Found and Not Quite Lost

The Big Bang Theory's Sheldon is a classic 'Otaku' - the creepy obsessive who rarely leaves his room.

If Sheldon was just socially awkward, we might diganose maniakku, that is, one with only otaku-leanings. Yet after sabotaging his roommate's budding romance, this week, his dark, disturbing, traits must be addressed even as they are swept under the rug subservient to the pursuit of cheap laughs.

William Gibson offers "understanding otaku-hood is one of the keys to understanding the culture of the web - the passionate obsessive is the information age's embodiment of the connoisseur; there is something profoundly post-national about it, extra-geographic."

While the web punctures and deflates authority (after the emissions light glowed distressingly on Ranger's dashboard last week, the mechanic said it'd cost $105 to investigate; the web advised running two tanks of fuel fully through prior to panic, whereupon the warning light disappeared), the web elevates geeks to respectability.

--and fine art.

Collaborating with Murakami, Marc Jacobs, per the New Yorker, 'helped popularize bipolar tastes for high fashion (Louis Vuitton) and low celebrity (L'il Kim), popularzing the current enthusiasm for perversity and art, and combining overt cuteness (teddy bears!) with classic cool.'

Jacob feels "everyone should have a black outline drawn around them like a cartoon."

For his part, "Murakami's practice is not only referential of pop culture, but his entire life is symbiotic with pop itself, creating a reciprocal relationship between high art and mass culture, drawing upon imagery and personalities found in his day to day life," much the same material as Lautrec referenced and extracted from the dancers-artistes of his day to day life at Moulin Rouge.

In the parish hall, on Sunday, Robert and I discussed a former youth group member, an anime-devoted misfit - cloying, devoted, intolerable - yet, today, elevated in her arena like Jerry Lewis in France.

Perhaps it's a question of utility.

Rosetta Reitz, eulogized, as "an ardent feminist who scavenged through the early history of jazz and the blues to resurrect the music of long-forgotten women to create a record label dededicated to them," may have been otaku-jazz but rose above.

Havelock Ellis contends "Einstein was immediately preceded by the Russian Ballet."

Some otaku, otherwise, are left-nostalgic dead-ends: Hugo Chavez hosts the World Meeting of Intellectuals and Artists in Defense of Humanity to discuss "The United States: a possible revolution?"

Still, if nothing else, Freaks and Geeks creator Paul Feig confesses, "before the advent of the Internet, geeks had to cower in corners alone - now they can gather forces online and discover many thousands of like-minded souls across the land - a step forward in the march of progress."

Thus what's written here makes neither impact, or money, nor advances quantum physics, or revolution, its existence (100 posts!), as written by someone in oversized Tiger slippers, in a Sheldonian room containing a Hideki Matsui bobble-head positioned next to an icon of St. Augustine's mom, carefully arranged on shelves of books precisely arrayed in height order, left to right, signifies nothing and everything of contemporary consequence.

Lost and Not Quite Found

When it was time to renew the University library card, I let it lapse.

Did you gasp?

I had to let go - it was a candy store so tempting, I hurt my neck.

Sometimes you must live within limits, satisfying cravings, in small doses.

Addictions can be sated in other ways -- attending book sales at surrounding country libraries provides one such fix.

I drove to a sale last Saturday in Ladysmith Village. Although there weren't any desirable books, as is often the case at the more rural locations, there were a few appealing VHS tapes: St. Maybe, once a fond seminary reading assignment, and Pinocchio.

The Village, not the event, made the more lasting impression. Turning through the gates, you encounter a community, the antithesis of the Route 1, you just left. Tidy homes cluster around a rectangular park. A cozy library nestles at the end of a tree-lined central avenue comprised of brick town homes. It's out of place in the nicest of ways.

IFC's been looping Waiting for Guffman this month. Wikipedia calls the movie a 'loving parody.' I don't think so. While other Christopher Guest films deflate heavy metal, dog shows and folk music, all already crying out to be lampooned, small towns like Guest's fictional Blaine don't necessarily deserve the same treatment.

We've been exploring this subject for weeks now discussing small town depictions ranging from the grotesque, like Anderson, Faulkner and O'Connor's, to the Sinclair Lewis more relatable treatment of formidable Main Street cliques. No one paints a finer American neighborhood mural than Anne Tyler, as she does in the highly recommended St. Maybe cited above, nor does anymore capture contemporary English mores better than John Mortimer.

