Well I’ve been a blogwatcher on LSD

And I’ve rode bare-a***d on the top of the Sphinx

I’ve even done a gold ribbon [???] on the top of Kismet

And well, that was fun for a while, you bet, but…

Cacciaguida: What’s the difference between bawdy and crude?

Camassia on Andrew Sullivan’s “leaving the Church, keeping the faith” statements. Follow-up here. Both well worth your time.

Dappled Things: “The Moslems are, yet again, wreaking terror and havoc in our country by wearing their very dangerous head scarves.” The next post down is the last three words (or one word thrice?) on moonshine enforcement in Fairfax, VA.

Dear Raed has a whole passel of new stuff up.

New Iraqi blog! Via InstaPundit.

Hit and Run: Jesse Walker on Bolivia’s political turmoil, market reforms (or are they???), and Lady Coca. The comments here are also rewarding and quick reading.

Jason Kimble vs. me on gay marriage–once again I’m gonna have to issue an IOU on this one, though I’ve already started working on (short! really!) replies. But I’ve got a lot on the plate right this minute and will not be able to get to this stuff until later in the week.

Sed Contra: Moving post on meeting the Pope.

The Volokh Conspiracy: A funeral in Israel–state-established religion not exactly working according to plan.

New X-Men #148: “As with a lot of Morrison’s superhero work, it combines old school Silver Age lunacy with entirely modern Morrisonian lunacy, and somehow comes up with something that seems to make complete sense on its own terms.” I want to write about this idea of lunacy later, since I think it’s the reason I adore the Lee/Kirby X-Men and Grant Morrison’s run but am not especially sold on Chris Claremont.

And an excellent piece on Evelyn Waugh’s religion–worth reading even if, unlike me, you’re not a fan of the guy who could write both a hilarious satire of journalism and the only convincing deathbed conversion scene I’ve ever read. Via Dappled Things.

…Bikini girls with machine guns…

SSM: WHY? Got a couple interesting emails today, asking why I spend so much of my time on same-sex marriage lately. The emails were phrased in sharply personal language, but whatever, it’s certainly a fair question.

Partly, honestly, it’s just the tidal rhythms of my attention. Sometimes I am superjournalistic, unable to think of anything except how I can affect the daily surf of the news. For the past couple months, though, I’ve been in exactly the opposite mode. I’ve been thinking almost exclusively about my fiction work. It’s hard to pull myself away long enough to earn the rent by doing basic journalism work. And this blog has reflected that seasonal shift in my interests. It’s moved from politics and high-philosophical talk to a much more cultural/artistic focus. Same-sex marriage is the exception to a general “all arts all the time” rule.

It’s the exception for six main reasons. In reverse order of importance:

6) I’m getting paid for this. I’ve been doing piecework for the Institute for Marriage and Public Policy for a while, and just accepted a part-time editing job there. I’m supposed to be thinking about this stuff!

5) I do think same-sex marriage is about marriage. And I do marriage/chastity counseling once a week. I used to think of it as “pro-life” counseling, meaning anti-abortion. That was pretty short-sighted of me. In fact, my volunteer job (at a pro-life pregnancy center) is about women who want to make marriages but have no role models and no sense of how to go about that. My volunteer job is about the necessity of marriage, the fragility of marriage, and the devastation of a marriageless culture. So yeah, this is personal.

4) I don’t want this to be a solely cultural-criticism blog. Just a personal preference.

3) I think about same-sex marriage in highly literary terms. I think those terms are accurate and translatable into policy language. I think you can talk about the deepest needs of the human heart–the need for a role, the need for a gendered heroism, the need for a mask, for example–without flying off into academia-speak.

2) I’m queer, and so people might listen to me who would otherwise not listen to an opponent of same-sex marriage. You all can vote amongst yourselves as to whether I’m the Benedict Arnold of the Gay Community or its Elia Kazan, or whatever. I can spend my time ripping strips off myself, or I can spend my time not caring, and I think I was supposed to learn in high school that the former route is… not productive.

