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Tender-hearted in Tehama County: a weekend at Farm Sanctuary

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 5, 2008
in Animal Rights, Traveling and Veganism
. 5 Comments

My wife and I spent the weekend up in Northern California. (Parenthetically, we really were in Northern California this time, up in Butte, Glenn, and Tehama counties. Like most southlanders, I tend to refer to the Bay Area as “Northern” California when that region is, clearly, closer to the center. My childhood homes in coastal Monterey and rural Alameda counties are almost as close to Mexico as they are to the Oregon border.)

We went up north to attend the spring hoe-down at Farm Sanctuary, which has rapidly become one of our favorite charities. I’ll get pictures up tonight or tomorrow of some of the pigs, geese, goats, sheep, turkeys, rabbits and cows with whom we bonded. We also got to meet vegan animal activists from all across the West, enjoy some delicious food, and hear some inspiring and moving speeches about the next steps for both Farm Sanctuary in particular and the animal rights movement in general. Continue reading ‘Tender-hearted in Tehama County: a weekend at Farm Sanctuary’

Friday Random Ten: off to Orland edition

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 2, 2008
in Friday Random Ten
. 3 Comments

That’s off to Orland, not Orlando. Reasons why on Monday; I’ll be incommunicado for the weekend. #2 and #6 are covers, both of which I confess I often prefer to the originals.

1. “Spectacular Views”, Rilo Kiley
2. “Sin City”, Dwight Yoakam
3. “Your Life is Now”, John Mellencamp
4. “Tangled and Wild”, Oh Susanna
5. “Lost in the Supermarket”, the Clash
6. “Ol’ 55″, Don Campbell
7. “Tonight You’re Gonna Lose Me”, The Lonesome Sisters
8. “Sunny Day”, Deana Carter
9. “Take a Chance with Me”, Roxy Music
10. “Country Comfort”, Elton John

Bonus Track: “Sweet Savannah”, Shooter Jennings

Learning to rest within the run: on mindfulness, the mountains, and taking a tumble on El Prieto

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 1, 2008
in Athletics and Fitness
. 2 Comments

For the first time in a year and a half, I had a good hard fall while running this afternoon. (For those who know the area, I ran from the Windsor road parking lot up to the Sunset trail on Mt. Lowe via the El Prieto trail and the Millard campground.) Flying down El Prieto, my mind wandering on to a variety of topics, I caught my right foot on a rock and went sprawling. I had just enough time to twist over to absorb most of the impact on my right shoulder, but my right wrist and knee also hit the ground very hard.

I got the wind knocked out of me, and I lay there, alone, for a stunned moment. The ritual after a fall is always the same: turn off my stopwatch (always the first thing, as we must have a proper time for the run at the end), then start checking for injuries. There’s always that moment of great fear that I have seriously hurt myself, and will be stuck on a trail until someone comes along. And of course, the greatest and most immediate anxiety is that I won’t be able to run again for a while.

Since I started serious trail running ten years ago, I’ve had maybe a dozen minor falls and four or five fairly serious ones. A serious fall is one which causes me to miss at least one day of running as a consequence. I’m not unaware of the far more significant dangers. I was raised on the legend of my grandfather’s beloved first cousin, Walter “Pete” Starr, who famously died from a fall in the Sierras in 1933 after authoring a still-serviceable guide to those mountains. In April 2000, my running buddy Dave Trinkle died in a fall off the Mt. Wilson trail after (typically) ignoring warning signs about a decaying area of trail. These men are often in my mind when I’m running, especially by myself, in remote or dangerous areas. Mind you, I don’t take major risks! But there are dangers in the mountains that I love, and both family lore and my own memories of Dave remind me constantly that I have an obligation to balance that passion for running on dirt with some common sense.

