MagicThought

Here is the link to an article from the BBC news that talks about the growing number of athiests in the U.S., and also mentions the numerous books out today that question God and religion. Apparently people are finally noticing this trend and becoming aware that we are in a moment of doubt…they just don’t really seem to know why.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/7053157.stm

Kristin K.

Ok, just when you thought it couldn’t get weirder, here comes a new book, which according to it’s title is a memoir written by a foreskin. Circumcision will become central to our thinking when we read Paul’s Letter to the Romans and sections of the Hebrew bible, as it was the central paternity ritual in ancient cultures for thousands of years, and is still the subject of much debate. Note that the book review I’m pasting below begins by acknowledging the current obssession with books about God that I talked at length about a few weeks ago. This is the first time I’ve seen someone acknowledge this current trend. Also note all the references to fathers — abusive or dead or ancient. And notice the discussion of patrilineal anxiety near the end of the review, and the reviewer’s depiction of the memoirist’s ultimate show of defiance to God the father in the conclusion.
Dr.B.

October 21, 2007
Painfully Religious

By BENJAMIN ANASTAS
FORESKIN’S LAMENT

A Memoir.

By Shalom Auslander.

310 pp. Riverhead Books. $24.95.

It has been another good year for God everywhere but in the bookstores. Whether it is Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s emancipation proclamation from Islam in “Infidel” or the historian Mark Lilla’s reckoning with Christianity’s relationship to politics in “The Stillborn God” or Christopher Hitchens’s withering indictment of the Big Three in “God Is Not Great,” the religious impulse so prevalent around the globe has been taking a serious — that is to say high-minded — drubbing. With the exception of Hitchens, who is not above throwing a sucker punch to please a crowd, the current challengers to the Lord’s dominion have been instructive and edifying company on the page, but rarely any fun.

Now Shalom Auslander has entered the ring, flying off the ropes, pro-wrestling style, with his memoir, “Foreskin’s Lament,” a no-holds-barred affront to the G-d whose name is never uttered by the faithful under Jewish law. Auslander, a contributor to “This American Life” and the author of a book of stories called “Beware of God” (2005), grew up in a strict Orthodox community about 30 miles north of Manhattan — “By the time I was 8 years old,” he recalls, “I had already learned 12 different names for God” — and his funny, fierce and subversively heartfelt book is a record of his coming-of-age in captivity and an ode to “the evil inclination” that would set him free from bondage, but not entirely.

“My relationship with God,” Auslander writes in a typically bracing passage, “has been an endless cycle not of the celebrated ‘faith followed by doubt,’ but of appeasement followed by revolt; placation followed by indifference; please, please, please followed by” — well, a series of rebukes that can’t be printed here.

“Foreskin’s Lament” is divided into self-contained episodes that hew neatly to the David Sedaris model (and that all but come with commentary by Ira Glass) while revealing a world and mining a moral outrage that is Auslander’s own. There is the annual Yeshiva of Spring Valley Blessing Bee, when students compete to call out the correct blessing for foods based on the six major categories and the infinite number of combinations outlined in “The Guide to Blessings.” Auslander’s quest to be a talmid chuchum, or wise student, is handicapped by trouble at home: his father gets violent when he hits the kosher wine, leading to bloody noses and compensating gestures from his beleaguered mother (“Who wants the last matzo ball?” my mother asked. “I made extra”). He’s also thwarted by Rabbi Kahn, who fixes the questions to favor Avrumi Gruenembaum, a classmate who has just lost his father. There is the holy ark to house the Torah that Auslander’s father, an accomplished carpenter, builds at the request of Rabbi Blonsky for their synagogue; the honored task brings only public humiliation and more tension to the family dinner table when the doors won’t open during services.

“Rabbi Blonsky was 40 years old,” Auslander remembers, “and he worried a lot about the Jewish people. I was 9 years old, and it was the Jewish people in my house I was worried about. A holy ark wasn’t going to help any of us.”

