News!

As some of you have no doubt already seen mentioned by John, I’ll be joining him over at Upturned Earth for most of my blogging.  I’m keeping this site around, and may use it for the occasional post.  I haven’t yet introduced myself over there — I spent this afternoon locked in mortal combat with my computer and opening pitch of the Cubs’ season is in thirty minutes — so keep an eye out for that.  It should be happening shortly.  I’m excited about this move; it’s really just the culmination of the Kentucky basketball-Notre Dame football analogy.

Apparently, Some People Don’t Read This Blog

Let me preface this by saying that the only news I’ve heard in the last week involves either the Final Four (Tom Izzo, go kick some Tarheel ass for me, would ya?), North Korea (really guys?), and that apparently Ichiro has a bleeding ulcer (ouch).  Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, the New York Times on the Iowa gay marriage ruling:

“The new decision says marriage is a civil contractand should not be defined by religious doctrine or views.” [Emphasis mine -- JLW]

Which is to say, the reason I’m wary of court decisions — as opposed to legislative action or ballot initiatives — encapsulated.  Having ctrl-F’d the decision itselffor the word “contract” (three of my last seven days have involved air travel; go easy on me), it appears the editorial is working from this passage:

“This contrast of opinions in our society largely explains the absence of any religion-based rationale to test the constitutionality of Iowa’s same-sex marriage ban. Our constitution does not permit any branch of government to resolve these types of religious debates and entrusts to courts the task of ensuring government avoids them. See Iowa Const. art. I, § 3 (“The general assembly shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion . . . .”). The statute at issue in this case does not prescribe a definition of marriage for religious institutions. Instead, the statute declares, “Marriage is a civil contract” and then regulates that civil contract. Iowa Code § 595A.1. Thus, in pursuing our task in this case, we proceed as civil judges, far removed from the theological debate of religious clerics, and focus only on the concept of civil marriage and the state licensing system that identifies a limited class of persons entitled to secular rights and benefits associated with civil marriage.” [page 65; emphasis mine -- JLW] 

Now, I don’t have a problem with the opinion of the court that they should approach civil law as civil justices.  The problem is that the means require they modify marriage as a contract, as it is as defined by state law.  But this codification of marriage does not encompass the entirety of marriage (and was not meant to be more than a legal approximation) — marriage is a societal institution.  The court has no authority to treat it as such an institution — it must treat, and modify it as defined by the law: that is, as a contract.  Nothing more, nothing less.

Only society itself can modify marriage as a societal institution.  The citizen body votes on a ballot initiative; their elected representatives — with authority that stems from society – pass laws.  The law itself, I hear you say, defines marriage as a contract, etc.: but again — the definition of marriage as a societal institution goes beyonds the limits of the legal code’s authority.  It is a social institution; it is part of the tradition; the tradition is not simply what is defined by government.  The institution can only (? is best?) understood within the legal code as a contract: that does not mean that, as a societal custom, it is nothing more than a contract.  It is, then, a legal approximation of marriage.

So back to the original point.  The difference between a legislative means and a judicial means is how marriage is (must be) treated: as a social institution, or as a legal contract.  This is a problem — or something to cause a touch of worry — only if you believe, as I do, that to define marriage socially as a contract is to devalue it.  The decision doesn’t do that, and nothing I’ve said should be taken as any sort of comment about the validity of the decision itself.  But the decision does give the Grey Lady cause to declare in an editorial: “marriage is a civil contract.”  The thing to be wary of is that the approximation becomes the meaning.  If that happens, I think a lot of people who have fought a very long time for gay marriage will look around one day and realize that what they won was only an approximation of what they wanted.

Now on to the things that matter in life, like Opening Day.

What In The Wide Wide World Of Sports?

From tomorrow through Sunday, I’ll be in Minneapolis at the annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South, where I’ll be presenting a paper — on the use of the word phaidimos in the Odyssey, so it relates, actually, to the name of this place.  So that’s why I won’t be around until then.