1) I’m saying stuff I’m not hearing other people saying.

I do hope that helps.

NEW JOB: I’m doing a day-to-day editor gig at MarriageDebate.com. Haven’t posted yet but will soon. You all should visit!

ARE ALL THOSE YOUR GUITARS?: So I had one of those days. Here’s my soundtrack. You can take this as a same-sex marriage post if you like, since the whole self-dramatizing (hey, if I don’t dramatize myself who will?) angstfest was sparked by that “issue.” (I hate that word. So antiseptic.) This is just a passing phase, one of my bad days…. Anyway, better now, but I thought this list was funny in its intensity of sturm und drang, so figured I’d share. I feel like this more days than not. Fortunately, I’m pretty skeptical of “feelings.”

Vestpocket Psalm, “Sonic Reducer”

Elvis Costello, “I’m Not Angry” (Spending all my time at the vanity factory, wondering when they’re gonna come and take it all back…)

Avengers, “Paint It Black” (I see the girls walk by, dressed in their Sunday clothes…)

Elvis Costello, “Battered Old Bird” (He said, “One day I’ll put away all of my cares.”)

Avengers, “Thin White Line” (Don’t ask me how I feel/’Cause I feel fine)

The Baltimore Consort and the Merry Companions, “Cold and Raw” (Well I myself did disappoint, for she did leave me fairly…)

Ani Difranco, “Adam and Eve,” except for the lame condescending part

Cat Power, “Faces”

Nina Simone, “I Shall Be Released.”

IT’S SHANKTASTIC! IT’S SHANKALICIOUS! IT’S DEESHANKFUL! Did a ton of writing today, very psyched, but then did volunteer job, now crashing. Brain fried. Eyes rebelling against computer screen. Plan to post tomorrow, late, after viewing many movies (right now the rundown is “The Sixth Sense,” “The Wicker Man,” “Blood of a Poet,” “Beauty and the Beast” [Cocteau], and some IMAX thing about a sunken ship). You’ll get movie reviews, SSM stuff, and the first scene of the new short story. I think you’ll dig the new story.

Here are some links that I would comment on if I were awake:

criticism of my same-sex marriage posts from Motime and Pigs & Fishes (scroll around). Will reply to P&F; on-site later, but would prefer to talk to Motime over email, except I can’t find an email address on his site. Am I just dumb? Or is it not there? If you’re reading this, MLTP, could you drop me a line? Thanks.

Sean Collins: His take on David Skal’s Monster Show. I think I expected less of the book, thus was less disappointed (this is the great thing about being a pessimist!). Agree about weird prominence of Diane Arbus (the introduction, which focuses on her, is really creepy and morally ubersketch), disagree about IMO utterly justified prominence of “Freaks.” Anyway, much of what Sean says is perfectly true, though where we disagree I still think I’m right…!

Julian Sanchez: DC Blogorama!!!! Thursday, Oct. 23rd. I plan to be there, rockin’ the casbah.

HORROR BITES: Below, you’ll find five short-ish posts about same-sex marriage, of which I think “Heather Has No Daddy” is the most important. You’ll also find a blogwatch with some comments about superhero-comic conventions. Now I’m going to blog some random comments on horror that didn’t make it into my big “Rene Magritte, Master of Horror” post below.

The Old Oligarch and I talked about this quite a bit while I was working on the Magritte post. His comments included the idea that horror is when “the parts are still there, but it’s gruesome because what supports them is missing.” There’s quite a bit of that in Magritte, I think, but I’m too tired to work it out….

More scrutably, he suggested that horror is about “chastising overreaching appetites. Man searches for justice in the natural level, but it doesn’t happen there, so it has to happen symbolically via horror.” (He’s getting this from E. Michael Jones’s Monsters of Id; what little I’ve read of Jones didn’t impress me, but this particular insight sounds absolutely right to me.) Readers of my short fiction (you only get the first scene, because my archives are Bloggered…) will probably not be surprised that horror’s overblown, outraged, anguished, bloody-minded response to a world “where nothing is ever put straight” really resonates with me.

