i am interested in the life i would have had if i was a boy, and that is one facet of it.

collier schorr.

she is a woman, of course, so it is a little bit different, but it has hit close to home.

aj apparently is bisexual

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This south american fruit bat has been found to hang upside down because of his sweat.

Donald Bartheleme's reading list for grad students, about what you would expect, but interesting nonetheless.

hondurus has a surge of homophobic violence

kick ass features an eleven year old chop socking her way thru various european apartments, i for one am excited.

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via strange maps, it is a nebraskan farmers field, in the shape of nebraska.

instead of resigning now maybe the irish bishops could have done something about pedophiles when they were actually present in parishes, and no moving them about does not count as doing something.

Sondheim and Lansbury dish about musicals.

me on nellie mckay

i think that an academic discussion of sucession as it realtes to national politics would be incredibly useful at this point (cf east timor, scotland, kosovo, bosnia, indenigenous land claims in australia and canada, quebec, eteria, somilia, kurdistan, etc etc) but i remain unconvinced that the work can be done by a secretive orginazation of apologists from the american south.

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Leeches feasting on blood foam, as part of a Russian cosmetics and mecdical leech farm.

an important revulation of Jefferson's view on patents, and it's relation to historical copyright law.

Edward Schillebeeck who surrived 3 vatican investigations of his orthodoxy, has died last week at the age of 95. His refusal to actually have opinons but to carefully consider all possiblities, and to talk about the importance of discourse and a multiplicity of praxis over any cultural orthodoxies gave me permission to be a theologian. he is why i am in god school. his two tiny books on the eucharist and on celibacy are highly recommended.

top five qoutes from this lacerating interview with nyt critics Mahaoloa Dirge on women and hollywood:

I had a female studio chief a couple of years ago tell me point blank that she wasn't hiring a woman to do an action movie because women are good at certain things and not others. If you have women buying that bullshit how can we expect men to be better?

Working within the system has not worked. It has not helped women filmmakers or, even more important, you and me, women audiences, to have women in the studio system. … I think the studio system as it exists now is a no-win situation for women filmmakers.

Let's acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them. But they are important commercially... I've learned to never underestimate the academy's bad taste. Crash as best picture? What the fuck.

One, the people making Romantic Comedies have no fucking taste, two, they're morons, three they're insulting panderers who think they're making movies for the great unwashed and that's what they want. I love romantic movies. I absolutely do. But I literally don't know what's happening. I think it's depressing that Judd Apatow makes the best romantic comedies and they're about men. All power to Apatow, but he's taken and repurposed one of the few genres historically made for women. ….We had so few [genres] that were made specifically for the female audience and now the best of them are being made by Judd Apatow.

There's a reason that women go to movies like Mamma Mia. It's a terrible movie… but women are starved for representation of themselves. I go back to Spike Lee and She's Gotta Have It. I remember going to see it at the Quad in New York, surrounded by a black audience. People are starved for representations of themselves.



Dear Jonas Brother: If the sex isnt v. good, then you are doing it badly. asshole. kisses. anthony.

the italian northern leauge actually did immigration raids on christmas eve.

esteher chavez who spent her life working against the murders of women in Juraez, died last week.

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Kate Beaton does Wilde and Bosie

more protests turning violent in iran

60 images from paris, 1962

first playboy club bunny manual.

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MArtin Parr, Lemon MErianuge Pie, date unknown

sarah barnski does gorgeous street photography, with some really strong portraits.

i want every single soliary one of these sweaters

i love these circuit building kits intended to teach kids.

The Tarantino Mixtape from Eclectic Method on Vimeo.

Tarintino Mix Tape cleverlly edits his films so that the visual similarties/stylistic tics become obvious.

i am totally obsessed with the elegance of joy garnett's compostions, here in the unmonumental seires.

karl rove divorices his wife.

me: i am watching gossip girls
SvnRgdTgr: Do you enjoy that show?
Sent at 11:19 PM on Sunday
me: i dont know
but jesus i am t hat bored
Sent at 11:21 PM on Sunday
me: also, elton john has wy too much shit
SvnRgdTgr: laugh Well, now you're working out your own opinion about the show.
I know, hon. He's extraordinarily wealthy.
Sent at 11:25 PM on Sunday
me: this was todays lessons
SvnRgdTgr: Okay. To be honest, the fact that Elton John still has a lot of stuff is kinda amazing, considering how much he spent in the past on cocaine.
me: i am blogging that

the best thing about an education is two scenes with peter saarsgaard in a room with a 16 yr old. the first, he is in a tanktop and formal pants, laying on a hotel room bed, asking his schoolgirl lover to show him her breasts. after she lowers her borrowed nightgown, he moves across the room, and replaces the straps. it is delicate, loving, power grabbing, sexy, and horribly patriachal. the second is as he deflowering her. he kids around with a banana, she talks about her adulthood, though she is just 17. they eventually sit on a couch, her prim and contained, him sprawling, her clothed, him shirtless.

saarsgard has this talent for appearing earnest while being cagey. the seductive cad as innocent enough, not innocent, but appearing to be just calm, just placid enough to get a way with a fairly large amount of shit:

the bisexual who seduces seinna miller and then jon foster, a unstable triad of selfish desire remade as libertine freedom in mysteries of pittsbergh (the last scene, where miller drops the coffee after discovering foster ass up next to him in bed--he languidly asking her to come back)

seducing liam neeson's kinsey with dry scientific talk in the middling motel room on that first search for homosexuals, in condon's biopic

the hiding of gender of a same sex lover for a husband and wife producing team in the dying gaul

even the rapist in boys don't cry, or what ever he was doing in garden state, or the killer as cop in flight plan

Postmodern music: 1) is not simply a repuditaon of modernism or its continuation. But has aspects of baoth a break and an extension. 2) is on some level, and in some way, ironic. 3) does not respect boundaries between sonorities and procedures of the past and the present. 4) Challenges barriers between high and low styles. 5) Shows disdain for the often unquestioned value of strucurual unity; 6) questions the mutual exclusivity of elitist and populist values. 7) avoids totalizing forms (eg does not want entire peioces to be tonal or seiral or cast in a prescribed formal mold); *) considers music not as autonomous but as relavent to cultural, social, and poltical contexts;9) includes qoutations of ro references to music of many traditions and cultures; 10) considers technology not only as a way to preserve and transmit music but also as deeply implicated in the production and essence of music. 11) embraces contradicitons 12) distrusts binary opoositions 13) includes fragmentaitons and discontrinuties 14) encompasses pluralism and eclecticism 15) presents multiple menaings and multple temporalitites 16) locates meaning and even structure in listeners, more than in scores, performances or composers

johnathon kramer, as qouted by chumbawumba

american journal of nursing used one of my photos


David Lynch bashes George Lucas' resturant choices

12 people under threat of execuation for sodomy in iran


The Alien talks about how much he enjoys raisin crunch cereal.

biblical costumes

first v ideo of a tool using octopus. (welcome to the big world, right next to corvids, dude)

high end sex toys from coco le mer, so fucking gorgeus (silver cuffs that cover the wrists, with one simple hoop)

salughtering meat, and the conditions at abattoirs is the number one reason why i would become vegeterian, the latest is a discovery that aserolized pig brans can cause major neurological difficulties.

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nyc fotos from the late 70s or early 80s

brian ulrich does that decaying shopping mall thing, but he has earned this from his first set, plus he can actually say something interesting.

the new massive attack dvd features a longish interview with Georgina Delvins, the star of The Devil and Mrs Jones. She complicates the narratives of both utter abjection (cf Chambers, Lovelace) and total liberation (cf Sprinkle) and mostly views the process as weirdly lonely--i wonder if it is any less lonely or explotive then being a housewife though.

mosque burnt in palestine.

vintage postcards of tourist traps in michigan.