MSM Failures and the UK Coach Search

So I’ve totally lost my mind and have spent the last 48 hours doing little other than hitting refresh on various websites on my computer — all of them related to Kentucky basketball.  We’ve been on Calipari watch, in case you missed the news.  Unconfirmed reports say church attendance was up 5% this past Sunday in Kentucky (I’m not making up that someone claims they read this; no faith in its accuracy).  I’ve also been on my “Coach Billy Gillispie Diet”: today, I’ve eaten a two slices of toast with Nutella, a blueberry muffin, and a bowl of macaroni.  (That’s probably only funny to Kentucky fans.  Hmm.)  But I’m briefly going to try to be relevant and sensible.

One thing that following this minute-by-minute and not actually doing any work I need to do (and have now put off for 6 months — I’m serious on that part) has demonstrated is the ineptness of many of the media outlets involved: Memphis, Lexington, and Louisville alike.  The various network affiliates and newspapers are relying on and mooching off of one another’s reporting — primarily the Memphis stations — rather than confirming things independently.  What this means is: the earlier banner on the Courier-Journal’s website declaring Calipari hired is now gone, because a Memphis CBS affiliate backtracked on their story. 

Or, the Courier’s sub-headline about a phone conversation between Calipari and former UK coach Joe B. Hall, in which Hall was (apparently) misquoted as saying that Calipari had told him he was coming.  USA Today picked it up, verbatim.  A Memphis station called to confirm with Hall, who made a point of saying Calipari said he had made no decision.  There is now no evidence at the Courier that this story ever happened.

Despite the ridiculous nature of Kentucky fans about the whole damn thing, the people who have had egg on and off their faces for most of the last half week are local news stations and papers, primarily those in Kentucky.  Memphis stations may look jumpy and premature, but the Louisville and Lexington stations look like they can’t do their own reporting, even (especially?) when there’s no new news to report.  All in all — and I don’t think you can quite figure it out unless you’ve wasted enough of the last two days as I have — I have a far greater understanding of the present failures of the media than I did even last weekend.

Right now, however, I’m waiting for a private jet from Lexington to land in Memphis in 20 minutes.  If he’s on it when it leaves, he’s in; if not, probably not.  Either way, I think I get an answer soon.

My UK-Notre Dame Meme Is Spreading Like Wildfire!

Yeah, I’m just going to take credit for it.  Anyway, I’m spending most of my time not preparing a paper for presentation this weekend but reading rumor blogs trying to figure out who my team’s next coach is (today’s favorite seems to be Memphis’ Calipari, but my brother told me on Friday that Billy Donovan was a “done deal” so I don’t believe anything until it happens anymore).  But a Memphis paper reports that Calipari met with his players today:

“While Calipari did not say explicitly what he planned to do, players left the meeting convinced that Calipari would take the job. According to the source, Calipari told the team that Kentucky was the Notre Dame of basketball.” [Emphasis mine -- JLW]

“Well, if anyone ever actually teased T.S. Eliot”

Or so wonders Alan Jacobs after pointing out a wonderful little anecdote in the history of English letters: Eliot rejected Animal Farm.  But here’s the best part — someone did!  (Well, sort of.  And I apologize for the Wikipedia citation; but I’m fairly certain I’ve read this elsewhere, as well — oh, and my generally favorable opinion of Eliot as poet and thinker should be clear by now, and I’m generally willing to take Leonard Woolf’s word for it on the matter of Eliot and anti-Semitism.)

‘One of the first and most famous protests against Eliot on the subject of anti-Semitism came in the form of a poem from the Anglo-Jewish writer and poet Emanuel Litvinoff,^[48] at an inaugural poetry reading for the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1951. Only a few years after the Holocaust, Eliot had republished lines originally written in the 1920s about ‘money in furs’ and the ‘protozoic slime’ of Bleistein’s ‘lustreless, protrusive eye’ in his Selected Poemsof 1948, angering Litvinoff. When the poet got up and announced his poem, entitled ‘To T. S. Eliot’, the event’s host, Sir Herbert Read, declared ‘Oh Good, Tom’s just come in’. Litvinoff proceeded in evoking to the packed but silent room his work, which ended with the lines “Let your words/tread lightly on this earth of Europe/lest my people’s bones protest”. Many members of the audience were outraged; Litvinoff said “hell broke loose” and that no one supported him. One listener, the poet Stephen Spender, claiming to be as Jewish as Litvinoff, stood and called the poem an undeserved attack on Eliot.^[48]However, Litvinoff says that Eliot was heard to mutter, ‘It’s a good poem’.^[49]‘