To Auslander, who is no longer observant but is still, as he phrases it, “painfully, cripplingly, incurably, miserably religious,” the God of the Jews is a great divider, tearing apart families over questions of ritual — some of the book’s most moving material concerns the decision by Auslander and his wife, Orli, made at great personal cost, not to have their son circumcised by a mohel — and turning life into a chessboard ruled by commandments and laws no human being could ever fulfill. Living in New Jersey with Orli (also the product of a religious upbringing) and desperate to see the New York Rangers play in the Stanley Cup finals on Sabbath, the two dress up in their Saturday finest and walk all the way to Madison Square Garden, dodging traffic on the George Washington Bridge and fighting blisters to watch Game 6, being played in Canada, on the Jumbotron. “It felt like synagogue — another place where people cheered for someone who wasn’t there — but with hockey,” Auslander writes. After discovering as a rebellious teenager that a yarmulke and zizits are a license to shoplift, Auslander is shipped off by his parents to a yeshiva for wayward teenagers in Israel, where he meets a girl and even reconnects with God for a time. But first there were more practical lessons: “Israelis sold pot, I was told, and Arabs sold hashish; I didn’t know what hope there could possibly be for the Middle East if they couldn’t even agree on how to get high.” As for his Baba’s failing health back home and the note to God that Auslander writes to shove inside the Wailing Wall, I will leave that for readers to enjoy on their own.

Framing these episodes of faith reprimanded, traif scarfed down in fast-food parking lots and the evil inclination let loose to run wild is the story of Auslander’s excitement and dread as he and Orli prepare to have their first child, a son. Why the dread? Well, for starters, there is the knife. And after that, the Covenant with God that Auslander has spent a lifetime trying to nullify by finding an escape clause. In naming their son Paix — “peace,” a nonreligious play on Shalom — and by having him circumcised in a hospital instead of by a mohel in a religious ceremony, Auslander and his wife take the difficult and undeniably hopeful step of striking out on their own.

“Thousands of years ago,” Auslander writes of the Prophet Jeremiah, “a terrified, half-mad old man genitally mutilated his son, hoping it would buy him some points with the Being he hoped was running the show. … Six thousand years later, a father will not look his grandson in the face, and a mother and sister will defend such behavior, because the child wasn’t mutilated in precisely the right fashion.”

Writing with humor and bitter irony about the most personal subjects, with deep, real-world consequences, is no task for an acolyte, although many have tried. With his middle finger pointed at the heavens and a hand held over his heart, Auslander gives us “Foreskin’s Lament.” Mazel tov to him. And God? Well, he’ll survive.

Benjamin Anastas, the author of “An Underachiever’s Diary” and “The Faithful Narrative of a Pastor’s Disappearance,” is at work on his next novel.

As you may recall from The Historian, the historical Dracula was a Knight, a member of an order of Knights. Nearly all scholarship on medieval knighthood makes it clear that it was initially established as a secret paternal society dedicated to the establishment and protection of paternal descent — not an easy thing to do prior to the invention of paternity tests. Thus the much-storied emphasis in tales of knighthood on saving “damsels in distress,” i.e. women being raped, as that complicates questions of a child’s legitimacy and thus the transference of wealth and property from father to son. Why should I leave my castle to a kid who may not be mine?

And so, according to an article in today’s NYT — pasted below — knights are back in a big way, and notice that the first “castle” in America was opened in Florida — flowered, and by extension, de-flowered, as in what happens when a woman’s virginity is taken — in 1983, the early years of the computer revolution. (The whole Highlander craze about Knights, first the Movie than the tv show, started three years later.) Also notice that there are “9″ castles in America, and that although there are references to “wenches,” children, daughters, adolescent girls and, ahem, flowers!!!. There is a king, but he’s with a princess, not a queen, who could presumably bear him children. And there are two male squires, but no female equivalents. Indeed, besides the aforementioned princess, the only women mentioned in the entertainment are wenches, medieval prostitutes who were outside the reproductive order and practiced crude forms of birth control. There are no mothers mentioned. There is a father, however: “The adolescent girls screech when the knights toss them flowers, the drunken college-age guys can’t quite disguise the childish glee under their sarcastic detachment, and the adults — well, one father on a Saturday night could be heard shouting vulgarities at a knight as his young daughter shrank into her seat.” Perhaps he’s angry cause all of this knighthood stuff reminds him that he has a daughter, and not a son. The father shouts, but the girls screech when the knights “toss them flowers.”