I wasn’t hurt at all today, other than some scrapes and bruises. I did take the lesson of the fall seriously, however. I usually fall going uphill, when I’m less attentive; normally, I’m very careful on descents (which is normally when serious accidents occur.) Today, I fell because my mind was elsewhere. And as I got up gingerly and brushed myself off, I said “Okay, God, I get it. I need to pay attention.” I’m a good pray-er and a lousy meditator. As I ran the final three miles back to the car, I watched my foot placement very carefully. I also recited the one meditation that consistently works for me, from Psalm 46: Be Still and Know I am God. I say the line three times, and then drop the last word, repeat the shortened line three times, and so forth until in the end I’m just reciting, over and over again, “Be.” (I dispense with the “and” and the “know” at the same time.) It works when I’m quiet on the couch, and yes, it works when I’m running.

In one of his most famous poems, former U.S. poet Laureate Richard Wilbur wrote about the legendary Boston marathoner Johnny Kelley. His description of how Kelley worked the course was perfect, a reminder of how it is that I want to run — and indeed must run, if I am to stay safe, sane, healthy, and alive:

Legs driving, fists at port, clenched faces, men,
And in amongst them, stamping on the sun,
Our champion Kelley, who would win again,
Rocked in his will, at rest within his run.

I long for nothing more than to be rocked in my will, and at rest within my run. To remember how to do that well, I apparently need the occasional fall.

Some thoughts on teens, driving, and helicopter parents

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 1, 2008
in Family and Youth
. 32 Comments

Back in February, the New York Times ran a story that jived well with what I had already begun to notice: Fewer Youths Jump Behind the Wheel at Sixteen. The opening of the article summarizes the reasons:

For generations, driver’s licenses have been tickets to freedom for America’s 16-year-olds, prompting many to line up at motor vehicle offices the day they were eligible to apply. In the last decade, the proportion of 16-year-olds nationwide who hold driver’s licenses has dropped from nearly half to less than one-third, according to statistics from the Federal Highway Administration.

Reasons vary, including tighter state laws governing when teenagers can drive, higher insurance costs and a shift from school-run driver education to expensive private driving academies.

To that mix, experts also add parents who are willing to chauffeur their children to activities, and pastimes like surfing the Web that keep them indoors and glued to computers.

I turned sixteen in 1983. I took the test for my learner’s permit promptly at 15 1/2, took the (free) driver’s ed course in high school, and got my license within weeks of hitting my 16th birthday. As I will turn 41 later this month, I am rapidly approaching a quarter-century of licensed driving. (I tried to calculate last week about how many miles I had driven in those 25 years. These days, I average only 12,000 miles per year, which is low by Southern California standards. In earlier years, when I had a longer commute, I drove easily twice that. I’d guess that I’ve logged somewhere around 400,000 miles so far in the USA and Britain.) When I was in high school, as virtually any American adult over 30 will tell you, a driver’s license was a much-longed for rite of passage, a crucial demarcation line for adulthood. The only people I knew who didn’t have their license by their 17th birthday were those who had either repeatedly failed the test or those whose visual disabilities made it impossible for them to drive.

But it is not so today. The Times notes that rising insurance and gas costs have played a part, and I don’t doubt that economics are a factor. Many states have placed onerous restrictions on teen drivers, limiting when and with whom they can operate a motor vehicle. When I got licensed 25 years ago, there were no such restrictions. In the early ’80s, a teen in California could load up a car with a dozen friends and drive them around at midnight. No mandatory seatbelt law, either. Continue reading ‘Some thoughts on teens, driving, and helicopter parents’

Thursday Short Poem: a section from Newman’s “Coitus Interruptus”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on May 1, 2008
in Poetry
. 0 Comments

This is the first time I’ve ever put up a poem on Thursday by someone who is a friend on Facebook. Richard Jeffrey Newman’s collection The Silence of Men has been on my shelf for a while, and it’s to my discredit that I’ve taken so long to plug it and to put up one of his offerings as a Thursday Short Poem. Newman writes in a style that recalls Sharon Olds, particularly in his reflections on the body, sex, and death — but his worldview is of the deep masculine. Both tender and unsentimental, he’s produced an interesting and memorable collection. I recommend picking up a copy.