Ralph Stanley on TV in the 50s.


Frank Fairfield, LA old timey musican, young and v. able.

we are saved from finincal ruin due to large scale narcoctics trafficing.


full text of modern display alphabets from 1834.

Blair and the war in iraq, confirming what we knew a decade ago. sociapathic fuckwit.


White Wine in the Sun, though supposed to be funny, it is one of the moving arguements in favour of a secualar xmas. moved me to tears.

this house on the san juan islands by helitrope architechts, is like the farnworth cross bred with a container ship.

hickoree hard goods makes very pretty clothing.

first person lds document about autonomy, baptism, and the devolpmentally delayed.

the muppets do i've got you under my skin. sunday the boys, col and d exchanged presents, and then watched the muppets xmas special, at the end, we had a vote, and cannonized jim henson.

Rube Goldberg - Contraption - LE best
by e-boueur

A man in suburban england made a rube goldberg machine that used all floors of his house. astonishing in how elaborate it is.

jennifer cruise and friends write a long list of what she would do if she was a romance heroine.

civil rights projects are being investigated decades after they were declared cold.

From Untitled Album

Pool Near Palm Springs

the problem with CSI the tv show is that it encorages people to trust both the police, and worn out tech.

if harvards finances are in such a fucking mess (and they are) why did Obama hire Larry Summers?

the wallpaper collective have one made of images of dinasours called fossil fuels

Four thots about 19th century Australian Landscape painting

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a) they were done by europeans, who had no experinece with the land
b) they look (eeriely) like european landscapes (esp like constable)
c) canadian history has similar tendecies and histories, esp. in eastern canada (cf Kreighoff and kane) (is there a kenyan 19th century tradition that looks like this)
d) which leads to two questions
a) was the re-creating of new worlds as old worlds a delibrate act of conciousness or was it an accidental not knowing any better
b) what were the later practical differences b/w these two effects?
(also, nolan looks english--the modernism of him, and the modernism of let's say harris or carr are not that different from their euro histories) (so the radical change of aborigonal artists working arclyic on canvas maybe was the first attempt to create a visual vocab of aussies for aussies?) (geoff?)

avatar and race, from io9


the death of gaurentees means that sothebys and christies are down 75 per cent.

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and my top ten is up at sally's

best presents ever, from all sorts of people, including the usual suspects (tickets to the mag fields, brie, a sexy mormon missionary calendar, original prints, organizer sets, a cool metal box for photos, a lenticular print of jesus from david)

i am the 2009 Leather Archives Visiting Scholar, which means a huge grant and a trip to Chicago--who said that fucking cowboys was not a serious academic pursuit?

I will be on CIUT Radio 89.5 from 5:30 to 6 pm on Saturday.

IN
Robarts
Stacks
1 copy
PQ2603 .L3343 E2813 1995

dinner at black hoof...wow, beautiful room, plus meat--roasted marrow, charachturie plate with lardo, duck confit, duck sausage, cherry venison, and two kinds of pork--then i had pork face, with chantrelles, and then the panacotta with blueberry jam. wapoos on tap, then a dry italian red, then a apertif from swiss.

queer
otherness
purity
babylon

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Abby LEe Kramer models for Vogue Italia. I want to lick cocaine off her pussy.

antonmically correct t shirt

a dozen photos from the mid 60s of the american national forrest service.

same sex blessings have been approved by episcoplians in eastern mass.


Delta No Smoking in slow motion.

bette midler and cher do a trashy ladies medley from the mid 70s.

this is why record company statements fail to function.

10 ways homo/transphobia affects breeders.

casual surrealism, james lipton, sexting, and beards--a freudian nightmare.

japanese monsters on velvet


Bulbous Robot moves under a door--amazing how liquid its mvoements are.

great photos from scandavia.

porsche factory shots ca 72.

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Ben MacKenize why won't you love me.

bruce golf round house ca 57--it is for sale, and among the more adventorous of the texan vernacular modernism, so gorgeous!

fascintating article on the potential of Gabour Sidlbe having a career post-precious--she is working some, and cast in some interesting things, including a sundance comedy that might suggest some work, but i imagine it will be mostly indie.

Platon's photographs of world leaders is really kind of interesting, blank, heavily lit, with a flatenning of all but the most outre of personality (ie bertsculoni will always look like a pimp) which i am sure means something about power, about status, and the like--that it was mostly shot in a portable studio just outside of the UN says something, but i am not sure that the images are as rhetorically rich as Platon assumes them to be.

AMerican CAtholics, power, and the control of information as it relates to sex abuse: a minnepolis case study.


John Cage's Variations.

full levi johnson session--i have masturabted to this

galleio moon drawings.

a bunch of photos from 1975.

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Alpacaca's who is cute?

early retirement has caused GM's pension funds to dry up faster then people thought was possible.

computer for splitting the cheque

Daily Chav

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La Liz by Avendon ca 68

occasionally anarachsits have a sense of humour about themselves

half a dozen elizabeth peyton drawings, some better then others--not her best work.

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from college men, his smile is more exciting then his cock.

fifty of the best protest signs of 2009.

Mary Greenglass is the second glbtq episcopal bishop--i like this woman, smart, capable, and knows what she is doing.

game changing essay on the new topographers from lacma on fire, with this amazing ppgh:

As a movement, the New Topographers have been more respected than loved. ("If I sign your petition can I look at something else?") The revelation of this exhibition is how much things have changed. OK, it's not exactly the feel-good show of this holiday season, but neither is it medicinal.
These artists were reacting against the Ansel Adams mode of landscapes. Yet as recently as the mid 1970s, that still entailed making meticulously exposed 8x10 B&W prints. (Only Shore's photos are in color.) Houses and cars and signs have changed enough to introduce unexpected notes of nostalgia. It's easier to read irony into the pictures, intended or not. Have the images lost their edge, or simply become part of art history?

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From the New Industrial Parks of Irivine California.

Works Cited:


Primary Sources:
Pine-Coffin, R. (trans). Augustine. Confessions. London, Penguin Modern Classics, 2005.
Wright, William (trans). Eusebius, Ecclesiastical History. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. 1898.
Documents of the Council of Nicea. New Advent Church Fathers. http://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3801.htm


Articles
Caner, Daniel “The Practice and Prohibition of Self-Castration in Early Christianity
” Villgae Christane, 1Vol 1. No 54. 1997. 401.
Dimshaw,Carolyn. “Eunuch Hermeneutics”, ELH, Vol. 55, No. 1 (Spring, 1988), pp. 32
Hanson, RPC. “A Note on Origen's Castration” Viligae Christianiae. Vol. 20, No. 2 (Jun., 1966), pp. 81-82


Books
Bernau, Anke, Evans, Ruth, and Salih, Sarah. (ed.) Medieval Virginities. Toronto, University of Toronto Press. 2003.
Brown, Peter. he Body and Society:Men, Women,and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity. Columbia University Press, New York. 2000.
Ferguson, Everrt. Church History. Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 2005.
Miles, Margaret. Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine's Confessions. New York, Cross Roads Publishing House. 1992.
Stark, Judith Chelius. Feminist Interpretations of Augustine. From the seires Re-REading the Canon. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press. 2007.
Taylor, Gary. Castration:An Abbreviated History Of Western Manhood. New York, Routledge. 2000. .

Augustine and Origen were t wo foundational thinkers in western chisttian history about sexuality and the body. They had other things to say, other opinons, and other desires, but those two elements provided a defining thread throughout the throughts and constructions of their reality. Though they were building work up, constructing from history and experience, synthesizing thought patterns from Israel, Greece, North Africa, Egypt and Rome, there theology of the body does not seem to be very constructive. It seems absent, pockmarked with lacunae, and foundationally absent.

