Errant Musings

It’s been quite a while since my last post. I was dedicating all my energies to drafting the final chapter of my dissertation, but then got taken down by a sinus infection. After that I traveled to New York to discuss an exciting new project and spend time with old friends. The trip was lovely, but truth be told, I’m feeling somewhat depressed about the state of the world right now. There’s a lot on my mind: all my piled up work, the earthquake/tsunami in Japan, the crackdowns in Libya and Bahrain, not to mention the power grab in Wisconsin. In times like this I, like many, turn to art—not to be entertained, or to forget (though who could blame us), but because through art we can begin to make some meaning out of the stress and sorrow.

While in NYC I had a chance to see a film that rises to the level of art. Of Gods and Men is a French/Algerian movie based on the real-life events surrounding a French monastery in a small Algerian town during a time of unrest in the mid 1990s. There are many things to love about this story: Christians who aren’t worried with converting souls, but rather of alleviating suffering in this life; a small Muslim town who embraces the monastery as their own (though not its god); and rebels who are more than a one-dimensional homogeneous mass of marauders. Then there are the cinematic features: the way the actors portray their crisis of faith; the pacing of the film which gives you a feel for the quiet monastic life while also building tension and suspense. And finally, there is this one amazing scene—a kind of recreation of the Last Supper—from which you feel nearly everything there is to feel about being human.

Notably, the suite from Swan Lake plays in the background as the monks come to terms with the decisions they’ve made. It’s the same section of music as that playing in the background of Black Swan’s finale, however the two scenes could not be more divergent. In Black Swan the sacrifice is one made for the sake of fame and external recognition, in Of Gods and Men the sacrifices the monks are willing to make are an expression of their vows to live a life of compassion and service. Their plight cuts to the quick of what it means to be human—what makes life worth living and dying for? For these monks, who ironically spend many hours alone in silent meditation, it is the fellowship of others—what they call love—that motivates them to live and to die.

I often agree with Roger Ebert’s take on movies, but he missed the boat on this one. He argues here that the monks were foolish. However, the lead monk explains that the monastery’s reason for being (as decided by the monks themselves) was not to patronize the poor—it was to live among them, to be one of them, not to cut and run using resources others around them did not have. The monks were willing to live and die, to forgive even their tormentors, in the name of a principle beyond religion, sex, or fear. They were willing to be both embraced and destroyed in the name of love, making them not martyrs but existential heroes.

After two weeks of non-violent protests, and decades of murder and torture, Egyptian revolutionaries have toppled a repressive regime. Mubarak and his ruling party have given into the demands of the hundreds of thousands of protestors and given all authority over to the military. It is yet to be seen what the military will do with this power, whether they will give up significant amounts of their power in the transition to a civilian-led democracy.

Despite the harsh realities that await us in the morning, the beauty of this moment cannot be overstated. A murderous regime has been overthrown, but more than that the Egyptian people have fought back the fear and alienation the regime depended on, and from many they have become many AND one. An organizer of the revolution was just speaking on Al-Jazeera and in tears she cried: “Everything now seems possible, everything is possible. For centuries they’ve told us that as Arabs we are not capable of democracy, but we have proven them wrong. I’ve never been so proud and happy in my life. I’m just overwhelmed.”

From all the way across the world I too am overwhelmed. In my field of study we are entrhralled with the question of revolutionary consciousness: what is it, how does it emerge, what conditions make it possible, is it a moment, is it a process, does it belong only to the moment of danger, or can it exist among us in the everyday?  For the past two weeks I have been glued to the air streams of information watching this consciousness unfold and come into being.

One of the things I’ve witnessed is that revolutionary consciousness was expressed in Egypt as a profound love: love for a future that lived only as a dream, love the revolutionaries have for one another as beings who deserve to live in dignity. Time and time again stories emerged of the protesters caring for one another, feeding one another, sleeping together, and talking without regard to religion and class—notably with full participation by women and men, young and old. Love and courage, courage and love—to me the lesson of Egypt is that these are the two fundamental features of revolutionary consciousness.

