one of my hats writes a song.

some bucks a day have come
and lured, then collared me away
from native greenery and peace
i miss color
my drab environs are confusing and new
lines drawn thickly around me, ink still wet
like fitzgerald said, the dew's
still on her
i must cut away from what looks sharp
or stark, with the light atop the dark;
these ribs won't keep this heart at bay
much longer.

mwhua ha ha mwhuntsman.

this is an email to my coworker matt, a designer i work with a lot. he fly, he cool. why it is that blogging an email is all i've got in me today is evidenced by the email itself. pretty goddam strongly, i think.

from where i sit, here on this friday, some things are apparent to me.

- i can still sleep for 4h and function properly at work the next day

- but doing that 3 nights in a row is really pushing it, @ this point

- seriously, if my eyes could open enough for me to see in the mirror, they’d be demon eyes, i’ll bet—

- like this, [see image at top] only smaller

- your email handle, “maguila”, when you say it aloud, sounds like

o the name of a little-known foreign tennis player who overcomes the odds, or

o the name of a dwarf or witch from Harry Potter, or

o how the teletubbies pronounce “gorilla”

- “mhuntsman” looks okay on paper, but when you say it aloud, as one word like with yours, it comes out sounding like

o count chocula has a crush on me, or

o a warm-weather bacteria that causes swelling and genital discomfort, or

o the noise maria sharapova makes when she hits a forehand, plus the word “man”

- each of our names gets a tennis reference, good for us and our names

- i don’t remember at all how i feel about the copy for the 4 email creatives i sent you eod thursday. are they any good.

-isms in my opinion are not good.

here : another email i wrote. this one to lotta; it was a reply to her rather fierce comments on the list i clipped from amazon (see 2 posts ago, about dawkins' book getting shelled by harry and oprah).

the sad thing about dawkins is that he's a good scientist. the selfish gene is, from the excerpts i've read and accounts i've heard, tremendous, and played a big part in helping to change the genomic game. just this weekend i had my brilliant scientist friend recount this to me and demand that i memorize it (this is the dude who's taught or pointed me to most everything i know about evolution, also a brilliant christian (by which i mean not that he proselytizes, but that his spirit is effervescent, his cup doth run over)) so it's just dumb to have dawkins fall of the edge like that. i don't get why he chose that route.

were we ever to take up a legit point-counterpoint stance, though, the core of my response would be similar to my complaint with christopher hitchens, which itself would read something like,

dear ladydawkins : you're not allowed to assault the objectivity of something without being objective. maybe when you're out for a fag, but not in an even slightly formal critique; not at book length. you're just not. and you know this—fuck, man, let's stop fooling and announce that you know or once knew it better than i know it. and you're not the forgetful type. so you're a fucktard, one who's been swallowed in the fleshy wet lips of his own ego, and now whenever i hear your name i'll have to quash the mental picture of one of those molly-mouth fake vagina deals they sell at the porn store. nice work.

ok, so the similarity with what i'd say to you ends after the 1^st sentence. how i'd continue, though, is to point to gw bush. the man is as good a face as any for the current-day regime of people and policies and –isms that make me not want to call myself a christian, or not want to state it as such. and christ surely knows that i've got my own struggles with trying to square my shoulders and heart up to him; i'm not in a position to be defending the retardedness of anyone else. so we don't have to call me a christian; call me a dude who's trying to follow christ. who despises everything focus on the family has done after about 1986. who thinks christian politics should be confined to the church (since she is the one best equipped to carry out the single verse in the new testament that explicitly describes the conduct of christian society (from early in james): take care of the orphans and the sick; and try to have a noble heart). whose sense of mystery and wonder has increased with every revelation about neuroscience and evolution and physics.

that's the other thing about dawkins, the thing that perhaps irks me most: the incompatibility of faith and science is the terrain of the biblical literalists, for whom metaphor is deceitful – when, in fact, metaphor is the primary framework by which we approach higher truth. (that sounds didactic and i'm sorry; what with it being the subject of 2 recent essays for grad school, i jump to the task of defending metaphor, which is unnecessary and lame.) the dawkster hems himself in and tweezes himself down: he's a recently brilliant and skeptical scientific mind who has reduced himself to the level of the kansas school board.

don't fall for that shit. blame the organization, blame the –ism (as ferris, years ago, wisely gave us permission to do) blame the inevitability of humans in significant power becoming corrupt and doing hateful shit. but it's a band-aid of an argument to fault any faith of any credence for the (inevitably vast) sins of its members. humans in power do bad shit, and religion will always be a prime motivator for rallying the masses; it's perhaps the best way humans have to trick other humans into excusing their individual selves while they rape de horses and ride off on de women. but it's a human trick played on other humans. my personal faith (which, fetal-alcoholic and prone to holdups though it may be, i'll never desert, having felt god's love rest on my own head) didn't sign up to defend anybody's pope, or anybody's –ism. to discount the legitimacy of all faith at all levels is to discount most of the wisdom gained and given by most of the wise people we've ever had.