Dr. B.

Here’s the link if you want to see pictures:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/21/theater/21robe.html?ref=todayspaper

October 21, 2007
The Life of Gallant Knights, Off Ye Olde Jersey Turnpike

By CAMPBELL ROBERTSON
LYNDHURST, N.J.

THERE was a time long, long ago — or so the tale begins over the loudspeakers — when a wise king and his stalwart knights stood fast, an enemy army broke, a brother fell in battle and someone was bereft of something. The words are difficult to make out back behind the curtain at Medieval Times, amid the sand and wood shavings and hoofbeats.

But no matter. There sits the wise king himself upon his royal steed. There are the six knights on their chargers. Yon stands Don Javier, master of horse, tanned and thin as a riding whip. And here in the glow of torchlight are two brave young squires. They discuss the Xbox.

For around $53 a ticket ($38 for children under 12), a visitor to Medieval Times Dinner and Tournament, a theme restaurant here, receives a cardboard crown and a meal of chicken and ribs, dished out by a band of wenches and eaten without utensils. Visitors also get a two-hour show involving a king, a princess, some impressive horses and the knights, who joust, fight with swords and generally thwack one another around a sand pit in scripted, physical combat.

As in professional wrestling, there is apparently a plot to the show, but that isn’t what draws the hundreds of spectators to this concrete castle across the parking lot from a Subway sandwich shop. They come instead to cheer the thwacking.

Medieval Times began 34 years ago, as a dinner-theater attraction on the island of Majorca. Javier Romero, a proud son of Córdoba, was there, performing feats of horsemanship for tourists. It has grown to become a theme restaurant empire, with nine castles in North America; horse ranches in Texas, Florida and Maryland; and attendance figures in the tens of millions.

Mr. Romero left in the early years to work on a ranch, then rejoined in the 1990s as Don Javier at the 17-year-old, 1,350-seat Lyndhurst castle, looking after the Andalusians in the stables backstage and training them to perform stunts.

It is difficult to get Mr. Romero, now 53, to talk of anything besides the horses. But he has seen change, because change always comes, even to Medieval Times.

The first castle in America opened in Florida in 1983; for the next couple of decades each new castle was to a degree its own fief. The stalwart knights of Lyndhurst were under the tutelage of a celebrated fight choreographer called, by those who knew him, Tino. Though Tino was the choreographer for the fights at all the castles, Lyndhurst was his seat, and his style held particular sway here.

Things were different then, said Rich Brostowski, 37, the bar manager at Lyndhurst, whose shoulder-length hair and eagerness to demonstrate fighting techniques suggest that he has not completely forgotten his 13-year tenure as a knight. Many of the knights in those early days, he said, read fantasy novels, studied period movies and joined role-playing groups like the Society for Creative Anachronism.

“To me a knight is here,” Mr. Brostowski said, pointing to his head. “This place was never just a job for me. I am a knight. That’s who I am.”

Over the next 10 years the Lyndhurst castle came to have some of the longest-serving knights in the Medieval Times empire. “It was a tight-knit group,” said Stephanie Keil, 23, who has been a serving wench for five years. “They were revered and respected and feared.” (Later, revealing that she is engaged to Mr. Brostowski, Ms. Keil added with a smile: “I’m a lucky wench.”)

Around 2000, in a phase that a Lyndhurst manager referred to as “corporatization,” the company, which is privately held, began tightly standardizing the fight choreography, so one knight could smoothly substitute for one another. (Injuries are not rare.) Personal battle flourishes were curtailed and, under the training of the new corporate head knight, all combat, Tino-style and otherwise, achieved conformity. The knights of Lyndhurst adapted. But eventually discontent arose among the ranks. Two of the castle’s most senior knights, like the disaffected barons of 13th-century England, drew up a list of grievances and began persuading the squires and the other knights to take on the actors’ and stagehands’ unions as their bargaining representatives.

