Batfort
Style reveals substance
Page 6 of 67
Growing up, I had no idea that the concept of Lent existed. I’d heard of it in the vague way that I’d heard of all things associated with the Catholic church, but our family never did anything of the sort.
I’m the most “liturgical” of my family, you see. I’ve willingly attended Catholic, high Episcopalian, Anglican, and Orthodox services—though I’ve never joined any of those churches.
Something raises my hackles with the contrast between the deep administrative structure and Christian Truth.
Anyway, I first observed Lent in college. I didn’t really know what I was doing, or anything about why Lent was important. Looking back, even the concept of fasting was completely foreign.
Since then, I’ve been selectively observant. Off and on. One year I used Lent as an excuse to quit eating gluten. Another year I “gave up staying up late” and imposed a bedtime.
Since reading Antifragile and learning about the importance of fasting in the body’s healing, I feel like I understand the intent of the Lenten season a lot more now.
I’m not ready to do a prolonged fast from food, but I am looking forward to a period of renewed spiritual searching.
This year, I’m giving up YouTube.
I need a rest from inputs, from many voices with opinions and ideas about the world. I need time to seek God, and to sort through my own views of the world. I need to spend more time working on substantial projects.
There are things that I’m going to miss. I’ll probably miss the last days of Pewdiepie’s reign. I like the way that Owen Benjamin illuminates the spiritual realities of the world. And even though I don’t eat plants, I love a good food/travel video.
But it’s okay. Life isn’t YouTube. I’m not going to be completely cut off from communication with the world.
And it will be good to stretch myself.
Tomorrow is the launch of a project I’ve been working on for months.
There will be no fanfare. There’s no event or afterparty.
Just…me doing work.
I’m trying to steel myself for the letdown that always happens when I get to the end of a project, which I know will be exacerbated since there’s no event or end product to feel satisfied over.
It’s funny how things that take up so much mental energy in our heads end up being pretty much nothing.
Anyway, here’s a famcazing Korean music video featuring the best guitar-cameo I’ve seen in a long time.
I’ve never met a Mormon woman who wasn’t obsessed with memories.
Tara Westover is no exception.
Educated: A Memoir is the story of Tara’s life until now, from her childhood on the side of a mountain in Idaho—no formal schooling, of course—through her decision to go to college, learn how to live in the “mainstream world,” and eventually get a PhD. It’s an exploration of memory and how we write history—just as much about Tara sorting through the shifting and morphing memories of her childhood than anything else.
It’s a story about education, yes, but also about family dynamics, what happens when one chooses to live set apart from the mainstream, abuse, coming-of-age, memory, and most of all, Mormonism.
I have a lot of thoughts, obviously, but no clear conclusion. It’s an interesting book in that it holds up a mirror to the reader in ways that we might not expect—which makes me suspect it a little bit. (More on that later.)
Tara and I share a lot in common. We’re the same age, and like her I had never heard of the Twin Towers until they fell on 9/11 (it’s not just a backwoods Idaho homeschooling thing, although I grew up one state away). I grew to really empathize with Tara by the end of the book, as she struggled to reconcile herself with her family. All families have problems, and while mine are but a tiny blip on the scale of abuse compared to hers, the sheer cartoonish realism of her family helped me put some of my own experiences in perspective.
One of the more memorable bits in the book, to me, was a part where Tara emails her mother about an abusive situation at home. In the moment, her mother agrees with her and Tara thinks that she has the support that she needs to stand up to her father. But when she actually goes to confront him, she realizes that what her mother had said was merely reflecting back to her what Tara herself needed/wanted to hear. Total house of cards. This happens multiple times, where people would say one thing in sober mind, but then completely recant when back under the influence of the abuser.
As Tara sorts through all that happened to her, she comes to doubt her own memories and her own perception of what happened. It makes sense that different people will remember past events differently (especially when they involve trauma, and why you need multiple eyewitness accounts for a truer picture), but DARVO is a real tactic used by real abusers.
That’s gotta make you feel crazy. It also made me start to wonder about the reliability of Tara as a narrator.
