April 2009 Archives

As I was playing Can't Buy a Thrill, the debut by one of my long-time favorite bands, Steely Dan, the conversation at the breakfast table this morning turned to the confusing profusion of lead singers on the album. Keyboardist/ songwriter Donald Fagen, who would go on to take exclusive singing duties on subsequent albums, takes lead vocals on most of the album's cuts, but drummer Jim Hodder sings one tune ("Midnight Cruiser"), and two songs ("Dirty Work," one of Kelly's favorites, and "Brooklyn") are handled by vocalist David Palmer. Obviously, this gives the album a slightly less unified feel than one might expect, but I explained that the band's perfectionism demanded a particular kind of vocalist for particular songs.  When I mentioned Palmer's status as a "blue-eyed soul singer," Kel looked amused.

"Interesting euphemism there," she said.  "Like the eye color is the important thing."

"Well, that's an old one," I noted.  "I mean, 'Brown-Eyed Handsome Man' isn't really about eye color, either."

That apparently hadn't occurred to her before, nor had the sexual implications of "rounding third, he was heading for home" made themselves clear, but I tend to follow the Aerosmith Rule ("If a line CAN be about sex, it's about sex.") with Berry songs as well.

But the issue of euphemism for race is ancient.  The term "cover song," after all, originates from the idea of having white performers sing songs originally made popular by black artists, covering up the presumed blackness of the music.  Elvis's success as a "white boy with the black sound," as Col. Tom Parker put it, was the most obvious case of coverage, but later examples range from Eric Clapton doing Bob Marley's "I Shot the Sheriff" to Tom Jones singing Prince's "Kiss." (The most painful was without question Pat Boone whitewashing Fats Domino's "Ain't That a Shame.")

All of these issues are cropping up in my thinking as I've become involved in our school's continuing attempt to improve the environment on campus. Last fall the Caucus (formerly known as the Minority Caucus) put together a showcase of sketches and presentations to explain the difficulties faced by students of different races, religions, socioeconomic classes, sexual orientations, etc., and this fall I'll be helping out.  Student organizations other than the Caucus will be helping set up the program this year, and it's hoped that we'll be able to demonstrate to the community that there are certain standards of civility that we expect everyone to support.  (These standards, I should note, are still evolving.  The school's official display of the Confederate Battle Flag ended only about a decade ago, and we didn't have a student come out of the closet on campus until 2005.)

I've been brought into this discussion largely to demonstrate that yes, straight white males consider the issue of civility in the community important, but in some ways, I feel as though I'm a bit of a cover-up myself.  I am certainly straight, white, and male (and brown-eyed, for that matter), but in at least a couple of significant ways, I'm not part of the majority at all; I'm just passing.

The most obvious is the fact that, according to the laws of Moses and Israel, I'd be considered Jewish.  My mother was a Jew, though she's been a practicing Episcopalian all my life.  Given my oh-so-Christian first name and WASPish surname, however, I've never yet been taken for Jewish by a stranger, so I've been personally subjected to anti-Semitism only once, at summer camp in about 1973, when a kid who knew my background decided to tease me about it. I was so surprised that it took me a while to realize how upset I was, whereupon I burst into tears and ran back to the cabin. Other than that, however, I've never had problems, unless you consider the internal debates about the nature of God that have raged back and forth in my head for the last forty-odd years to be a problem. I suspect that my nature would have led me to my current non-churchgoing semi-agnostic/Taoist perspective in the long run anyway, but I can see how my internal Jewishness might have been at least partly responsible for my voluntary departure from the Episcopal church soon after my confirmation in 1975.

That's not the only passing I do, though.  A much more widespread form of passing exists for all of us with external genitalia, and it's so subtle that I'm not even sure it's passing.

I speak, naturally, of sports.

