“A Russian Guide to Scary Movies”: Russia Beyond the Headlines

Last updated on: October 29, 2014 at 8:21 pm By Eve Tushnet

Russia’s first horror films appeared before the Revolution in 1917 and, unfortunately, did not survive to present day. These first films had largely to do with the flowering of symbolism and other decadent tendencies in Russian literature that actively promoted interest in mysticism. Later, horror movies were not produced in the Soviet Union, where the only permissible artistic method was socialist realism. The screen version of Nikolai Gogol’s “Viy” remains the only example of a horror movie made in Soviet... Read more

“The Gift Shop of the Dead”: I Visit the Museum of Crime and Punishment

Last updated on: October 24, 2014 at 9:03 pm By Eve Tushnet

for AmSpec: For the past twelve years I’ve volunteered at a crisis pregnancy center serving mainly low-income women in the District of Columbia, and I’ve noticed something about how our clients talk: Nobody ever says “prison.” Boyfriends, husbands, fathers, sons were never “locked up,” “in jail,” or “serving time”; they were always “incarcerated.” There is an unexpected poignancy to the bureaucratic term—a lacy Latinate word suffused with so much pain, as if standardization and abstraction could dissolve shame. Hesitation first,... Read more

“Confessions of a Former Bad Catholic”: A Queer Calling

Last updated on: October 22, 2014 at 9:10 pm By Eve Tushnet

w/a lot of substance: …As I thought about this last night, I was taken back to my college and early graduate school days. Without hesitation, I can say that I was a deeply devoted Catholic. I attended Mass almost every day, not out of compulsion but because I woke up each morning with an eagerness to hear that day’s Gospel proclaimed, to be present with the very small daily Mass-going community in my college town, and to be in the... Read more

“Sublime Recovery and Banal Recovery”: I’m in AmCon

Last updated on: October 22, 2014 at 12:28 pm By Eve Tushnet

sketching: This week I’m preparing to go to the 10th National Harm Reduction Conference (which I’ll be reporting on for TAC), and also reading for the first time David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest. The conference and the novel offer strikingly different narratives of addiction and recovery–both of which are gaining cultural ground in different ways. more Read more

Three Gay Catholic Links

Last updated on: October 20, 2014 at 4:23 pm By Eve Tushnet

EVERYBODY’S DOING IT. First, I’m in Brazil’s Gazeta do Povo. If you can read Portuguese you can get my basic shtik in a whole new language! Second, Slate has another thoughtful piece on celibate gay Catholics up, which extensively quotes my friend Ron Belgau: At the end of October, the University of Notre Dame will host a two-day conference bearing a name that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago. “Gay in Christ” will feature Catholic speakers who... Read more

Small Synod Notes: Not All Gay This Time. (But Mostly Gay.)

Last updated on: October 20, 2014 at 3:04 pm By Eve Tushnet

* Obviously I’m disappointed that the language of sacrificial love and welcome couldn’t get a 2/3 vote. * More disappointing, though, is that neither “side” sought to imagine vocations–a fruitful, sacrificially loving future–for gay people within the Catholic Church and in accordance with Her teaching. That’s just not anywhere in any document from the bishops. It’s the most important question and it’s still a blank. (Do I want bishops to sit around imagining my life? Not necessarily. But I want... Read more

From “Infinite Jest”

Last updated on: October 20, 2014 at 2:23 pm By Eve Tushnet

[Gately’s] respected and well-liked by almost all the residents, which the House Manager says causes the veteran Staff some concern, because Gately’s job is not to be these people’s friend all the time. –from the description of the drug rehab halfway house; it’s weird reading this book after having read so much about abusive and just pointless “treatment” at similarly 12-Step-only, non-research-based treatment centers in the real world. It’s presented with wry irony here, but that antagonistic, “condescension and contempt... Read more

“Their Decadence and Ours”: Helen Andrews

Last updated on: October 17, 2014 at 11:34 am By Eve Tushnet

right in her wheelhouse–provocative & insightful: Fundamentally, the difference between the two movements was that the English thought decadence was just a game. Only after intense personal suffering did they come to realize what the French had known from the beginning, that it was serious business in which a person could—almost certainly would—get hurt. more Read more

“Ivan Bilibin’s Russian Wonder Tales”

Last updated on: December 23, 2014 at 7:09 pm By Eve Tushnet

One of my favorite picture books when I was a child–second only to Tomie de Paola’s Prince of the Dolomites–was a retelling of “The Tale of Czar Saltan” with Bilibin’s illustrations. see them here! Read more

“What the Synod of Bishops’ Document Means for Gay People”: Me at OnFaith

Last updated on: October 15, 2014 at 11:58 am By Eve Tushnet

doin’ my thing: “Pope Will Marry a Gay Couple Tomorrow, Probably.” “Pope Just Basically Giving Up on Catholicism: ‘Fun While It Lasted,’ Pontiff Says.” “Synod Changes Absolutely Nothing, Unless It Helps Me Politically.” According to the headlines, either St. Peter’s has been demolished by a great gay earthquake, or the Synod of Bishops on the family is a tiny earthworm whose tiny earthworm-castings will be forgotten before All Souls’ Day. Of the making of tweets there is no end. In... Read more