Faith by Numbers...and One by One

Sociology is a subculture of anthropology. Anthropology is the study of all humans at all times. That is not to say it is like Paul’s admonition, “Pray always” (or was that in Psalms?), but it means generally that the study of anthropology is very broad based and reaches for many topics. You could say, for example, that dinosaurs are anthropology because humans study dinosaurs. Despite that dinosaurs lived so long before human time that any relevance to environmental factors analogous to what exists today is completely erroneous, human curiosity with dinosaurs makes them a subject of anthropology, though indirectly.

Anthropology is one of the newest studies to poke its head above the surface of the ‘ologies. It is perhaps more ambitious than the others, and imperialistic. Anthropology divides itself into four major fields: cultural, archaeological, linguistical, and biological or physical. Thus it swallows up older, established departments such as history, medicine, primatology, languages, art, classics, grammar, psychology, education, literature, and certainly sociology, that comes under cultural anthropology, Margret Meade stuff.

I thought sociology was that trendy study of the Fifties and Sixties. I didn’t know it existed any more as a department unto itself, without archaeologists to bring in rich, glamorous grants, real estate deals, sacred findings. Sociology is useful as a subfield of a subfield of anthropology, pitted in direct opposition against psychology—the study of group dynamics versus the individual.

Anthropologists have to study Freud and Jung and Chomsky and Dian Fossey and Dennis Tedlock, Foucault, Geertz, Marx, the Leakey’s, the brothers Grimm, Goodall, le Projet du Garbage, and Zora Neale Hurston. It’s like the doctor who only studies one animal versus the veterinarian who has to study all species of our kingdom. Anthropology is a great way to learn a lot of different things, even soil taxonomy.

All these things feed upon each other. The study of human beings is the study of individuals and groups, how their biology predisposes their behavior within a current natural and social environmental overlay, plus factors of the past and the dynamics of interaction, how vocal and physical discourse continues to reform throughout human experience.

Urbanization is a worldwide trend of human populations. Technology has freed us from the farm to seek abstract provision for our basic needs; in other words, non-tangible currency is sought to cover food, shelter, clothes, safety, warmth, and potable drinking water sources, such as Starbucks. Urbanization requires compaction, which is an adaptation many people can fit inside their cell phones. People squeeze into Facebook as they would into a New York subway. We short-cut language, fitting a noun into the concept of red, and what makes red and how that color makes us feel, and also making idioms to wear over time into the smooth casings of cliché, dropping vowels out of a text message, as in ancient Hebrew.

Being able to fit is a crucial adaptation. Conformity is vital to survival. To live closely with others, you must fit closely with others. You must seek out commonality and belonging in order to survive the city. McDonalds, mass transit, syndication are popular commodities—everyone liking the same thing, everyone eating the same thing, everyone listening to the same thing, everyone buying the same thing. The individuals combine to behave as one organism, single cells in the arteries of the city.

Safety in numbers can also result in mass annihilation. Conformity is as vitally important as mutation.

The breakdown of counter culture and subculture can be useful to an extent, but needs to be not so rigid as to view alternatives to mainstream culture as necessarily detrimental or inferior.

In heaven, I believe there will be groups and individuals. According to the Beatitudes, the population of heaven is made up of the poor in spirit and those who suffer persecution for the sake of the Lord. The former is surely a group of people, not necessarily those who do a lot of thought on their own, but those who love the Lord, and the Lord loves them. The latter, however, are the saints, the individuals who stood in the face of mass dissention and declared their love of God. They declared their faith in opposition to the status quo who were mightily armed and even more mightily determined not to hear the single voice of individuality.

Christianity may be the next form of adolescent rebellion, with sex, drugs, and rock and roll off the taboo shelf and integrated into mainstream culture. Perhaps Christianity is the new counter culture, subversive to the norm of what is going on, but this is not the first time Christianity has been in this position.

Harmony is impossible if we’re all singing the same note, and dissonance is important too.

Atwood and Voluptuary

I just finished a novel titled “Alias Grace” wherein Margaret Atwood details extensively the inner life of the celebrated Canadian murderess Grace Marks. The novel is rendered in a modern polyphonic style, which means a variety of narrative voices are employed to keep the reader’s (ah, that buffoon, that simpleton, that spastic child, the reader!) attention . It is by turns epistolary, first-person narrative, third-person narrative, and journalistic. Stanzas of 19th century poetry are slipped in amongst contemporary news accounts, presumably to lend resonance and induce the suspension of disbelief. Nothing dresses up a book after all like an impressive quote or two. When these cannot be suitably manufactured by the author, they can always be copied in from elsewhere.

The plot centers on a doctor's examination of Grace Marks. He is attempting to clear her name and to establish himself as an expert in the treatment of amnesiacs. In the process of his examinations the good doctor falls in love with Grace Marks, succumbs to madness, and seduces his laudanum-addict landlady. His mechanical and maniac copulations with the married proprietess drive him further into lunacy, but he doggedly pursues his examinations of the murderess in the parlor of the warden’s house. As she recounts in exhaustive detail (so as to better demonstrate the dazzling researches of the author) the life of a maid in 19th century Toronto, Grace Marks remarks on the doctor's visible deterioration.

