacre.  His father then stepped in and married his brother’s widow according to the ancient tradition of levirate marriage (Deuteronomy 25: 5-10), though he could have easily gotten out of it.  He is a man of honor and his word.

David looks up to his father, but he doesn’t understand him.  He thinks about his dead uncle whom he is named after, and how he wouldn’t exist if his uncle hadn’t been killed.  He considers the contingency of his being.  Out of death comes life.  I’ve considered my own contingency lately.  Like many kids, when I was little I had a security blanket.  Mine was handmade by my Grandma.  It was red, white, and blue with the number 76 on it for America’s bicentennial.  The thing is, I was born in 1977.  The blanket had been intended for someone else—someone whose existence would’ve precluded my own.  But that baby didn’t survive a full nine months gestation, and so I had a chance at life.  It’s terrible to think my parents had to suffer such grief for me to enter the world.

When David considers his contingency on the death of his uncle David, he still “wants to be [his] own David” (311).  And I need to be my own person, too.  I’m still figuring it out.  In my own family, I’m a bit of an outlier.  I still have the faith that I was taught as a child, but it’s changed.  I no longer attend an evangelical church, instead finding solace in Episcopal services.  On political issues I’m often on the opposite side of the spectrum.  And while both my wife and I came from homes where our moms stayed home, now I’m the one home with the kids.  It’s traditional, except not in the expected way.  Fortunately, none of these differences has lead to any breaks with my family.  We still love each other very much.

As he grows older, David asks the hard questions about Judaism.  He becomes interested in source criticism.  He wishes to defend Torah from attack, but first he must learn what the goyim say.  He starts by reading books given to him by an old neighbor.  He finds books that are critical of the Graf-Wellhausen hypothesis.  Basically, this hypothesis posits that there are various sources that have been edited together to make up the Pentateuch, or the first five books of the Bible traditionally ascribed to Moses.  Reading these books, even though they defend Torah, is frowned upon by his family and community.  They are dangerous to contemplate and read.  His father will not allow him to read books written by Germans while he is in the same room, even though they are written by important Orthodox rabbis.  No one in the community wants to consider what modern scholarship might say if it could destroy Torah.

I relate to David’s predicament.  When I was in Bible college I had a confrontation with a Bible professor about the inherent worth of studying secular literature.  At the time, I was an English major, and all I wanted to do was figure out how a Christian should relate to and read literature.  In my own way, I wanted to be a David and defend Christianity and the Bible from the evils of deconstructionism and other literary critical theories.  But my professor saw the reading of secular literature as a sullying influence, one that could easily lead one into sin.  Reading salacious stories could inflame lust in the mind, which was just as bad as committing sin with the body.

David’s curiosity for books and knowledge is insatiable.  One of my favorite moments in the book is when David finishes reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.  He’s at a cabin on a lake with his family for an August holiday.  He spends a moment reflecting on how great the book is and how his understanding has changed because of it.  Then he goes back into the cabin to find another book to read.  I’m not nearly as prodigious in my reading or intellect as David, but I still relate to his curiosity.  I want to learn about so many things.  This blog is the testament to my curiosity, the place where I lay out what I am learning and starting to think.

In the end is his beginning.  David pursues his studies of the Bible as literature to the tremendous disappointment of his parents.  I’m about to embark on my own intellectual journey on a smaller scale.  Though practically having majored in Bible while at Bible college, I’ve never seriously grappled with any modern scholarship.  I’d like to know what scholars have to say about where the Bible came from and who the original audience for it was.  It’s important to my faith that I seek the truth about the book that is the vehicle for my knowledge of God.  I’m planning on reading through James L. Kugel’s How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture Then and Now, in which he attempts to thread the needle between ancient interpreters and modern biblical scholars.  In his designation, the ancient interpreters are the basis for today’s traditional understandings of the Bible, while modern biblical scholars arose about 150 years ago and are those who read the Bible “‘scientifically’ and without presuppositions” (xiii).  I assume he means the presupposition of belief in its literal truth and divine origin, which in itself would be a presupposition.  I’ll have to read more to find out exactly what he means (chapter One is helpfully titled “The Rise of Modern Biblical Scholarship”).  I say that he is threading the needle because he claims traditional faith, even as he wrestles with scholarship that “contradict[s] the accepted teachings of Judaism and Christianity” (xvi).  Kugel, by his own account, is a modern David Lurie.  I’d like to find out what he has learned in his journey.  I’ll report back on my own journey.