in the 1^st excerpt on slate, hitchens calls cs lewis dreary and absurd. "…religious apology … some of it is dreary and absurd—here one cannot avoid naming cs lewis…" it's crazy, but that was the lightest line in all the excerpted pages—that was hitchens being funny, smart and light and a leettle bit sassy. no, it's true, hitchens! one cannot avoid naming, can one! egads, the dreariness! if you do not desist i may chortle.

the fat lady is jesus.

this little bit is an email i wrote to meg, my floridian friend & co-student, who mentioned franny & zooey briefly. i have a very hard time being brief in this regard.

franny & zooey is a strange little book, there's almost no plot, and less action; you can stop reading now if you want 'cos i'm incapable of talking about this book in passing terms; franny has her "little green book" that she carries around with her throughout; for several years, this was my version of that; i called it my hip-pocket book. one of the tensest scenes happens w/zooey in the tub and his mother on the other side of the curtain. you get to see them try and have a conversation, each in turn trying to connect just as the other retreats, over this whole mountain of historical prejudice and mother-son expectation and learned roles. (it is perhaps my most-loved scrap of dialogue.) the whole book is centered on franny's college-aged crisis, her professors and favorites all seeming phony. she has this crisis and flees home. ultimately the story is zooey's as much as hers, 'cos it's him trying to help her, to talk to her in a way that is generous and not self-centered, and he's not good at it, in many respects, so he's figuring stuff out too. ...sorry, miss meg, i'm not at all meaning to go into a synopsis-style defense of it, here. all of that is context for the larger point, which is that you're right, zooey does come out with a christian thing near the end, recalling how seymour used to make him shine his shoes for the radio show they were on as kids, which didn't make any sense, and then they talk about the hypothetical fat lady who is christ (in a as-to-the-least-of-these-you-do-unto-me kind of way). and sure, we can all chalk up seymour as a tremendous christ figure, and blah, blah blah that's exactly what my 11th-grade lit teacher taught us to look for. yay for us, we see that seymour is a christ figure, only he killed himself instead of being killed, how ironical. (i actually do love that christ-figure element, but it's more robustly centered in other glass family stories; i especially like raise high the roofbeam, carpenters.) here, seymour's burden is only superficially the point---it's pointing to the point. the point is franny's little green book, the pilgrim's way, which is about a nameless, lame, 14th-century russian wanderer who is trying to do as st. paul instructs (in ephesians or somewhere), and learn to pray without ceasing. franny is so taken with this idea; she wants to do this. she's...christ, she's halfway through college: she's bright and beautiful, has just dumped her boyfriend, and is positively doubtful of her ability to love, to honestly care for anyone, about anything. she wants to sacrifice herself to this noble abstract: pray without ceasing. franny's at a point that i experienced at exactly that time in life, in college but with graduation in sight. the sum effect is to be absolutely insecure about herself and absolutely cynical of the skills and ideas of others. she's lost and skeptical of all the intellects and influences she so recently trusted, and so she has the book with her in the very first scene when she gets off the train; and also in that beautiful scene where she has lunch with her hatefully conceited college boyfriend, where she takes it with her into the bathroom stall, sets it on her lap, and has a panic attack severe enough that she passes out. and later, as she recuperates at home, where zooey sees it, and he speaks of it knowingly but somewhat caustically--enough that she's quietly very affronted. zooey, at least with his sister and mother, is sophisticated without being tactful. but that's when the book begins to come down off the pedestal for franny, and it's the set-up for the fat lady/christ thing. i too remember being disjointed by the ending, the first time through it, and even still a little bit the 2nd. but the entire story serves to make it's last point; or, no, rather, as i've come to perceive it, the ending serves to point my eyes backwards over the story i've just read: love is all that's left. without love, the ability to pray without ceasing has little point, and none that christ cares about; without love, seymour's suicide remains too selfish to see how lonely he was, too selfish to be forgiven; without love, the idiosyncratic neediness of your family is enough to suffocate you. ...that's my franny & zooey ramble, part I. you don't have to like it, i promise. after i recommended it for the reading list last year, my professor trashed it to me---without demonstrating that he'd ascertained anything, or even that he'd finished it---and i had to work a bit to retain my opinion of him. but i did, and now i'm fine.