-- yet this week, despite intentions to the contrary, the trail ended at Mailer's noxious Castle in the Forest, where, as if C.S. Lewis' Screwtape demon, instead of politely pursuing average suburban pew sitters, like us, schemes to possess the biggest prize of all: Adolph Hitler.

Whether it's a charming Southern village, or the Austrian hinterland, you and I may end up anywhere, as long as we keep trying on identities.

Until we find one that fits, we'll flail, desperately, at times; or, at others, deliberately proceed, as if we were ever arriving at a series of stations, rooting out the idealized totality of all our desirable mutual cultural references, whether a town of post-Scroogian conversions, Waitist diners, a Scrubtion hospital, or a miracle on every 34th street.

Often, lost in the stacks, I can't decide where to go.

You know it's time to travel on but you're caught in-between.

If you ride too many trains, at once, you may suffer an injury, as I did, at the University library.

Better to take it slow, one stop at a time, not missing opportunities, which otherwise, overwhelming, are missed.

Journey to the Center of the Neck

I take note this week of our annual trek to Kilmarnock in the Northern Neck where there's a store which sells customized t-shirts, sweaters and jackets displayed on irresistable $5 racks.

It should come as no surprise to anyone, then, today I'm garbed in a Mr. Rogers-style cardigan which identifies the wearer as an employee of the White Stone Family Practice.

What may be unexpected is that the elderly cashier who rang up the sweater said she'd only been to Fredericksburg once in her life.

So, here I am, constantly regaling you with tales of our small town life only to find out, in relation to a really, really small town, we are a big city after all.

It certainly ties in with the Sinclair Lewis Main Street novel I've been reading this week - where the new Mrs. Dr. Kennicott attempts desperately to fit into her newlywed husband's hometown of Gopher Prairie, Minnesota.

A few months ago I'd disptached a resume via email to the Cal Ripken foundation. I was thrilled to see a response within an hour. Upon reading it, however, and finding the resume had been forwarded to the local Executive Director, I knew I'd never hear anything about it again.

While Carol Kennicott longs for the anonymous freedom she knew in St. Paul, the townspeople of Gopher Prairie boast, at the same time, of a friendliness not extended to her or any outsider. My offer to the baseball people of the city of Baltimore was doomed as soon as it was allowed to run aground upon the shoals of a small town clique (and children's sports cliques are the worst of all).

Our old sounding board, editorialist Rod Dreher, recently penned a paeon to Wendell Berry, noting, "who, as a young man, left a promising East Coast academic career to return to ancestral land to farm, write, and raise a family."

Dreher informs us, "most Republicans don't care for him because he is a harsh critic of industrialism, consumerism, and the unfettered free market as a destroyer of land, community, and healthy traditions," while, "most Democrats regard him as out of touch because he is a religious man who holds autonomous individualism, especially the freedom it licenses, to be similarly destructive of families, communities, and the sacredness of love."

--which leaves this Spotsyltuckian even more out of touch, if that's possible, as one who dwells in an undestroyed land of corn and soy farms no more than a dozen miles away from a wealth of welcome, much frequented, consumerism; and as a religious person, and member of a like-minded community, of autonomous individuals, who aren't suspected of destroying, or spreading license, but, instead are gathered together within an encompassing diversity which, through its inclusionary nature, strengthens our congregational family and its sacredness of love.

Having gone this far, we're taking it to the limit.

We're moving on to a place which'll make Berry's head explode.

-- Malltown, USA!

A wondrous place 15.5 acre plot in Glendale, California, in which to live and shop in faux locales as varied as Rodeo Drive, Rush Street, Vegas, Boston or New Orleans.

Developer Rick Caruso, in the NY Times, explains "the whole idea isn't just to shop or eat or go to a movie, it has more to do with recovering that which is lost in Southern California's car culture -- the sense of community that comes through street life."

Ah, there's the vaunted theme 'community' again.

While Dreher/Berry believe they've captured the essence of community with their value-laden, unrealistic-for-most-of-us, back to the farm schitk, Caruso offers something much more reachable within our grasp.

Fifty years ago my dad and I walked under the El tracks in Brighton Beach to a bakery which smelled like heaven if heaven smells like warm fresh bagels and biolis. If Caruso constructs the same quaint old New York scene in L.A. could it not jog genuine memories of those who've experienced, and still desire, the real thing, and, what's more, is available to millions more, creating a new/old world which no longer exists for anyone except in this mode if not at all?