Certainly it is this moment, just as the regime topples, where the euphoria of this mode of being is made most visible. Though we must remember that it was built heart by heart, moment by moment, many days and weeks before now. What we must also recognize is that Egypt has much more to teach us about revolutionary consciousness in the next days, weeks, months, and years. It is my hope that there are forms of this consciousness capable of spreading beyond Egypt and the Middle East (next Iran! next Palestine! next Saudi Arabia and Yemen and Syria!).

Valentine’s Day is just a few days away here in the US. There are parts of me that have recoiled at the incredible sappiness and seeming silliness of the holiday. But now, for the first time, I see the holiday through a different lens. There is something powerful and beautiful about a holiday dedicated to celebrating love; it’s just that we’ve been holding on to a rather stunted version of something that in reality is full of revolutionary potentialities. This Valentine’s Day can we widen the scope of our embrace to include people in other continents, speaking foreign languages, and worshipping foreign gods? Can we withstand the emergence of a Middle East that doesn’t match our vision of it?

I sound impossibly naive, I know, but the Egptians have just given me hope in human beings again—everything truly seems possible.

One of my New Year’s Resolutions is to read more non-dissertation books. The goal is one book a week. It’s an ambitious project, made more difficult by all that needs to be read for the dissertation, not to mention trying to get through my weekly The New Yorker.

January: 1 1/2 books read.

I started out with a collection of essays by Woody Allen, Mere Anarchy. I really enjoy Allen’s short fiction because he makes me laugh out loud in a way that few authors do. The New Yorker frequently publishes short pieces of his—and they are gems. A few of my favorites are “Udder Madness” and “Will the Real Avatar Please Stand Up.” Check them out, you won’t be disappointed.

I must confess that I didn’t make it through this collection. More than two Woody Allen stories at a time is just too much. When you read his essays it doesn’t so much feel as though he’s giving you the voice of an orginial character coming alive through narrative. Rather, he inserts a version of his own Woody Allen character into various other fictional people, animals, objects. The effect is absurd, which is why it’s hilarious. But Woody Allen the character isn’t exactly the kind of person you can stand to spend more than an hour or so with. I’ll probably make it through this book piece by piece eventually—especially if I leave it by the toilet. I think Woody would appreciate that.

In a departure from my usual fiction-only reading habits, the next book I picked up was Valerie Plame’s Fair Game. This one I read on the Kindle while traveling. I was inspired to read it after seeing the amazing film version featuring Naomi Watts and Sean Penn. I don’t know how the filmakers did it, but even though I knew how the story ends I was on the edge of my seat completely stressed out. While many of us have most likely forgotten the event, or paid it little attention at the time, the movie shows us why we should care. There are so many different levels to the film—personal, national, international—and each one is done just right. In my opinion, this movie and its actors should be up for Oscars.

The book can’t help but be drab in contrast. I say this because Valerie Plame was a covert operations specialist. She’s not allowed to write about the good stuff. While the filmakers aren’t bound by contracts and ethical obligations to the CIA, Valerie is. She could explain the basics of what her job was like (and what it was like to be a mother while being a CIA agent), but not any of the particular details. And here I get to why I think this needs to be read: politically appointed CIA officials at the higher levels of the office in charge of reading through, redacting, and releasing these kind of books tried their best to kill it. They have redacted the most insane things, like how long she worked for the CIA and how she met her husband—all of which is public knowledge you can get through simple internet searches. When you get to a place where material was redacted, the editors let you know. At times, the redactions clearly take up pages. It makes it hard to figure out what is going on, but I think the publishers did the right thing by releasing the book anyway. They have provided an afterword written by a knowledgable journalist, and she fills all these pieces in for you. Read this first, not after.

The other fascinating thing about this book is that she describes a life that we aren’t use to women living. She was like the real herione that I was glued to the tv watching in Alias (well, for much of her career she was more like Jennifer Garner’s handler played by that really cute guy whose name I can’t think of). Even though the media and the government tried to paint her as nothing much more than a former ambassador’s wife she was in fact not only a covert operative, she was chosen to participate in elite covert ops. I followed the events as they unfolded at the time, and I bought their depictions of her hook line and sinker. I pictured her as someone recruited into the CIA because of her marriage to her husband, and I thought she did little other than report what she overheard at state dinners, etc. I’m no fan of the CIA or the military, but the feminist in me loved reading about this woman breaking the gender boundaries in much the same way that I was thrilled seeing Demi Moore seriously kick ass in G.I. Jane.

