Tuesday, December 22, 2015

Coming to a Theater Near You: A Christmas Apocalypse

My children have had an unusual influence on my views since they began, one by one, to pass through adolescence. I admit that they have shaped my reception of certain popular cultural artifacts I don’t know much about, mainly because I don’t care enough.

A few years ago, for example, they told me that a situation comedy about nerds wasn’t worth my time. I wasn’t going to watch it, but they confirmed my decision.

“It’s written,” my older son said, “by someone who thinks he knows what a nerd is. But he has in fact never met one.”

He explained this because, like my daughters, he happens to consider himself a nerd and the friend of nerds. And none of his friends talk or act like the “nerds” on the show. This doesn’t surprise me. TV never gets what something is really like. 

“They’ve convinced everyone who thinks they know what a nerd is and does.” My son shook his head slowly. “They just don’t get it.”

Coming to a Theatre Near You
More recently, both my sons, now squarely in high school, the target audience for Hunger Games, told me not to bother with those movies either.

“I’m so sick of post-apocalyptic movies,” my son said. “They are all the same, with some teenager showing special powers. No imagination.”

I wish I could claim that they got this from me. But they stayed away from the last two Katniss adventures on their own, and not just because she’s a girl. They avoided the Maze Runner movies as well. And Divergent.

And I have wondered with them: Why the sudden popularity of post-apocalyptic movies aimed at adolescents. What is up?

Today, as with everything religious that has been secularized, the word “apocalypse” is synonymous with "catastrophe." It evokes images of a world devastated by disease, some scientific experiment gone wrong that was meant to improve the human condition, or, less often, some attack of aliens. In this world, a remnant faces a global environmental catastrophe, horrible weather conditions, mutants, aliens, lousy economic conditions, or scarce resources overseen by a one-eyed tyrant who thinks he’s god, all of this against a backdrop of a ruined former urban glory vaguely recognizable as LA or New York.

There are usually zombies.

That’s not what the word once meant. "Apocalypse" is a Greek word meaning to unveil, to remove the curtain—basically, to reveal. In the old parlance--before 20th Century Fox--it meant that the world would not just end but face a final revelation (hence the name of the last book of the New Testament). And this would be brought about by God. That's apparently not scary enough anymore. 

God Terms
I grew up with Planet of the Apes and Soylent Green. And in school, I learned that our sun would last several billion more years after I died, and life on Earth could go on unless human civilization, probably through a nuclear holocaust, snuffed it out.

Today, I look through two lenses. In one, God creates and destroys, and in the second, humanity rises to destroy. I admit I am conditioned to expect a human catastrophe. But I am also drawn to the idea that there may be some real horror, not in what human beings can do, but in what will be shown of our own mistaken ideas about ourselves, revealed when the veil of the present age (however many ages it contains) is swept aside.

In school, the take was that there was no veil. Or, it would reveal nothing. But what if it does?

That’s another take on the apocalypse.

I’m not sure my sons want to see that in a movie theate either.  

Sunday, November 22, 2015

And Rocks should Sweat

(This is a section from one of my works-in-progress, tentatively titled The Last Self-Help Book)

In the 1990s, television talk shows were just one venue where the jetsam and flotsam of low self-esteem could be seen bobbing up in the wake of the national trend of felt needs. Today, the trend has gone corporate. If you lack self-esteem, as I do, there are many individuals, organizations, and corporations out there willing to take your money.

Many are the major hotel chains that have become winners in this trend as they host three and four day conferences featuring self-help gurus who encourage legions of fans to reach their potential, unleash their inner leader, and, of course, buy more of their books and tapes.

The Conference: The Next Best Thing to Being Mr. Big is Being Near Him
It may sound as though I am simply being only negative about something that many, many people see as effective in helping them to become better than they are. Susan Cain reports on one example, the Tony Robbins UPW conferences, where excited people pay from $895 (the cheap seats where the attendees watch on giant screens) to $2,500 (where they can be near Tony and dance with him on stage) to learn to be true extroverts (37).

