Clearly SOMEBODY's plot, anyway

Cryoelectron tomography of a magnetotactic bacterium: a three-dimensional reconstruction of the interior of a Magnetospirillum gryphiswaldense cell. The cell membrane is blue, the magnetosome crystal red, and the surrounding vesicle yellow. The image makes it clear that both the membrane vesicle and the "mature" magnetosomes are strung like pearls on a chain along a filamentous structure (green), which is similar to a cytoskeleton. From the article "Bacteria Which Sense the Earth's Magnetic Field" Image copyright: Max Planck Institute for Biochemistry

Sometimes science sounds just like Dungeons and Dragons, doesn't it?

So the question of the day is: Can literature corrupt?

That may sound like a pretty big question for my extremely small and flippant blog, and don't worry, I ain't gon' get all smart on you or anything, it's just that a couple things have come up in the last couple days, and I wanted to think about them.

Our Aimee got the following email about the forthcoming movie The Golden Compass from her relatives sur le bayou, and then from the room mother of her daughter's first grade class:

"We need to get the word out about this movie - it is coming out in December - an atheist produced it, it is marketed for children and in the end they kill God.
Send this to everyone you know.
The Golden Compass is a big film, due for release on Dec. 7, targeting children. It has an atheistic theme that destroys God in the end of the film with the intent to 'kill God in the minds of children'."

Apparently The Catholic League has called for a boycott. Not that boycotting movies appears to be within their purview - the stated mission of The Catholic League is

"to safeguard both the religious freedom rights and the free speech rights of Catholics whenever and wherever they are threatened."

Whatever. How about if I don't touch that.

Just this weekend I had recommended the movie, and the books that it is based on, to my friends in NYC, who, as it happens, are Catholic, and, as it happens, had decided not to read the books or take their kids to see the movie, on the grounds that the trilogy (called His Dark Materials) is anti-Church. I didn't know about the boycott. I don't even think of His Dark Materials as having anything to do with Catholicism. I just think it's an astonishing adventure story with a lot of metaphysics thrown in. I don't generally recommend it to anyone under about 13 because the concepts are really quite mature. I know some grownups I wouldn't recommend it to, let's just say.

So I was a bit surprised that they'd already heard about the movie and had decided against it, but then, I often discover that I am quite oblivious.

In my opinion, if you participate in decisions about what your child reads, I am all for it. Hell, you participate in any facet of your child's life, that's great. Too many parents don't. And my friends have been at this parenting thing a lot longer than I have. So when I meet parents who don't let their kids read Harry Potter, or Philip Pullman, or Captain Underpants, I usually don't press the point. I don't always get it, but that's ok.

I pushed it a little with my friends this weekend because His Dark Materials is, as I say, an astonishing adventure, and because, as I say, it doesn't strike me as anti-Church. If you've read these books, now is the point where you call me an idiot. The books are patently anti-Church. All the bad guys are working for The Church. And, yes, in fact, God dies.

However, the world of His Dark Materials is not our world. It's like saying that the movie Aliens is anti-corporation. It is. But it's not like Ridley Scott is pointing a finger at, say, PepsiCo. Or even Microsoft. (And god knows there are novels that do just that.) It's a different world, and it's a different Church.

I also find that having a character named God, who dies, is kind of an interesting thing to try out in an alternate-universe novel, and further, I think that Christians and atheists alike can have interesting conversations about it.

There are important differences between Philip Pullman's God and the God that my friends and their kids have a relationship with. First of all, Pullman's God is in a book. Secondly, he's a guy, an old guy - a mortal guy. Thirdly, he's not very important. Say what you will about God in our world... I don't even believe in Him, and even in my life - that God is important.

So, the God in the books is definitely Philip Pullman's God. Pullman is certainly an atheist. So'm I. But there are so many Gods. I think everyone who believes in God - or a god - probably believes in someone different.

And none of this really answers my question: Can literature corrupt?

Are Aimee's relatives right? Can watching The Golden Compass 'kill God in the minds of children'?

I personally think that no fancy movie with Nicole Kidman is going to change an individual's mind about anything except perhaps the advisability of trying cosmetic injections.

Books, though, are a more personal experience, and I think get inside your head more. Can reading The Golden Compass kill God in the mind of a child?

Depends on the child. Depends on the family. Or... wait. You know what? Fuck this hedging. No. No kid is going to read this book and move from a position of full faith to thinking that God is Dead. It's not a newspaper, it's fiction. There are talking animals in it - no child is going to read this book and then turn around and start talking to squirrels.

On the other hand:

Aimee says that these are the relatives who believe that the war in Iraq is God's punishment for the legalization of abortion. Maybe, if you live in a world where such things are possible, maybe in that world animals could talk. Maybe a child could read Harry Potter and become a devil worshipper. If you believe in magic, anything could happen.

And... our Token Boy Librarian, upon reading my earlier post about the company that is offering to freeze the stem cells in your menstrual blood to use in possible future customized medical treatments, said,

"see, and here my first thought was 'well, that's clearly a vampire plot'.
I think I need to take a break from the graphic novels."

Ok, so... I could be wrong. (And weirdly, that's exactly the kind of thing my friend in NYC would say, and in exactly the same words.)

I didn't write this to pressure my friends, who read this blog, to bring His Dark Materials into their house (in fact, you put it that way, and it really sounds menacing - like the Pure Evil in the toaster oven in Time Bandits). I respect immensely their engagement in the intellectual and moral life of their kids. Besides, their kids are too young for those books, which I forgot. Plus, it's entirely possible that they might take offense at the way Philip Pullman slags his fictional Church in the books. I myself get pretty cheesed-off when certain authors consistently treat their fictional females with disdain, so I don't read those authors.

However, I maintain my position that when a kid comes from a family in which morals and behavior are presented consistently, explained, and discussed, that kid can evaluate non-familial inputs (such as current events, the behavior of other kids, TV characters, and books) with a critical mind.

If it's taste, it's one thing. If it's fear, then you've already lost.

And as for the title of this post... here's my theory:

Shot right through with a bolt of blue

I seem to have developed a relationship with this year's baseball semifinal. Whatever you call it.