The real question, of course, is this: Did anyone ever tell Milton a joke and get him to laugh?  (I mean, come on, Johnny — “sage and serious Spenser”?  It’s a pun a line and sheer ridiculosity throughout!)

Wendell Berry Tribute Day In the Louisville Paper

Two articles in today’s Courier-Journal about Wendell Berry that might interest people.  First, Actor’s Theatre in Louisville is set to beging performing a play, Wild Blessings, based on his work.  It’s apparently “composed of 36 poems” — and hopefully will work out better than that Billy Joel musical someone slapped together a few years back.  I don’t have much to say about it, though if I weren’t leaving for snowy Chicago today I wouldn’t mind going to see it.

The second article, “Poet will step off farm to hear works read on opening night,” is a brief profile of Berry which includes these entertaining sentences:

“In addition to poetry, Berry writes essays and novels by hand and his wife assists with the typing of them. He has made a slight concession to computers. His manuscripts are copied onto disks when it’s time to send them for publication by a main press.”

 That brings to mind a Berry-esque rant about handwriting in Bringhurst’s book that I read the other day (and was trying to figure out a way to make relevant to a posting):

“Many people now cannot form legible letterforms at all except by tapping on a keyboard.  For those people, writing and the alphabet have, quite literally, ceased to be human.  How do you expect to be able to cook good food or make good love when you write with prefabricated letters?  How do you expect to have good music if you live on a typographic diet of bad Helvetica and even worse Times New Roman — never mind the parodies of letters that flash across your cellphone screens and the parodies of numbers marching over the screens of your pocket calculators and cash-dispensing machines?  How can things so ill-formed have a meaning?” (“The Typographic Mind” in Everywhere Being Is Dancing pp.217-8)

My handwriting, as described by one classmate “is either the worst-best or the best-worst handwriting I’ve ever seen” and, in the words of another, “Looks really distinguished and pretty until you actually try to figure out what it says.”  (Or, as a teacher once put it, “It’s not illegible.  It’s just difficult.”)  So I’m not quite there yet — and I certainly don’t have the hand-stamina to do what Berry does.  I don’t know: I like to think that a little bit of one’s personality comes through in handwriting, which is part of why I don’t like reading handwriting that’s blandly sloppy — when it comes across like the person writing was irritated that they had to be bothered to take the time to write something out.

The idealized image of what handwriting should be, in my mind, will always be my grandfather’s (though it has suffered a little recently as he’s aged, but it’s still more elegant than mine, and probably than mine ever will be).  He’s a retired elementary school principal, and among the many laments he has about things that are no longer taught in schools is penmanship.  (And good posture.)

Tradition in the Twenty-First Century

(N.B.: This post is primarily a thought experiment.  For the sake of that experiment, I occassionally take things for granted. – JLW, 4/6/09)

Scott Payne’s “Twenty-First Century Conservatism” is well worth a read, even if you wind up disagreeing with all of it. While I’m more prone to staying way up high in the ether and not really wanting to muddy my hands with how all this abstract stuff, you know, applies to politics, he goes there, or makes a start of it, which is helpful. Among his points:

“Critically embrace tradition: a conservatism of the twenty-first century doesn’t need to cut is umbilical cord to tradition altogether, by my lights. In fact, conservatism’s connection to tradition is potentially one it’s strong points in a world increasingly loosened from any moorings. But conservatives need to find ways of embracing those traditions with a critical eye and be prepared to let go of traditions that no longer make any sense. This post by Will Wilson that keep going back to on engaging self-reflective traditions is the key here and I keep waiting for Will to pick that line of thought back up on move it forward a couple more yards, but it’s somewhere to start. This links in to some degree with my comments around culture and is, in many sense, a more full-bodied approach to reform in this regard, but I think there is a whole separate project and element to the ideology at work here that speaks to one of the core planks in conservative identity, so I’m loathe to mash the two together.”