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personal

Hospital Stories (3)

A few years ago I worked at a hospital as a constant observer.  It was a transitional job as I tried to figure out the next step of my life. What exactly is a constant observer?  one might reasonably ask.  A constant observer is basically a nurse’s aide who stays in one room to be with patients who might be a harm to themselves or others. Hospitals try very hard not to tie people down on their beds anymore.  There are a lot of reasons I might be assigned to a patient: dementia, adverse reaction to medication, brain injury, detoxing, or suicide watch, to name some.  I saw people at their most vulnerable state.  This is the third in what I plan to be a series of vignettes on my experiences in the hospital.

The moment I step into the room she’s in the middle of packing to leave. She’s already kicked her sister out that morning (after calling 911 twice). Her therapies for the day have been canceled. I convince her to take a walk with me around the unit, but when she gets back to the room she keeps packing. It’s not going to be an easy day.

She carries her bag out to the hall and looks for the exit in another patient room. She sets her bag down because it’s heavy with her hair products, magazines, and clothes. Her nurse manages to take her on another walk around the unit while holding her hand. Her nurse is very good with her and has a calming influence (and medication). When she comes back she takes a nap for a half hour (like I said, medication). When she wakes up she’s fairly calm and normal again for half an hour or so. Then she realizes her washer/dryer aren’t there, so they must have been stolen. Obviously I am involved in their disappearance.

The day before she had blown up at me when she couldn’t find her appointment book. I had tried to explain that her sister was holding on to it while she was in the hospital and had called many of her clients to let them know of the situation. She was in the hospital because of a brain aneurysm. She accused her sister of trying to ruin her business, and then she said I had taken her sister’s side and that I should just stay out of her family business. She had trusted me, and she thought I was couth. The nurse was able to calm her down, and later in the day I came back in the room and she had totally forgotten the incident.

Whenever she wasn’t mad at me, she treated me like a confidante. She would complain to me and talk bad about anyone after they left the room. While the nurse or aide was in the room, she would act relatively nice and compliant, but as soon as they left the room she would launch into them. Everyone was bitchy, or would cut your throat, or was snotty. I wondered what she said about me when I wasn’t in the room.

Later that day, right before I was off for the night, she looked for her cigarettes. I tried to explain that she didn’t have any because there was no smoking allowed in the hospital, but she said they had been in the drawer and now they weren’t so I must have stolen them and thrown them away. She walked out of her room and then right back in, but when she came back she wouldn’t look at me. She faced the other direction, towards her bed and the window, with her arms crossed. The night shift came in while this was going on. I slunk out of the room, escaping her silent accusations.

So now we’re back together again, and she’s upset about the missing washer and dryer. She goes to the bathroom, and when I ask if she’s okay in there (she could be unsteady at times) she comments that she can’t even go to the bathroom without a guard. Then she storms out in the hall and one of the aides asks where she’s going. The aide offers to show her the washing machine on the unit. This doesn’t satisfy her She wants hers, so she’d rather leave the hospital.

The aide turns off the WanderGuard alarm as we leave the unit (the woman had on a tracking anklet since a previous escape attempt). We try to direct her back around to the unit, but instead the woman bolts right towards the elevators. She hits the down button but then looks towards the windows at the winter landscape (a feint, I later realize). The aide goes back to get help. I stay, hoping I can delay her from getting any farther, but then the elevator door opens. I don’t want her to get to it in time, but she reaches a hand in just before it closes. I try to steady her/restrain her, but she shrugs me off and then glares at me because I was touching her. She tells me not to do it again. She’s seething with fury at me.

Once in the elevator she hits the ground floor button, and I keep hitting the open door button. It starts beeping loudly, so I let it go. We travel down, and I worry how I am going to stop her from going out the front door. It’s zero degrees outside with a wind chill even lower. I’m in a near panic about what to do. When we get to the ground floor she tells me she’ll yell if I touch her. I keep thinking about how to delay her or call security. I somehow manage to divert her to the information desk. She wants to complain about her treatment, but she has to wait because there is someone ahead of her. Then she sees her niece’s boyfriend and I see the niece and I motion almost frantically for her to come over. I’m so relieved that she happens to be there at that moment. She talks to her aunt, soothing her, and leads her back to the elevator.

