“ON AVERAGE TERMS WITH JESUS, ON BETTER TERMS WITH MYSELF…“: Ouch. Read more

IT’S THE FEAST OF ST. BERNARD OF CORLEONE! Read more

GUANTANAMO GUARD REUNITED WITH EX-INMATES. Via Ratty. Read more

“THE AMERICANIZATION OF MENTAL ILLNESS.” Terrific piece. If you want more on some of these subjects, check out Andrew Solomon’s Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression. Read more

What makes possible the psychic translation of the surgical incursions into the body into a poetics of healing is a kind of transsexual somatic memory. Surgery is made sense of as a literal and figurative re-membering, a restorative drive that is indeed common to accounts of reconstructive surgeries among nontranssexual subjects and perhaps inherent in the very notion of reconstructive surgery.—Second Skins. This longing for and nostalgic memory of a home (a home in one’s own flesh) which has never... Read more

THE ORIGINS OF EL GRECO: Posting so I remember that I want to see this!!! Read more

MARRIAGE DEBATE is back from our holiday hiatus. Right now we’re offering a look at the second generation of Rev. Sung Myung Moon’s mass weddings; Britain’s first mixed-sex convent; online marriages; “divorce without vows”; marriage in the health-care bill; and a lot more. Read more

Operative in Sacks’s and Anzieu’s practice as clinicians is that same narrative drive held as most precious in transsexual autobiography: from fragmentation to integration; from alienation to reconciliation; from loss to restoration.—Second Skins Read more

COMMAND PERFORMANCE: Once I’ve actually finished Second Skins I’ll do a chapter-by-chapter. Like many academic works (e.g. Etienne Gilson’s deeply-felt Heloise and Abelard) this book opens with its toughest and most jargon-riddled chapter. I hesitate even to comment on the Judith Butler critique since I am a) unschooled and b) desperately anti-sympathetic to Butler’s project. I basically felt like Prosser was defending… you know… common sense–which isn’t really accurate, and certainly isn’t an especially useful interpretive lens, even though I... Read more

“UNDERGRADUATES ARE THE MOST SINCERE SHOPPERS THE WORLD HAS EVER KNOWN.” Apparently my AmCon piece about Georgetown is now available to subscribers as a PDF here. I… uh… am not a subscriber, so I have exactly no idea what’s in this piece. Does it even contain the sentence in the title of this post? I don’t know. Anyway, there’s probably something about The Exorcist, and my high school drama, and the arduous process of constructing an identity. Read more