I'm not, as anyone can tell, a sports person. Like a lot of spazzy, myopic kids, my number-one strategy for avoiding ball-coming-at-me situations - which without exception elicit from me flop sweat, prayer, flailing, grimacing, and shame - has been to profess an active disdain for organized physical activity. Hey, I never liked organized religious activity either. Same reactions.

However, as my memories of cringing at home plate feebly waggling a bat at a softball I can barely see fade to dim specters in the dust-moted golden haze of The Land Before 1983, I have less reason to sneer at sports. Now, from time to time, I can enjoy watching professional basketball players actually fly: I can gasp at the artistry of women's soccer players (look at that shit! she kicked the ball around the defender, passing it to herself!). In New York, we even went to baseball games. Those were really fun.

But I'm still not a fan. I still don't know the rules, and I still think football in particular is both bureaucratically boring and viscerally ugly - a rare combination, wouldn't you say? I don't follow a team, or any particular players.

My husband is something of a fan. He knows a staggering amount of information about athletes, up to and including where some of them went to high school. He grew up in Cleveland, which is by god a sports town in a football state. He and his long arms played high school basketball and college rugby. He would watch a couple of games a week if he had the leisure to do it (to his immense credit, he doesn't, so he doesn't).

The fact that Bob grew up in Cleveland is significant. Cleveland teams have brilliant seasons, but do not tend to win championships. Was it a big deal when the Red Sox won the whatever a few years ago? Hah. NO Cleveland team has won ANY championship in ANY sport since some year that my husband and every member of his family would know.

Wait I'll look it up. 1964, the year Bob was born, the Browns won the Superbowl.

[Bob corrects me: the Super Bowl hadn't been invented in 1964. The Browns won the NFL Championship.]

And it's not that Cleveland teams simply suck: this much I know. I went to college out there, and in the '80's in Cleveland, even at the geek school, much of our social life involved getting together to watch the Big Game: playoff series after playoff series - and even a Super Bowl, I think - when through some sudden fluke, defeat was snatched from the jaws of victory. Last-minute fumbles, insane athletic feats by the other guy, chokeage. Apparently, God Hates Cleveland Sports.

Game 1:
This weekend we were out in the old town for a family wedding. Niece Kate marrying Nice John. (Good luck, you kids!) Game one was the night before the wedding, and we missed it - well, Bob missed it. I didn't know one way or the other. We were attending Cousin Stretch's baptism that evening, and as the priest expelled her demons and incorporated her into the church, everybody but me knew that the Indians were playing the Red Sox. Boston won.



Game 2:
Katie and John, the bride and groom, are, like most Clevelanders, sports fans. Big sports fans. Let's put it this way - when their wedding invitation arrived, and it was cream-colored with a brown border, I didn't think for a minute that the brown was there to signify that it was an autumn wedding. I had my fingers crossed about the bridesmaids - I knew there was an outside chance they'd be wearing orange dresses with numbers on the back.

They weren't, of course - hey come on, I'm teasing... but the wedding party did enter the reception at a run, each wearing a team jersey over their tux or gown. That was pretty cute.

That night, back at the hotel, after our kids fell asleep, a batch of family crept into our hotel room to debrief, drink more, and - you guessed it - watch the game. That game went to 23 innings, tied until the Indians scored an unprecedented 47 runs in the top of the last inning and then retired the Red Sox side. Those numbers may not be exact, I did eventually fall asleep once the Indians were ahead by like 4. Still, pretty compelling, for baseball.

The next evening we found ourselves downtown when dinnertime rolled around. Googling "best sushi Cleveland" and plugging the addresses that came up into Google Maps, we came up with some joint in the Warehouse District. The football game was just over when we parked, and my god. Apparently the Warehouse District in Cleveland is considered a good place to watch the game, get unbelievably wasted, and then stagger around trying to use your cell phone in between little vomiting episodes.

I kept a tight hold on the kids, and we made it to the sushi place without either of them being propositioned or puked on. The sushi place was not what we expected - lots of purple and glass, it looked like a club, kind of. But it was fine, you know, fish is fish. We always end up eating sushi when we travel. At any other restaurant the kid options are as follows:

1. hotdog
2. grilled cheese
3. chicken turds
4. cheeseburger
5. maybe spaghetti

... and several days of a diet like that is just ugly. At sushi places they eat edamame and tofu and miso soup and fish.

When I took the kids to the bathroom to wash hands I noticed that the big guy at the table next to us was kind of... paved... in diamonds. Big studs in the ears and two wide bracelets on one arm. "Musician?" I thought to myself. "Gangster? Bet he's a ballplayer." He was a black guy with a shaped short beard and he spoke staccato Dominican Spanish into a cell phone. He acquired at least three hangers-on while he ate his sushi and watched the irritating Tom Brady get sacked on the overhead TV.

So the next day I looked through the Indians and Red Sox rosters, and found that we were sitting next to David Ortiz, designated hitter for the Boston Red Sox! Big Papi, they call him. Beloved, in Boston anyway.



Game 3:
The next night we were up in Bob's sister T's swanky new apartment facing the lake. Big beautiful views, including the stadiums and the blimp. Of course, we turned the game on, and once again, Cleveland won.



Game 4:
Last night we were back home here. We watched the game. Cleveland won. I am more than mildly not-disappointed. I am, in fact, looking forward to Thursday's game. I am thinking to myself, "Wouldn't that be something, if for the first time in 43 years, Cleveland won a championship? This is kind of exciting. But, uh, HOW many games are we talking about?"

I spent the first seventeen years of my life actively avoiding sports. I spent the next seventeen years peripherally aware of sporting events and teams, and the last five gradually getting used to the fact that athletic prowess can be kind of compelling.

Things have changed since I was the most uncoordinated kid in the Baltimore metropolitan area. For one thing, nobody expects me to do sports now - I have a knowledgeable, physically competent husband to teach my boys how to throw and catch, kick and hit, and to explain to them how the Earned Run Average is calculated.