Back on the unit, her nurse talks to her as well. I stay away for an hour. I sit in the nurses’ station and try to soothe my nerves. I’m tense and almost shaking. I go back to her room as her dinner arrives. She’s completely forgotten the incident and isn’t mad at me or anything. She falls asleep soon after dinner and sleeps nearly the whole night through. I find out later she does get up in the night for 40 minutes or so and apparently thinks the sink in her room is an oven and tries to light the gas burner.

Coda: The next day we watch a marathon of “What Not to Wear” on TLC together.

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literature, personal

10 Books

Not too long ago on Facebook, there was a meme making the rounds of 10 books that made an impression; basically an excuse to list one’s favorite books. I’m a sucker for lists and list-making. No one asked me to make a list, so I figured I’d do one for the blog, with explanations. I’m following the guide of books that made an impression, rather than my ten favorite books (which would be hard to figure out). I’m putting them in the approximate order that I read them.

Autobiography of Malcolm X: As Told to Alex Haley
Perhaps the first book I read by an African American, and considering I was a freshman in college when I read it, that is very sad. Given to me by my sister, a beat up paperback held together with a rubber band. I remember being struck by many moments in the book, first of which was young Malcolm being told by a teacher that he couldn’t be a lawyer when he grew up, instead he should plan on something more realistic. Another moment was his descriptions of getting a “conk,” a lye treatment to straighten his hair. It opened my eyes to a cultural experience that I had never imagined (and later learned even more about when I saw Chris Rock’s Good Hair). I hope to have a lot more to say about Malcolm X soon as I’d like to read the recent biography by Manning Marable.

A Brief History of Time (Stephen Hawking)
I’ve talked about this book previously and how it changed my views on the universe. Until I read it, I felt comfortable in my insulated worldview of a young universe created approximately 10,000 years ago. It shook everything up.

Rose (Li-Young Lee)
This collection of poems, Lee’s first, is important to me personally for two reasons. I can’t remember reading a contemporary poet’s collection before this one. I was drawn in by the poems about memory and inheritance. It’s a lovely collection. But even more importantly, it was the first gift I gave to my future wife (that and a mix CD—ha! remember those?)

The Things They Carried (Tim O’Brien)
Searing Vietnam stories that show the power of storytelling in the aftermath of trauma. That doesn’t make it sound nearly as good as it actually is. Memory shifts, unbalancing the reader. And the stories accumulate and adhere and echo, and the fiction all becomes more true.

The Blind Assassin (Margaret Atwood)
Layers of fiction where a novel within a novel is more true than the story the narrator of the main novel tells. I’m not sure if I still go for that kind of book, but at the time I read it, I was fascinated by the slipperiness of truth, and how we tell ourselves stories (even bold fictions) to make sense of our lives.

Amazing Grace: A Vocabulary of Faith (Kathleen Norris)
This book came at an important time in my life. I had recently moved to North Dakota as a grad student and didn’t know anybody there. I was looking for a different church experience and found comfort in the Episcopal service. I also found Norris, first The Cloister Walk and then Amazing Grace. She talked about Christian community that was rooted in history, tradition, and literature. Her books, too, were comforting.

So Long, See You Tomorrow (William Maxwell)
When I first read So Long, See You Tomorrow, I didn’t imagine Maxwell would become my favorite author. I read it too quickly for a class assignment. But I read it again on my own, and then his other novels and stories. I don’t think I’ve come across a writer with so much empathy and compassion for other people. And he writes such beautiful sentences.

Virtually Normal (Andrew Sullivan)
This book (along with What God Has Joined Together by David Myers and Letha Dawson Scanzoni) made me rethink gay marriage. I realized that disallowing gays and lesbians from traditions and social institutions and then condemning them for not conforming to traditions and social institutions makes no sense. And I’m not the only one. Public opinion on gay marriage has changed quite a bit since he wrote the book in the mid-90s.