It's the privilege of age to no longer pretend to ideals you don't hold even if it's self-serving to grandstand them for others.

I can actually admire farmer cum rugged individualist Wendell Berry from a distance without copying him just as I've admired Dorothy Day all my life for her ministry to the poor and voluntary poverty without ever aspiring to the latter.

I'm glad someone does it as long as it's not me.

The Future of Aging

As a person who put the "I" into ISFJ it takes persistent encouragement to draw this introvert out. So it was last week at Senior Camp as told in last week's tale, Seven Miles to the Horizon.

Even those senior saints were only partially successful. The ninety-two year old who befriended me desired I party until the wee hours of 10 p.m. When I slunk away per usual, at 8:30, she bid her companions undertake unsuccessful extraction missions.

On travel in Greensboro for the company this week, I read in the complimentary hotel USA Today how Billy Graham is marking his 90th birthday. This time it's personal - he's pictured at his Montreat, NC, mountain-top home, rocking on a porch built by a relative (may he RIP).

The article dangled a too-tempting-to-resist 1960's Woody Allen interview captured on You-Tube. It's worth watching for the good-naturedness alone beyond any notion of the odd pairing.

The interview led to something unexpected. Alongside the clip was another of a Larry King interview I quote frequently in Sunday School where Graham was asked if he thought he'd go to heaven, to which he responded, "I hope so but don't deserve it."

It wasn't this gracious response, but another, which led to something of which I was totally unaware. When Graham responded to King it wasn't for him to judge whether followers of other faiths went to heaven, it apparently unleashed a torrent of condemnation, as cited briefly in the USA article, but not with the intense vigor found on the net, and which subsequently spawned a full-fledged anti-Graham industry.

It shouldn't be suprising to Spotsyltuckian readers that the Greensboro Borders is a familiar and required destination for all my corporate companions prior to dinner. Surveying the magazine rack, I was drawn to purchase the Christian Research Journal containing the article, "Navigating the Emerging Church Highway," the same topic Phyllis Tickle presented at senior camp the preceding week.

Mark Driscoll defines the emerging church 'highway' as consisting of four lanes: Emerging Evangelicals; House Church Evangelicals; Emerging Reformers; and Emergent Liberals. The first three are delineated acceptably orthodox in one way or another; the fourth is described as having "drifted away from a discussion about how to contextualize timeless Christian truths in timely cultural ways and has instead come to focus on creating a new Christianity," i.e. as heretical and apostate.

While Driscoll annoints the sacred trio as cleverly packaged for younger generations, the fourth is condemened, as is the ecumenical Graham, for "discussing the need for unity between all religions."

After a Presidential election which promises the vision of a broader American landscape (absent the disappointing passage of Proposition 8), George Will pictures the South, as "beginning to look less like the firm foundation of national party than the embattled redoubt of a regional one."

Akin to the U.S. Pacific strategy in World War II where only islands suitable for airstrips were invaded (with the exception of the Phillipines as a sop to MacArthur's ego) leaving others to wither on the vine, this is ever the fate of fortresses, orthodox or territorial, where history passes by untouched.

Clive James' Cultural Amnesia profiles Heinrich Heine, a 19th century German journalist, essayist and poet. Wikipedia states Heine was 'born into a family of assimilated Jews, who were subject to severe restrictions, forbidden from entering certain professions, including an academic career in the universities.' Heine justified his Lutheran conversion by describing it as "the ticket of admission into European culture," something I also claim in relation to Virginia. Would it have been otherwise for both of us!

The AP reports conversely on an American woman, who "sought to make a new life for herself as a Jew in Israel." She studied intensively for a year, took a Hebrew name and adopted Orthodox custom and wardrobe. Five years later, Israel's Rabbincal High Court annulled her conversion over the question whether anyone can be Jewish if not born of a Jewish mother.

I note in the same USA Today which jump-started this week's reflections where a sketch, Tiggers Don't Like Honey, from The House at Pooh Corner, sold at auction for $49,770. The value accorded to this drawing implies something about how we cherish the image of simple hospitality.

Whether in relation to family, a circle of friends, the workplace, a parish, community or nation, my faith stands or fails in the existence of real or imagined places like The House at Pooh Corner. Houses, where people who are nicer than I, gently serve, instead of barricading the door shouting all the reasons I can't come in.

As long as there are people in my life who persist in such gentle hospitality, some of their kindness may yet succeed in drawing this old ISFJ out.