The protests were not primarily about wages (which, for a knight, can run to around $27 an hour) or benefits (there is a health-care plan) or any of those perks mentioned in the signs posted backstage. (“Let it be known that King Alfonso declares that his royal subjects may be eligible to receive or participate in” — tuition reimbursement, 401(k), program, etc., etc.)

No, they were displeased about the lack of job security and about the accelerated — and in their eyes, increasingly risky — knight training of some young squires, who prepare weapons and horses and assist the knights in the show.

Management tried to assuage the pro-union forces, but anticipating the impending battle and the losses that would probably come in its wake, management also began summoning knights from around the country, including Scott (Tweety) Limberg, 24, a diligent and experienced horseman from the castle in Myrtle Beach, S.C., and Gabe Tucker, 32, an Iraq war veteran from the Atlanta castle.

More young squires were encouraged to begin knight training, which usually meant learning from scratch how to ride a horse. Others were recruited, like Jesse Schneider, 20, who trained with the Navy Seals and was discovered at Montclair State University. “He is a prodigy,” said Mike Vila, the Lyndhurst castle’s show manager. “One of the best I’ve seen.”

A secret-ballot election took place in September 2006, and though the pro-union forces were convinced they had the votes, the nays narrowly won the day. It would be the last battle for the old knights, several of whom had already moved on to administration posts or jobs at other castles.

One of the two knights leading the unionizing efforts departed. The other was accepted into a management training position. He is now dating a princess.

The new cavalry, for the most part, is young, friendly and irreverent; it is composed of more athletes than role players. Haircuts are now mostly short. Chris Capitani, 22, has asked squires to tape his fights so he can review them later, the way he would if he were still a linebacker at Rutherford High. “For the young guys,” Ms. Keil said, “it’s not as much a lifestyle.”

For them, this is more a really cool job.

“I’m a huge W.W.E. fan,” said the recently knighted Sinan Logan, 24, referring to the pro wrestling circuit. “I figure this is the closest I’ll get to it.”

The new regime is welcome for some of the squires and wenches, who found that the previous men, as one wench put it, could sometimes be a little too Knights of the Realm both in and out of the arena. Attendance figures are higher than ever, a castle spokesman said. The adolescent girls screech when the knights toss them flowers, the drunken college-age guys can’t quite disguise the childish glee under their sarcastic detachment, and the adults — well, one father on a Saturday night could be heard shouting vulgarities at a knight as his young daughter shrank into her seat.

Of the performers in the show only three have been here more than a decade: John Gonzalez, 32, a knight who also owns a gaming store; Bill Ponder, 49, a former door salesman turned master falconer; and Mr. Romero, master of horse. For the past five years Mr. Romero’s nephew, José Velasco, seemed destined to become his heir at the castle, and had the skills and passion for the job. But one must become a slave to the horses, Mr. Romero said.

Which is why, worn down by working a night-and-weekend job and with a wife and child to support, Mr. Velasco quit in August for a well-paying job at a company that makes parts for fire engines.

Fellow Magical Thinkers, I have a friend who monitors the NYC music scene for me, cause he knows I moved to CS from there and can’t go hear stuff like I used to, and he periodically e-mails me about things that are hip and new.

I just received the following e-mail from him telling me about a hot new band called Vampire Weekend. I have heard of them, and frankly think they kinda suck, but it strikes me as interesting that vampire fever is popping up in all cultural areas, including the alternative music scene:

Hey man, here’s the next NY band. The “Clap Your Hands Say Yeah” of 2007, if you will. Have you heard them? If not, check out their site:

http://www.myspace.com/vampireweekend

Vampires, it seems to me, are largely remnants of a patriarchal past when the fantasy of parthenogenesis or creating a dynastic family line wth out the complications of genetic error always made possible by reproductive sex; as such, their return and astonishing popularity now indicates a kind of nostalgia for the good old days, as well as a fantasy of finally making good on the march of history through cloning, etc. Notice that it’s often women who are tasked with the main work of destroying them: Mina, undoes Dracula in the novel, then has a baby; the narrator of the Historian is largely responsible for undoing Dracula, then she can focus on falling in love and getting married; In Underworld, Selene (Kate Beckinsale) is mainly in charge of Vampire ass-kicking; and of course Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a woman who has no father and is surrogate fathered by Rupert Giles, the guy with all of the ancient books who runs the library.