My Antonia (Willa Cather)
This is a beautiful coming of age story set on the American prairie, tinged with sadness. The title character is only seen at a distance, through the eyes of the narrator Jim Burden. It’s a story told in episodes, much the way our memory works. I supposedly read it in high school, but I had trouble reading for class back then. I read a lot on my own, but I didn’t like being told to read a book. I rediscovered the book shortly before moving to South Dakota. I wanted to read a novel of the prairie, and I ended up falling in love with Cather’s books.

My Name Is Asher Lev (Chaim Potok)
It was hard to choose which Potok book for this list. I’ve only read three of his so far, but I’ve loved each of them (and I just started a fourth). This was the first one I read, and our oldest son’s middle name is Asher. What I love about Potok is that he takes religious belief seriously in his characters. Though his characters live in the world of Hasidim and Orthodox Judaism I can see the similarities and parallels in the fundamentalism I grew up in. Purity and piety are prized above all else. There is no room for art because it is dangerous. Asher Lev wrestles with the twin pulls of God and artistic expression in this beautiful novel. Perhaps I’ll manage to have something worthwhile to say about the current book I’m reading in the near future. I hope not to take so long between posts in the future.

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personal

Hospital Stories (2)

A few years ago I worked at a hospital as a constant observer.  It was a transitional job as I tried to figure out the next step of my life.What exactly is a constant observer?  one might reasonably ask.  A constant observer is basically a nurse’s aide who stays in one room to be with patients who might be a harm to themselves or others. Hospitals try very hard not to tie people down on their beds anymore.  There are a lot of reasons I might be assigned to a patient: dementia, adverse reaction to medication, brain injury, detoxing, or suicide watch, to name some.  I saw people at their most vulnerable state. This is the second in what I plan to be a series of vignettes on my experiences in the hospital.

The call light was on. Normally I was assigned to one room to care for a patient who might be a harm to themselves. But now I was on a wing of an understaffed department, assisting where I could. I ducked into the room to see how I could be of use.

“Hi, my name is Andy, and I’m one of the nurse aides on this floor. How can I help you?”

She looked surprised and frustrated (and maybe annoyed) to see me. Her nurse, a woman (the nurses are almost all women, that goes for nurse aides, too), had been in the room less than five minutes ago. The patient had just come out of surgery about a half hour ago. She looked to be in her mid-40s. The bed was uncomfortable. The instructions were for her to lie on her back, completely straight, for four hours and not to bend her leg. Her nurse had set the blood pressure cuff to measure her systolic and diastolic every fifteen minutes per usual post-op procedure. She had a peripheral IV of saline.

“How am I supposed to go to the bathroom?” A reasonable question.

A man at the bedside (her husband? her brother?) chimed in, “She’s not supposed to get up because of the surgery.”

“Oh, well, then you’ll have to use a bedpan. I’ll get one.” No one likes to use a bedpan.

I brought back a pan and a towel from the service center. I was trying to be a professional. Most of my experience with assisting toileting involved helping people who were out of it or elderly. She looked disapprovingly at me. I could tell she did not want me to help her pee. I didn’t really want to help her pee. But everyone else was busy. I didn’t want to have to ask anyone else to come to the room after I had answered the call light. I shifted my weight from one leg to the other. “Would you prefer that a woman assist you?”

“Yes.” She nodded.

The man looked at me as if I hadn’t even been an option.

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personal, poetry

Forget the Words

I told you once to forget the words I say,
and I told you twice to remember that.
You told me you never listen anyway.

Most of the time my thoughts are on display,
written on my face, shallow and flat.
I told you to forget the words I say.

And then I asked you, “Parlez-vous Français?”
to find the difference between chien and chat.
You told me your French is rusty anyway.

So then I tried some Spanish andale!
But you never studied the other Lat-
in tongue—just forget the words I say.

Our languages never can convey
meaning beyond one little caveat—
you weren’t even listening anyway.

I love and hate you. I listen. I pray.
The words didn’t stir you; you still sat.
I told you to forget the words I say.
You told me you never listen anyway.