Something about her story feels too on-point for me. She’s raised in the backwoods of Idaho by a larger-than-life version of the people who think God created the Remington bolt-action rifle to fight the dinosaurs and the homosexuals. (And I don’t say that to be funny. That 13 second clip has done so much to fracture America, don’t even get me started.) Her family is made even more dramatic and scary through the abuse of her brother and the burn wounds of her father. She escapes the fate of her sister and sisters-in-law by going to college, where after a heroic struggle becomes a perfect student. She even gets her Harry Potter-charmed life at Cambridge complete with choirs and house meals in the great hall.
I mean, college-aged me would have romanticized the hell out of her life.
But literally being in the Middle East when Osama bin Laden got taken out? Come on. Even lampshading that event as she’s describing it had me thinking “Is this girl for real?”
Truth is often stranger than fiction, but when your story provides easy opportunities to dunk on the n-word, the Illuminati, and white supremacy, while simultaneously tying homeschooling and skepticism of the medical establishment to the trash-strewn backwoods of Idaho that are clearly meant to be left behind—I start to notice how closely your truth reinforces the Current Narrative.
When there are footnotes all over the book defining conflicting versions of events, I understand. Memory is a slippery thing. When there are disclaimers like “The italicized language in the description of the referenced exchange is paraphrased, not directly quoted. The meaning has been preserved” on quotes of the emails sent from other people, I get that maaaaaybe your academic pride want to keep the prose clean and free from the “errors” made by the other party in the exchange.
But when both of those things exist in context of a very convenient narrative, can you blame me when I get a little bit suspicious? I didn’t learn how to “close read” a text for nothing.
Then I feel bad for questioning the victim. You can never doubt a victim, you know.
So let’s believe her story.
Even then, what bothers me the most about the book is how little it addresses Mormonism.
Tara’s family are Mormons. The Mormon church plays a background role through the whole book. Tara’s dissertation topic involves Mormonism, something she’s proud of because she views it dispassionately, as a scholar not an acolyte. A large, softly-spoken part of the story is her distancing from the faith of her childhood, dramatized when she refuses the offer of a priesthood blessing from her father.
I know a little bit about the Mormon church. I’m not an expert by any means, but I have some background. And from what I know, this would be a huge deal.
The center of Mormon faith is the family—and the family revolves around the patriarch. Families are forever—so a woman can never truly escape her husband. Even if he’s delusional and bipolar. Even if he’s enabling his abusive son to terrorize the rest of his family. Even if that means agreeing with your daughter in private, but turning on her in public.
This memoir never addresses it baldly, the impact that Mormon family dynamics have on the rest of the story. There’s this conflation, this blurring between Mormonism and small-town Idaho, with prepping and unschooling and essential oils. No question of how the Mormon church structure, or its beliefs, contributes to the abuse. No question about how this could happen in a community, under the eye of a church, without anybody saying something. Maybe that’s just how the Mormon church operates.
Let’s talk geography for a moment. Tara’s hometown of Clifton is about 120 miles from Salt Lake City. Contrast that with North Idaho, which is a 600 mile drive from Clifton. North Idaho is where the Ruby Ridge standoff occurred, which features prominently in Tara’s fake memories from her childhood. These memories set the tone for how we should view her family: preppers, permanently at odds with the federal government, possibly white supremacists. But not Mormons.
By the end of the book, Tara confronts herself—but I never feel like she confronted her faith. She sidesteps away.
As I finish the book, I’m feel that I’m meant to come away with the impression that everyone who distrusts the federal government is guilty of something (anything from not getting a birth certificate for your kids to being a white supremacist, take your pick). That you should get educated, let you go astray from the Current Narrative. That this book is meant to warn us MAGA-country folk away from our lives of sin, and to reinforce to the city-folk that us country folk are ignorant and worthy of scorn.
I will say this: Tara’s struggle with reconciling her father’s world with the “real” world tugged at my heartstrings. I deal with this myself, trying to figure out how to reconcile my knowledge of the spiritual world with how to live in the world that we see every day. I certainly would not want to condemn my own children to a life of economic dependency because of my beliefs, no matter how strong.
So thank you, Tara, for giving me an example of what can happen when we withdraw too much from the world.
God calls us to be wise as serpents an innocent as doves. Educated provides an example of how difficult it is to walk that line.
As with all of the Very Personal Review series, I’m no expert in this category. I can’t always connect a book with broad context or deep history, but I still like to share my experience and thoughts.