For another, the Baltimore teams of my youth have undergone a molecular shift. The high-achieving Orioles that everyone used to brag about are treated with contempt even at home, and the Baltimore Colts, well, the Colts live in Indianapolis.

It's kind of a funny thing: my first year in Cleveland was 1984, the year that the Colts ran off in the middle of the night. I had heard something about it, but in Cleveland, my god, it was all anyone wanted to talk about. People teased me about it! I was dumbfounded and amused. I didn't even pretend to understand, but I did kind of enjoy it years later when the Browns quit Cleveland to come be Baltimore Ravens.

"Ravens" is not a bad name for a Baltimore sports team, but I cannot bring myself to like them (I'm not alone, either!). I sort of can't remember why, though. Maybe that's just how it works.

Not the End of the World by Geraldine McCaughrean - review

Not the End of the World by Geraldine McCaughrean. Age 11-17. Geraldine McCaughrean is one prolific and well-rounded person. She writes adaptations of classical literature for children (Gilgamesh. Odyssey. Cyrano. etc.). She won the contest to write the sequel to Peter Pan. She writes reg'lar old adventure novels. And she wrote Not the End of the World, a "realistic" retelling of the story of Noah and his family, complete with onboard predation, physical and psychological brutality, manure, and moldy grain.

Yeah man, it's a wild premise. Our main narrator is Noah's daughter Timna, who gradually begins to question her father's version of what's going on and why; but most of the other humans and some of the animals on the ark weigh in with their points of view as well. I think it could be an important book for a kid who is learning to discern alternate perspectives, who is beginning to, you know, question the dominant paradigm.

Certainly I've never spent much time parsing the story of the Flood - I'm a big wintry atheist and think it's all horseshit. So Ms. McCaughrean's thoughtful and thoroughly imagined book took me somewhere I've never been.

I would press this book into the hands of every potentially open-minded kid I came across - if I weren't worried about the parents. You can call me a coward but I would really run it by the parents first. I would hate it if a hypothetical Devorah and Lilit weren't allowed back at the the library because some godless propagandist librarian (that's me!) suggested a book that gave their parents hives. Thumbs up, by the way.

More thoughts on the infinite

stunt kite, St Simon's Island

Juliet got wheedled into putting up her Christmas tree the day after Thanksgiving by her nieces. Yikes, says I. I just got the Halloween decorations back down the basement, I'm not ready to bring up xmas.

Gad, is anyone ever ready for Christmas? Oh now that's not right. I can clearly remember being very into it. When I was single and lived alone, actually.

Now, though, the thought of putting up lights in the cold, clearing out a corner for the damn tree, ornaments on and ornaments off, jeez I just don't need the extra hassle. In fact, I have for years been whining to Mr. Librarian about an artificial tree. Oooh, no mess! Oooh, just snap it together! Oooh!

To me, someone growing a tree so that they can cut it down and sell it to me so that I can put it in my living room and watch it slowly die seems absolutely absurd. Cut flowers, ok, they're pretty and don't take up much room in the garbage when they're done, but, like, a whole tree?

It's got to be bad for the environment too, all the resources in growing, shipping, and disposing - vs. the one-time cost of manufacturing an artificial tree. I made all these arguments to my husband. To further arm myself in case he proved intractable, I looked up the overall energy cost of real vs. artificial.

So guess what. Manufacturing an artificial tree out of PVC vinyl is like so environmentally heinous that you could deforest most of Montana, and, as long as you mulch your tree instead of putting it in the landfill, you'd be doing Mother Nature a favor.


Good thing I checked, huh? Good thing I had the skills, resources, and most of all inclination to look into something that seemed like a reasonable assertion before turning around and beating someone else over the head with it.

This is all I'm saying about the religion thing. I have had several penetrating conversations over the last few days about my atheism blog entry. I especially want to thank A the Niece and Friend Mary for being skeptical and tolerant and willing to civilly discuss what sounded like a big fat diatribe on my part.

In some ways, I am unmoved.

• I know that there are religious communities that actively discourage examination of received information, and I am against that.
• I know that there are religious communities that preach doctrine that is in direct opposition to fact. That makes me very uncomfortable, and sometimes hopping mad.
• I know that there are religious communities that condemn people who do not believe as they do, or who do things that they think is wrong, and god damn it, that condemnation is the exact opposite of what I know to be a major tenet of almost all world religions - tolerance.

Tolerance, to me, is the ultimate grace. It is the one word that summarizes the lessons one can draw from the stories of Jesus, Mohammed, Rama, Buddha - and you know, I call myself a religion retard but in fact I've read them all.

Intolerance is what kills people. I don't think I need to back that statement up.

On the other hand, I failed to state in my previous entry what has always kept me from decrying religion, and that is the (good) moral and spiritual guidance it can provide. Mary said it best when she pointed out, "My parents didn't send me to Catholic school so that I wouldn't be corrupted by people like you (paraphrase), they sent me to Catholic school to learn right from wrong."

Yeah, I still believe you get that from your parents more than from anyone else, but her Catholic education probably contextualized the specifics that she had absorbed at home, made it obvious that "Don't lie" wasn't just some preference of her mom's - "Don't lie" is a universal value.

Further, there is a lot to be said for the solace and comfort of ritual. And there are intrinsic goods: I know Buddhists who swear that the meditation involved has solved their anger issues.

And take it from me, you cannot study the history of the Western world without learning the history of the Catholic church and of Judaism.

In fact, I largely give the mainstream established faiths a pass. In the United States at least, Catholicism, Judaism, and the older Protestant sects have reached an equilibrium with the surrounding culture. They can accommodate dissenting views without feeling threatened, and, I would say, seem to place more of a priority on maintaining the well-being of their congregants (uh, with certain egregious exceptions) than on micromanaging their lives.

Those kids can grow up and go through a process of doubt and investigation and not feel like they're the first ones to ever wonder about such things.

It is, in the end, the ability of religion to subvert or suppress critical thinking that I take up arms against. It's not just religion that can do this - bad teachers and Dr. Laura play their part - but it kind of is just religion and parents that can start the process so damn early. A friend of Joe's is a middle school science teacher in rural Virginia, and has been told by his students that "our parents warned us about you" because he was known to teach evolutionary theory.