This absence could be constructed as beginning from the body. The results of the corporeal body, and the later failures of the corporal body foreground their experiences as both men and as theologians. There are two concrete examples of this, Origen's self-castration and the problematic relationship that Augustine had with his son, and the son's unnamed mother. The castration was common enough to be counciled against at Nicea, and had a long enough psychic life to be mentioned symbolically or linguistically well into the medieval era. Augustine's son is mentioned in the Confessions. His conversion to mainstream Christianity provides an impediment to not only a full and complete relationship with the child, but with the mother (who was a concubine) and his wife.

These two events were part of the cultural context of the time. They were not isolated incidents. They had a long life outside of the church as well. Thesse two acts could be construed as narratives of absence, of neglect, of longing, and desire. They left the church scrambling for narratives of presence, completion, and satiation. Using Augustine's Confessions and City of God, plus Origen's sermons, the council documents of Nicea, 1^st century discussions of sexuality, and later commentaries/histories I hope to discuss this tension. There have been attempts to broker a peace between the longing and the desire for completetion, but the wound is so deep, and the brokenness so primal, that the tension orgininates in the core of Christan histoy itself. Keeping that in mind, I will spend the paper discussing these two men as sites of contention, a contention that perhaps should not be constructed as a set of problems to be solved, and more likely to be constructed as a delicate pas de deux where erotic presence and absence introduce desire that leaves feelings of profound loneliness.

To castrate oneself is to make the isolation from the body move from a symbolic act to one of the extreme literality. Though there were any number of symbolic castrations at this point, constructions of for example celibacy or renouncements of the flesh that functioned as speech acts with the same purpose as gelding, using a knife on the tender parts to our post-modern and western cultures seems an extreme. While not a common practice, there is a number of textual cites that suggest this behaviour was not rare in the cultural contexts of the 1^st and 2^nd centuries.

It was common enough, that it was frequently condemned. Even in letters and sermons at the end of his life, Origen worte about the violence as too much, as an act of excessive devotion. This renunciation of the practice has led some scholars to suggest that he never castrated himself, that the rum ours were an object of speculation, matching the excess of other early patrisitic discussions, especially since the castration was first mentioned in Eusebius's Ecclesiastical History. ¹

The English early church historian RPC Hanson's “A Note On Origen's Self Mutualition”, published in the Vilgiae Chritinae in 1966 was the first to majoirly outline exactly what the context and history was, going through deutro-cannonical contexts, through a number of sources, and histories—tracing the possbilities of castration as a devotional act, where he mentions not only the ubiquitious Matthew 19:2, but also the acts of John 53 and 54, Tertuillian, and others. The issue of castrating for any number of reasons, weighed heavily on the mind of the early church fathers as a serious moral and spirtial act.

In an extension of this essay, Daniel Baron writes about how these acts were considered a problem for early church history: “(Studies of this History) tend to marginalize self-castration as a rare act on the "lunatic fringe"6of early Christian asceticism.Their view needs modification. Though testimony is scanty, sources from the fourth century indicate that by then self-castrationhad become a real problem in the nascent Church. Basil, for example, excuses his discussions of it by asserting a need
to "check the many such eunuchs" who had "already grown prominent in the Church. A more general concern appears in the Nicaean Canons and the so-called Apostolic Constitutions which contain statutes against self-made eunuchs both among the laity and the clergy

It must be clear however that the desire against castration was more many people a move to avoid having sex with women. It was a way to elimainate the source of desire to never be forced to think about it again, never be dragged down into the swamps of lust. It became a kind of iatrogenic construction of desrire, where the source of vitrue (I.e having children, being married, and the like) ended up in the destroying the soul. Eliminating the source, meant eliminating lust all together.

Though that was the most common reason for castration, and it was the one that all of the sources that Hansen qoutes mention as the primary reason for this castration. There are two that must also be mentioned. Living in a roman context, Eunuchs provided a legitimate third gender. There was a rhetoric of proper roles and behavior for those who had their testicles removed. There were then a christians who were eunuchs as new converts. Not only that, but those in the Roman era who had there testicles removed were often slaves. In addition, at this point in time the penis was subservient in political and social power to other male genitals. In these contexts, Christians who chose to be castrated were those who continued to other themselves, to mark themselves as slaves, as those who were willing to engage in a “little” martyrdom and give up the most important thing that they could, aside from their lives.

This must have had some influence on Origen, who as a new convert was trying to find his place, his contexts and his desires. But all of these reason were sub-textual for the one that is the most clear, and becomes strangely, a kind of argument in favour of a whole church. Origen castrated himself in order to teach women. He became a third gender in order to interact with a second. The medieval historian John A Arnold makes this explicitly clear: “"the point of Origen's castration was to remove scandal rather then to remove desire. The latter, as ORigen said, it refused to do" The removing of scandal in order to include women in the contexts of the church is less interesting then this idea of desire never ending—that elimanting the source of desire fails to eliminate desire itself.

The desire to elimanate both this practice of castration and sexual desire, and by extension elimanting sexual otherness could be considered one of the goals of Nicea. Though there were not many explicit prohibitions against sexuality in these councils, one of there goals was to speak about what made them Christian and what separated them from their cultural context. The cultural context here, was one that encouraged castration as a mark of status, but also thought that the christans were engaging in a variety of sexual sins that were scandalous—including but not limited to orgies and incest (because the early followers called each other brother and sister).

In this context, there became a perverse catch 22. Castration could prove that they were incapable of lust and were not committing the acts that they were accused of but it also meant that they were engaging in a context that was explicitly hostile to who they were. Besides, eunuchs were often used as sexual escorts or members of relgious cults that were not christan at all, and the assumption was that choosing to eliminate testicles for reasons outside of this kind of religious fidelity were ambiguous and not well understood. Within this context, one can understand the need for the council of Nicea to sepereate themselves from both Romans who were engaging in this practice and larger christian communities.

The canon against this prohibition, does talk about a variety of exceptions—in it's finesse in texts of exclusion and conclusion it becomes a deft way of defining otherness, and allows for multiple examples of those who are still allowed to be castrated. In this capacity it is similar to the Roman rules that made castration illegal, but allowed for those who cut them off with their own hand to not be prooscusuted:”If any one in sickness has been subjected by physicians to a surgical operation, or if he has been castrated by barbarians, let him remain among the clergy; but, if any one in sound health has castrated himself, it behooves that such an one, if [already] enrolled among the clergy, should cease [from his ministry], and that from henceforth no such person should be promoted. But, as it is evident that this is said of those who wilfully do the thing and presume to castrate themselves, so if any have been made eunuchs by barbarians, or by their masters, and should otherwise be found worthy, such men the Canon admits to the clergy.”

Nicea allows for another possibility—it is the mark of a discourse that moves from the policing of literal, to the construction of the linguistic or rhetorical. In this context, the prohibitions will become ones that centre on behaviour, and intellectual contexts and not on explicit acts. We have then these calls to a pseduo-castration, or a castration of the heart, in a similar transformaiton to the epistles of Paul, where a circiumscion of the penis becomes a circumscion of the heart. In this context, a castration of the testicles becomes a castration of the sexual will—or to put it another way, a pyhiscial construction becomes a social and cultural construction.

This can be seen in the work of Origen, where talks movingly about the nature and glory of the word of God, where the word becomes material. The creation of language becomes a creation of flesh, and the controlling of language, becomes by extension a controlling of flesh. This was balance was to have occurred from the beginning of time, but was also supposed to be new, so we have this permanet tension between what is ancient and what is new, what was always there through the language of the divine, and what is constructed through the fallen flesh of humanity. This desire for language, and it's slippery interlation with the body is found throughout the church fathers. Origen castrating himself becomes a failure of language, and not a failure of self.