One of my favorite pieces is a long one, “Coitus Interruptus”. I’m putting up the opening section here. We’ve been talking a lot about white privilege in the feminist blogosphere lately; re-reading this poem earlier this week, I saw something here I hadn’t seen before, something about the ways in which racist reality both impinges upon — and leaves untouched — white existence.

From Coitus Interruptus

Naked at the window, my wife calls me
as if someone is dying, and someone
almost is, pinned to the concrete face down
beneath the fists and feet and knees of three

policemen. I’m still hard from before she
jumped out of bed to answer the question
I was willing not to ask when the siren
stopped on our block, but now I’m here and I see

the man is Black, and how can I not
bear witness? They’ve cuffed him
but the uniforms continue to crowd our street,
and the blue and whites keep coming

as if called to war, as if the lives
in all these darkened homes
were truly at stake, and that’s the thing —
who can tell from up here — maybe

we’re watching our salvation
without knowing it. Above our heads,
a voice calls out “Fucking pigs!”
but the ones who didn’t drag the man

into a waiting car and drive off
refuse the bait. They talk quietly
gathered beneath the streetlamp
in the pale circle of light

the man was beaten in, and then
a word we cannot hear is given
and the cops wave each other back
to their vehicles, the sparkle and flash

of their driving off
throwing onto the wall of our room
a shadow of the embrace
my wife and I have been clinging to.

Thank God for those who willing to answer the questions that I too am often willing not to ask.

“Fly, you fools!” A simple answer to the question about where to go to college: UPDATED

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 30, 2008
in Academia, Family and Teaching
. 20 Comments

I’ve been getting emails and calls and visits this week from various students who, having been accepted to at least two colleges to which they have applied for transfer admission, are now trying to decide where to go for school.

Let me make it simple: all things being equal (and Berkeley and UCLA are pretty equal in most programs, as are Cal State LA and Sacramento State), go to college as far away as possible from your friends, family, and everything you have known. I don’t know if anyone has copyrighted it yet, so call it the Gandalf theory of higher education. When in doubt, and if you can possibly afford it financially, move away.

So much of a good college education takes place outside of the classroom. Disconnecting from loved ones, if only for a time, is a vital part of becoming an adult. Not everyone has the luxury of making such a choice, but if my advice is asked, my answer is essentially the same as that uttered by Gandalf the Grey in his last words before the Balrog drags him down.

I do understand that some students must live at home for financial reasons. Though I think debt and independence are preferable to solvency and enmeshment, that’s a personal cultural bias on my part, a bias others may not share. I do think that there is much to be said for spending as much time as possible in another corner of the state or country, exposed to different weather, different media markets, different social values.

And for what it’s worth, as someone with an undergrad degree from Cal and a Ph.D. from UCLA, I can say that I loved Berkeley with every fiber of my being. My attachment to Westwood never rose above the tepid. But as they say, your mileage may vary.

UPDATE: I’m bumping this up from the comments section. Daisy at Our Descent offers the exact opposite advice in a lovely post. I’d like to note that my wife shares a view closer to Daisy’s; she graduated from high school in Glendale and headed off to USC, living at home the entire time. She wouldn’t have changed that for the world.

In the end, I acknowledge that giving advice about going to college is like giving advice about whether to have sex at a young age: the right answer is contingent upon a unique set of circumstances surrounding the needs of the particular person inquiring.

I’d point out, though — and this is clearly for a future post, maybe soon — that the desire for autonomy is not evidence of a lack of devotion to family. As I’ve argued before, WASPy families in which men never do more than shake hands to show affection to each other, and where children leave home at 18, never to return, are no less intensely loving for their commitment to formality and personal autonomy.

More on that to come.