Dr.B.

Right now on the new south park, the boys enter a dimension containing the world’s imagination.  Terrorists attack imaginationland and let all the worst things in our imagination loose. The U.S. government taps the boys for intelligence.  Its too be continued next wednesday night at 9pm on comedy central, I think.   ~Lauren

While watching The Office this past Thursday, I could not help but think of our class during the Dwight/Computer competition. Dwight races the new website to see who can sell the most paper (a product needed for most writing technologies and reproduction). After the “computer” sends him an instant message, he replies, “Here’s a suggestion, computer. I assume you read binaries so why don’t you go 011 1111 011 011.” These numbers definately look like reproductive organs…So I guess Dwight creates his own doom in telling the computer to go reproduce!

- Jenna W.

As I mapped out historical trends today there are a few things I didn’t get to that I’ll post here. If you can think of more please add to this post.

So far in the two epistmes we’ve looked at extensively, Digital and Typewriter, there have been a number of recurrent elements. Some of these elements are:

Dragons
Writing technologies
unstable father figures
teeth
Absent or inadequate mother figures
Links between literacy and Fathers
Links between illiteracy and mothers

I keep forgetting to mention that the most popular dictation software on the market, i.e. a software program that can turn — as it advertises — “talk into type” is called “Dragon Naturally Speaking.”

Here’s what Wikipedia Says about it:

Dragon NaturallySpeaking is the speech recognition software package produced by Nuance Communications for Windows PCs. It was among the first programs to make speech recognition practical on a PC. NaturallySpeaking uses a minimal visual interface. Dictation appears in a floating small box as words are spoken, and when a pause for breath is taken, the program will essentially transcribe or paste the words into the location of the cursor.

Here’s the link to the product’s website:
http://www.digitalriver.com/v2.0-img/operations/scansoft/site/367062/367062_dns-talk.html

I’m pasting below a paragraph from the NYT review of the new show, “Pushing Daisies,” for two reasons. First of all it refers briefly to the “collective unconscious,” then dismisses it. Second it refers to a current preoccupation with the “Thanatolgical,” i.e. death, i.e. The Real. Such a concern is consistent with a culture immersed in the Symbolic and struggling with its desire for the imaginary.

“Pushing Daisies” stands out even in a season already overloaded with series — some old, some new — that toy with the undead and paranormality, notably “Medium,” “Ghost Whisperer” and “Heroes,” as well as comedies like “Chuck” and “Reaper.” The reasons for all this thanatological correctness probably lie deep within the collective unconscious, but there is also an easy explanation: Ideas are the computer viruses of the entertainment industry, complicated to contract but all too quick to spread.

Hey ya’ll! Since “premier” week is right around the corner I was browsing the network’s internet sites, completely excited that the return of Grey’s Anantomy is less than a week away, when I noticed a new show called “Moonlight.” The description it gives about the show is ”When a series of vampire-style murders plague LA, immortal investigator Mick St. John sets out to find the culprits and re-connects with a woman from his past at a crime scene.” Vampires in LA? Impossible! Anyway, I am sure the show will be cheesy and inaccurate but it could be something entertaining to watch! If you are interested it comes on Fri, Sept 28 at 8:00pm on CBS!  See ya’ll in class!

~Corene

The Braun Castle, a castle that Vlad the Impaler is said to have spent the night in, is a huge tourist attraction and is currently the subject of a legal dispute (concerning ownership) between a New Yorker and the state of Romania.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7004758.stm

The nature of the dispute (besides involving millions of dollars at stake) is a conflict between the man claiming ownership due to his (patri)lineage to the original owners of the castle and ministers in Romania, who consider the castle which attracts about half a million tourists a year to be a “prized asset.” Why the hell is a castle that was visited ONCE by one of the most brutal dictators ever to have lived the object of such hyped up symbolic value? And why is this dispute happening now, when the original owners were evicted back in World War 2?