This lingustic transformation becomes a permanent thread throughout any number of discourses that surround christanity from the 3^rd century to the 21^st. Carolyn Dimshaw, the queer theorist and medievalist, mentions for example, several of the golden legends that talk about language bringing up, or reconstructing the failed body. Though this is between 800 and 1000 years after the death of Origen, it suggests that this anxiety about how language and the body interacts—and even attempts to control the body, or the construct the body as negativity, as a set of absences, as a set of prohbitions against what we can have and what we cannot have becomes vital. Two examples from Dimshaw's essay Eunuch Hermenutics, allow for both lingusitic and physical eunuchs to retain their place as a kind of third gender. The first one: “"Cesearius again: "a monk called called Bernard at Calavux was troubled by lust. He then dreamt that he was pursued by a man dressed as an executioner, carrying a long knife, accompined by a black dog. Eventually his persuer caught and castrated him, feeding his balls to the hound. The man found himself phyiscally intact but free from lust.”; the second: “ a pilgrim commits fornication and then is tempted by a demon in the guise of st james the apostle, to castrate himself, he is going to do this until st james himself saves his balls” (108).

These two, both dreams, both about the terror of sexual sin, and about how much easier it would be for God or the saints to remove all desire, so far after what was written by those who made themselves “eunchs for the kingdom of heaven” suggests that t he controlling of body thourh amorphus, absences, the attempting to make present through what is left, has a cultural memory. Origen's ignoble end, and his status as the church father who never made saint, because of his lack of the fiedilty to the word provides an interesting mirroring in Augustine—who began where Origen ended, and attempted to complete narratives that constisted of ragged threads and moth eaten garments.

Though there has been some discussion about the possiblity that Augustine read Origen in translation, and so some of this translation and the like could be constructed as literal, I do not mean in it such a capacity. I am talking about the psychic heritage that foregrounded the discussions of the language at this point. Qouting Dimshaw again “"There is in Augustine's writing a deep strain of belief in the natural relation of words and their referents. Die Diealectia includes a chapter on the origins of words...this fanscaiton with he infnats process of learning language in the confessions suggests a profound desire for verbal signs rooted in the physical, in the body, a lanugage understood by all humans...”

Augustine's lifework, in many ways was finding the language that allowed him to castrate himself without a knife. His internalization of language, of narratives of desire, of continence as it relates to the self, emerges as a centrality to mystic Christianity. This desire for continence emerges in four important ways—his history as a manciean and the use of contraception, the ambiguous and problematic connection he had with his son, one of attachment and detachment, loyalty and shame; how this relationship worked through a series of lacunae and absences, and how these worked as a way of sorting out what it meant to love God.

Augustine began his early life as a Manciean, an early sect that functioned as the largest rival to christianity. One of the things they believed strongly was the complete abasement of the body, and not only abasement of the body, but that the spirit must be forever divorced from the flesh. They thought that giving more children into the world was considered an evil. He became a Manciean just after taking a concubine in his late teens, and having a child with her. His concubine lasted 15 years after the birth of his son.

Margaret Miles explains this problem in her essay about the concubine—Not Nameless but Unnamed: “...Manicheans thought of the created world as the evil production of an evil Demiurgee, they sought to avoid perpetuating it by procreation. Read with a hermeneutic of generaoisty, Mancheans acute sensitivity to the suffering of all living beings led them to seek to prevent the possiblity of further suffering by infanticide or exposure by the long suffering of human existence.” ² His joining this sect becomes a way of finding his way out of the pleasure that foregrounded his life up to this point.

Augustine spends some time in his early Confessions talking about how much pleasure he had, especially sexual pleasure: “I could not be wholly content to confine sexual union to acts intended to produce children” or “sensual folly assumed domination over me and I gave myself totally to it in acts allowed by shameful humanity but under your laws illicit.” Both of those quotes suggest a double problem for Augustine's view of sexuality. The first is that he was trying to figure out exactly what the purpose of sexuality was. The second was about what activities were allowed and what were forbidden—these issues center around reproduction.

Fifteen years of sexual congress happened after the birth of his son. Fifteen years where he did not have any children, or at least any children were not talked about. That he kept, and helped raise his older son would suggest if a second child happened in those 15 years, then he would not have killed the child. It is also well known that the Mancihieans were heavily involved in the practice of contraception. This would suggest that he was integrally involved in sexual activity without reproducing. This becomes a mirroring of and in the views of a later Augustine a corruption of Origen's later desires. The presence of a son, and having sex for so long without children—for becoming a symbolic eunuch not for the kingdom of heaven but for pleasure would be a place of great sadness of his life.

He talks about his abandoning the mother of his child, and about the ambigious realtionship to his son in the 6th book of the confessions: “Meanwhile my sins were being multiplied, and my mistress being torn from my side as an impediment to my marriage, my heart, which clave to her, was racked, and wounded, and bleeding. And she went back to Africa, making a vow unto You never to another man, leaving with me my natural son by her. But I, unhappy one, who could not imitate a woman, impatient of delay, since it was not until two years' time I was to obtain her I sought—being not so much a lover of marriage as a slave to lust—procured another (not a wife, though), that so by the bondage of a lasting habit the disease of my soul might be nursed up, and kept up in its vigour, or even increased, into the kingdom of marriage. Nor was that wound of mine as yet cured which had been caused by the separation from my former mistress, but after inflammation and most acute anguish it mortified, and the pain became numbed, but more desperate.”

This controlling of lust, of viewing marriage as not a conjugal desire for love, and for the desires of companionship but an uncontrollable fire that must be determined to be quenched. The previous quenching mechanism, the previous mechanical castration in the form of contraception was a failure because it made the desires grow ever larger. That she left to go home, that he took over the raising of his son and that she never had sex after Augustine, suggests a number of problems. He loved the product of lust, but it reminded him of his fallen state. He loved both his wife and his concubine, but his faith required a total commitment to the lord, and that was impossible with these two women in his life—though the attachment to the wife was a bit more acceptable and socially. He was also mourning, not only for his sinful nature but

16, 8 1-3

2Found in Femminist Interpertations of Augustine.

