EPISODE 602: THE PLACES I HAVE BEEN

Hello, Malaysia!

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

There’s a little corner on the campus of Loyola Marymount University where a couple of dining tables and couches have been placed beneath tall coniferous trees. Dormitories form an “L” around the area, behind which sets the afternoon sun.

I’ve lived on campus eleven years now, but until the last few months I’d never noticed this spot. Lately I’ve taken to sitting out reading on nice afternoons.

And at some point I realized the reason I’ve picked this spot is that it reminds me of the redwood forests of Northern California. There really are just a few trees, and they have needles rather than leaves, but still they are long and thin like redwoods, and the glow of the setting sun on the bark takes me right back to Big Basin Redwood Park. And it doesn’t really matter that it’s just one tiny corner of an abandoned campus, I see that light in the trees and I am there.  

It turns out I’ve gone on a lot of trips like this in the last year. A couple weeks ago I spent three glorious hours walking the crowded streets of New York as I watched the recently released director’s cut of Margaret on HBO Max. The film has a lot of merit as a story, it’s written and directed by Kenneth Lonergan, who has written many great plays and films, including You Can Count On Me and Manchester by the Sea. But it’s also filled with long shots of life in New York – people walking the streets; the Metropolitan Opera in those glorious moments before the performance begins when the chandeliers that look like Baby Superman’s Krypton spaceship begin to rise; the endless stories being played out at night along the apartment windows. So many evenings when I lived in New York I would walk along the southern end of Central Park. Looking up at the golden-lit windows of the apartments would stop me in my tracks.  Each a beautiful life, a million stories.

I’ve watched the red dirt of the outback stain my shoes and my pant legs a bunch of times, and felt the thrill of a chilly fall breeze in England, too. In fact just last week I watched the new Netflix film “The Dig”, which is the true story of a middle aged man who spent his life a self-taught archaeologist who’s asked to dig up an ancient English burial mound on a widowed mother’s estate. It’s a wonderful film – Ralph Fiennes, Carey Mulligan, Lily James—but not terribly visual as movies go. Still, being there with them on the land had a rich physicality for me. I can feel the dirt in my fingers as I’m writing to you right now.

In the last month I’ve been to India a couple times for the first time, really, and loved it, and pretty much had to be kept from buying a flight to Spain after going on a Pedro Almodóvar jag. And today I was in Japan, riding through a forest of yellow leaves which floated down all around me.

In the Before Times I would sometimes daydream about a version of life where Star Trek transporters were real, and airports were basically just everything up to the metal detectors. You step through—and Hello, Malaysia.

(Fun fact: Hello, Malaysia was the name of one of my “What I did last summer” reports in grade school. It had absolutely nothing to do with the contents. When asked about this fact by the teacher I pointed out that in fact the contents of the report had nothing to do with reality of my summer as well, which if described would have read like a Stephen King novel but with Bored Middle School Kid in the place of Pennywise, so what is reality anyway?

And that was how my year-long blood feud with Mrs. Hamburger began.

And yes, that was her actual name. And no joke she often wore her hair in a bun.)

But sometimes it feels right now like I have an actual transporter at my disposal, right down to that sense of gratitude that rises to the surface sometimes when you’re sitting at a café on vacation and suddenly recognize Wait, this is actually happening, I’m really here.

Don’t get me wrong, I still want to leave this campus and this town and this country and sit in an actual Buddhist monastery in rural Japan rather than search through one for supplies while playing a samurai in a video game. I want to walk through street fairs and people-watch kids riding on their dads shoulders and old couples walking arm in arm as I eat kind of dicey dim sum. I want to sit on a Friday evening in this London rabbit’s warren of a pub that sells port and finger food with my friend Amanda and laugh and tell stories and then walk myself home along the blue-black waters of the Thames. I had a conversation last week with an older Jesuit who was talking about this community of people he usually spends summers working with in Europe. He couldn’t go last summer, it’s not clear he’ll be able to go this summer either and hours after I got off the phone with him the ache of his longing for them was still rolling over me in waves.  