It seems like "good" religious education, promulgated by people who respect the child, allows for curiosity and exploration. But you take an incurious child, or a dogmatic or overzealous educator, and you end up with an adult who forwards email about underarm deodorant causing cancer or Jews planning the September 11th attacks.

Well, hell, Mary's right. You take the word "religious" out of the previous paragraph and it still reads true.

*Sigh*

So why am I unable to leave this alone? Because a child's mind is the epitome of potential. Just as we model good behaviors, we should model good habits of thought. We do that mind a disservice when we present statements of faith or dogma as irrefutable fact, without acknowledging alternative points of view or encouraging the child to evaluate those statements on her own.

I would propose two reasonable tests for statements that we make to children:

1. "Is it a (more or less) universally-held belief or value?"

2. "Is it provable?"

(A third test might be, "Is it useful to me at this moment?" which would allow such statements as "I'm sorry honey, the ice cream store is closed for the summer.")

Given these tests,

• Stealing is bad = universally held to be true
  
• Homosexuality is bad = not universally considered to be true
  
• The Earth orbits the sun = provable
• The Big Bang = not completely provable
• God created the world in 7 days = also not provable

Big Man is losing a tooth, and he's a bit squeamish about it. This is where the Tooth Fairy comes in, right? Promise a reward and the process of losing a tooth becomes less scary. I told the story. I said that when I was a little kid, my parents told me that if I put the tooth under my pillow yada yada fairy quarter etc.

Then I said, "What do you think about that?" He got this kind of incredulous smile and asked, "Is that true?" I told him I personally have never seen a fairy, but I was sure that there would be a present under his pillow in place of his tooth. "How do you think I know that?" I asked, and with another smile he answered, "Because you'll put it there!"

Not preoccupied - occupied

I find it very odd that in our civilization we're quite happy to speak of a Catholic child that is 4 years old or a Muslim child that is 4, when these children are much too young to know what they think about the cosmos, life and morality. We wouldn't dream of speaking of a Keynesian child or a Marxist child. And yet, for some reason we make a privileged exception of religion. And, by the way, I think it would also be [wrong] to talk about an atheist child. - Richard Dawkins

This is the reason I stopped going to the pictures

For Aimee's cousin John

I have been reading some things about atheism lately.

And I'm convinced.

No, just kidding, I've been an atheist all my life. I'm real comfortable with, as they say, witnessing to it. But there's this recent discussion about evangelizing for atheism.

I'm reflexively against that. Independent thinking is what got me here - why would I try to influence someone else's train of thought? However. The articles that I have been reading, by Richard Dawkins and others, make some interesting points:

1. Religion is bad. It can lead people to murder. The worst a lack of belief can do is get you murdered for your impertinence.
2. God is not true.
3. A population that believes something that is not true - in the face of contradictory evidence - is a psychotic one.

And most persuasively: teaching little children "that there is a higher kind of knowledge which comes from faith, which comes from revelation, which comes from tradition, and that it is the equal if not the superior of knowledge that comes from real experience" (Dr. Dawkins, at a recent conference called "Beyond Belief: Science, Religion, Reason and Survival") seems, when you put it that way, to undermine our other attempts at educating them. To subvert any potential for a rational society. Certainly it serves to establish precedent for the kind of mulish credulity that has allowed great swathes of our nation to put their trust in people who have demonstrably lied to them about matters in the public interest.

I've seen this with Big Man's friends. At the risk of alienating some of the other moms, I will say that it is tremendously disturbing when a five-year-old contradicts a factual statement by an adult with some Christian claptrap.

Furthermore, it's not like the claptrap is limited to moral or peripheral issues. I might roll my eyes but I would have no essential objection to a kindergartner telling me that if she punches her brother Jesus will be disappointed. We'll all be disappointed. We allow little children to be incentivized by mythical figures - if it'll just keep her from punching her brother between now and Christmas, say.

No, we're talking death, babies, and the creation of the world - big stuff.

I have held off talking about god to my kids. Death, babies, the creation of the world - and god - when they're ready to know, they'll ask. And I fully intended, when I had to address the question of faith, to speak of diversity of belief, and appreciation of the world's mysteries, and different approaches to explaining things that seem hard to understand.

The religious of the world, however, take the opposite approach. I've had a 4 year old sing out, "I know why Jesus died!" Big Man greets this revelation with concern: "Somebody died? Was he sick?" Not only that, but these kids are learning that I - along with my unbaptized children - am going to Hell.

So fuck it, maybe I will throw in my lot with the more radical atheists here. Why shouldn't I tell my kids that god is a myth? That their peers who speak of god are being taught things that aren't true? And why shouldn't I start now?

Persuasive evidence:

1. Two recent articles, one in the NY Times and one in Wired

2. Ann Coulter

3. A song I heard out of a preschooler:

A, B, C, D, E, F, G,
Jesus died for you and me

Delicious demon

Dawn of the dead, version 1, originally uploaded by pwilnyc.

We trick or treated last night for an hour and a half. My three-year-old son hung in there enthusiastically, walking around the neighborhood til even my feet were sore! That's my boy!

Scientist costume, originally uploaded by pwilnyc.

He ditched both the wig and the glasses though, I mean, wouldn't you? Our group had a witch, a princess, a ghost, a bee, a vampire, Thomas the Tank Engine, a paleontologist (Mr. Three - I didn't tell him that I have known a disproportionate number of paleontologists, and I have very seldom seen them wearing lab coats), and Big Man, who was a walking art table. We saw hundreds of kids, it was a scene, man. The perfect night, too, warm and misty and moonlit.

A lot of grownups dressed up too. I saw a woman in an Afro wig, hoop earrings, and a miniskirt scarecrow outfit - I think she was a cross between Michael Jackson and Diana Ross in The Wiz! Our friend Daphne and her daughter Neighbor Girl both dressed as witches, with big and little brooms. When someone asked Neighbor Girl what she was, she said, "I'm a witch, just like my mama!" Got a big laugh.

"I'm a witch, just like my mom!", originally uploaded by pwilnyc.