That paragraph strikes one as horribly romantic, and the idea of a child who is raised, and then left, a father who returns to teach his son, and then leaves to go back home has a certain romantic sensibility that must be placed in a proper context. From the tail end of the 20th century, the confessions strike a reader as closer to Rousseau then Origen—but the construction of family was different, the expecations of fatherhood is almost unrecognizable now then it was in the ancient traditions. Reading through Augusine, in his confessions is to figure out what the ethic of his relationship with his body and the aftereffects of his body was. In her slim book on the confessions, Margaret Miles talks about the implications of that seeking of a narratology of bodily discipline: “The confessions is, among other things, a narrative deconstruction of what is ordinarily thought of as pleasurable, and a reconstruction of true pleasure. Augustine's criterion for the adequacy of various orientations and organizations of human life was which kind of life provides the most intense and lasting pleasure...”(20).
Reading about the infamous pears episode, in relation to how the text rarely talks about the son is an indication of where the absences work through. Augustine knew that he should have felt poorly about stealing the pears, that the pears did not provide anything functional, and that the pleasure was explicitly connected to waste. The youthful indiscretion of that incident was clear cut, confessions worked out what was wrong, as a didactic way of informing his nascent Christian listeners how to develop new identities and new histories—especially how to control the bodily pleasures in a way that they had not needed to before. He uses the stomach aches, the bodily displeasure, of the purloined fruit to lead to a bodily view of shame, and that shame allows for the discipline that he was previously absent.
The narrative of the son cannot be maintained in the same capacity. He had failed to control his body, he failed at the continence that was required of him. The indiscretion was of his adulthood, it resulted in finding out how to construct one of the more difficult requirements of Christianity. Though his son came from a realtionship where he was engaged with the body, and he did not disappear from the pleasure. The son that came from him in sin was not abandoned, the mother of that sinful child was still for much of his life, visited, and occasionally slept with, The separating from her was difficult, and the reminder of his relationship to his son was a constant reminder of how he failed to be a “eunuch for the kingdom of heaven”--Origen's physical castration did not, in the end, make him any more orthodox, and the symbolic castration that Augustine engaged in, only deepened his sense of shame.
Though he taught, and lived with the child when he moved from boyhood to adulthood, the abondoment of the mother, and the child continued from the beginning, suggested that though the confessions tied the narratives of Christianity to an emerging view of the body, the writing/reading on the body was not a complete act, but a set of gaps—both textually and inter-personally. He went through the Roman pagans, the mancihieans, conventional christianity; but he never forgot where he came from. He went from being married, to having a concubine, a son with that concubine, and though he recognized how the body, and the heresey worked together his processing out where never fully complete. His realtionship to bodies and to texts were never really stable, his attempts to maintain his body by will alone, was seperated by what he considered sin. In other words, the sins of the body intermingled into sins of texts, and became a singluar object, an aobject tht could not be carefully sliced off, could not be discarded.
In his cultural history of Castration, the pyschoanalyst Gary Taylor talks about how this cultural and social intermingling resulted in this cult of completetion, of wholeness. The failure of the body to function fully in metaphor becomes a failure of christanity itself. “Augustine and his fellow allegorists are therefore confident...(that) castration is a mere metaphor for sexual abstinece. It must be a metaphor because the literal reading is illogical. Of course, this strategy...subordinates God to logic; it belongs to a much larger program, epitomized by Augustine, to reconcile a Palestinian religion with Greek Philosophy....(192). Taylor goes on to discuss how this construction was not written on every member of the body of christ, and although there is a move forward to allelegorize the unstable body, the tension of that allegory rests on the making of men into a third gender—that it becomes impossible to play the same games, to construct the same narrratives, and to engage in the same kind of texts between men and women.
Origen castrating himself to teach women others himself, but the crude surgery does not magically transubstantiate himself into a woman. Augustine making himself celibate allegorizes the textual body, but the problem of women remains—and because of his expereinces with his mother, and the mother of his child means that he was much more nervous about the interaction with members of his community. In E Ann Matter's discssuion of Christ, God and Woman, he talks about this role in the community: “After his conversiona, and his decision to live a celibate life, Augustine mantianed a certain distance from wmoen. Augustine;s biographer Possidius says that as bishop of Hippo, he never let any women, even his sister, stay in his house for fear of scandal (Possidius, Vita Augustini 26) It has often been noted that Augustine never cultuivated intellectual reationships with learned ascetic women in the way Jerome became friends with Paula and Eustochium at Bethlehem”
I would argue that Augustine's worries about women's bodies relate to the instability of an allegorical text versus the permanence of violence against the body. To allegorize castration, to make the castrating act one not of physical permenance but of a lifestyle, of desire that can always overwhelm, means that an allegorical or lingustic construciton of negation is always therented. Because the object of this negation is the phallus/penis it pushes outwards on the bodies of women, who's mechincal operatives are better hidden, and who's calls to celeibacy are more ambigious. In this projecting onward, it becomes this game of tug-of-war, where the shame of the incomplete/allegorical castration of the unstable body topples into the the same of a womens body who because of her lack of voice, and really lack of body becomes an absorbing absence.
The penis and testes are so unstable, that they need to be controlled, first by intervetions in the physical sense—in isolating them from women, from mechincal interventions, and in the most severe cases, castration itself. When these texts move away from the physicality, at the same time and for similar reasons to Christianity itself, then the control moves from corporeal solutions and moves into linguistic constructions—these linguistic constructions, the speech acts of shame, of censoring and blocking of desire.
There is some discussion that augustine could read origien and translation, and did. But you can see how the interactions of his body mirrored the body of origen, and how Origen worked through the problems of Paul, who was attempting in his desires to figure out exactly what Christ wanted to say. The body of Christ works as an object of tacticle materiality, but also symbolic language. The language is never really settled—and the narratives that emerge are not linear. The testicles of Origen, work as testimony for the problems of a body that can never be properly reconciled.
This lack of reconciliation provides a originating text to the difficulties of Augustine—who was so afraid of his body, that he was never able to find out what it meant, what the natural consequences of his actions came from. Peter Brown, who wrote about the nature of masculinity and devotion in relation to Augustine, elucidated the difficulties of Augustine's penis: “Frustrated by his inability to rationally explicate this irrational moment of orgasm, Augustine produces more and more discourse and centers more theological debates around the problem of sexual excess in an unending spiral.”
The spiral here is one that we have been caught up in. The orgasm erupts/disrupts in the middle of the book, the body breaks apart, his semen spread and diseminanted through what he thinks and what he feels. Because the body, the penis, is found within the texts, and because the texts are foundtational to how we live with our bodies and our texts, means that those with out penises, without the ability to contain their sperms become violators of the reason that was so desperate for. The body is unruly, our thoughts about the body are unruly, our desire to control the body become an attempt to push back the chaos of sexualised desire.
In this sense, the literal castration of Origen, and the symbolic/lingustic castration of Augustine are two failed solutions at filling the gaps, ending the lacunae, embodying the requirements of previous thinkers, and to rule. The move from literal to symbolic does not change the essential goals of the double mirror, it posits a soultion so seductive that it has become the status quo, one that should be deconstructed or anaysled, to provide other releases for our bodies.

Singles:

Video Phone:
I am spending the year at an evangelical anglican residence. I am flipping through channels, with some people in the common room. Video Phone comes on, and people walk into the room. At the beginning, it is me and this dude named Dave, at the end of 4 minutes there are 20 people. They are aroused, isolated, confused, broken, and horny beyond belief. I remain unconvinced of Gaga's genius, but anything that introduces the other while getting Sony to pay for it must mean something.

Heads Will Roll
The ambition is part of the charm, and how it works as video, as spectacle, as costume, how the gothic (think Siouxise Sioux but also think Melmoth the Wandered) is lightened with camp horror. The sophistication of the work as a pop object is made problematic by the extraordinary sophiscation of it as a song--as a musical object.

Run This Town
Rhianna's vocals are more interesting here then they are in the entire album she released this year. Her ego, unabated and unattached, overwhelms both Jay-Z and Kanye, which allows for her own voice, which is one of the goals of femminism, and one of the goals of pop. She achieved that goal best thisyear.

StarStrukk
Sex is complicated, and straight boys have never quite figured out how to fuck for liberation. Let's give 'em a hand for trying. Plus, it has the best chorus to dance to in half a decade.

Ray Fever--When I Grow Up
Atmospheric, moody, slightly annoying in that Bjork way, a major earworm that prevented me from dismissing it.

John Mayer--Who Says.
The tabloid personae enjambs with some amount of emotional rawness, and although the whole fame weakens me with ennui is such a cliche, the Laurel Canyon vibe of this makes it better then the sum of its parts. This was the single that convinced me there was something there beyond whiny.

Camp Out
While we wait for Courtney Love to get her shit together, and produce something as brilliant as Mono, this aussie dyke will tell us what we are missing. Optimisic song about crumbling, inspirational song about falling, with guitars that surge with the grace that happens in the dark with strange bodies--earnest without being obnoxious.