As Cain notes, Americans spend $11 billion a year on the self-help industry. She argues that by following the self-help money, we can get a sense of how it “reveals our conception of the ideal self” (35). In the case of Tony Robbins and his followers, that idea self is extroverted, large, alive, in shape, and beautiful and willing to help others in large ways.

The message that some may be getting in the trend toward extroversion is that you are falling short if you are an introvert.

True Believers
As Cain makes clear in her discussion of the UPW (Unleashing the Power Within) Conferences, it takes true believers to make the big break to being successful on Tony’s terms. The first day of the conference, a rigorous day of dancing to old top forty hits, listening to Tony talk about his life, and generally basking in his warmth, energy, and success, ends with people being encouraged to walk over hot coals in their bare feet to prove their convictions. This is nothing if it is not true belief. The conferees have been convinced and brought into the idea. At the conference, they’ve been pushed and shoved over the steps that might stop them if they were to go it alone. Many large churches today try to emulate what this conference looks and feels like, with people singing familiar songs and dancing together, reciting certain mantras together, and then hearing inspiring personal stories.

But what about introverts? What if the real world out there beyond our five step and four principle reality is very different, and we were created to fit into something that none of our gurus have had the ability to imagine? What if living a life of quiet is not living in shadows or being unsuccessful? What if living alone is to allow oneself to unleash the power within.

Attendees of this conference will never get the chance to ask those questions. Those who try to follow the steps and the principles will not look aside to something else. We will see ourselves as failures, because we are not Tony Robbins. We have been hypnotized by a mirage that someone else has made very real to us.

Work Cited
*Cain, Susan. Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can't Stop Talking. New York: Crown, 2012. 

*I am grateful to graduate student Ana Rosales, a fellow introvert, for leading me to this wonderful book. 

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

The New Normal

Eighth grade was the year I decided that I had to be normal.

No more listening to classical music. I was going to listen to top forty. I had my eye on a girl in my class and wanted to be her ping pong partner for co-ed doubles at our school. She couldn’t know that I liked all four movements of the Shoshtakovich Fifth Symphony.

I stopped listening to Shoshtakovich, Mozart, Brahms, and Rachmaninov. I put all of that far from me, I betrayed it. I danced to the top forty hits of the season, talked about bands like Cream and Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young. And I became this girl’s partner. I was normal. And then we won the co-ed ping pong tournament. And then she dumped me.

Perhaps most of us have removed from consciousness our more desperate attempts to appear normal. It doesn’t matter what it was that we thought made us strange. In eighth grade in 1970, listening to classical music wasn’t normal or even really very odd. It was just flat, or, as convention would have had it then, square

I returned to it after my ping pong fling. I was taken back like an old friend and will listen to Brahms even today. 

The Great Drive
I had no idea how insecure I was until much later. And it was insecurity that made me give up a genuine interest so that important people would like me. Being normal is a longing, and for some it is also drive. I realized this when I met some people who suffered from disabilities. I admit I was an adult by then, but these new friends gave me a new angle on what it means to be normal, this most prized and also most conspicuous status.

Here's one example. My wife and I, when I was finishing grad school, made a new friend. He and his wife were very funny and engaging, and we found we had a great deal in common. It took a month before we realized that George, our friend, was blind.

Perhaps he had kept that hidden from us. Perhaps we didn’t know what signs to look for. We do now. But at the time, George had appeared normal, whatever that is. It came out only on the night when he had his laptop out and it spoke to him as he typed by searching around for keys. Then we realized that he simply did not want us thinking of him as George, the blind guy. He wanted to be George, the guy we knew. His blindness never slowed him down. His wife had to drive the car. But he jogged and walked and did everything else he could.

