Transmissions from Acadiana

Hey Mom,
I'm fine. Louisiana is nice, I think. I'm mostly staying with Memeem (my grandma), which is going pretty well. I'm enduring her micromanaging and in turn she's been super sweet. Uncle Pierre is a peach. Most of the fun I've had here, I can chalk up to him. Chris (my cousin) has gotten old enough that he's interesting to talk to. I'm totally at peace with the weather, but not the mosquitoes. The food is alternately amazing and, y'know, Memeem's frozen tidbits reheated plus pickled carrots.

I've been going to church with Pierre's family, which makes me a little nostalgic for when we used to go (how much should I give at collections? $5?). The actual work of putting together the family's land records is tedious and organizationally challenging, but it's kind of fascinating to dredge up all the family history.

So that's how I've been doing,
Max


Some anecdotes from my time here:

We shot an alligator that was in our lake. It took a few tries, but the third shot was "Swamp People good" and killed it dead. Unfortunately we fumbled on the collection and the alligator sank like a stone. So, no alligator steak for us.

We cooked half a pig in what is called a "Cajun microwave" (large metal box with coals on top that cooks by radiative heating). I will never forget the image of my uncle Jacques stepping out from under the roof into light drizzle, looking skyward as he very slowly chewed some morsel of pig, an expression of perfect ecstasy written across his face.

I drive my late grandpa's Lincoln town car (executive edition). Yes, I feel like a bad ass.

I listened in on a detailed discussion of how pretty much all animals taste good.

Instead of enduring the heat and humidity, I've mostly been enduring the arctic winter of Louisiana air conditioning. There is no reason for the thermostat to be set at sixty-five, guys.

We picked up some box lunches from a gas station mart that tasted better than any "Cajun" food you can find in California. It's roughly the equivalent of going to a taqueria in SoCal. Pork, beans and (dirty) rice.

Everybody is warm and friendly and knows how to have a good time. The parties are all-ages and always a blast.

We had a discussion of how some people in a small subdivision were angry at a black guy for moving in because it would lower their property values.

The clerk of court's office charges $1 per page of legal documents you print out and I've been printing hundreds of pages at a time, but nobody is going to count the pages for you or second-guess how many pages you say you printed. It would be called the honor system if it needed a name here. Have I mentioned that Ville Platte is a small town?

Beginning of Summer Update

Let me catch you up on my life:
I got fired from Monsanto in April. I agreed a month later to spend the summer in Louisiana doing property management for my family. In two days, I leave for southern California to visit (step-)family from South Carolina, then Saturday I leave for Wisconsin to visit maternal family for a week. From there I fly to Louisiana, where I will stay until the end of August (living without air conditioning or in-home internet access). When I get back I'll be moving to the Bay Area. With luck, I will have lined up a job there to start on. I've been dating Sarah for about six months now and she is presently looking for jobs in the Bay Area too. I'm unsure whether or not I will apply again to graduate school or indeed if I will remain in biology. I got fired because I essentially sucked at following molecular bio protocols.

This blog has been on my back burner for awhile and I apologize to you, my loyal readers. It's not for lack of ideas, but for preoccupation with life. Just as last September boasted a bumper crop of fresh material because I was freshly employed, had nothing to do and lots to write about, since April I have been unemployed and my future has been decidedly uncertain. I'd like to point out that this blog passed 5000 unique views and 100 posts a little while ago. This blog is not dying anytime soon, but be patient.

Oh, also, I just turned twenty four, so happy birthday to me. I definitely feel like I am in my mid-twenties at this point, which is something I couldn't say a year ago. According to my dad, I still have ten years before everything goes to shit physically.

Turning Back the Clock

I had a dream that suddenly I was fourteen again, in my Dad's house. I asked Dad what had happened. He wasn't sure, but suggested that I take this opportunity to correct my life's mistakes. I thought about what I would do differently. I thought briefly that I'd have more incentive to keep my grades up. My life would be so much easier if I'd gotten a grade point higher by 0.07 (anything below a 3.0 is a tough sell for grad school). Thinking on that, I realized that no, I'd probably repeat that particular mistake. It wasn't as if I was unaware of the consequences the first time around. I'd know how to deal with a few ornery classes and professors, but it wouldn't make enough of a difference. I'd probably be more successful with dating, knowing how to deal with girls. I thought about all the roads untaken and how different of a person I could be but for a few matters of happenstance. Would I have flowered in a more competitive university like Berkeley?
I looked for the bathroom, but I'd forgotten that a little later in my original timeline my sister had discovered two secret rooms in Dad's house that had been converted into the main bathroom (the other one had become a closet, I think, by 2011). So, I re-"discovered" those secret rooms, thereby changing the course of history according to my priveledged knowledge of the future.