If You Seek Amy
The single entendre has a long history as blues argot, which may place Brit-Brit as more historically minded then we give her credit for. That said, what is interesting here is not the lyrics, or picking apart the meta (yes, it is about Paris Hilton; yes, the line "does she take a peice of lime for the drink i'm buying is more effective of a diss then registers on paper). What is interesting is how unhinged it is, over stuffed with robots, with vocal effects, with snycopated rhythms, with chesire cat laughing--the mania of the song (maybe literal mania) abstracts beyond any use function. If Blackout was baroque, this is Rococo.

Corb Lund: Corb continues to add to the narratives of classic country--as the last album worked through new soilder songs and new horse songs, this one has farm songs and card songs. This is the card song, and it is about betting on home and therefore need to bet from going away. Aside from the world weariness, the sadness of the vocals, the perfect guitar work, there is a processing of the domestic and local over the international. He lives in Alberta, which is losing money and people, and where the money is disappearing, and where the recession is hard. Best song about the disaster of imminent poverty.

Surf Solar.
Noise. Dance. Attack. Noise. Dance. Attack.

Hang Over OST.
The movie was funny, and hated it's characters. That they thought they were being harder, more butch, more difficult then they really were was part of the joke. From the opening with Danzig, to the queering of Elvis via El Vez, the construction of that joke was told mostly through the music.

Phil Kline:
Sacred Harp singing breeds with Elizabethan ecclestical chanting, and gives birth to tape loops. Holy because of how impure it is.

The Mountain Goats:
I spent the year doing theology work, though I have a problematic and deeply ambiguous relationship with Christ/God. All of my feelings, of loneliness, and desire, of home-seeking, and of scapegoating, of living with the texts, and wanting to destroy the texts are here. Most important theological work of the last decade. We should play it over the loud speakers at the next Lambreth, and JD should get a private audience with the Pope.

Alaisdair Roberts
Because of the hurdy gurdy. It makes me want to make sure that every new release of the decade features the hurdy gurdy--and yes, that includes Adam Lambert.

Marvellous Boys/Ghana
One of the miracles of living in the age of digital recordings is that there is no need to crate dig. These well curated selctions of african pop talk more about disapora, race, the liquidity of texts, and the claiming/reclaiming of culture and history then most--but that is besides the point, they are the party records of the year.

Nellie McKay
Earnestness is the new irony, and Doris Day knew that in the 50s. Wry, reworking/reclaiming of a lost voice is completely decimated by her version of the Black Hills of Daktoa, the loneliest version of a cowboy ballad since Rufus worked all of the homoerotic tension of Brokeback into The Maker Makes.

Mastadon:
Does it make me a hyprocrite that i love the insane back story and guitar wank on this one, but hate it on Rush, or do i just perfer to be slapped rather then seduced?

Lily Allen--Because who hasn't been fucked up and 22, though she makes more money then you, the feelings are the same.

Lyle Lovett
Could be replaced with Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, or Steve Earle, though Lovett has a better band, and has wider influences. There is something to be said about the solid, workman like desires to release an album that is polished, well constructed, warm, and functional. I wish to sound as consistent as he does at his age.

opening went brilliantly.

Nips and Lips

Come As You Are

December/Jan 09/10.

All Images are Commercially Printed from Digital Sources.

1. Neo-Classical (AGO Bus Ad)

2. Lips on Billboard (Across from the CBC)

3. Grinning White Teeth

4. Tattooed Star (Hair Salon, Dundas)

5. Hetero couple Kissing (Eaton Centre)

6. American Porn (Tits and Bubbles)

7. Wet Sailor

8. Green Wall (Yorkdale)

9. Pink/Green (Mac Cosmetics)

10. Lauren Hutton as Shot by Avedon as shot by Me (Meta)

pc010840.jpg

pc010840.jpg
Originally uploaded by PinkMoose

you should know that neither rihanna, her songwriters, her producers, her sessional musicians, nor her publicists are thinking half as hard as you are about this.

Sholem

1) Second-favorite Coen Brothers movie.
Burn After Reading. (maybe too soon, but come on Brad Pitt deserves an oscar for that one)

2) Movie seen only on home format that you would pay to see on the biggest movie screen possible? (Question submitted by Peter Nellhaus)
Barry Lyndon, Imitation of Life, L'Aventura,

3) Japan or France? (Question submitted by Bob Westal)
Japan.

4) Favorite moment/line from a western.
Joan Crawford in skin tight black moving down that staircase in Johnny Guitar.

5) Of all the arts the movies draw upon to become what they are, which is the most important, or the one you value most?
interior design or fashion.

6) Most misunderstood movie of the 2000s (The Naughties?)
Marie Antoinette. A tragedy about the capriciousness of wealth, about the markets rise and fall, the problematics of constructing an aesthetic of luxury, and the overwhelming power of visual sophistication esp. for young girls (in fact the film is also profoundly, intensely autobiographical, which ads a layer of the ennui, of the weltschermz and all of those other chic european words--watch it with the leopard.

7) Name a filmmaker/actor/actress/film you once unashamedly loved who has fallen furthest in your esteem.
Maybe Imitation of Life, in the sense that I suspect it's politics, and the desires that surround those politics are more cack handed, less subtle, and more about the status quo then i suspected--i love it so much, plus the weird incesty subplot with steve is kind of edgy/

8) Herbert Lom or Patrick Magee?
Patrick Magee

9) Which is your least favorite David Lynch film (Submitted by Tony Dayoub)
A Straight Story.

10) Gordon Willis or Conrad Hall? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom)
Gordon Willis, for the muted pallette of Interiors (the only thing that made that move worth while)


11) Second favorite Don Siegel movie.
Private Hell 36.

12) Last movie you saw on DVD/Blu-ray? In theaters?
Orphan. The Men Who Stare at Goats.

13) Which DVD in your private collection screams hardest to be replaced by a Blu-ray? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom)
The Devil and Ms Jones, or any of the 70s Porn.

14) Eddie Deezen or Christopher Mintz-Plasse?
I suspect that Mintz-Plasse, given the oppurtunity could actually act.

15) Actor/actress who you feel automatically elevates whatever project they are in, or whom you would watch in virtually anything.
Tilda. (i saw her in Hell Raiser, so yeah)

16) Fight Club -- yes or no?
no. yes. maybe. it was kind of hot.

17) Teresa Wright or Olivia De Havilland?
Olivia De Havilland is more of a bitch, so that gets it for me.

18) Favorite moment/line from a film noir.
Lana Turner's Tits in the Postman Always Rings Twice.

19) Best (or worst) death scene involving an obvious dummy substituting for a human or any other unsuccessful special effect(s)—see the wonderful blog Destructible Man for inspiration.
Any of the rear projection driving scenes in Rock Hudson/Doris Day comedies.

20) What's the least you've spent on a film and still regretted it? (Submitted by Lucas McNelly)
2 bucks to see Van Helsing.

21) Van Johnson or Van Heflin?
Van Johnson is the last queer icon playing straight in the 50s to be left unrescued by meta-cinematics and theory laden jargon, so him.

22) Favorite Alan Rudolph film.
Mrs PArker and the Viscious Circle.

23) Name a documentary that you believe more people should see.
Rodeo Shorts produced from the PNR in the 50s and 60s.

24) In deference to this quiz’s professor, name a favorite film which revolves around someone becoming stranded.
the first swept away.

25) Is there a moment when your knowledge of film, or lack thereof, caused you an unusual degree of embarrassment and/or humiliation? If so, please share.
I pronounce directors names wrong all the time.

26) Ann Sheridan or Geraldine Fitzgerald? (Submitted by Larry Aydlette)
Ann Sheridan.