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personal, poetry

Corvus Brachyrhynchos (American Crow)

You love your birds. We love them, too, you know;
your stunning pictures allow us to believe
in the forgotten world we can’t retrieve–
the one you captured in the Folio.
We’re far removed from birds these days. The crow
you shot and skewered with wires to achieve
a life-like “Mankin,” posed as you conceive
the Truth of Crows, is dead, removed. Although
once you were almost killed for nothing more
than your gold watch. But they got theirs, the crone
and her two sons, strung up by Regulators.
Thus you were saved to paint what you adore:
your birds, your marvelous birds, for educators
and public alike—you, the crow, alone.

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personal, poetry

Holding Pattern over the Pacific

To Amelia

You said, “The love of flying is the love
of beauty.” Easy for you to say above
Pacific blue stretched out for miles and miles
as waves coalesce forming frothy smiles.
What you and Fred didn’t take into account
was the deceptive cumulus pile surmounting
the horizon—and, you know, at times, I forget
to check my blind spot, too. And my regret
for not sharing your love of beauty or hot
chocolate at eight thousand feet is not
universal regret. I’d like to circumscribe
the globe like Drake (as you and Fred once tried),
but really, how am I supposed to find
Howland, pinprick point on maps and in Fred’s mind
when he couldn’t navigate celestially?
I’d be no better off than you; I’d be
“running north and south”: the same last words the cutter
Itasca, amid the static, ever heard you utter.
Some days strike me as trials from God and
some don’t. So I still wait for you to land.

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personal

Hospital Stories (1)

A few years ago I worked at a hospital as a constant observer.  It was a transitional job as I tried to figure out the next step of my life. What exactly is a constant observer?  one might reasonably ask.  A constant observer is basically a nurse’s aide who stays in one room to be with patients who might be a harm to themselves or others. Hospitals try very hard not to tie people down on their beds anymore.  There are a lot of reasons I might be assigned to a patient: dementia, adverse reaction to medication, brain injury, detoxing, or suicide watch, to name some.  I saw people at their most vulnerable state.  This is the first in what I plan to be a series of vignettes on my experiences in the hospital.

He couldn’t get comfortable on the bed.  And no wonder—his wife had told the nursing staff (and me) that normally at home he would sleep on a recliner for a few hours, get up to go to the bathroom, then lie down on another recliner.  She said he could only sleep for a few hours at a time, suffering as he did from restlessness and frequent urges to urinate.  I considered what this information meant for my evening. He had a catheter in place, so the urinating itself wouldn’t be a problem, but sometimes people still feel the urge to urinate.  I’d also found that it’s hard to explain a catheter to someone who is already confused.  I frequently would say “I know it feels like you have to go to the bathroom, but you have a tube that drains your bladder.  It’s doing the work for you.”  Sometimes I would show them the catheter bag filled with urine if I thought it would help them understand.  With one guy I had to explain the catheter more than two dozen times in a day—he’d forget within five minutes what I had said.  So the nurse brought a recliner—broken, but it was the only one on the unit—in an attempt to simulate the patient’s home environment.  I put a garbage can under the foot rest to steady the chair.  It wanted to lurch forward.  He was cold so we put a few blankets on him.  With that, he and his family accepted our illusion of home.  But soon enough, after his visitors left, they put him back in the bed so they could put the bed alarm on.  The alarm would let the nursing staff know if he tried to get out of bed, permitting them to dispatch me a few doors down to watch another patient.  A short time later they asked me to return to his room because he was yelling and cursing.  When I sat down next to the bed, he thought I was his wife there to comfort him.  The lights were low and he was confused because of… I don’t even know.  Old age?  Alzheimer’s?  A stroke?  It was the middle of the night?  He told me that he loved me so much.  I grabbed his hand, thinking that might comfort him.  He wanted to be comforted, so he was playing out the script of comfort.  I didn’t want to break out of my role and shatter the scene.  But then he started kissing my hand.  Now I felt really uncomfortable.  He was a total stranger, and he was kissing my hand.  Also, it didn’t seem right, posing as his wife, letting him believe she was there.  Still, I didn’t move at first because I was frozen.  But the moments passed, and I still couldn’t yank my hand away.  He was alone and disoriented in a place that was not his home, and I wanted him to be able to feel some comfort right then.  I also hated the thought of facing his embarrassment if I made him realize his mistake.  And I really didn’t want him to get upset again.  I told him to relax and go back to sleep.  I tucked him in, and then I withdrew back into the shadows of the room, thinking about how I had stumbled into misplaced intimacy.