But sitting with Judi Dench and Maggie Smith as they fall in love with India and Bill Nighy and Tom Wilkinson remains oddly okay for now, too.

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And now for the “Now You Try” section of our episode…

A British writer I have mentioned here in the past, Kieron Gillen, was noticing that many times in the pandemic he’s been walking somewhere talking on the phone to someone who is doing exactly the same thing. They’re taking a walk together, but apart.

And Kieron, who is a crazy-brilliant science fiction and fantasy writer, came up with a game based on that experience. Basically, you call a friend; the two of you take your walks, as usual, and as you walk, you use the world you’re seeing around you as prompts to make up little stories about some kind of fictional adventure you’ve been having.

The game is called “Amble”; you can find it here. It’s just a single simple How to Play page with the prompts he suggests. He’s selling it for $2, but you can pay whatever you want, including nothing. I highly recommend it.

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After a lot of weeks of chasing deadlines and not well suddenly Friday most everything that was due or overdue is done, and I’m hoping to maybe dig my way out of some of the piles of books and articles I haven’t had time for.

One piece that I read with interest this weekend is this from the New York Times Magazine about a classics scholar at Princeton who is challenging his discipline on the basis of its consideration of race, or lack thereof. It’s a very interesting piece, that looks at everything from the use of Roman symbols and mottos by white supremacists to the scholar’s own complex history growing up as a poor undocumented Dominican kid in New York. Discovering the classics became a way into an intellectual life, but now he questions whether it wasn’t all a trap for him.

We didn’t have the classics in my high school. My first encounter with them was as a philosophy grad student early in my training in the Jesuits. We had a whole semester reading Plato. It felt like a big deal to me, the kind of thing Harold Bloom would have insisted you’re not a fully realized human if you haven’t done.

Ironically, the only thing I remember from the experience was reading The Symposium and slowly realizing that the Greeks, this society that Americans and people in the West so often raise up as The Model for Human Civilization, had a completely different take on homosexuality than our own. I can remember rereading parts of the dialogue wondering, Am I reading this right? Are some of these men openly gay?

(Actually—and this is well and truly crazy—when I think of that moment for some reason I hear myself asking those questions as Paulie Walnuts from The Sopranos. As if I’m sitting out with Tony and the boys at that outdoor coffee spot, reading The Symposium and then stopping and telling them what I’ve just read. Then Tony gives one of those deep Italian “WHOA”s that he was always giving, and we all have an unexpectedly deep conversation about homosexuality, the Greeks and America.

Stay tuned for Episode 603, “Constructive Criticism from My Psychologist”.)

Reading that book, it was like I had discovered a secret of the universe. And in a sense, for me, having only just begun to figure out myself, I guess I had: The Way Things Are is actually just The Way Things Are Now, As Described By Some. The straight white men who have supposedly discovered everything, decided everything, defeated everything were actually a much more eclectic group of women and men, many of whose stories have been forgotten, erased or ended in tragedy because of who they were or who we are today.

In part the NY Times Magazine article is about how classicists are resistant to considering the hidden figures or issues that populated Greco-Roman society, like Rome’s widespread use of slavery. And in refusing to consider those topics, they reduce their field to a kind of propaganda which is easily repurposed in horrible ways.

But what I find equally fascinating is how even with that massive problem in the field, still the texts themselves still have the power to open and liberate.

A good story is like God--it exceeds any bounds that we try to set on it.

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A couple other fun things for your week.

A thread for those who love birds and bird names:

Stu Royall @stu_bot3000

My favourite species of birds are the ones named by people who clearly hate birds. (thread)

A delightful interview with John Oliver about all the mascots on his show.

I found this particular clip from a few years back particularly hilarious (and also genuinely sweet):

And lastly:

What can I say, I love that Bernie meme.

Have a good week. Take it gently if you can. Little by little, we’re getting there.