27) Do you or any of your family members physically resemble movie actors or other notable figures in the film world? If so, who?
no.

28) Is there a movie you have purposely avoided seeing? If so, why?
Frankie and the Bean, because i suspect that the homophobia ruins a great little cop film.

29) Movie with the most palpable or otherwise effective wintry atmosphere or ambience.
Kill Bill, the scene with the roof top sword fight b/w the bride and lucy lius charachter

30) Gerrit Graham or Jeffrey Jones?
Jeffery Jones

31) The best cinematic antidote to a cultural stereotype (sexual, political, regional, whatever)
Brokeback Mountain and the western. Brokeback Mountain and the womans weepie.

32) Second favorite John Wayne movie.
I only like one.

33) Favorite movie car chase.
It's a cliche, but the one in Bullit.

34) In the spirit of His Girl Friday, propose a gender-switched remake of a classic or not-so-classic film. (Submitted by Patrick Robbins)
I would like to see Caged Heat with an all male cast.

35) Barbara Rhoades or Barbara Feldon?
Barbara Feldon

36) Favorite Andre De Toth movie.
Crime Wave.

37) If you could take one filmmaker's entire body of work and erase it from all time and memory, as if it had never happened, whose oeuvre would it be? (Submitted by Tom Sutpen)
I think that bad film makers or even evil film makers have given us a large amount to work worth, that everything is grist for the mill and there is rarely anything that cannot be redeemed, half an hour of brett ratner shooting in hawaii, or not being able to have the underwater shooting of reifenthsthal because of her nazi movies being two examples.

38) Name a film you actively hated when you first encountered it, only to see it again later in life and fall in love with it.
Red Desert.

39) Max Ophuls or Marcel Ophuls? (Submitted by Tom Sutpen)
Max Ophuls.

40) In which club would you most want an active membership, the Delta Tau Chi fraternity, the Cutters or the Warriors? And which member would you most resemble, either physically or in personality?
The Warriors i would like i think, but i resembele delta chi.

41) Your favorite movie cliché.
the sweeping shot over the suburbs.

42) Vincente Minnelli or Stanley Donen? (Submitted by Bob Westal)
Minelli's rship with Judy Garland made Easter Parade, the most exquisite confection in the history of cinema--such trauma leading to such meriunge.

43) Favorite Christmas-themed horror movie or sequence.
Silent Night Deadly Night.

44) Favorite moment of self- or selfless sacrifice in a movie.
The Night Porter, she sees the kapo on the train, and seduces him, as a sucide, as a revenge, as an erotic pull, as an exhaustion.

45) If you were the cinematic Spanish Inquisition, which movie cult (or cult movie) would you decimate? (Submitted by Bob Westal)
Twillight.

46) Caroline Munro or Veronica Carlson?

47) Favorite eye-patch wearing director. (Submitted by Patty Cozzalio)
Nicholas Ray

48) Favorite ambiguous movie ending. (Original somewhat ambiguous submission---“Something about ambiguous movie endings!”-- by Jim Emerson, who may have some inspiration of his own to offer you.)
The half a dozen alternate endings in 28 days later.

49) In giving thanks for the movies this year, what are you most thankful for?
The two charachters named douglas, that seemed so close to my own personality.

50) George Kennedy or Alan North? (Submitted by Peet Gelderblom)
Alan North

TOP TEN COUNTRY ALBUMS OF 2009:

1. Tim McGraw Southern Voices

I was worried that this wasn't very good, but i have had it in the rotation for a pretty constant 3 months. Poltical and moderate, a kind of post-Obama opus about what exactly it means to be from the South, American, a man and weirdly, in it's moral comprimises and socially constructed smooth negotiating power, a democrat. All of that said, his voice is strong, his band is the tightest it has been in a decade, and the lyrics maintain a sophistication, and slightly dark twinge that we expect.

2. Lyle Lovett Natural Forces

There is something so lovely, so exacting, and so emotionally wrought about his work. Filled with a swing that is only sometimes melancholy which sets the place with an exactitude that is effortless. It is also one of the most charmingly filthy albums of the year--including a cover of the Doughboys epic food=fucking opus Pantry, and perhaps the catchiest song about masturbation ever (Choke My Chicken). That he does this while covering Van Zandt's heartbreaking Loretta, or Bayou Song, the harshest text about Louisanna since Randy Newman.

3. Corb Lund Losin' Lately Gambler

Not as epic as the last one, a set of domestic settlings. Moving from home because of money, or losing lovers to the lure of the east, or gambling in suburban malls instead of Vegas. Post-recession, for a group of people that never made that much money in the first place.

4. Roseanne Cash The List

Maybe this riding her daddy's coat tales has more to it then I anticipated. A freudian nightmare of loss and erotic attachment to the absent, it provides a liturgical counterpoint to the popularizing hagiography of Cash. (I am reminded of what Dorthy Day said about being made a saint: "“Don't call me a saint. I don't want to be dismissed so easily")

5. Steve Earle Townes

Speaking of acts of Hagiography. Earle seems more comfortable in New York then he ever did in Nashville, and some of the best work about home is done by those in exile. Sung by a survivor of vice, the rough burr of hard living is never made smooth, but it is also not used as an excuse for poor musicianship or lacklustre performances. An act of brotherly devotion that works as a musical text as well.

6. Alaisdair Roberts Spoils

Outsider folk singer from Edinburgh. Holy, multivalent, ancient and post-modern, it's competing signals isolate any attempts at singular meaning. It is a morally severe attempt to find out what it means to be holy, and to not be religious, and is filled with both a terror of the divine and a love of Her as a parent. It also featured the hurdy-gurdy, which is awesome.

7. Bob Dylan Christmas in the Heart

It must be a joke, some inscrutable camp construction that is not intended to be understood--and so one wonders if the last jewish mystic is playing around on us or making some sort of real statement. That he keeps throwing curve balls, and we keep swinging must mean something.

8. Luke Bryan Doin' My Thing

Young, handsome, and reatively new to the scene, he knows how to write.

9. Brad Paisley American SAturday Night

Better contained, and excluding his more sentimental instincts, here for this voice, and his refusal to play to the worst instincts of his own cornpone schitck.

10. Miranda Lambert Revolution

Not the masterpeice of the last album, but enough of a new direction, with the same kind of pop instincts grafted onto a desire for Opry led legitimacy. Makes me want to know what she does next.

TOP TEN COUNTRY SINGLES OF 2009:

1. Adam Lambert Ring of Fire

The song really is about destruction, it is not cute or sweet or loving--it is about the destruction of both self and other. Sarah Vowell once wrote about the fire being hellfire--a pentecostal fear of damnation. This queering of the original text takes the discourse about original sourcing, about love, and about the desire for queer acceptance and moves it to centre stage. More destabilzing then the faux-outrage blowjob at the AMA awards, and also prettier then most other covers.

2. Dierks Bentley Sideways

The sing-along chorus of the summer, pure pleasure.

3. John Mayer Who Says I Can't

Remember when Laurel Canyon folk used to be as country as Bakersfield or Alabama or Omaha, makes we want to hear an entire album from him.

4. John Rich Shuttin' Detroit Down

Rich turned crazy this year, with the cocaine, the legal messes, whatever he was doing to Glenn Beck, and the general irrascibility, all of which hid the album, which might have been a mixed blessing, because there was only one or two great songs on it. This was one of them, a sequel to What Made Milwauke Famous, it was a huge stone on the chest, equal parts first person reportage and call to economic war.

5. Brad Paisley – “Welcome to The Future”

A little optimism never hurt anyone; the guitar is super tight, and the eight byte sound effects make the song both about then and now. A correction to his cult of nostalgia.

6. Heartland Mustache

I laughed. I still laugh.