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literature, personal

He-Man Woman Haters Club?

I recently finished Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books (all six of them), and I’m sad that there are no more.    The Earthsea books have magic and dragons, but what really impressed me is the depth of the female characters.  As much as I enjoy Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, it’s really a story about dudes.  Sure, you have Eowyn disguising herself as a man and killing the witch-king, but by the end of the story she’s given up fighting to settle down as a healer and wife.  I’ve also enjoyed George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series, which has many well-rounded female characters, but the world in which they live is so brutal.  You wouldn’t wish it on your ex-girlfriend (I hope!). Thus it was a welcome change to read Le Guin’s series, especially the books in the series that treat the roles of women as interesting.

The first and third Earthsea books have familiar quest narrative plots, the kind of thing Tolkien made famous and has been copied time and again in the fantasy genre [e.g. a young man, raised by his uncle, growing up on a farm, always dreaming of the world beyond the horizon and feeling different from the other kids, meets a mysterious stranger and suddenly his life is an adventure with elves and magic and stuff].  That’s not to say that Le Guin doesn’t do a good job with the quest trope: the narrative in the first book follows naturally out of the main character’s personality and motivations (his name is Ged, by the way, a deliciously ridiculous fantasy name).  By the third book he is older and wiser, but again on a typical fantasy quest to the land of the dead.  However, it’s when the series departs from the exploits of Ged and focuses on women, especially Tenar, that it really shines and stands apart from the fantasy that I’ve read.

The second and fourth books focus on the lives of women and the options that they have in the world of Earthsea.  The stories are about the daily lives of women instead of merely writing another quest with a woman in the role of protagonist instead of a man.  The second book focuses on the childhood of Tenar when she is groomed to become the high priestess in a mysterious religion on the outskirts of Earthsea.  As a priestess she is isolated from everyone, especially men.  She has nominal power, but two old priestesses really run the show at the temple.  None of them have actual power anyway.  The fourth book is primarily a domestic novel.  Years later Tenar is a widow living on a small farm by herself.  Her children are grown, but she takes in an abused and abandoned girl and adopts her.  Their life together constitutes much of the book.  The contrast to the male quest narratives is stark.  Ultimately, the climax of this mostly quiet and excellent book is the most important revelation of the entire series.  It turns the patriarchal world of male wizards and monarchs on its head, setting up a conclusion of ultimate reconciliation in the sixth book.

The series can be described as feminist in a genre not known for its progressive attitudes towards women.  And it’s good, too.  The writing is strong and economical (the books are short compared to the usual heavy tomes associated with the genre).  It definitely deserves its place in the Fantasy Hall of Fame.  But its respect for female characters definitely makes it an outlier.  And it got me thinking about my enjoyment of other genre fiction.  When I’m not reading serious books, I enjoy getting swept up in a spy novel, a hard-boiled mystery, or some super-hero comics.  I try to be discriminating and find out which are the best of the best in these genres and stick to those.  But it doesn’t change the fact that these genres by and large have trouble with their depictions of women.

The A.V. Club had a feature up yesterday about the state of superhero comics in regard to gender and minority representation.  The panel discussion highlights some positive steps the comics industry has made (like a new teenage Muslim Ms. Marvel), while also talking about how much better it could and should be in the area of in its representations of women and minorities (seriously, check out the Hawkeye Initiative to see how ridiculous the representation of women can be).  Some of my favorite superhero stories of the last decade or so involve female characters (e.g. Renee Montoya in Gotham Central and later in Fifty Two, Batwoman first introduced in Fifty Two and then later getting her own series, and the most recent incarnation of Wonder Woman by Brian Azzarello).  But all of these stories were still written by dudes.  Not that dudes can’t write good women characters (but they usually don’t), but there should be options.  DC and Marvel need to hire more women writers (and editors, artists, and colorists, etc.), not just to write women characters, but to tell good stories.