Look, by any reasonable standard, I am a nerd.  A nerd and a half. You know this. I've been reading comic books since I was four, and I can not only use the word "Excelsior!" non-ironically, but even provide you a reasonably accurate list of every member of the Legion of Super-Heroes over the past fifty years.  I know what a General Products hull is and why you shouldn't get near a major gravity well in one.  I know where the Fords of Bruinen and the Wobbish River are.  I have a Roger Dean album cover on my classroom wall (along with my Bros. Hildebrand Star Wars poster and my map of Middle-Earth). I know what "fnord" and "slash" and "OTP" mean, and I can sing "Reviewing the Situation," "Marian the Librarian," and a variety of other show tunes from memory. I even have a 21st-level paladin who's been through three separate Holy Avenger longswords. (I don't want to talk about it.)

But I can pass for a jock.  Okay, I'm way the heck out of shape, but I can still hit a free throw or hit a penalty kick with some degree of skill; I can walk the walk.  And while I will never attain the degree of fan interest necessary to follow an entire baseball season, I can definitely talk the talk; I know the significance of numbers such as 714, .400, and 61*.  I may have little interest in the NBA as it's currently set up, but I'm a longtime follower of college hoops and can give you a lengthy argument as to who UNC's best-ever point guard was.  (Phil Ford, but I'm prepared to listen to supporters of Raymond Felton and Ty Lawson.)  And I have no football experience beyond the Pee-Wee level, but I've been a fan of the NFL since second grade and will cheerfully debate with you about who you should take in the first round of your fantasy league draft this fall.  (Be wary of Steven Jackson; I don't trust the Rams' offensive line.) 

Maybe this last doesn't really lessen my innate nerditude, since, as D&D Greg says, "Fantasy football is still fantasy."  Still, all this means that even in the company of people who coach sports for a living, I can make conversation.  I'm not held at arm's length by people who fear I'll suddenly start reciting digits of pi (of which I know relatively few anyway: 3.14159) or singing Tom Bombadil songs. This is often a comfort to me, particularly on long bus rides with my colleagues, but I do sometimes feel as though I'm being less than honest.  Is my fondness for sports really part of my makeup, or have I deliberately adopted it as a form of protective coloration?  Is passing a sin, particularly if I'm not deliberately trying to pass?  If I'm not walking around proclaiming my nerdhood to the world, does that automatically mean I'm in the closet?

Perhaps I'll figure some of this out while I'm working on this fall's presentation.  And who knows, at the end, maybe the world will be a little more comfortable for everyone at Woodberry.  Even the brown-eyed.


8:35 AM

Because I teach, I'm occasionally called upon to explain things to people.  Students, mostly, but not always the ones in my classes. Recently, I've been engaging in one of my periodic discussions of natural history, a subject in which I am 100% professionally unqualified to teach, but in which I have done more than a little independent study, particularly on the subject of evolution.

I'm for it, by the way.

Not all the students I'm discussing the subject with are so happy with it, however, and one in particular is so determined to stick with creationism (though I think he's actually calling his version "intelligent design") that he pulled out an assertion I hadn't actually seen used in an argument before, though I'd read of its use in past arguments: that the light of the stars we measure at millions of light-years away was actually created not by the stars, but by a much more recent Creator--and was created in transit, so to speak, so that it only APPEARS to come from the distant stars.

Aside from calling into question the morality of a Creator who would violate natural law in order to bear false witness (and make the evidence of the universe deny His very existence), the main thing this behavior would do is destroy all science.  If you can't count on natural laws to be true at all times and places, science, mathematics, and even logic become impossible, and we're literally unable to know anything about the universe other than the most basic Cogito ergo sum solipsism. 

This, to me, is a far more terrifying idea than the possibility that I might share DNA with a lamprey, but I suppose if you insist on seeing the universe reflected in the glass of the Bible, rather than directly, the universe is likely to be bent in some pretty terrifying directions to see it in the Bible's funhouse mirror.