7. Carrie Underwood Cowboy Casanova

I love when erotic langour goes all sideways and bitter.

8. White Horse--Taylor Swift

She could do with a bit more self awareness, but there is something tender that seems real--i mean i know the problems with authenticity and pop, but there is something so lovely, so intensely broken about how she realises what she was told was a lie.

9. Miranda Lambert White Liar

You do not want to get Miranda Lambert angry, you would not like her when she is angry. (she is a bit self loathing, and sad, here too, but it is mostly about the vengeful)

10. Roseanne Cash Sea of Heartbreak

I love her voice.

TOP FIVE COUNTRY REISSUES OF 2009:

1. In the Pines Tar Heel Folk Songs and Fiddle Tunes Old Time Music of North Carolina
2. Fire in my Bones Raw and Rare and Other Worldly African American Gospel
3. Joan Baez How Sweet the Sound
4.
5.

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST MALE VOCALISTS OF 2009:

1. Brad Paisley
2. Corb Lund
3. Steve Earle

COUNTRY MUSIC’S THREE BEST FEMALE VOCALISTS OF 2009:

1. Taylor Swift
2. Carrie Underwood
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outline for xian history paper

introduction:

1. origen and augustine were two of the most important thinkers of sex and the body in the early church
   
2. origen's castration and augustine's (problematic) relationship with his son were two narratives of profound ambiguity that cast a long shadow of this history.
   
3. these two acts could be construed as narratives of absence, of neglect, of longing, and desire.
   
4. they left the church scrambling for narratives of presence, completion, and satition.
   

origen:

1. on the history of castration as a literal act
   
2. on the ambiguity of exactly what origen did
   
3. on the calling out of castration at the council of nicea
   
4. on the move from castration being literal to being a lingustic/symbolic model.
   
5. the construction of celibacy as part of this model, and its later antecdents.
   

augustine:

1. on the history of his libertine nature
   
2. on his rship to the mancieans and the paradox of pleasure
   
3. the ambigious and problematic connection he had with his son, one of attachment and deattachment, loyalty and shame
   
4. how this realtionship worked thru a seires of lacnue/absences.
   
5. some notes on the virture of contience, how it relates to his earlier sexual ethics, and his later work.
   
6. a small note on the misogyny angle.
   

conclusion:

1. the body as unruly and unstable. esp. the penis
2. personal history as social history as church history
   
3. lessons to learn.
   

Early Christian Thought and the Classical Tradition: Studies in Justin, Clement, and Origen
Book by Henry Chadwick; Oxford University Press, 1984

Three goods of marriage, Augustine
(offspring, fiedilty, sacrament)
The Treatise of Marriage, 401
Holy Viriginity


augustine was with this woman for 15 years, some discussion about thier sexuality practicing contraception,

anti reproductive stance of the manicheans

marriage as an example of free will, but if that was the case, is not marrying also the same way, one can chose to sin, but why did augustine not marry him

from elizabeth clarks intro to the anthology st augustine on sex and marriage.

David G. Hunter
Marriage, Celibacy, and Heresy in Ancient Christianity:
The Jovinianist Controversy
Oxford Early Christian Studies


From A Note on Origen's Self-Mutilation
Author(s): R. P. C. Hanson
Source: Vigiliae Christianae, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Jun., 1966), pp. 81-82
Published by: BRILL
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1582228
Accessed: 28/11/2009 14:47

The Acts of John 53 and 54, a mid-second century legendary ac-
count made by one Leucius Charinus of a markedly Gnostic turn of
mind. Here a young man is described as castrating himself shortly after
his conversion. John rebukes him gently, saying that he should have
cut off the impulse and not the members. Compare Justin, Apology 1,
29, 2-3, where a young Christian is recorded as asking permission of
the governor of Alexandria to perform the same act.1


Charles Wilcox, introduction to the good of marriage
The virgins and celibates of ST Augustines time were being challenged by the insidious quesitons: You, then are better then Sara, You then are better then Abraham


From Caroyln Dimshaw's Eunuch Hermentuics:

"There is in Augustine's writing a deep strain of belief in the natural relation of words and their referents. Die Diealectia includes a chapter on the origins of words...this fanscaiton with he infnats process of learning language in the confessions suggests a profound desire for verbal signs rooted in the physical, in the body, al anugage understood by all humans..."

From the Council of Nicea:
Canon 1:

Canon 1

If any one in sickness has been subjected by physicians to a surgical operation, or if he has been castrated by barbarians, let him remain among the clergy; but, if any one in sound health has castrated himself, it behooves that such an one, if [already] enrolled among the clergy, should cease [from his ministry], and that from henceforth no such person should be promoted. But, as it is evident that this is said of those who wilfully do the thing and presume to castrate themselves, so if any have been made eunuchs by barbarians, or by their masters, and should otherwise be found worthy, such men the Canon admits to the clergy.

Celibate Pleasures:Masculinity,Desire, and
Asceticismin Augustine
ERIN SAWYER
Department of Religious Studies
Stanford University
1995, vol. 6, no. 1]
[Journalof theHistory Sexuality
of


From
Augustine is a complex figure who writes a dynamic of pleasure and
eroticism into many of his texts, ranging from his more abstract essays
on the human will, the concupiscence of the soul, and the life of Adam
and Eve in Eden, to his deeply personal Confessions.He centers many
theological discourses and debates with his contemporaries around sex-
ual questions and their ramifications for the life of the human subject in
the worldly city.

Augustine's ideal state is not a quietistic, contemplative asceticism in
which sexuality has been stilled; rather, Augustine creates a new type of
asceticism that turns from the pleasures of the body toward the pleasures
of the struggle against sexuality carried out through foregrounding
sexuality.

Margaret Miles, Desire and Delight: A New Reading of Augustine's "Confessions"
(New York, 1991),

4Peter Brown, in his chapter on Augustine in his The Body and Society:Men, Women,
and Sexual Renunciation in Early Christianity (New York, 1988)


Frustrated by his inability to rationally explicate this irrational moment of
orgasm, Augustine produces more and more discourse and centers more
theological debates around the problem of sexual excess in an unend-
ing spiral.

Augustine, on the other hand, sees sexuality, albeit a regu-
lated sexuality, as a central feature of life in Paradise had the fall from
grace not occurred.

While Adam and Eve can be ashamed by their nakedness, Adam incurs
a heightened degree of shame because of his disobedient member. This
shamefulness produced by the splitting between the will and the body
leads Augustine to lament, "Where does that come from which, unless
resisted, will not permit man to be chaste? ... It rises up, I repress it; it
resists, I restrain it; it fights, I oppose it (18)

Augustine's discourses illustrate that the real problem is located
in the competition between the two poles of animal lust and divine will
within the same body. (20)


To read the Confessionsas a failure on its own terms, however, is to
overlook the crucial metaphor of battle and struggle. Augustine cannot
come to a total unification of the will and a complete sexual asceticism
because the spirals of discourse on sexuality he generates prevent the
possibility of coming to rest. More specifically, Augustine revels in the
struggles against desire and intensifies these struggles within his texts in
order to produce sharp conflicts between the spirit and flesh. I am not
disputing the contention that Augustine may have had certain types of
physical desires, but I am focusing on how he reproduces his erotic long-
ings on the level of text and discourse. Augustine does not limit his con-
fessions to vague discussions about his lustful feelings. Rather, he feels
the need to confess even the most private secrets-"I exhausted myself
in depravity, in the pursuit of an unholy curiosity ... I defied you even
so far as to relish the thought of lust, and gratify it too, within the walls
of your church during the celebration of your mysteries" (3.3.57)-
events that must have haunted him well into his converted, ascetic years (26)