I'd forgotten how incredibly small Bri was when I was fourteen. Now she's roughly my size, give or take six inches, but back then she was much smaller than me. She hadn't had any kind of growth spurt and was the little, feisty kid I remember her being. As soon as I started knocking at walls she began ferreting out the painted-over outlines of hidden doors and casing the new rooms.

Pitchfork and Allmusic

It all started with Sufjan Stevens.

Sufjan Stevens was at the height of popularity when I was finishing high school, having just released the second album in his fifty states project. All of my hippest friends had him in heavy rotation on their iPods, right up there with Radiohead. The next year, in the dorms, I used iTunes's network to view and listen to the libraries of fellow students. It became apparent that Sufjan was among a group of bands whose popularity could be traced back to heavy promotion by Pitchfork Media. It also became apparent to me that Sufjan Stevens was a sort of fraud.

His music was all surface and no substance. That was notable enough, but my real epiphany was the realization that his music's surface catered to the sensibilities of critics and aspiring pretentious white kids everywhere. The elaborate arrangements, unusual instrumentation and hyper-empathetic vocals broke through bored critics palates and bypassed well-rehearsed cynicism. This would be all well and good if most music critics emphasized songwriting/musicianship over the progression of music's sound. Sometime before they actually wrote a review that sounded like a fourteen-year-old having a wet dream, they would have realized that the songs just weren't that great. It wasn't that Sufjan Stevens was bad, he just wasn't the musical genius he got billed as.

In the last couple of years Sufjan has admitted that the fifty states project was a publicity stunt that he never actually intended to carry out. At the end of last year he released his densest, most use-weird-noises-to-cover-a-lack-of-underlying-talent album ever, to an excellent reception by Pitchfork.

Hype is a pretty natural tendency of art criticism, especially when the critics in question are relatively young (when I was finishing high school the mean age of Pitchfork staffers was in the mid-20's). Some amount of self-policing must exist for an organization to produce a thoughtful body of criticism worthy of respect. The "Pitchfork band" phenomena indicated that shiny new, rapidly rising Pitchfork Media was (and continues to be) the most prominent, most irresponsible perpetrator of music over-hype in the industry.

Sometime during my freshman year, I started reading AllMusic. They gave the Queens of the Stone Age respectful reviews, said nice things about Sufjan without implying that he had any real talent, and panned Radiohead's alleged masterpiece Kid A. That last bit caught my attention and it earned my respect, even though I disagreed with their review right up until they backtracked and conceded to the album's greatness last year. In short, AllMusic embodied the contrary, thoughtful kind of snobbery that I saw in myself.

With the aid of dorm broadband, I was downloading music about as fast as I could keep up with. AllMusic provided comprehensive artist bios, discographies and a wealth of internal hyperlinking (genres, similar bands, bands influenced, etc). It's design was ideal for me to rapidly sift through music and investigate and expand my tastes into unknown territory.

It soon became apparent that I faced a dilemma. If I continued to blindly trust AllMusic's reviewers, my tastes would quickly become beholden to and bounded by the tastes and knowledge of a small group of individuals. I had to decide whether or not to sell my soul to AllMusic.

I mulled the decision over for a couple of weeks, but in the end it was an easy choice. I was fresh off my discovery of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. I was eager to develop a taste for the "classic" bands and albums of rock and roll. I never put much stock in individualism and indeed, I'm irritated by the definition and cultivation of "personal taste". Personal taste should be treated as bias that must be filtered out of any final, "true" assessment. There is such a thing as great art in absolute terms.

I sold my soul to AllMusic. And I never looked back.

On Militant Atheism

The following was compiled from a debate with Rob about a post of his titled Schmutz about ridiculing a passerby for having ash on his head on Ash Wednesday. For the purposes of this post, please read "religion" as "Christianity". Also, and this should go without saying on my blog anyways, if you have hate for this post, please don't remain silent. Address me directly and thoughtfully, either by comment or email.

For what it's worth, Rob, I don't consider you militant anything either. You say that in defending religion I am "defending the indefensible"? Lines like that ensure a long return letter from me.

So you say it was your laughter after being angry, bigoted and confrontational that made it ok? I guess it depends on the kind of laughter. I laugh a hard, cruel laugh when I've made a particularly witty joke at someone's (or an implied group's) expense. That was the laughter (maybe muted, but the spirit anyways) I envisioned in your post. It is a laughter at one's own horribleness, but it's also a sort of victory lap, a twisted embrace of all that is unholy about wit and being born to, frankly, a superior mind. It has its place in my life and I expect it has its place in yours. I'm just saying that if that kind of laughter has made its way to strangers simply for having ash on their foreheads, you've gotten a little far afield.