There’s a danger in a self-conscious tradition, and a tradition in which it’s acceptable to toss off a limb for the sake of the whole — traditions, in addition to being billion-headed rabbis (not letting that analogy go, folks), are like starfish: limbs re-grow after time. (But a limbless tradition, like a limbless starfish, is less likely to survive: it’s probably more a danger with tradition than a starfish.)

The problem, on the other hand, with an ossified tradition is that it has ceased to live and lapsed into reflexive (more or less) dogma. An ossified tradition fails because the existence of a tradition within history inherently causes changes to the circumstances of that tradition — and that can necessitate changes to the tradition itself. To borrow (again) from Eliot’s imagery, the creation of a new work of art, by its existence, alters the relation of all previous works of art within the tradition to one another, even if imperceptibly.   Any tradition that is not dying or dead is a living tradition.

Or, to pull in Bringhurst (because I’ve been reading him):

“A myth is a theorem about the nature of reality, expressed not in algebraic symbols or inanimate abstractions but in animate narrative form.”

and,

“Because mythologies and sciences alike aspire to be true, they are perpetually under revision. Both lapse into dogma when this revision stops. . . . Where they are healthy, both mythology and science are as faithful to the real as their practitioners can make them, though evidently neither ever perfectly succeeds.”  (Robert Bringhurst, “The Meaning of Mythology” in Everywhere Being is Dancing)

Though not a perfect analogy, reading “myth” as “tradition” works to an extent. In a sense, the tradition is a theorem about the nature of reality, or how we should behave within reality, expressed through and on account of the acquired wisdom of prior generations. “Acquired wisdom”: it is human, not infallible. Burke was never a Tory, and that’s not irrelevant.

The danger lies in irresponsible revision of tradition to make it what we want, rather than understanding that for the tradition to be relevant and effective — for it to survive — it must speak to the moment. “Eipe kai hêmin” says the Odyssey’s narrator, invoking the Muse: “Speak to us in our time.”

The prime issue in matters of tradition and the critical re-thinking thereof is gay marriage. Scott links to this post of Conor’s, which lays out very nicely the Sullivan-esque “Conservative Case for Gay Marriage.” I want to reframe that argument in terms of what I’ve been saying — to demonstrate how that argument is not a “revision of tradition to make it what we want” but a necessary political adaptation of the tradition to allow continued relevance.

It goes into matters of truth and form. (I don’t like the use of the word “truth” there — it’s misleading, in its way. The type of distinction I want to get at is better described as that of “poetry” as the essence of a poem, and “verse” as the form of it.) Marriage, as a political/societal tradition has at its core the truth that it is essential for society that family units be officially bonded and recognized, and that children, if at all possible, be brought up in families (death can be a circumstantial complication here, however). The form that the tradition stipulates is a man and a woman. Society, however, has moved away from that form, and – if divorce rates are to be allowed to speak their meaning – away from the idea of marriage in any form as much more than a legal contract. (My opinion of divorce is hardly Catholic, but when divorce rates are at 50%, it’s hard to make the case that marriage hasn’t been devalued somehow and that the stability of the nuclear family has been jeapordized.)

The move to make, such thinking would say, would be to alter the form to better preserve the underlying truth within society. That is to say, expand marriage to include same-sex couples, but make it clear in doing so that it is not because marriage and family mean whatever we want them to mean, but because of the importance of family in stable form to society.

And this all leads up to my objection to the idea of removing government from “marriage” altogether and calling everything a civil union. It defeats the purpose of expanding marriage to defend marriage and the nuclear family: in fact, it only devalues the idea of marriage by having the government declare that, for all political and society purposes, marriage is nothing more than a contract. Understanding marriage as something divorced from family (this should not be taken as saying that a valid marriage must produce children, or somesuch thing) is far more damaging to marriage, and certainly more against the tradition than altering the traditional form of marriage.