The devil feeds on resentment: on marriage, sex, duty, and the “extra mile”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 30, 2008
in Christianity, Marriage and Sexual ethics and transformation
. 14 Comments

Jeremy Pierce posted an interesting piece yesterday: Sex and Duty. He’s taking issue with some aspects of my take on the 30-Day Sex Challenge. My basic point was that desire and duty are mutually exclusive, particularly where sex is concerned. I argued that the Pauline doctrine of mutual submission and the apostle’s words in 1 Corinthians 7 do not constitute an obligation to be sexually available to a partner when one is not in the mood.

One mistake I made in the original post gives Jeremy an opening to challenge my position. Casually taking Matthew 5:41 completely out of context, I wrote: Challenging spouses to “go the extra mile” for each other is a biblically and psychologically sound notion.

Jeremy jumps on that:

This Pauline view can be easily motivated by Jesus’ teaching in the Sermon on the Mount, particularly by the Golden Rule (do to others what you’d want them to do for you) and the extra mile (if someone asks you to carry something a mile, do it for two miles, and if someone asks for your coat offer up your shirt too). Jesus speaks as if this sort of thing is a typical characteristic of his followers, and those who don’t do this are failing to be like citizens of the kingdom of God out to be. I can see how someone would apply such statements to the case at hand by arguing for a duty to have sex even when one isn’t interested for the sake of the sex.

But this is not duty for the mere sake of duty. It’s duty for the sake of the other person. If a person motivated by love for another person has a duty to do what’s loving for the other person, there may well be times when that involves having sex when one otherwise wouldn’t have been interested, and Jesus’ teaching does seem to include cases like that. I’m not sure why cases of voluntarily being willing to have sex when one isn’t interested should be exceptions to the kinds of loving acts he commands in those passages.

Of course, as Walter Wink and other theologians have pointed out, much of Matthew 5 is concerned not with how we treat those whom we love, but those whom we hate. Wink points out that the challenge to go the second or extra mile had a specific meaning:

Jesus’ third example, the one about going the second mile, is drawn from the relatively enlightened practice of limiting the amount of forced or impressed labor (angareia) that Roman soldiers could levy on subject peoples to a single mile…

It is in this context of Roman military occupation that Jesus speaks. He does not counsel revolt…

But why carry his pack a second mile? Is this not to rebound to the opposite extreme of aiding and abetting the enemy? Not at all. The question here… is how the oppressed can recover the initiative and assert their human dignity in a situation that cannot for the time being be changed. The rules are Caesar’s, but how one responds to the rules is God’s, and Caesar has no power over that…From a situation of servile impressment, the oppressed have once more seized the initiative. They have taken back the power of choice…
Continue reading ‘The devil feeds on resentment: on marriage, sex, duty, and the “extra mile”’

“Seal Press Saved My Life”

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 30, 2008
in Books
. 1 Comment

Victoria Marinelli has a powerful post up this morning in defense of Seal Press. An excerpt:

Part of why I will always support Seal Press is because of a volume you published when, I am certain, no one else was brave enough to: Kerry Lobel and the NCADV’s “Naming the Violence: Speaking Out About Lesbian Battering.” (That book saved my life once.)

And now I see you have quite a range of new material, and that you are doing your damnedest to survive as a feminist publisher. I understand you’ve had some travails of late, and I hope they’ve been a learning and growing experience for you. I’ll be cheering you all the way.

Long live Seal Press.

Read the whole thing. I’m using two Seal Press books in my courses this fall.

DMV

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 29, 2008
in Stuff
. 6 Comments

Very busy day, including a trip to the DMV to have my picture taken for my license renewal. I’ve got a post in mind about the reluctance of young people today to rush to get their licenses, which is a striking change from the experience of my generation. It will have to wait.

In the meantime, I realize that I am wearing the same shirt I had on the last time I had my license photo taken. I may like me my fashions, but I do get a heck of a lot of wear out of the clothes I buy.