And if you think WE decorate OUR house for Halloween, boy you should have seen the next block over! Fog machines, spinning bats, spooky sound effects, adults dressed like zombies and witches handing out candy... there was even a jack o'lantern carved to look like an Imperial stormtrooper - man that takes skill!

But Tom Chalkley's house gets the prize. Tom dressed like a (dead) gravedigger and was actively burying a body in his front yard. He told some yarn about the "dead" guy and was impressively creepy all by himself, but then, after an extra jet of fog, the dead man lurched up out of his grave and flopped around, convincingly zombie-esque. It was a virtuoso performance - you could hear the kids screaming and laughing all the way down the block.

Now... here is the thing.

Is it ok to scare the bejeebers out of little kids like that? Is it, in fact, ok for kids to go door to door demanding candy?

Well I mean you can tell that I would say yes. I love flamboyant; I love spooky. But I'm also a Nazi mom who doesn't have cookies or broadcast television in the house. In fact, it's because I'm so strict about a lot of things (manners, diet, TV, safety) that I think Halloween has an important place.

For one night, you don't have to say thank you for the candy (although I caught myself reflexively reminding the kids to do it). You can EAT candy. You can go out after dark; you don't have to walk on the sidewalk. You can cross the street without a 30-second ritual of looking back and forth and holding a hand (not the big streets obviously).

One night of transgression doesn't develop bad habits or undo even a short lifetime of training. The costume reinforces the concept that We Are Not Ourselves tonight.

Sweet, sweet freedom.

Big Man's school had a "Harvest Festival" in addition to their Halloween parade, for all the sad kids whose parents are Jehovah's Witlesses (yes I said it) or 7th Day Adventists. They're not allowed to "celebrate" Halloween because it is derived from a pagan holiday.

First of all, do we "celebrate" Halloween? Certainly not in the same way that we "celebrate" Mass, or Diwali, or Easter. I think we "observe" Halloween.

And second, who's going to break the bad news to them about the pagan origins of Christmas and Easter?

I don't get this joyless bullshit. What about Halloween is so threatening as to inspire a ban? I just don't buy that it's the scary witches and devils and the implications of violence - if that's so, those people's kids had better not be watching TV or movies. Is it the lapse in discipline that Halloween represents? Or is it that the children are in charge?

I think the latter. After all, kids are the ultimate pagans - until they are instructed in established traditions, they make up their own rituals and superstitions, and draw their own conclusions about the world, which adults, for the most part, are constantly trying to correct, if not thwart entirely.

And I think that's why I am so offended that someone would ban Halloween. It's this one night when we relax and let them follow their instincts. A drop of anarchy in little lives that otherwise should be tightly controlled. One night of the year to taste freedom and power, to learn that it is sweet but also scary.

So 'Good' - I spread it on toast!

We went to Philly today, Ac Nat Sci family field trip. Museum was terrific (even if the interactive kid exhibits were 85% nonfunctioning, dag is that frustrating), but the highlight for the boys was the gigantic smoking heap of smushed cars just as we entered the city; and the highlight for Mr. Librarian and myself was the Santorum for Senate billboard.


(Not my photo, went by too fast)

1. Does Rick Santorum NOT know that Dan Savage has redefined his name? I mean... yummy! I mean... ew.
2. "Good" is capitalized? Is he echoing grace ("God is great, God is good")? Is he mimicking Biblical usage? Either way, doesn't it seem like he's one letter away from stating "Santorum is God"? It kind of does to me.
3. Furthermore, is capital-g "Good" gooder than small-g "good"?
4. Who is the candidate here? Rick Santorum? or Santorum-is-Good? This weird construction makes it sound a little like it's Borat endorsing him.
5. Please nobody vote for this freak.

On second thought, maybe a little santorum would be good for the Senate. In what way I can't imagine, but I think it couldn't possibly make things any worse.

"To the memory of little Bernice"

A Little Pink Rose
copyright 1912 by Carrie Jacobs-Bond

(con molta espressione)

A little pink rose in my garden grew,
The tiniest one of all;
'Twas kissed by the sun,
caressed by the dew,
Oh little pink rose in my garden.
Oh, little pink rose, 'twas you!

[You see where this is going, don't you?]

Oh, little pink rose of your mother's heart!
Have you faded, and gone away?
Has the Gardener gathered my little pink rose,
For His loveliest garden today?
Did He need one more blossom of your size and hue,
And was that the reason the Gard'ner chose you?

Oh, little pink rose in your mother's heart!
Have you faded, and go-one away?

Gah! Found this gem in a big box of old sheet music that was in Bob's mom's house. I can't stand this morbid dead-baby crap, but I must say I love the accusation that GOD KILLED THE BABY for aesthetic reasons - God the Mad Ikebana Florist, that's a new one.

It made me think of those wackos with their "reborn" baby dolls - you know, very skilled and probably very deranged women who take high-end baby dolls, eviscerate them, and rebuild them from the eyelashes up. It's creepy. Here's one. The way that she describes every detail of the process, stripping the factory color and then applying paint in thin layers, rooting each hair, replacing the eyes, all this painstaking ritual - you know what it reminds me of?

Serial killers.

I mean, I like babies - now. Now that I've had a couple. But back when I didn't have any, I didn't really get the appeal. Even these "reborn" "angel" bleah bleah things aren't particularly attractive for the most part. Check this one out:


Compare to:

Big Man, 1 month old

Similar pose, similar age, though Big Man's got a mouth like a coin slot and the other one's got those poofy Shiloh-Jolie-Pitt lips. They both look pretty constipated. The fact is, a baby's mostly great because it's alive and warm and soft and is GOING TO GROW UP INTO SOMETHING MORE INTERESTING! Ok it's wild that it's so small and yet is still a human, that's also a neat thing about babies. But these aren't.

See? Not human, and not going to grow up. Not even warm. Creeping me out utterly.

Oh and you know what? When I checked A Little Pink Rose on eBay (I'm grossed-out, but I am not above making a buck on it), someone's selling a inkjet copy of that cover for five bucks. "Shabby Chic." heh heh heh.