O.O. added that horror often involved “gross magnification of one aspect of man”; he used the first “Terminator” movie as an example of the gross magnification of the unconstrained will. The Terminator is “like Kant on steroids, all it knows is duty and will. And it’s terrifying because there are no limits to that. It never gets tired or despondent, it just wants to kill you.”

For his part, Sean Collins, in his senior essay (PDF–I’ve started to read it but haven’t finished–maybe tonight), identifies dread as the key feature of horror. It’s the opposite of suspense–you’re not wondering what will happen, you know what will happen, and it is going to hurt.

He also writes about a certain kind of horror imagery, which comes in two varieties (I’m doing this from my notes, since I can’t cut-and-paste from a PDF, so please let me know if I get it wrong): 1) a being in a place where no one ought to be, in defiance of laws of possibility; 2) a “monumental, monolithic, or statuesque object, serving as a testament to the presence of evil, madness, sickness, or irrationality.”

For #1 you should picture the two twin girls from “The Shining” (“Come and play with us”)–unmoving, not threatening or attacking Danny, brightly-lit, but wrong. Magritte does this all over the place. Elements of this kind of image include: everyday appearance; lack of visible threat or even action (its mere presence is what’s wrong or a sign of what’s wrong); an onlooker in the movie, in this case Danny.

Anyway, I have no particular conclusions to draw from this, just wanted to get those scraps onto the blog, perhaps to be woven into a coherent narrative later.

In a bit, I’ll post the ten scariest and/or most horrific movies I’ve seen, and try to figure out to what extent they fall into these categories.

SSM: THE GAY RUSSIANS LOVE THEIR CHILDREN TOO: Final same-sex marriage post for today. Another quick take on Unqualified Offerings. (I know I’m only addressing bits and bobs of his arguments. I promise, as this series goes on I’ll wrestle with lots of ’em, not just a few.)

UO writes, “I’ve probably got more to say about gender roles later, but a brief thought for now: From what I can tell, gays love their kids too. So if it becomes widely accepted that straight children of gay parents have special gender-model needs, particularly straight children opposite in gender to their parents, I would expect actual gay parents will invest a fair amount of thought and ingenuity in finding ways to meet those needs. Magazine articles, advice books, Yahoo groups, pediatrician’s office classes, the playgrounds of parks in gay neighborhoods, coffee klatches — all the places that parents try to figure out what the hell they’re doing before they ruin their children….”

Yeah, I think people generally love their kids. I also think–and this is pretty obvious really!–that parents often choose family structures that put their kids at a distinct disadvantage. That’s pretty much the entire “Unexpected Legacy of Divorce” argument in a nutshell.

If it is so easy to overcome problems in family structure simply by reading magazines and seeking out Gender Appropriate Role Models, why does this not work so well when it comes to divorce or single motherhood? Surely these parents, too, love their children. But it’s really hard to replace Dad. Maggie Gallagher (there’s that name again…) wrote an excellent 1992 piece about her own experience as a single mother (unavailable online, but you can find an excerpt here) that takes a hard-hitting look at this fact.

And as Jennifer Hamer’s important What It Means to Be Daddy: Fatherhood for Black Men Living Away from Their Children inadvertently showed, no matter how much a guy wants to be involved in his family, it’s really hard if he’s not married to his kids’ mother. And that’s true of the kids’ father, not their “father figure.” A friendly guy who comes over to the house a lot, and tries to be like a father to you, isn’t even close to a reliable, in-house, married father. There is really no substitute.

I should be crystal clear: People whose parents chose sub-optimal family forms, or had said forms thrust upon them, or some combination of choice and constraint, generally go on to lead only reasonably screwed-up lives just like everybody else. Nobody’s doomed because mommy and daddy didn’t marry. But it makes things harder. Often, a lot harder. Kids grow up, and they work through it, because we’re a tough breed, humans. But why should they have to?