For my wife, the angle on normality has sometimes been one she quietly calculates while the rest of us, oblivious, plan for a walk or an outing. She comes along. She refuses to be left out.  But sometimes, I can still see tears squeezing out of the corners of her eyes as she tries to pace herself. Like George, she doesn’t want people to know. She has functioned fully. She is a full-time teacher. She has had four children. She has lived longer than she thought she would when I met her.

She was born without a heart valve.

Don't Give Up
I’d like to say something great now. 

I could say that people like George, people like my wife, have led me to question why I ever gave up classical music for a girl I wanted to play ping pong with. Why did I diminish myself so that someone else would like a person I wasn't? George and my wife have never diminished themselves. They've done the opposite. They don’t want special treatment. They don’t want to be treated like they are handicapped in some way. They want to be and act and move in terms of who they are..

They love getting into life. They aren’t drawing attention to anything about themselves that deserves special treatment. For me, they are the new normal.

Sunday, September 6, 2015

Faking Transformations

For the most part, I am drawn to people who dare to live by their convictions. In the mid-‘90s (about twenty years ago now), I followed with excitement Fox Mulder’s quest on TV’s X-Files for “the truth.” I respected Mulder’s conviction that the world was bigger and more unusual than the world handed to him by his elders. I respected his conviction that, as the show put it, “the truth is out there,” bigger than a consumer-minded American ideology. Mulder’s openness to experiences not explained through his partner Scully’s scientific method reflected my own suspicions about any method, process, or brand. There was something of the American way in Mulder’s uncompromising quest. I still think so.

I have to admit, however, that after a while—that is, after about seven seasons—I started to have trouble with this ongoing need, promised by TV, to be after something new every week.

All the time.

Fans started referring fondly to the “monster of the week.” And after a while, Mulder’s disjointed “experiences,” which were constantly being buried or denied by the government, didn’t add up to anything transformative. Like all TV, the program began to represent a cult of the continually new. The message after a while seemed to be, “What matters is that we are here this week.”

This cult of the perpetually new I have also come to view as deeply American.

Having Our Cake and Eating It Too
This past week at a full faculty meeting where I teach, a colleague shared a similar insight into what had bothered her about a recent run of nonfiction books friends had told her she had to read. These works, some dealing with cooking, some with divorce, some with relationships, promise transformations. But the trouble with all of them, my colleague noted, was that the narrators really don’t change. Even though the narrative arc points to a place where they are supposed to gain some sort of spiritual insight, they remain the same character and hold to the same values.

Perhaps, I suspect, that is what we really want. We want transformation, and we want it on our own terms. 

My friend’s critique is important. The new run of memoirs seems to cut a different path from the one mapped out in Augustine’s Confessions. It is not just that they affirm some sort of spiritual wisdom from materialism. And it isn’t just that they are self-infatuated or involved. Rather, they are marketed. They fit our rugged individualism and our need for some emotional experience. The trouble is that the experience is not fully understood by the writer, and it is not sustained and continued. 

It is like too many movies. The writing claims to represent something spiritual, when it really traffics in the emotional. 

My friend's critique concerns me for another reason as well. I have been working for the last nine months on a spiritual memoir. It is an account of how I moved from nihilism to Christianity in my late twenties. I have been having a difficult time with it, in part because I am writing about something that many people will either read as another cliché or as unreality. 

I keep working on it. What seems to work is to tell the truth, no matter how hard it is, and to remember that I am not the hero of it.

'Tis the Season 
Meanwhile, with the Labor Day weekend, we are turning now from the summer movie season, where movies seek big bucks, into the season where movies seek Oscars. It seems that we are in for the presumption, at least, that what we want now are transformative experiences. But I don’t think we should be fooled. Transformation is rare. Though it seems to be sought after by the very wealthy as well as the very weak and the strong, it is faked a great deal of the time. Some of the books my colleague was critiquing will be in the theatres trying to fake us out. I will not bother with them.