I used marriage as an example of how the logic of this understanding might work – disagreement with its appropriateness on this issue particularly shouldn’t be taken to mean that it is, generally, inapplicable.

Another caveat: I’m talking here purely about the tradition in political/societal terms. None of this applies to religious or religious/societal understanding of tradition, but the religious tradition and the political tradition oughtn’t be allowed to merge. The Pope need not compromise because of popular sentiment – there’s a strong case that he shouldn’t (but I’m not Catholic, so I’m staying away from actual Catholic issues; he just works as a nice example). One is about the relationship among humans, and the stability of society, and, because of this, is far more mutable; the other is about the relationship between man and G-d (and only after this the relationship among men) and because of this far more immutable.

Nothing to See (or Say) Here, Really

But I’ll talk about it anyway.  By “it” I mean UK basketball, of course.  The whole vibe about the program and Gillispie around here was just eerie for the last week: dead man walking, like.  I’m not going to complain much about him being gone (though if he hadn’t insisted his job ended at the gym door, I might have been more on his side). 

Billy Donovan is NOT the next coach, in case you were wondering.

As far as Travis Ford, currently of Oklahoma State and formerly of the 1992 Unforgettables: I wouldn’t be so quick to include coaches in what I had to say about a connection between place and players at Kentucky, so he makes me nervous.

This might be of interest/amusing to any Notre Dame fans reading: the guy who cut my hair today told me, more or less, “This is going to be a real turning point for the program.  If they don’t get it right this time, we’re going to wind up like Notre Dame football has become.”  And on ESPN, the guy defending Kentucky said, more or less, “You’ve got to go easy on Kentucky fans.  It’s like Notre Dame, with the less-than-realistic expectations every year…”  I was so on top of those analogies during football season, but now no one’s going to believe that I was first.

“Skill Is Seductive”

Despite my differences with him on certain issues (religion, particularly) I think that Robert Bringhurst is one of the most fascinating writers and thinkers out there — his analysis of the meaning of mythology is, if you ask me, second to none.  And his voice is strident on the nature of art and artifice:

“[Robert McNamara's] example has taught me, nonetheless, that positions of power must not be occupied by people who are happy to take refuge in the craft of administration or the skill of systems design, nor by people whose sense of respect for the physical world is subservient to their sense of political loyalty.  There must be some point too at which even typographers, meterologists, knifesmiths, philosophers, and shovelmakers raise their heads from the workbench and ask how what they make is being used.  There is no sane person to whom napalm or mustard gas is saintly.

[...]

“Morality is part of language itself, and language is part of morality.  Not all sentences are good to speak on all occasions even though the language can construct them.  And not all things the designer can design are desirable just because he can design them.  I think this truth applies, in its small way, even to Peter Schoffer’s title page — though in Schoffer’s case the witnesses are dead, the statute of limitations has long run out, and the page is inarguably beautiful.”  (Robert Bringhurst, “Boats is Saintlier than Captains” in Everywhere Being Is Dancing pp. 197-9)

Or, to see it framed differently, read the parable of “Father Smith’s Confession” and “Father Smith’s Footnote” in Walker Percy’s The Thanatos Syndrome.  It doesn’t work for excerpting in this medium.  The point, of course, is that the beauty of the artifice alone isn’t enough to make something truly, nobly beautiful (for it to be kalos, let’s say).  Because,

“If we divorce truth from beauty, we’re engaging in a sophomorically lazy reading of Keats’ dictum, forgetting that beauty alone does not make something truth: we must have truth to have beauty.”

Without the truth that makes it kalos, the beauty of the artifice can be deceptive.  In the realm of art, it leads to debates over obscenity and appropriateness and eventually at least one side calls the other bourgeois; removed from that realm, however, the deception can become dangerous: elegance does not necessarily make something good.

________________________________________________________________________________________

(The title of the post is Bringhurst, from the same essay.)