So what does that say about me?  Looking at the rows of comics on my bookshelf, I suddenly have the urge to trot out my feminist bona fides.  Virginia Woolf and Willa Cather are two of my very favorite authors.  My wife works while I stay home with the kids.  I love Buffy the Vampire Slayer (thanks to my wife).  I believe pay inequality is a real issue that needs correcting.  I listen to Lucinda Williams and Cat Power.  I think we’re long past due having a woman president.  I accept influence! Really!  But I can’t shake off my disturbed feeling at how much enjoyment I have derived from literature that does not treat women with adequate respect.  Just reading Ursula Le Guin doesn’t make up for it.

Often the only role a woman plays in a spy or detective novel – another of my (now guilty) pleasure genres — is the love interest.  Or the femme fatale.  And I usually gloss over the sad representation of women as I try to figure out who committed the murder or if the hero will get the intel out from behind enemy lines.  Sometimes I’ll notice how cliché or predictable the women characters are, but I forge on, even relishing the sad loner-ness of our anti-hero protagonist in his fight against the injustice of the world.  But mostly I sleepwalk through the stories, turning pages to find out what happens.

I’m waking up to it.  A lot of this escapist reading goes back to the type of reading I did as a kid.  Reading cold war spy novels or X-Men comics in my room.  It’s comforting to try to return to that seemingly simpler time.  A few years back I reread some of the authors I liked in high school and I was embarrassed for myself.  That’s nothing new, I suppose, but it was like cold water on the face.  The stuff I read now, more highbrow than what I read then (spy novels by le Carre or mysteries by Benjamin Black), still can hardly be called feminist lit.  It’s a good thing it’s not a large percentage of my literary diet.

Maybe reading is like the food pyramid.  It’s important to have a diverse and wide-ranging diet of authors and genres.  And it’s okay to have dessert, but not too much, or I’ll get sick.  Or to try another food analogy, maybe sexism in literature is like MSG.  It’s not good for me, but it’s in lots of yummy foods so I eat it anyway, hoping it won’t harm me.

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The Scopes trial and me, part 2 (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Accept Evolution)

The question of evolution is one I’ve thought about a lot, and from both sides of the issue.  I started as a William Jennings Bryan and have become, if not a Clarence Darrow, at least a member of the defense counsel for Scopes.

When I was in grade school I was convinced that I was going to disprove evolution.  How exactly I was to do that I wasn’t quite sure.  My first step involved filling a notebook with a list of dinosaur names and facts about them.  I attended a private Christian school throughout elementary, junior and senior high.  So when it came time to put together a Science Fair project, I did one on the extinction of the dinosaurs.  My report was a garbled mishmash of Flood geology, a water vapor canopy, and National Geographic articles about extinction events like asteroids or a comet.  I created a diorama in a fish tank of plastic dinosaurs on land made of green Play-doh surrounded by blue plastic wrap to signify water: Voila!  The Flood.  What this was supposed to show or prove is beyond me.  Even my teacher had doubts about my project, noting that I had not followed the scientific method.  I had no testable hypothesis.

The standard Young Earth Creationist explanation of the dinosaurs’ extinction is that dinosaurs were created on the 6th day along with the other animals.  This happened approximately 10,000 years ago, give or take (or 4,004 B.C. if one is following James Ussher’s chronology where he added up all of the genealogies in the Bible to arrive at a date for creation).  Humans and dinosaurs coexisted until the time of the Flood.  The Flood was a catastrophic event that changed everything.  Before that time there was a water canopy that surrounded the Earth.  Once the water canopy was gone, (presumably the water rained down as part of the Flood), then the climate of the Earth changed.  Pre-Flood, the Earth’s climate was temperate and mild.  Post-Flood, the climate became closer to what it is today, perhaps even allowing for some sort of ice age or two (though the work of glaciers on the landscape could just as easily be explained by the Flood).  So dinosaurs died out after the Flood presumably because of the change in climate (or maybe an extinction event like an asteroid/comet also contributed, or so I guessed).

