Playing hell in Charleston:
The men and women massacred while studying the Bible the other night in the Emanuel A. M. E. Church were, in their own way, raising hell.
That phrase might seem ill conceived or even disrespectful but it can be invoked here to honor their courage and the A. M. E Church’s long tradition of challenging white supremacy. Their private prayer this week was political simply because their mere existence challenged racial power. There is a long contextual history of race violence in America which gives us tools to see this event clearly but even more than that, there is a history that is deeply specific to both place and to that phrase.
Ren Jender emailed me this piece in Toronto Life by Leah McLaren about having been Jian Ghomeshi’s friend, and her take on his behavior:
What’s startling about the allegations against Jian is not that a seemingly law-abiding person is accused of doing terrible things. That happens all the time. It’s the way Jian wove the most cherished and sacred liberal values of Canadian society into an ingenious disguise that he used to hide in plain sight. He was a wolf in organic, fair-trade lamb’s clothing. One woman I spoke to for this story who is now accusing Jian of sexual assault believes his persona was a deliberate cover for his predatory behaviour. She thinks he created and used his personal brand—one that was endorsed by the same network that brought us David Suzuki and The Friendly Giant—to get in touch with women so he could abuse them. She also believes that for him, in his sickness, that dark irony was a turn-on.
Jian used liberalism and feminism the way Roy Cohn used McCarthyism—as a grand screen of moral superiority that hid his deeper, more urgent desires. Did it turn him on to correct his Q staffers for using sexist language like “manning the phone” and then punch women for pleasure in private?
I rarely support boycotts, as they usually wind up hurting the people you wanted to help in the first place, but I am not going to read or link to Reddit again until they shut down /r/coontown, and I encourage you to join me. That fucking thing is going to get someone murdered, if it hasn’t already.
when i told him i’m a lesbian my boy jay was like, BUT ALL YOU WRITE ABOUT IS DICK. *squints eyes* first of all, patently false. i write about 1 eating snacks 2 hating: new things/going outside/human garbage in general and 3 luxurious face creams. second, i can still absolutely do every single one of these things in between these extensive feelings talks mavis is always trying to have and listening to this dar williams playlist over and over and over while my bra burns. another of my friends was all, “are you worried you’re going to lose your audience?” and really guys, i kind of am? but then i think if i can write “pussyhole motherfucker” 17 times in one post without alienating anybody cool then what’s the fucking problem? i haven’t dated a man in over three years, and before that i was fucking midgets and dudes who work at foot locker and shit, so it’s not like anyone was hanging around here for heartwarming stories of heterosexual love anyway. if you hate it, kick rocks. you won’t be missed. bitches gotta eat bitches out.
Mallory and I are superfans of MEG, the terrible book about the big shark, which is finally getting out of development hell courtesy of…Eli Roth…and you can talk about MEG freely in this space.
Alexander Chee on working for William F. Buckley and his wife Pat. I became mildly obsessed with Pat Buckley after reading their son’s book about his parents, and I think Chee really gets at the complexities of hate and love in this piece.
I thought this meditation on reading as therapy was fascinating!
Bibliotherapy is a very broad term for the ancient practice of encouraging reading for therapeutic effect. The first use of the term is usually dated to a jaunty 1916 article in The Atlantic Monthly, “A Literary Clinic.” In it, the author describes stumbling upon a “bibliopathic institute” run by an acquaintance, Bagster, in the basement of his church, from where he dispenses reading recommendations with healing value. “Bibliotherapy is…a new science,” Bagster explains. “A book may be a stimulant or a sedative or an irritant or a soporific. The point is that it must do something to you, and you ought to know what it is. A book may be of the nature of a soothing syrup or it may be of the nature of a mustard plaster.” To a middle-aged client with “opinions partially ossified,” Bagster gives the following prescription: “You must read more novels. Not pleasant stories that make you forget yourself. They must be searching, drastic, stinging, relentless novels.” (George Bernard Shaw is at the top of the list.) Bagster is finally called away to deal with a patient who has “taken an overdose of war literature,” leaving the author to think about the books that “put new life into us and then set the life pulse strong but slow.”
Did you read the thing about gay Mormon men who oppose same-sex marriage, and are married to women? The writer also talks to gay Mormon men who are married to women and DO support same-sex marriage:
He notes that Danny Caldwell and many of the others in the brief do not refer to themselves as “gay.” They prefer the term same-sex attraction, or SSA. “To them it’s an inclination, but it’s not their identity, it’s not who they are,” unlike their religious identity, he says.
Derek Kitchen, another gay former Mormon I spoke with in Salt Lake City, who is running for city council, says this approach can’t end well. “When your entire personal worth is your standing within the church and where you land in the afterlife…It’s hard to say it’s okay to be gay.” If your strategy is to get your family and friends to accept who you are without really supporting who you are, he adds, paraphrasing gay activist and author Dan Savage, “I would not say that it gets better.”