But on my trip along the Rapidan River today, there were blue-gray gnatcatchers buzzing in the trees, and late Virginia bluebells were blooming beside the path, and I began thinking about how they got there.  Obviously, random mutation over an enormous length of time would be one method, but it's not one that satisfies everyone. If you believe in the funhouse mirror's accuracy, they got there because God, in one of the tiny increments of his ineffable plan, determined that the six blossoms to the left of the path in the shadow of the hickory tree had to be there, as did the fourteen blossoms to the left of the path, but in the shadow of the larger tulip poplar, not to mention the fifteen blossoms that lay in the patch of sunlight between the shadows of the two tree trunks, not to mention the seventy-eight bluebells on the RIGHT side of the path, the miscellaneous weeds that grow among them, the trees themselves, and the assorted invertebrates, microorganisms, and fungi that lie unseen beneath the bluebells. And that doesn't even count the bluebells elsewhere along the river, in other parts of Virginia, or in the rest of the world.  Not to mention all the big stuff like keeping the gravitational constant of the universe steady, keeping planets in their course, and listening to the prayers of all the beings in the universe that want Him to take care of something.

If nothing else, it seems as though the God who has to specially create everything that ever was, is, and will be would wake up every morning in a prodigiously grumpy mood considering all the stuff on His to-do list.  And since He's omniscient, He would know every night before bed exactly what He'd have to put up with the next day.

So I began to consider: wouldn't God create a universe where He could be surprised?

I'm sure that if God were to sit down and plan a bluebell, or a gnatcatcher, He would doubtless be enormously pleased by the way in which His creation came into being.  The violet-blue shade of the flowers, or the bright eye-ring and white tail feathers of the bird give such pleasure to me, I can't imagine how they could do less for their Creator.  They're beautiful, they hold their spots in the ecology well, and they reproduce successfully.  Bully for them.

But if He knew how they were going to turn out--perfectly according to plan, just like everything else He created--would His pleasure in them be greater or less than if He did not?  If just saying "Let there be bluebells" is all it takes to get a perfect set of bluebells, why bother saying it?  God already knows exactly what they'd be like and how they'd fit into the universe.  Bringing them into being isn't really necessary--it's just gilding the lily, so to speak.

So  is it that hard to imagine that God might set up a universe with only a few predetermined elements--the number one, the speed of light, the law of entropy, and a few other items--and then turn it loose to see what happened?  He's omnipotent, after all; He could create a universe where He didn't know how it was all going to turn out--where His omniscience would not apply.

If God were walking down the path alongside the Rapidan and had never seen a bluebell before, what mighty delight, what rapture, what ineffable joy He would know when first He came across one.

Sort of the same way we take delight in our children when they do something we have not taught them.

I think such a God and I would find quite a lot to talk about on a riverside walk.  And I have no doubt that He'd make the best possible companion along the way.


5:03 PM

Children's book-writer N.D. Wilson sums up my own experience with books and philosophy:

The world is big. The world is wonderful. But it is also terrifying. It is an ocean full of paper boats. For many children, the only nobility, the only joy, the only strength and sacrifice that they see firsthand comes in fiction. Even when children have plenty of joy in their lives, good stories reinforce it. As long as I'm dealing in honesty, I may as well admit that I have been more influenced (as a person) by my childhood readings of Tolkien and Lewis than I have been by any philosophers I read in college and grad school. The events and characters in Narnia and Middle Earth shaped my ideals, my dreams, my goals. Kant just annoyed me.

Extend that annoyance to Henry James and you've pretty much duplicated my feelings.


7:57 PM

I know, I know, we're in the internet age and print is dead, and Sports Illustrated puts a different cover on different regions' copies of the same issue nowadays, so it's relatively unimportant in the grand scheme of things, and we are after all talking about basketball, which is hardly a life-and-death matter, but it's impossible for me not to celebrate this:





1924 1957 1982 1993 2005 2009, baby!


7:56 AM

I've been through this before, but that doesn't mean it's unimportant.  Today is kind of a big deal:

1) I sent a manuscript off to an editor who's been very patient with me.  Keep your fingers crossed.

2) Kelly gets back from her trip to Boston today.

3) There's a little basketball game tonight.  I could say a lot, but I'll limit it to a picture and a comment:































GO TAR HEELS!


11:59 AM

A few pics from my recent trip to New Orleans and environs:




5:32 AM