Atwood channels Grace Marks in a first person voice marked by thick chains of clauses held together with commas. These rattle noisily along the tracks of one’s brain. One does not regret that Grace's voice is forgettable. One’s eyes grow literally sore as Grace details, for instance, the best method for churning butter. Perhaps there are many readers, a vast untapped reservoir of readers, for whom the trivia of 19th century householding would prove endlessly fascinating. Perhaps in her exhaustive researches Ms. Atwood uncovered this demographic.

As in all Atwood novels women are persistently, vigorously, comprehensively, and opportunistically leered, fondled, pinched, and boffed. The copulations are endless, joyless, and strangely sexless. When one closes the book and places it on the table, one still hears the complaints of the women within the covers, one’s overloaded brain recalls an apocryphal episode wherein a lady, stuffed into a trunk in whose side panel a hole two inches in diameter has been bored with a hand drill, is subjected to the anonymous interpolations of a tribe of coal-dusty, lusty railroad men while she is smuggled across the border to be sold as a slave in some shadowy Canadian market. This lady, folded in the trunk like a white trembling fetus, will later, upon recalling these horrors, take out a small pair of enameled scissors and loose a lock of her hair which will fall to the floor like an autumn leaf and then, seized with a kind of orgasmic urgency she will depilate herself and stand alone in some second-floor parlor, bare and dead like a winter branch.

When a novel isn’t quite working as a narrative I like to focus on the language. And Atwood is certainly a competent, even masterful, craftsperson. There are some wonderful constructions throughout and a broad and deep use of the language. Two words which I particularly enjoyed encountering were “voluptuary” and “vitreous.” When I find an excellent or unusual construction I tell myself to stop and underline it with a pencil for further study but alas, I frequently ignore that still, small, scholarly voice. Then I’ll rack my brain trying to remember what it was I had liked so much. This happened with “voluptuary.” I knew I’d been tickled by some “v” word in Atwood, but could not recall the page nor the general area of the narrative where it had occurred. I believed it might be lost to me, this faceless “v” word, possibly forever. With a sigh, I picked up the latest issue of the New Yorker and there, in the “Talk of the Town”, within a vignette about a casting call, was a woman described as “voluptuous.” And the word came back to me. Serendipity! This, I decided, was the happy ending, and made it worth reading Atwood after all.

Council on National Awareness

For the Presidents’ Day Council on National Awareness, I sat down and thought of twenty-seven presidents, all on my own without secondary sources.

I started with the presidents of my lifetime. That only brought me to Nixon. Then I did the big ones—Washington, Lincoln, Jefferson—monuments of the National Mall, everybody knows those. Then there are the other ones, random, scattered around in my brain. I couldn’t remember why I remembered Taft, but I knew Garfield had died in office without being assassinated (that we know of). Next, I went down the alphabet and picked up a few more. Then I went through the currency, trying to remember who was on every bill, but I got kind of lost after the twenty.

I thought I did pretty well to get twenty-seven commander-&-chiefs. I was surprised at who I remembered, and more surprised at who I forgot! How do you forget a Grover Cleveland, who was twice president? Or Woodrow Wilson, whom everybody studies in school? Hoover!

Maybe next year I’ll remember there are two John Adams’ and two Johnsons. For this year, I learned that McKinley is more than a mere mountain in Alaska, and that Polk is not just a Florida county.

Seinfeld = Gallagher

The DVD cover of Bee Movie features a honeycomb, a toy car, and bees in various comic poses, all of them rendered with the classic kiddie-crack features: huge eyes, button noses, fuzzy antennae. A marketing jingle, emblazoned next to one particularly saucy bee, reads: "Honey just got funny."

Did it? Expectations were high. This was Jerry Seinfeld's vehicle, after all, his comeback, the receptacle into which he had poured his post-Seinfeld genius. He worked the promotional machine like a pro, appearing on various talk shows in a fuzzy bee costume (one grew accustomed to images of the bee-Seinfeld, complete with deely-bobbers and black tights, lounging on talk show chairs), giving interviews on the radio and television, concocting press releases. It was a publicity coup. People were talking. The vast reservoir of goodwill he'd built up during the run of his show served him well. Seinfeld? A comic genius. And come on, it was an intriguing premise. Offbeat. Jerry Seinfeld in a movie about bees. Called "Bee Movie." Get it? Chuckle. And, you could bring the kids!

A quick re-hash of the plot in case you've somehow managed to avoid this movie so far: a young bee (Seinfeld), facing a lifetime of work in the hive, takes a trip into the outside world where he discovers that humans are consuming the honey which the bees work so hard to make. A lawsuit follows. Hilarity, I am sure, was intended to ensue, but instead the movie descends into a sticky morass of unfunny from which it never manages to extricate itself.