I will take my tip from what I think Fox Mulder was really after. The truth may be out there, and it may be strange. But if it fits the ideology of a TV format, I will question it.



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Tuesday, August 4, 2015

A TV Show Recommendation for Binge-Viewers

Occasionally, I like to recommend a program or a book that I think my friends should know about. John Irving’s 1989 novel A Prayer for Owen Meany is one of those books. In twenty-five years, however, I’ve only been able to convince one friend to read that book. 

With this full-disclosure of my questionable ability to influence others, I would like to recommend a TV show.

My wife and I are both binge-watchers, and we just spent a portion of our summer watching the first six seasons of the CBS series The Good Wife. I thought that I’d had enough of stories about lawyers falling in love and solving cases for the good of humanity, but this series has proved me wrong. Unlike the other long running lawyer franchises of the last twenty-five years, The Good Wife has followed no formula. It has remained unpredictable, focused on ethical questions and developing its characters. It has been, in a word, good.

Whenever I see a story or book with the word “good” in the title, I wonder if it is going to challenge conventional ideas about what it means to be good or to serve the good. This comes from my favorite Flannery O’Connor story, “A Good Man is Hard to Find.”

Right up front in The Good Wife, the main character, Alicia Florick, the “good wife,” is shown not divorcing her husband after he admits to having affairs in the opening scene of the series. For the next six seasons, she brushes off the dubious complements of women who commend her for “standing by her man.” But there has been something else going on, and not just ironically, as so much on TV seems to play.

Spiritual Emptiness on TV
With her husband’s help, and the help of others, this Alicia Florick has paved her own way. She hasn’t divorced her husband, but she hasn’t been a doormat for him either. She has stood on her own terms. She hasn’t always been good in a conventional sense. As of the end of season six, she hasn’t really forgiven her husband for his betrayal either. Yet her character arch, which has included her own adulterous affair, has nevertheless been interesting for the suggestion that she is aware of a certain emptiness and pointlessness to her life, and it seems to her to be a spiritual problem. This became especially emphasized after Will Gardner, the lawyer with whom she had a brief affair, was killed.

Along the margins of the show, meanwhile, her teenage daughter has become a Christian. While Alicia has gone from being a junior lawyer for the firm to being a partner, Grace, her daughter, has gone from following a strange Jesus-as-revolutionary cult on the Internet to being a serious reader of the Bible. While Alicia has meetings in their apartment with clients and other lawyers, her daughter’s Bible study group can be heard in the background singing some worship song. And Alicia sometimes sees her daughter as the only person she will go to with questions. Occasionally, her daughter has good answers. Not absolute answers. But kind, loving answers. She is not written as a bigot, a fanatic, or a dope.

The Bible In Real Life
In the most recent season, an episode even put Bible reading at the center of a case involving two farmers suing each other over a patented seed one of the farmers has invented. But these farmers, who are neighbors in a community, decide that they have a better way to solve their differences than in a court of law with contentious lawyers. They take it to their church, where the lawyers serve literally as counselors. Alicia tries several scriptures out on her daughter who then scolds her, saying, “Mom, that’s proof-texting.” Ultimately, the farmers end up agreeing to terms on their own, beyond the expertise of their lawyers, following a rather literal interpretation of a passage in Matthew that deals with disagreements among neighbors.

Of course, most of the time, episodes always have their share of murder, mayhem, and lying and scheming lawyers. But there’s more to this series that just lawyers in love, or lawyers playing the system. There is something here more satisfying, more worth thinking about.

I recommend it.

Check it out.

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Saturday, June 6, 2015

Reading Flannery O'Connor in Community



This past week, I had the pleasure of being part of a week-long seminar on the writing of  Flannery O’Connor. The seminar was sponsored by the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Azusa Pacific University, where I teach writing. The deans of our college are interested in helping faculty to continue a project of life-long learning, building community, and generally becoming more literate.