I heard a rumor I’ll be writing about this costume design soon
This time of year—whatever the “dog days” of winter are called—I like to curl up in the evenings with a nice cup of heartwarming k-drama. I’ve been catching up on Touch Your Heart this weekend, which reunites the B-storyline couple from 2016’s Goblin. (FINALLY.) Lee Dong Wook plays a lawyer (he played Death, literally, in Goblin), with Yoo In Na as actress who is a delightful bundle of emotions. I can’t decide what I like best about this drama: the chemistry between the leads, the costume design, the playful sound effects/audio engineering, or the pacing/comedic timing of the supporting cast. The tone of the show lurches from fluffy rom-com to serious legal procedural, as reflected by the lead characters. It’s fun to watch.
» Guru Anaerobic’s book, Gang Fit, is out!
» Classic Cook’s Illustrated Pot Roast recipe, coming soon to my oven.
» The Babylon Bee is an absolute gem. They’ve outdone themselves with their coverage of the Jussie Smollet situation.
» Nicholas from Covington Catholic is suing the Washington Post. Good.
» Maybe it’s time to start growing and raising our own food.
» The Brits have pulled out major visual rhetoric opposing no-deal Brexit
» Reclaiming our Cognitive Sovereignty
Here’s a personal example of how strongly the procedural memories — the mental grooves — are cut into our brains by the combination of our smartphone’s hyper-rewarding nature and reinforcing behavioral factors. After I’d come to the conclusions espoused in this essay, and had mostly migrated to my flip phone, I was working in my office and had my iPhone out to manually transfer some contact information over to my new flip phone. The next morning, I realized that somehow my smartphone — my precious iPhone — had ended up in my pocket.
Soon after, as I was transferring things from a pocket in one pair of pants to another, I found myself picking up my iPhone and saying, “Well, instead of going to the living room to check my newly deployed Amazon Fire, I’ll just look at my calendar on my phone to see what’s on the schedule for today.”
Ten seconds later I was checking my email, and next I was hitting the Reuters newswire. My very supportive wife then called out, “Hey, Jim, what are you doing?” At that point the “spell” was broken, and I carried my iPhone back upstairs to my office, where it belongs, plugged it in, and put it on the shelf. I’m guessing, though, that without her intervention, I would have wasted 20 minutes flipping through various sites chock-full of trivialities appealing to my nonconscious desires and my conditioned need for artificial immediacy.
Perhaps you remember Gandalf the Grey saying to Bilbo Baggins, near the beginning of The Lord of the Rings, “Bilbo, the ring is still in your pocket.” Bilbo was supposed to have left his precious behind, but somehow, like my smartphone, it was just too hard to resist and it found a way into the nearest pocket.
Ladies and gentlemen, this is a very personal post.
Today, after
- 27 years of Crohn’s disease
- 11 years of pursuing alternatives/complements to conventional medical care
- 6 years of gluten-free living
- 4 years of getting (mostly) treated for SIBO and quitting immunosuppresants
- 19 months of eating meat and animal products only
- 13 months of being truly medication free
- and 1 month of finally, finally FINALLY resolving the dead-tooth infection in my mouth
I passed a huge milestone in healing, without drugs or doctors or insurance. Just my body, healing itself.
Today I pooped like a normal person.
Thanks be to God for His unspeakable gift.
Back in the day, I took a class on comics. Homework was creating our own comics. It was pretty fun.
At the time, I worked at a job that involved mailing a lot of things, cranky customers, and a lot of time on my hands to think up ridiculous scenarios like this one.
A unicorn delivery service—why not?
Slightly goofy and a little bit absurd. These still make me chuckle.
Last year, I cultivated two habits that helped greatly with helping me “at home” in my own skin. These will not come as a shock to you.
These were a big part of my routine in the summer and early fall. Over the winter, though, I stopped being diligent about making time for these things in my routine.
I’d rather stay up late snuggled under a knit blanket on my couch, which means sleeping in later in the mornings. And with the late-season onset of winter in my region, I’ve been commuting with a friend—which means no gym time before work.
This has been a mistake.
Like many long-term health choices, the effects didn’t show up immediately. I coasted along for a while. But after a couple months, I started to feel their absence.
My moods are more unstable. I feel detached from myself. I’m not sure of what I think or how I feel. My goals, which were so clear, have started to blur and fade.
So it’s time to add these good habits back to my life.
I might journal at night, instead of in the morning, but that’s okay. The point is that I differentiate between everyone else’s thoughts and feelings, and mine.