In high school, instead of learning evolution, we learned evidence that the Earth and the universe were young, no older than 10,000 years.  The evidence included the rate of magnetic decay of the Earth and the amount of dust found on the moon (the latter of which I could not find with a quick perusal of Young Earth Creationist websites, perhaps that argument is no longer used) [edited to add: Subsequently I found on the Answers in Genesis site a long paper which concludes that the moon dust argument “should for the present not be used by creationists”].  We were told that the magnetic force would have been too strong if the Earth were older, and the moon would have had much more dust.  There was a lot more evidence.  The eruption of Mt. St. Helens in 1980 was meant to show that catastrophism could cause immense change that would make the affected area appear old.  The Flood, of course, was meant to be the prime catastrophe that caused mountains to appear or layers of sediment, and all the fossils and the Grand Canyon, etc.  Carbon dating was right out.  It didn’t show what it was meant to show, and wasn’t even accurate past a few thousand years.  Troubling aspects like visible light from distant galaxies was hand-waved away with the confidence that God could create the universe with the light already having traveled to Earth.  The universe could have the appearance of age if God so chose.  Humans, animals, and plants were all created fully formed, so it made sense that so would the universe.  Why it had to be so big was a question I never asked.

I continued my education at a private Christian college in the South.  Halfway through my first year, I picked up Stephen Hawking’s Brief History of Time from my roommate’s shelf.  I didn’t know much about it, except that Hawking was supposed to be a genius.  My memory of the experience is that much of the astrophysics went over my head, but that the overall grandeur of the universe, its immensity, hit home.  The evidence for a nearly 14 billion year old universe stacked up.  I faced some major cognitive dissonance.  The thought of an old universe was unsettling, but I had no intention of giving up my faith.  I remember trying to broach the subject of an old earth with some friends in the cafeteria.  I was nervous because it seemed like I might be flirting with potential heresy.  Nothing we talked about gave me an idea how to reconcile the impasse, so I ruminated on it for the next few months.

Fortunately for me, the college had invited Hugh Ross as a speaker for their annual lecture series in the Spring.  Ross is a Christian astrophysicist who interprets the days of Genesis as long periods of time (commonly referred to as the day-age theory of creation).  His interpretation does not allow for any macro-evolution of species into other species, instead relying on God to perform special creation at various stages of cosmic history.  It was a huge relief to me that there were other Christians who thought the Earth might be old, too.  I didn’t have to give up my faith or my new understanding of the universe.  I didn’t know much about science at that point, but it was clear to me that the Young Earth Creationism that I had believed considered a certain interpretation of Genesis as primary over scientific inquiry.  The only point of science was to prove what was already known from the Bible.  There was no discovery possible, only confirmation.  In theological terms, Young Earth Creationism treats special revelation (the Bible) as superior to natural revelation (the created universe).  Now that I’d had a personal encounter with science (not one mediated by the lens of creationism), I could no longer accept that.

So how could I have let go of my belief in a young earth, given my fundamentalist upbringing?  I had only attended Christian schools up to this point.  I was surrounded by people who thought very similarly to me, who believed the same things I did.  Before I heard Ross, I had never had a serious discussion about the age of the Earth where it wasn’t already assumed that it was created less than 10,000 years ago.  While it was this bubble that created my confident belief in a young earth, I think that it was also this same environment that actually let me question those assumptions.  If I had gone to a public high school or a state university, I would have felt under attack for my faith.  I undoubtedly would have stood up for my beliefs in a biology class, and held onto them all the tighter because they were part of my identity.  Because my belief about the age of the earth was safe in my Christian school environment, I could question it.

A few years later while in graduate school I read Del Ratzsch’s The Battle of Beginnings and  Kenneth Miller’s Finding Darwin’s God, two books that attempt to reconcile Christianity with evolution.  I found both of them very interesting and compelling, but I wasn’t sure that I was ready to agree that God used evolution.  But I was now willing to say it was possible.  In the years since then, there wasn’t a single dramatic moment when I decided that I could accept evolution as an explanation for the diversity of species, but it gradually happened.  I suppose a change like this takes a lot of time.

I’ve only had a handful of conversations with family and friends about evolution since I became evolution-friendly, but the situation always makes me feel like the outsider, the stranger, the black sheep.  I’m no longer on the creationist team.  It’s the Bizarro-version of the creationist standing up to the evolutionist teacher and defending the faith: Now I’m the one standing up for evolution (or not saying anything). It’s pretty strange.

Evolution is a topic I’d like to return to again as I read (and reread) more.  I’d like to explore the theological implications of evolution: what does it mean for creation and humanity. But I’d also like to look at the science of it, too, as a layperson who doesn’t know much about science.

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