Life is not nearly so simple, and I'm not talking about the minority of nonbelievers who will wear ash each year. I'm talking about the bivalent nature of something as enmeshed into human life and culture as religion. It can be very bad for people, but if you miss its capacity to genuinely be very good for people or indeed miss the extent to which it genuinely helps most people within its clutches, you are missing something very important.

Living in Davis taught every person of notable intellect how boring militant atheism can be and frankly, how crass it is. I've lived the dream of a majority atheist/agnostic society and I can tell you for certain that it is a place of rationalized persecution, bigotry and, this is especially important, a notable lack of philosophical thought. Can you believe we have an atheist/agnostic club in such a place? What the hell do you think they discuss at their meetings? Seriously, all I can think of is getting out "the word" and why non-non-believers suck. They certainly don't have much to discuss in terms of personal philosophy. I can't imagine a UCD organization less likely to include an individual of insight and imagination.

I came to the conclusion a long time ago that I was just as helpless in not believing in god as so many people are helpless in believing in him. To think otherwise is to give oneself too much credit. There is no minority of people who came to religion by choice. There is a minority of people whose environmental inputs were balanced enough that their decision was decided by native personality rather than those environmental inputs. People are simply not that freethinking. I'm not a determinist, I just recognize genuine free choice for being the intensely rare thing that it is.

I know a handful of enormously intelligent believers. That's not enough, by itself, to give me pause before deriding poster boys for a largely retarded sort of follow-the-leader mentality. It was hearing intelligent people talk about the significance of religion to them that explained to me why religion has existed as something enduring and powerful with deep relevance to the human condition rather than as some transient fad. That, is enough to give me pause before deriding even people who are obviously floatsam upon the tides of religious alignment. It's even enough to give me pause before deriding a person who so clearly is being negatively affected by their floatsamesque religious affiliation, because I cannot easily estimate the positives that religion contributes to their life.

The "is religion more good or bad?" topic is an especially poignant one for me, because my very favorite "intelligent believer" has been affected both so positively and so negatively by her religion. I've tried to imagine what kind of person she would be without her religion and I find it just too inextricably tied. The knee-jerk agnostic reaction would be a revulsion that somebody could be so consumed by a human institution, particularly under the false notion that the institution was superhuman in origin, but being affected by religion is no different from being affected by anything else and there is nothing inherently wrong with being affected so deeply by human institutions. Individuality is, after all, just another value of human construction.

Back to my point, though. My friend is affected in incredibly positive ways by her faith and in dangerous and potentially limiting ways. She lives a life with both more pain and more joy than I think she would live without religion. As to whether religion made her already-intense personality "gel" into the amazing person she is or whether it has straitjacketed her true potential or paved a road for her eventual self-destruction, I cannot say. Surely there is an example somewhere for every case. For now, I have decided it is best that I take it on faith that it does more good than bad. Whether or not that is true, though, I think her life is unquestionably the richer for having religion.

My highest hope for the world is not that people live happy lives free of the worst kinds of sorrow. My highest hope is that people live rich lives, full of both enormous happiness and enormous sorrow. My hope is that somewhere in the process that experience imparts to them tremendous insight into human nature. If religion makes the world a more painful place on the balance, that is still worth the richness and wisdom it brings to the world. Peace and happiness always sounded terribly boring, anyways. I concede that my belief as to what the balance comes to can be reduced to simple faith in my own educated guess. I also believe that if you had any kind of appreciation for its good, you'd see it "being more good than bad" for the very likely possibility that I see it. You say the hurt unleashed on the world by religion is unfathomable? The good unleashed is certainly also unfathomable. To think otherwise is hubris. Who are you to call the balance in religion's disfavor?

Militant atheists often write-off religion's appeal as grounded in fear of "meaninglessness and death". Let me open by saying people respond poorly and inconsistently to ultimatums ("Go to church or burn in hell! Donate a dollar to Red Cross or burn in hell! Wash your hands or go to hell!"). In practice, it only gets you so far in coercing action and loyalty. Cults are just religions without the staying power. Religion survives because there is wisdom inlaid in the tradition, rules and ceremony with genuine human relevance that resonates with people and their children.

To be sure, there is also the appeal of escaping "meaningless and death", but from my vantage point that appeal is rooted much deeper than such a predictable write-off would suggest. Religion is a beautiful and sophisticated allegory for dealing with death and meaninglessness. Just like old school fairy tales deal with childhood fears and traumas by conveying understanding and acceptance through allegory (ie. Little Red Riding hood is about sexual predation), so too does religion, albeit on a more sophisticated and encompassing scale. Religion, understood in my terms, does not deal with fear of death and meaningless through providing escapism, but by teaching understanding and acceptance through allegory. It is the best kind of coping mechanism.