I’ve just been informed that we MUST go see 127 Hours. Turns out my husband has something of a boy crush on James Franco. Apparently it all started after he read an article about Franco in The New Yorker. The article was written just before Franco started his PhD in English, and just after he opened a show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in LA. In the spirit of Paul Auster and John Malkovitch, the actor plays himself as a performance artist in a permormance piece. But there’s a third performative level: the work centers on the casting of Franco as “Franco” in the soap opera, General Hospital. It’s not hard to read a critique of the Hollywood star system, kitsch melodrama, and the commercialization of avant-garde art here.

The short article is definitely worth reading (in fact, now I might have a small crush too).

But don’t worry. I’m not at all threatened about being in competition with Franco for my husband’s affections. I’m a hell of a lot closer to finishing my PhD than he is. But if that f-er finishes his in less than 8 years, I’m in big trouble.

I’ve just returned home from a memorial weekend in San Diego for a dear friend from my law school days. He died very unexpectedly at the age of 33 from bacterial meningitis. Since hearing of his death I’ve been thinking of a lot of things, among them the strange nature of friendship. There are some friendships that seemed destined for forever but the relationship ends—sometimes as abruptly as the shutting of a door, sometimes almost invisibly—and while you may always wish the best for these old friends, in the end the impact they made on your heart just isn’t what you thought it would be. Then there is the other category, the friends who leave their mark on you. The ones who become a part of you. You can hear their distinctive laughter or speech patterns like a stream running through your mind. Justin Jay was that kind of friend for me. For several years of the intensity that was law school, Justin Jay was one of my closest friends. In the years that followed I knew without question that when I needed Justin, he was just a phone call away.

We were lucky because our graduating class was not at all the toxic gathering of hyper-competitors that you hear about at most law schools (it wasn’t exactly something out of One L). By the even raucus standard of law school in the US, our class was a pretty historic group of revelers. There were dozens of people who on any given night, I could be sharing a drink with. Costumes were an essential ingredient to the magic, and we even had our own “party block” where two groups of students had rented houses across the street, eventually rigging up a seemingly endless supply of beer through a kegerater.

The first time I laid eyes on Justin Jay, he was napping in the seat beside me during Civil Procedure. I thought this a bit odd—I wondered “How can he not take this more seriously?” The answer is that while there could never be any question that Justin was brilliant, or that he cared about politics and history and injustice, he was never meant to be a lawyer (something many of us would eventually conclude—inlcuding me). The things that really held Justin’s attention were music and friends. After law school he moved to San Diego and decided it was time to start his musical career as a drummer in earnest. By all accounts he was succeeding.

By all accounts, Justin continued to be a rock star at friendship, too. According to his mother and sister, person after person approached them in tears this weekend to say that Justin had been their best friend. Could any of us ask more from life?

Justin’s uncle (appropriately dressed for our costumed event as Michael Jackson) led an informal ritual outside the last stop on our memorial bar crawl. He asked us to think about what we will take from Justin’s life, what part of the relationship we had with him would we carry with us forever. Justin and I always shared an irreverant love of the absurd. Every time I put on a fake mustache, Justin will be there with me. But more than that, I hope to cultivate what I think made Justin such a good friend: his ability to acknowledge the faults in the people he loved, but to love them no less for it. Justin was always the first person to tell me, “Yeah, you need to cut that shit out.” I’d nod in agreement, we’d laugh over the stupidity in question, and we’d go and get another drink. To call a person out like that requires humor, but also tenderness—and Justin was nothing if not a gentle, loving heart.

Justin, you lovable, wild, super-nerd, I love you. Thank you for all the laughs, for the soul-deep conversations, and for bringing two remakable women into my life—you’re mother and sister—whose love for you epitomizes grace and dignity. For all of you who loved Justin, thank you for making his life something legendary.