Contrail of consciousness

All right, I'm doing the stupidest thing right now.

CNN is streaming their coverage from 5 years ago and I'm running it. Tears dripping down my face, it's so hard to take.

We were on our way to the pediatrician's office, we had a 9:15 appointment, Big Man's first post-natal checkup, when we saw an enormous column of smoke off in the direction of downtown Brooklyn. We said to each other, "My god what could be on fire in that part of Brooklyn to produce that much smoke?" Gives you an idea the scale - we guessed it was a huge fire, but a mile closer to us than it actually was.

When we got in to the dr's office, people were sort of scrambling to try to get the TV in the waiting room to work. We groused about it, "Jeez it's 9am, who needs TV?" Somebody said something about Windows on the World.

And when we saw the doc, a good guy who used to joke about Big Man's name (in Yiddish, it's funny) he said, "I don't know how to say this, but a plane crashed into the World Trade Center."

I said, "Ha ha. That was 1934, and it was the Empire State Building."
He said, "No, it's true."
I still wouldn't go for it, "Why would you say that? I mean, it's not like that's not something we can check!"
I think he might have convinced us - we got up and looked at the smoke again through the window.

After the exam, we got the baby strapped in the carseat and Bob went into the underground parking garage to retrieve the car. As he drove up the ramps of the garage WNYC kept staticking in and out, and he heard scraps of stuff that sounded really bad. He pulled up, we snapped the carseat into place and pulled away. He told me, "I think one of the World Trade Center buildings collapsed."

I laughed. It was absurd, so I laughed. Then, like it was something that someone ELSE had neglected to take into consideration, I said, "But what about all the people in there?"

I took a break just now to do a puzzle with my three year old geography prodigy. It's the United States - he likes me to hold up each piece and he says their names and tells me where to put them. Calmed me down.


WTC from a helicopter - Bob's birthday present in, I'd say, 1998

This CNN thing is unbelievable. I didn't see it at the time. The reactions by the anchors make them sound so stupid, but we all were - see above.

As we drove back to our neighborhood, it was like it was snowing. "What is this shit?" I remember one of us saying, and the other realizing, "It's ash." We were a couple miles away.

At the time, when was the last time you'd heard the word "hijacked"? You know, it was a Cuba word, an Entebbe word. So strange, I remember it being so current when I was a kid but I guess it got replaced by carjacking. I don't know if it stopped happening but the idea of a screaming political terrorist (my image is Al Pacino, I think Dog Day Afternoon really formed my images of hostage takers) holding a gun to the temple of a stewardess just seemed so 70's at the time.

Thank god we were together. Bob worked for the City about 8 blocks away from the WTC. He would have been fine, but he would have had to walk home across the Brooklyn Bridge. The cell phones went out because the transmitters were on top of the towers, so I wouldn't have been able to get ahold of him. I would have lost my mind.

We didn't even go into the apartment when we got home. The park at the end of our street, Sunset Park, is the highest point in Brooklyn. We carried the carseat up there. People were standing around randomly, all facing Manhattan, not speaking at all. Hands to their faces. Like statues, like Pompeii but standing up. We couldn't see anything but smoke and dust where lower Manhattan was.

One time, my friend Sean visited us in Brooklyn. As we walked to the subway in the morning, I pointed out to him that we had a funny vantage point on lower Manhattan - one Trade Tower completely blocked the other, so it looked like there was only one. Sean shares my taste for speculative fiction so I pointed it out to him as, "What the world would look like if anarchists blew up one of the towers." I knew about the 1993 bombing, of course, but the idea that one of these massive structures could be erased from the surface of the earth was so absurd, it was science fiction.

I cried in the park, looking down at our baby. I knew the world was a violent, unstable place already, but I thought this was probably going to change everything. I felt so bad for him. And as it turns out, we have been at war for his entire life.

9:55am CNN used the words "Osama bin Laden," reporting that he had made threats against the United States. And the guy's still at large? What the fuck?

We went inside and watched CNN and New York 1. The WYNC person on the radio hadn't been able to keep it together. WNYC had transmitters and other equipment up there. Bob's sister Janie and her husband Miles had worked with that equipment.

My daily commute on the subway took me over the Manhattan Bridge. It was a privelege, to come up out of the ground and see the sun sparkling on the river, and at night to rise past the tall buildings with their sparkling lights. One time as we came out into the sunlight, two little Chinese girls in our car crowed, "Outside! Outside!" and Bob and I looked at each other and grinned. We felt exactly the same way.

I would look at those buildings at night and think about how much they were made of air. They looked solid but of course they were just matrixes of cement and steel, honeycombs full of light. It made me think of the structure of solids at the molecular level. They try to tell us that there is more space between the molecules than there is space taken up by the molecules.

I read the New York Times this morning. I have cried more reading that fucking paper than I have cried reading all other literature put together. Some of the companies that had people in the building had bought ads listing their lost. 75 people at one company, over 300 at another. The names were so New York - Economos, Wisniewski, Chen, Pham, Romero, Aquilino, Novotny, Costello, Hafiz, Ranganath.

When the one was gone and the other was still standing it looked so lonely. It stuck up so dangerously.

Everyone I knew didn't die; everyone I knew didn't lose anyone close to them. Everyone I knew who might have been hurt missed it by 'that much.' Mark was late for the train that would have taken him under the buildings. Meghann and her dad canceled their breakfast date at Windows on the World. That kind of thing. There must have been twenty or thirty thousand people working in those buildings. The WTC Evacuation Study reports about 15,000 evacuated. 3,000 died. From the report:

The high rate of survivability of persons on floors in WTC 1 and 2 that were below the aircraft impacts was attributed to the small percentage (estimated at 20%--30%) of the building occupants at their work stations at the time of the first attack

A strong argument against getting to work early. It was such a beautiful day - in my mind I see these lower-Manhattan go-getters deciding, fuck it, I'm going to have an extra stroll this morning before buckling myself into my cubicle. I'm going to sit in the sun and read another section of the paper before going up to work. Those kind of decisions should be the decisions that save your life.