On compartments, fuck-ups, and more precious voices leaving the blogosphere

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 29, 2008
in Age and Blogging
. 6 Comments

Eliot was right about the cruelty of April. Jill at Feministe has announced she is taking an extended hiatus from blogging, joining Blackamazon and Brownfemipower as prominent voices who have chosen to leave the ’sphere in the aftermath of some immensely painful discussions about race, class, gender, and identity. I’ve been reading Jill since she joined Feministe years ago, and I will miss her prolific and insightful posts. How she blogged so much whilst in law school is beyond me.

I won’t say I haven’t thought about taking a break as well. (I do take short hiatuses of a week or three fairly regularly). Sometimes, I wonder if I’ve run out of things to say, or if, as Jill wondered today, my voice is doing more harm than good. I am confident an extended break will happen someday, but for now, I’m going to keep at it.

One aspect of male privilege, I recognize, is the learned ability to compartmentalize. I’ve railed against various aspects of compartmentalization before, particularly when it becomes a device for avoiding the hard work of reconciling contradictory aspects of one’s life. At the same time, there are some useful aspects to compartmentalization, particularly when it comes to blogging. Continue reading ‘On compartments, fuck-ups, and more precious voices leaving the blogosphere’

Arnold redefines “bi”-partisanship

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 28, 2008
in Politics
. 3 Comments

It’s hard to stay too angry at Governor Schwarzenegger for long, even as he says remarkably maddening and inane things. Still, at least fifty percent of the time he represents a kind of moderate, sensible Republicanism that has been almost obliterated from the American scene. As one who wants to see the GOP return to the tradition of Pete McCloskey and Millicent Fenwick, I have a healthy dose of affection for my state’s governor, even as I have not forgotten his many shortcomings and liabilities.

But today’s quote from Arnold is priceless:

“I sleep with a Democrat every night. If I can do it, legislators can too. I’m not telling them to sleep together. That’s not what I’m saying, but…”

I love my state. (Cap tap to my former student and GOP politico, Brandon Powers). And I sleep with a woman with whom I share my life but not a common political outlook, so the governor and I have something in common beyond our Austrian heritage.

Nouns, not adjectives: Caroline Heldman and young women’s self-objectification

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 28, 2008
in Body, Clothing and Fashion, Eating disorders, Mass media and Sexuality
. 8 Comments

The new issue of Ms. Magazine hits the stands tomorrow. Of particular interest is an article by Caroline Heldman, assistant professor at nearby Occidental College: Out-of-Body Image: Self-objectification—seeing ourselves through others’ eyes—impairs women’s body image,mental health, motor skills and even sex lives. (It’s not available online; you will need to splurge for the magazine, which is well worth doing. A subscription is better. Ms., Bitch, and MakeShift are the three indispensables of feminist publishing.)

Heldman:

A steady diet of exploitative, sexually provocative depictions
of women feeds a poisonous trend in women’s and
girls’ perceptions of their bodies, one that has recently been
recognized by social scientists as self-objectification—
viewing one’s body as a sex object to be consumed by the
male gaze. Like W.e.b. DuBois’ famous description of the
experience of black Americans, self-objectification is a
state of “double consciousness…a sense of always looking
at one’s self through the eyes of others.”

In my work as a youth minister and as a women’s studies professor, I’ve seen this phenomenon grow seemingly worse in recent years. Paris Hilton’s remarks about sexualiy and her own self-objectification resonate; in 2005, she remarked that her titillating image is a product of her sexy sense of style, and in reality her boyfriends have commented on her less than rampant libido. She says, “I’m sexual in pictures and the way I dress and my whole image. But at home I’m really not like that. In other words, her sexuality is largely performative, almost entirely a response to an outsider’s gaze and not an expression of her own inner longing for anything other than validation. I’ve brought up this insight of Hilton’s with some of my students, and seen a variety of reactions, ranging from surpise to vigorous nods of recognition. Continue reading ‘Nouns, not adjectives: Caroline Heldman and young women’s self-objectification’

Sunday night thoughts on whiteness

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 27, 2008
in Ethnicity and Race
. 11 Comments

I got home from my run in time to catch most of Jeremiah Wright’s speech at the NAACP convention in Detroit. I’d heard him a few times before, but was mesmerized by what he had to say tonight. I can’t find a full transcript online yet; if someone has one available, I’d be grateful for a link in the comments.