I might have to start all over with my weightlifting program, but that’s okay. The point is that I focus on physical activity and put my body to the test.
Call it a post-New Year’s resolution. Whatever.
It’s never too late to start over.
It’s interesting how different people can have such varied reactions to the same idea.
Take Nassim Taleb’s ideas on how someone who “looks the part” might not be the best choice, all things considered
Say you had the choice between two surgeons of similar rank in the same department in some hospital. The first is highly refined in appearance; he wears silver-rimmed glasses, has a thin built, delicate hands, a measured speech, and elegant gestures. His hair is silver and well combed. He is the person you would put in a movie if you needed to impersonate a surgeon. His office prominently boasts an Ivy League diploma, both for his undergraduate and medical schools.
The second one looks like a butcher; he is overweight, with large hands, uncouth speech and an unkempt appearance. His shirt is dangling from the back. No known tailor in the East Coast of the U.S. is capable of making his shirt button at the neck. He speaks unapologetically with a strong New Yawk accent, as if he wasn’t aware of it. He even has a gold tooth showing when he opens his mouth. The absence of diploma on the wall hints at the lack of pride in his education: he perhaps went to some local college. In a movie, you would expect him to impersonate a retired bodyguard for a junior congressman, or a third-generation cook in a New Jersey cafeteria.
Now if I had to pick, I would overcome my suckerproneness and take the butcher any minute. Even more: I would seek the butcher as a third option if my choice was between two doctors who looked like doctors. Why? Simply the one who doesn’t look the part, conditional of having made a (sort of) successful career in his profession, had to have much to overcome in terms of perception. And if we are lucky enough to have people who do not look the part, it is thanks to the presence of some skin in the game, the contact with reality that filters out incompetence, as reality is blind to looks.
If you have to overcome people’s negative or lowered expectations in order to do a good job, you will likely be forced to cultivate better skills and more knowledge.
I can’t disagree. There’s a bubble that forms when you look and act the way that people expect, especially when there’s already a precedent set by public perception of what your role is. I’ve experienced this bubble. It’s weird.
But not everyone sees life this way.
Take this person I found on Instagram. She’s not happy.
One way to handle this situation would be to take advantage her perceived “lowered” status as looking-like-an-assistant and proceed to blow expectations out of the water with a stellar keynote. By starting from a place of low expectations, and over-delivering, she’d likely make a huge impression on people—because the perceived gain is high.
The other way to handle this situation is to complain about it on social media to try to influence people to change their perceptions.
One means swallowing your pride in the short term, but might pay off big in the long term; the other might feel good in the short term, but probably won’t go anywhere because people’s perceptions are typically heavily entrenched.
Stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason, and wishing that it weren’t so isn’t going to help us out.
There’s lots of benefits we can get from going against the roles that are cast for us by society. It just takes some imagination.
The fashion industry is diminished today.
Karl Lagerfeld was one of the—no. He was THE grandmaster of fashion. Complete shitlord. Did what he wanted, NFG. Master troll. Didn’t capitulate to terrorists or PETA anti-fur weirdos or anyone, really.
Basically he was the complete opposite of the fashion pack mentality.
Karl has been judging my bulletin board since 2009
The man was a force of nature. He was of the same era as designers like Yves Saint Laurent, but unlike YSL who eventually gave up and died, Karl kept living. He ran creative for multiple high-profile brands at once, actively did photography, and never gave the fashion media what it wanted.
The more I think about it, the more I appreciate how much Karl carved out a space for himself in fashion using villain tactics, along the same lines of Trump and Cernovich.
These tactics include, but are not limited to, the fact that he:
- Created a look for himself that was immediately identifiable and almost impossible for anyone else to pull off. I’m reminded of Alice Cooper, who also used the villain trope.
- Always, always shipped. (See: “Real artists ship.”) The man worked.
- Gave the something to talk about. Whether it was the Wookie Suit or the Vulva Scarf (see above), he created news cycles.
Karl’s death has left a huge void in fashion.
The only two people I can think of who might be able to step up and fill it are John Galliano or Marc Jacobs. Both are creative enough. Galliano has already fallen from grace once, and Marc Jacobs is a known troll.
Anyway. Weird things happen when there’s a void. We shall see.
RIP, Uncle Karl.
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