We were so isolated, out there in Brooklyn with our baby. We quit watching the TV when the president started talking about retaliation. I couldn't look at my fragile baby and think of Afghan villages under fire. So we slept, and ate cookies, and had visitors. Lots of people wanted to come see and hold the baby.


Sept 14, 2001

He was so little and beautiful and warm. They would come and want to talk about my labor, and his sleep, and they didn't want to tell their story about that Tuesday. We were like a little vacation from the smoke of Manhattan.

We went into town a couple times right after. My laptop had a virus; someone was moving out of town. My co-workers were astonished that we had tried it: traffic was closely monitored and everyone was still on edge that there might be more coming. Plus the air was awful.

Bob's sister Theresa came for a visit in October, and the first time she caught the scent, she had a violent fight-or-flight reaction. You could see her hair standing on end, her spine stiffen. Her house had burned down several years ago and that disgusting smell, plastic and scorched cement and god knows what, brought her right back to standing in the snow with her family and her dog going crazy watching everything burn.

Fighter jets patrolled the city. Once when I was in college, my two best friends and I went downtown on a weekend day and climbed buildings and explored the empty streets. Downtown Cleveland back then was a ghost town on weekends, it was like a giant movie set.

As we sat on a roof, we saw a pod of F-16s fly past in formation, low, just briefly visible in the space between two buildings. I was chilled: the word "Libya" passed through my brain as the wrongness of that sight struck me right in the heart.

It was the Cleveland Air Show, of course, and those were the Blue Angels. Cleveland not likely to be on the front lines of anything after all. Seeing those F-16s in the air over New York though - that wasn't speculation, or what-if - they were capable of shooting another plane out of the sky. Too late.

Bob stayed home a little past his family leave I think, because his building was being used to shelter rescue workers. When he arrived back at his office there was a stray work boot on the floor.

We passed by the site only once or twice. The amount of space they used to take up is enormous. As you drove by you felt like ducking, like flinching. Like all that empty air would crush you.

Five years later, beautiful blue-sky days no longer fill me with unease (although I'm glad today isn't one). It took me a couple years to realize why days like that made me grim and alert. Once, on a 2004 visit to New York, Jaime commented, "Well you really picked a perfect day to be here," and I replied, "Yeah I keep waiting for a plane to fly into a building." Jaime said, "That's not funny," and Bob quickly agreed. I wasn't making a joke, those days fucked with me like that.

Then a couple years when, in the middle of a beautiful blue-sky afternoon, I'd realize, "Hey! I haven't thought about disaster all day! Til now! Oh." And the day the kids tried on the neighbor kid's football gear, it wasn't til the next day that I realized I went through an entire beautiful day and just enjoyed it.



That's enough. Time to fix lunch for my littlest man.

Religion retard

Second best
Originally uploaded by pwilnyc.

So, I've already established that I am not, as they say, a person of faith.

I'm not sure they say that. I might have made it up. I like it though - it is almost a funny thing to say, if you load it with enough faux delicacy, and yet it is a perfectly descriptive and nonconfrontational way of saying I don't believe in God. Gods. Any god. People can get really itchy when you say, "I'm an atheist."

"Atheist" always sounds like there's a big gang of us out there, actively campaigning against Him. Well hell, I don't give a crap, believe what you want, especially if it makes you behave more nicely.

I didn't believe in god quite early. In fact, when I was a kid, I didn't think anyone did. I went to church every week, sang in the choir, but it all sounded like mythology to me. I liked mythology. It wasn't until much later that I realized that most mythology had been religion at some time.

Very very sucky, when looking at a Tibetan thangka illustrating some 400 Tibetan Buddhist deities, to say (to a Tibetan) "That is some cool mythology you guys have." Tibetan history has been continuously documented for like 4,000 years. Those deities aren't mythology, they're history. Culturally insensitive much? Oh sister, that's my middle name.

Once, I was training a group of curators and registrars at the Jewish Museum on the software my company had installed. I was groping for an example from their collection that might illustrate how the database handled composite objects: objects that are made of separable pieces.

I said, "Take, for example, a seder plate. A seder plate has the big round platter and then the, what, 6, 7, 8, little bowls."

Thirteen pairs of eyes rolled in unison. I've never seen anything like it. It was like Busby Berkeley meets Woody Allen.

On my lunch break I snagged a book in their gift shop and discovered: seder plate? One big plate, yes, with 6 spaces (which may sometimes be dishes): one for the charoset, one for the egg, the karpas, the shank bone, and two places for the bitter herbs. Not gonna make THAT mistake again.

Anyway, at the age of 8 or so, after church one Sunday, I asked my mom something like, Dag, how can that preacher live with himself, doing all that talking about something that doesn't exist? She kind of swallowed her gum and then had a conversation with me that left me entirely unconvinced.

Not to say I'm not interested in religion - no, I'm a fan. Of the imagery and the ritual, of course, not the dogma. Growing up going to a Presbyterian church, we didn't have saints, incense, Hebrew, ritual food, special clothing, crap smeared on the forehead, man we barely had curtains.

So I love all that crap. It's like a tenth-generation American who grew up on food cooked with soup, who as soon as she could, started eating and cooking food from cultures that use spices. In fact, it's exactly like that.

My first exposure to serious Catholicism came in 1994 when I traveled the Mediterranean countries by myself. I don't know dick about saints, but I quickly realized that I didn't really have to. That stuff was made for illiterates, and so the stories are right there in the visuals. You can piece it all together, and that's so great.

I made long lists of the saints I had seen -

• Barbara: holds a building
• Roch: shows people the wound on his thigh
• Lucia: has eyes? on a plate

I collated all the information from the statues and paintings I saw in Spain, Portugal, France, and Italy, and later looked 'em all up. UN believable. Saint Agatha, who had her breasts cut off because she wouldn't have sex with someone, was later claimed as the patron saint of bakers and bell-makers, because literacy had declined and people thought those lumps she held on a platter were buns or bells, and not in fact boobs.

That is so cool.