Every weekday morning, we met and discussed O’Connor’s work, which is challenging, to say the least. She is held up by Evangelicals especially as an important Christian writer, but I once again found myself wondering how much of her work was meant to be taken as “Christian” writing. It seemed that some sort of interpretation was needed.

But this is what made for the robust and interesting discussions all week, which hadn’t flagged by Friday morning. If anything, the people I talked with seemed to be saying that they needed to read more of her work and think more about the questions her fiction raised. This is, again, all to the good. A fiction writer is worth reading if that is one conclusion she leads readers to make.

What We Mean When We Talk About Goodness
Certainly, too many of us today think quite differently. We think that the meaning of something should be apparent, and if we don’t get something in the first five minutes of staring at it, then it isn’t worth more of our time. We like easy fiction. Just look at what passes for block-buster movies these days.

With O’Connor’s fiction, it was interesting to see us jumping to ready-made conclusions—ideas we’d already thought about—when a careful reading of a passage did not support that common-place conclusion. If anything, it resisted that and forced us to more careful reading.

The first time, for example, we encountered the words “good man” in the short story with that in its title, this was not an occasion in which what a character was endorsing as “goodness” was the same as the author’s view. In fact, by the end of the story, the word “good” had been used to name conflicting ideas. If anything was clear, it was that the characters in this story, perhaps like the story’s readers, didn’t know what they were talking about when they used words like “good man” or “good country people.” What, then, did these terms mean?

This is Just the Beginning
O’Connor’s stories, like all good stories, like so much of the Bible, stays with us like a tough experience. We think about it later, and it deepens our understanding in some way.

And having other people to work through so many of these issues was helpful.

I see why people join book clubs. Thank you to the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at APU for creating one out of the faculty. Reading seems a solitary venture, but at its best it does connect us with community and with our deepest concerns.

Friday, May 1, 2015

Finding the Time for What Matters: An End of Sabbatical Reflection

For four months, I have enjoyed the wonderful blessing of a sabbatical from my university job. I have been writing a book length memoir. At first, the memoir started out being about my sister, who died in her early twenties. As I began to really get into the project, however, things changed. Cathy is still very much at the center of this story. But now, it seems that I am writing about coming of age--and learning important spiritual truths.

I have discovered these themes as I have gotten into rewriting. In writing a second and third draft, I began to come to terms with issues that happened in my life over thirty years ago. I began to see why I reacted to people in the unhealthy way I sometimes did, and I learned forgiveness. It's been interesting to remember things and to discover what I have forgotten.

But the real point here may have most to do with the wealth of time I have been able to spend just writing without having to hurry or make room for other concerns. For four months, I have been able to write for at least five hours every day. That has been a great deal of time to spread out and open things up. I have been able to really get into issues in depth and revise things. I think that my style has begun to change a little again.

Normally, I have to write only in spare hours while away from my job, like everyone else. This is always a challenge, especially when so much of that time has to be taken up by lesson plans and paper grading. It is a challenge to be disciplined enough to write when and where I have a spare hour. Sometimes, I am unable to really concentrate during those random times when I can work. I find that I have chosen smaller projects that are doable.

But the last four months have been a valuable time to write, reflect, and read. I have stayed pretty close to a regular routine, and now I am working through a fourth draft of my story. It has been gaining momentum, and I can't imagine letting go of this practice once the sabbatical is over. I think I plan to look for ways to continue to work. This may mean less time on social media. It may mean less time spent talking and binge watching TV shows. But I think it will be worth it.

I don't have a bucket list. I don't want to sky dive or shoot a bear before I die. I am just thankful to be alive and to have this opportunity to write.

I hope that everyone else is finding time for doing the things they value the most.



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Sunday, March 22, 2015

Where Are the Heroes?