The fellow who introduced Dr. Wright used his first name repeatedly, evidently driving home the point that Barack Obama’s pastor speaks as part of a prophetic tradition that goes back as far — or farther — than the first famed Jeremiah. Those who splutter in righteous indignation at the reverend’s now-ubiquitious “God damn America” sermon would do well to reacquaint themselves with the Old Testament biblical tradition. I’m sure that this point has been made by many others, but it deserves repeating: prophetic language has political implications, but is not the same as political discourse. Only someone with a poorly-formed theology could assume that God will not punish America as he punished His beloved Israel. If God could allow the holy city on the hill, His beloved Jerusalem, to be sacked repeatedly; if he could permit and perhaps even will the first and second temples to both be destroyed, if his prophets could suggest that that destruction was earned and deserved, then it is jingoistic hubris to say that God holds the United States in higher esteem.

Watching Dr. Wright early this evening, I thought about the discomfort so many white Americans have with frank expressions of black anger. I thought as well about this comment by Fred, written in response to this post. Fred:

Maybe it is a matter of semantics, but I do not completely understand your comment on whiteness. “I have willfully refused to reject, renounce, or even seriously reflect upon my whiteness.” Skin pigmentation is an immutable trait, so what is there to reject or renounce. Should people also renounce their “blackness”? Or is “whiteness” some kind of euphemism for being a racial bigot?

When I wrote about “whiteness”, I wasn’t writing about my ethnicity or my skin pigmentation — but rather about a specific kind of privilege. One of the best-known short explanations of what white privilege is comes from Peggy McIntosh: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack. (A few years ago, Amp at Alas, A Blog posted his marvelous update on male privilege, riffing on McIntosh’s work.) When I write about renouncing whiteness, I am not talking about rejecting my European-American heritage; I’m talking about doing everything I reasonably can to avoid unconsciously benefitting from the system that McIntosh so effectively describes. Continue reading ‘Sunday night thoughts on whiteness’

Go to Claudette

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 26, 2008
in Writing
. 5 Comments

I’ve worked a bit with a professional writing coach, Claudette Sutherland. Claudette is presenting a workshop; here’s the info:

One True Sentence…

Sunday May 4

6:00-7:30

Admission will be $8.00

Electric Lodge Theatre

1416 Electric Avenue

Just at Venice and Abbot Kinney

You will hear and see how writing gets from here to there; from imagination to paper read by a collection of Los Angeles writers from several genres all in the process of growing and shaping their work. Samplings are from personal essay, fiction and memoir moderated by Claudette Sutherland from her classes in Creative Writing.

It is a provocative way to spend a couple of hours in the company of like-minded artists and a good setting for some conversation on creativity.

You can visit Claudette’s web site at http://www.gotoclaudette.com and see her student’s work all of which grew out of commitment to class, to practice and the work at hand.

If you live in L.A. and are thinking of taking the leap into writing anything — fiction or non — it’s well-worth your time. Amazing things can indeed happen.

One of those “something’s gotta give” moments

Published
by
Hugo Schwyzer
on April 25, 2008
in Blogging and Race
. 3 Comments

I’m sticking an entire post below the fold, and leaving the comments turned off. It’s pretty damn stream-of-consciousness, and though I am as sober as can be, I may regret this post in the morning. It’s been a very emotional day. Continue reading ‘One of those “something’s gotta give” moments’