I was mesmerized by the exhibit that my old museum put on about Haitian vodou (it originated at the UCLA Fowler Museum). The exhibit designers created representations of shrines to Ogou, Danbala, etc, massing together iconic objects preferred by these entities: a Darth Vader figurine, a certain brand of rum, perfume, colors, materials. And it turned out that visitors to the exhibit... tossed offerings to the spirits. MetroCards, cigarettes, etc. The intention of the exhibit was unimportant. Merely putting these objects together in the same place invoked the entity. If playing cards, smokes, a mirror, and something blue were blown together by the wind into the end of an alley, that place would be a place to entreat that spirit.

This comes close, to me, to the origin of the idea of sanctity. Sanctity as experienced in the world. You come across a spring, a flowering tree above it, and you are hit with the feeling of specialness. One way to translate that is: God was in that place.

Haitian vodou appropriates the images of Catholic saints and some of the icons of the Masonic tradition. I like that. To me, it gives the Haitian spirits more validity: everybody knows what Papa Legba likes, and when a Haitian spotted a picture of Saint Francis, he thought, "Legba wears brown - this is totally Legba, he'd love this!" It is the opposite of assimilation, the opposite of conversion. "Hey thanks missionary guy, I know just what to do with this!"

Doesn't take anything away from the saint. The Haitian knows that the concept expressed by that icon is separate from the image itself, and that he can use it in a different way, without offense to this spirit that the white guy is yammering on about.

It's the same with me. I see the picture of Saint Rita with a nail in her forehead, and I know just what to do with that. I'll draw a comic! A comic about domestic abuse and how much crap women take sometimes. Doesn't take anything away from the saint that somebody is praying to. She is not her picture. She is not even her story.

I heard something on NPR the other day about how the mikvah, the traditional Jewish ritual post-menstrual immersion bath, is now being appropriated as a feminist gesture. The implication of uncleanliness has been discarded, and women are now using the mikvah to get in touch with the sanctity of their bodies, to symbolically cleanse themselves of bad experiences, etc. Some rabbi expressed concern that it might become trivialized, stripped of its spiritual origins, "like feng shui."

Well... was Taoism really harmed by the feng shui fad? Sure, a lot of people hung a lot of crystals without understanding why, but has there been an overall decline in the respect granted the ancient traditions of China? Have spiritual practitioners of feng shui suffered?

Worse things could probably happen to Orthodox Judaism than the acculturization of the mikvah. Joe Lieberman, for example.

One of the big benefits of being a stone atheist is - I don't want to say a buffet approach to the rituals of this world, because I still don't participate in a single freaking one (except for the feng shui, I rearranged the wind chimes after reading part of Move your stuff, change your life) - but appreciating the icons and rituals and observing that the buffet approach can be beneficial. Cross-pollination can indeed stimulate new growth in new directions.

There's a lot of crap that people have to deal with in this life, and we should accept succor and remediation where we feel we can find it.

I still think it's all horseshit, but then, I used to read palms.

Subaru means "unite"

Picture 055
Originally uploaded by pwilnyc.

When we used to live in Brooklyn, we were quite near a big Hasidic community.

It was really neat. I can't pretend my interest was anything other than ignorant cultural voyeurism, let's just admit that right away. I thought it was wild to see these guys in the big flat round hats and little boys wearing 3-piece suits every day.

And sometimes at the museum where I worked it would seem to be, like, Orthodox Day - huge families piloting double and triple strollers, the moms in wigs and plaid skirts, the squads of kids identically dressed.

As these families became a more familiar sight, I began to notice certain themes. The plaid skirts. Tam o'shanters. If a boy wore glasses, they had gold-colored aviator-style frames. And the family car was almost without exception an 8-year-old Bonneville station wagon. We used to kind of joke that along with dietary restrictions, the book of Leviticus must lay down guidelines for transportation and eyewear.

A few weeks ago I had a few minutes to kill with Barbara, a friend at work. She's Orthodox, or conservative, or observant or whatever. Look, I'm aware that there are varieties of Judaism, just like I'm aware that there are different types of sins in the Catholic church - mortal, venal, original, extra-crispy - hey, I'm on it.

But I'm a second-generation atheist on my father's side and a cultural Presbyterian from my mother. Any religion that involves more ritual than a handshake after the service is a mystery to me. Like, don't ask me to say grace. We never said grace. I'm always thrown when all of a sudden everybody gets quiet and bows their heads. What happened?! Nerve gas? Oh, Christ, they're praying.

You ask me to do it, you are more than likely to get the old "God is great god is good let us thank him for our food." Single syllables and a sight rhyme - nice.

Maybe I could come up with a limerick:

Look at these plates on the table
Left by the Almighty Creator
"How'd He get in?"
Mom asked with a grin,
And Dad said, "Shut up," then he ate her.

Well I could probably do better. Ok, a bottle of aftershave could do better. But look what happened: I start out acknowledging the gift, and in 5 lines it's domestic violence even unto cannibalism. I just don't got the chops for it.

So I get up the nerve and I ask my co-worker, "Say, Barb, you're a Jew..."
"Yes," she says, arching an eyebrow. "I am a Jew."
"Well I have a rather flippant question." And I ask her why every Hasidic family in Brooklyn drove an old Pontiac Bonneville station wagon.

Giving me a lot more credit than I deserve, she considers the question, corrects my pronunciation - twice - and says, "Well, those are big families, and they have huge tuitions to pay. It may be that a used Bonneville wagon is just consistently the best deal they can get on a car that will seat that many people."

Barb is wise, Barb is knowledgeable. Mystery cleared up. She confirms that nowhere in the Torah does Yahweh exhort His chosen people to "Buy American!".

The other day, I picked the Big Man up from camp. He climbed into our AWD Subaru Legacy Outback wagon and said, "Mom, guess what? The car in front of ours was a Subaru too!"

I said, "Isn't that a coincidence. There are a lot of Subarus at this school, aren't there?" As I spoke, another car identical to ours pulled into the pick-up line.

It's odd, but I don't remember reading the page in the overeducated liberal handbook (the New York Times Magazine I guess, or maybe Consumer Reports) that dictates we use a Subaru wagon to bring home the organic milk and hiking sandals, and to ferry our kids to and from Friends School.