Many years ago, as a new graduate student, I enrolled in a Milton seminar. Our focus for the entire course was to be Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost. Fewer and fewer English departments are requiring that students read this work these days. It is difficult. It was written by a Puritan. And it is about worlds that have vanished (the world that loved epics, England following its Civil War, and, well, Paradise, of course).

Paradise Lost has all of the creaking, obscure conventions of ancient epics, including the invoking of the muses at the start. Early in the term, Dr. Brown, our teacher, set out for us another of the great epic conventions, with the question that has haunted readers of Milton for nearly four hundred years: Who is the hero of Paradise Lost?

If, as our teacher noted, ancient epics traditionally featured a hero who achieved greatness and represented the values and ideals of the culture in which it was written, then who would that be in Paradise Lost? In a poem about humanity’s fall from paradise, who emerged with the pagan grandeur and stature of an Achilles or Beowulf?

Many of the romantic poets--Shelley, Lord Byron among them, probably more familiar with Greek mythology than many of us are today--thought Milton’s hero was Satan. And in Satan’s first speech, he seems one possible candidate. But this is only at the start, before we learn that his many "transformations" leave him squating as a toad at the end of this poem. After that, any epic stature he seems to have achieved earlier--for example, when he rises from the floor of hell to his new purpose--I have to take with a grain of salt. At the same time, I admit that on my second reading I was still looking around the poem for someone of epic stature, a Christian Achilles or even a Hector. But I was stumped: one simply wasn’t forthcoming.

In the Comics
By the end of the semester, we had engaged in a number of other complexities, certainly, including Milton's sexism, his views of science, and the possibility of a "fortunate fall."  And I had begun to have new thoughts about the epic hero, especially with Dr. Brown’s casual references to the brooding egotists of the pagan epics. Achilles, for example, stays in his tent for much of Homer’s Iliad brooding because Agamemnon took the slave girl he wanted for himself while his countrymen are routed. And then there is Beowulf, who sits bored studying the monster as his tribesmen are slaughtered. Or consider Odysseus, a cunning liar.

Dr. Brown spelled out his impression that these were brooding egotists, adolescent types at best. I began to consider it possible that today's epic heroes would be found among the comic books and WWE. But like all good teachers, Dr. Brown did not give us a final answer to the question of Milton’s epic hero. What he did offer was the following supposition: as Milton rendered his sweeping vision of the new world set out between Heaven and Hell, could his hero in fact be anyone, even nameless people, who stood with faith against despair and the rising tide of evil brought on by egotistical, demonic figures that appealed to the lowest and vainest in human beings?

I had to think about this. Was standing for what was good heroic? My first thought was of Achilles' friend Patroclus, who wears Achilles' armor to try to fight off and scare the Trojans into submission. Was this really our only choice? What of a real hero? 

What of the Americans?
The longer I’ve thought about these suggestions, the more they have seemed at least helpful, and not only in a literature course, but helpful in life.

Today, there is much talk in the world about the need for heroes. Certainly, this talk suggests to me that we fear the villains, always in rich supply. We seem to fear that there is great evil among us, and our values are in danger of disappearing. When I was growing up, the devil was found in communism; then, with the breakup of the USSR, evil became personified in rogue fanatics like the Ayatollah Khomeini or tyrants like Libya’s Gaddafi or Iraq’s Saddam Hussein. Then it was Osama bin Laden. We seem to readily identify our devils. But our heroes?  

It is as though there is much fatigue today with a world of gray, where we live too much of our existence in pursuit of needed material gain and not really tied to a greater purpose. I’ve heard some argue that this talk of heroes suggests that we are seeing the waning influence of Christianity on Western culture. And honestly, I’m not so sure about our heroes, who are often held up to media scrutiny and then fall from grace in some way. Who are they, and how should we think about them? Does Christianity supply us with a way of identifying them? If we think too much about this, will we realize that we are mistaken in our American views of character, success, prosperity, and greatness? 

Certainly, a great Puritan poet like Milton would think so. He seems to be pointing in another direction.

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