This, perhaps, is the core of my belief system regarding religion. Religion is allegory that never breaks the fourth wall. Treated as such, it is not strident, it is not threatening, it just pushes gently and inexorably onto your skull, whispering how to live a good life, how to prepare for death, how to deal with problems both large and small. I've been working with this belief system for most of my adult life and I have yet to iron out all the wrinkles, but the beauty and reasonableness with which Christianity has opened up to me since then has assured me that I am onto something real and powerful.

Hopefully this clears up at least some of the enigma of my love for and defense of a religion I don't believe. I'm not an enigmatic person. I sometimes wish I was, which is why my first reaction to being called enigmatic is flattery. My second reaction, learned with time, is a recognition that any perception of enigma is simply a failure of mine to convey myself. I don't really want to be enigmatic anyways.

At the end of the day, these are arguments of belief and experience. There is a hard wall between us which you and I may or may not be able to bridge. Barring the success of such an appeal, I have this: Indulging in militant atheism and then posting it on your blog is cliche and contributes nothing to public discourse. Maybe in New Jersey militant atheism seems like an important voice that needs to be heard, but I assure you that your message is out there. Repeating it will only accentuate the misunderstanding and blind hostility on both sides.

Your post will provide no emotional comfort for militant atheists emotionally traumatized by the thought that their position is crazy. I've never met a militant atheist who thought their position was remotely crazy. Every one has been unwaveringly convinced that their position is the most sane position possible. Militant atheists need no comforting. What they need is a dose of reality. The crazier they think of themselves, the better. Their position is not valid. It is understandable, but it is not valid. Crazy is a label societies have traditionally utilized to cope with unconscionably destructive behavior. Militant atheism is destructive. It is hypocritical. It foments everything it seeks to combat. Its existence does no good for anybody, let alone people as a whole. What you are doing is at best, slightly bad for the world and at worst, extremely ugly. In either case it is not constructive in any artistic, philosophical or political sense I can think of. That post of yours is poison and it, my dear friend, is indefensible.

A friend of mine (a nonbeliever), after reading your post and my defending of your character, said, "well, still, you can be the nicest person and then turn around and say you hate niggers". I mean, unless that was the point, unless this was all an exercise in how slippery a slope hateful militant atheism is from a place of thoughtful agnosticism?

January Update

Quite a few things in my life changed with the new year.

Howard finally moved from Davis. He's helping his parents out for awhile and then he's going to move to Santa Barbara and live with his sister.

I got a new girlfriend. Her name is Sarah. She is cool and things are going very well. We went to San Francisco last weekend and had a blast. Props to Mereb for his restaurant recommendation (Burma Superstar). I bought some random stuff in Chinatown (6.50 a pound for dried shiitakes!). We hung out with Matt and Cory and I finally got to see at least a part their brewing process.

I got a pea coat and an mp3 player for Christmas, both of which have been in near-constant use since I returned to Davis.

The mp3 player has caused kind of a music renaissance in my life. Basically, it's allowed me to listen to music of my choosing at work and in transit. I've been able to give a lot more music my undivided attention and I've started to intensively research and download music again. I've been working on developing a taste for emo and the Rolling Stones. Somewhere along the way I acquired a taste for Sunny Day Real Estate, Supergrass, the Beta Band, Fleetwood Mac's Tusk, the Jayhawks and the Vapors. I also reaffirmed my relationship with the Shoes and Wilco, finally listened to John Cale's solo work and finally acquired the two fabled power pop albums by the Searchers that I had been looking for since last spring.

Amidst all the fun and turnover, the application deadlines for various graduate programs have been rolling in. Which is why I'm apologizing for not posting anything else this month. It's not that my mind is not brimming with good post ideas, it's that I can't justify making good on them when I could be doing something so urgently useful. So, wish me luck. Heaven knows I can use all the help I can get to turn in a few halfway decent applications by their deadlines.

Max's Warm Tonic for Colds

My dad infected the whole family with norovirus. Just when we thought it had burned itself out and I'd made it into the clear, I came down with symptoms when I woke up on Christmas Eve (nausea, sore throat, fever, headache, sleeping a lot). I felt better that night and enjoyed a thoroughly delicious Christmas dinner with family. I woke up Christmas morning at four am to puke and continued to puke until noon.

I made it back to Davis on Sunday and the worst is over, but I apparently got a cold simultaneously (for a second my dad thought my respiratory symptoms ruled out norovirus, but I just got a twofer), so now I have a cough. I made this up a while back as a general cold remedy. Cheers to those of you who also feel like crap.

Add a dollop of honey to a mug of water
Boil in microwave
(Optional) Add some kind of black tea
Squeeze in a slice of lemon or lime
Add a drop of angostura bitters (a full dash if you skipped the tea)

This was originally devised for someone who was morally opposed to tea, but I like a little caffeine in mine. Fun Fact: I've actually used a scaled up version of this for hydration on bike trips. Beats the crap out of water.