The problems with the movie are legion, but it really all begins and ends with the star himself. Seinfeld, the comic, always managed to carry his audience along the razor's edge of annoyance and amusement. He projected the desperate, unwarranted hipness of a geek in denial. This tension was never acknowledged, nor did it form any basis for his comedy, and the deliberate eliding of his equine and pop eyed awkwardness left him a very small window of goodwill in which to work; it was into this window that he slipped his observational humor, his banal wordplay, and his conspiratorial asides. A sports analogy might work here: Seinfeld was the control pitcher, the guy who never threw above 80 miles an hour but who baffled and enraged the hitter with his control. You weren't going to get overwhelming comedic power from Seinfeld, but you might walk away impressed with his self-possession.

In his television show, Seinfeld had the good sense to stay somewhat in the background, playing the straight man, often leaving the spotlight to his co-stars. This sort of Seinfeld-in-small-doses strategy worked perfectly, but I don't know if anyone could've predicted the sort of disaster that would ensue should he step front and center. It was there, a lurking comedic calamity, just waiting for the right vehicle. Enter Bee Movie. We get two hours of the Seinfeld voice. That reedy, adenoidal, perpetually pubescent scratch-and-whine, rising and falling like the strenuous bleats of a child's flute lesson. This voice subjects us to a barrage of Seinfedian chestnuts: "Shave my head and start callin' everybody 'dawg'", "That is one nectar collector." Something in his delivery and pacing, honed through years of standup, keeps the mind engaged. You can't tune it out. You can bury your nose in a book, you can entomb your head in a pillow, and it will follow you.

The story or design, either of which might have rescued this movie, don't. The Voice (which seems to bore more and more deeply through the brain tissue with each viewing, threatening to someday impact and detonate one's molten core of rage) emanates from a fuzzy, outrageously cute bee (an anthropomorphization of Seinfeld's contrived standup cool) complete with the cocked eyebrow and the pipe cleaner legs. We move through a series of preposterous plot contrivances, set pieces cemented together by gratuitous fight scenes, a love story (another of the antiseptic seductions routinely performed by Seinfeld on his television show), and a legal battle. The movie, gathering momentum, rolls right through Courtroom Drama and on into Disaster, Teamwork, Saving the World, and Lessons Learned. Watching it, one can almost hear the writers brainstorming, working, struggling. It's as if they walked out of the room a year early. Where's the unity? Where's the character arc? Where are the laughs?

After repeated viewings of Bee Movie I am afraid my opinion of its star has been permanently altered. When Seinfeld went off the air, Larry David, one of the show's co-creators, began work on Curb Your Enthusiasm, a rather brilliant little series that seemed to carry forward the spirit of its predecessor. I began to wonder if the real comedic genius had been misidentified all this time, if perhaps Jerry Seinfeld had just found himself in the right place, at the right time, aligned with the right friends. Bee Movie answers that question in no uncertain terms and in the process relegates Seinfeld to second-rate status. Worse, it casts a pall back over his entire oeuvre. Was he ever really funny? The answer: not so much. Is it possible that Jerry Seinfeld is the new Gallagher? Watch Bee Movie a few times and it might not seem so preposterous.

Time For Valentines

Time does not exist. There is no such thing as time. You MAKE time, and you make it moment by moment. You can never HAVE time. You cannot possess time, and time is not a tangible thing; therefore, it does not exist unless you make it.

Time and love are the same. To say you HAVE time or you HAVE love implies possession, and no one may POSSES time or love. To say you HAVE love or time invokes the subjunctive case, where obligation is inherently implied. Time does not serve under obligation, nor does love.

If you say you HAVE love, that is false. You cannot have love without giving love, and you cannot give love without first making it. Love is not yours to posses, and to HAVE love is impossible. As with time, you MAKE love, moment by moment.

HAVE implies obligation and MAKE gives you the power of creation, as from God. Love heals all wounds. Whatever takes time, takes love.

Slip Not

Politicians control who has access to what. It’s probably the second oldest profession.

Politicians have been boiled in oil over so many years, even the oil is corrupt. It if isn’t bad enough we have crude wars, now there’s the scandal of poly saturated olive oil.

Apparently it’s gone on for centuries.

There’s a huge difference between “extra virgin” olive oil and “extra light.” I’m not sure what the former really implies, but “extra virgin” couldn’t be any worse than “a little pregnant.” I wonder which was Popeye’s gal? Then there’s “PURE extra virgin” – really?

The words “olive juice” and “I love you” appear exactly the same on the lips and are equally corrupt, olive oil having been defiled with hazelnut oil and similar less expensive additives, while love is infused with betrayal.

If only Sarah Palin had been elected to Washington, we could have gotten this thing straightened out. Certainly we can’t trust Martha Stewart to tell us which oil is best for boiling politicians.