Is this the thread to talk about Season 2 of Transparent, and how at its heart it has a pretty conservative, pessimistic view of both the motives behind, and the consequences of, individuals opening up their sex life and sexual identity?
*** spoilers? ***
That article seemed a little... light-hearted, given the subject matter.
I can't say it made me laugh. But it did make me wonder why she goes anywhere near gurus in the first place. "All these other guys are creeps and abusers. But this one, he's legit."
That article seemed a little... light-hearted, given the subject matter.
It can be good to depict these guys as predictable clowns instead of monsters with the ability to easily destroy your life.
3: It does kind of look like she's just writing a sort of general taxonomy of people who are willing to call themselves 'guru'. After a while I started to think she could have summarized it with "He's a guru, also he wants to sex you up".
5:
I say this all as someone who loves the show, but. . .
It basically presents everyone queer or non-vanilla (mostly excepting Maura) as fundamentally damaged and opening up their sexuality as a way to cope with some trauma and/or selfishly abandon the strains of commitment. Off the top of my head, the two queer characters who achieve comfort in their sexual relationships do so by basically just having porny hookups: Davina (who likes a boorish dude) and Leslie (who likes barely legal waifs).
I haven't watched it, but I was in the room while RWM was watching the episode that crosscuts between lesbians saying that trans women need to check their male privilege and a Nazi rally. Can't say it made me want to watch the show.
I never heard of it, but "waifs" and "Nazis" is hard to resist.
Someone has been reading my dream journal.
It was either than or the comments at Crooked Timber.
Anyone click through to the NY Times article about Gafni? "Mark has a lot of Shakti." I anticipate using this line in about a million situations.
Anyway, everyone knows that you only become a guru in order to sleep with your followers.
And with that...I'll see y'all in April.
It will take more than four months to become a guru.
Being a student can be quite time-consuming. IYKWIMAITYD.
8 is a legit complaint but not representative of the season as a whole, though I'm uncomfortable with the Weimar/Nazi subplot anyway. (More later, as I lost my evening to urgent care for something that turned out fine and now I'm falling asleep.) Anyway, CB, it's in some ways maybe more helpful to look at the people who are straight and their dysfunction and maybe also to look at the characters who have been queer longer, like Syd and the radical lesbians and Tammy. The arc doesn't seem to be the same and so part of it may be about coming out/changing rather than living a non-heteronormative life. But I agree, not wanting to be out of relationship flux causes disasters for everyone in the family except arguable Maura and it definitely seems reasonable to ask what the deal is with that.
Bye, Ogged. Good luck at boot camp. Glad this is not like the 2008 thing.
The Gafni stuff is crazy. The dude actually had his rabbinical ordination revoked (which is extraordinarily uncommon) and then just moved on to the New Age scene without skipping a beat.
And that was after he had already gotten in enough trouble as an Orthodox rabbi in the US to move to Israel, change his name, and affiliate himself with the Renewal movement.
I'm too busy watching Adriana Ugarte win WWII single handedly.
I hate to be the one to say this if you haven't seen it elsewhere, but NMM to David Bowie.
25 Just heard. And gutted to hear it.
Yeah. That wasn't the news I needed today. RIP, man.
I come across so much of this shit writing about religion. AIMHMHB A friend of mine, married three times though I'd say he was trying honestly each time and it was always the wives who left him, said that as a vicar he could have a fresh sexual opportunity every week if he wanted it. It's more surprising in some ways that more people don't skeeve. But, for an example that has not yet been turned over, the supposed BFF of Mich\ael Ja\ckson and Yu\ri Gel\ler, was known for it before his emigration to the USA; another charismatic kinfecrimean religious figure of my acquaintance fucked his therapist, which is about as transgressive as you can get.
For Catholic clergy, if they're straight (big if) it's even worse and the pressures of the situation lead quite a lot of them into serial relationships with middle aged women who fall in love with them but get dumped because of God. Kieran Conry, the former bishop of Arundel and Brighton, whom I liked a lot, would be an excellent example. I feel more sympathetic to them, because there must be such pressures of loneliness as well as horniness in a solitary celibate life.
30.2: Serious question: how would you guess the numbers break down in terms of of gay priests, straight priests, and asexual* priests? 49-50-1? 25-70-5? I'm not sure I've ever read non-hysterical speculation, and your "big if" comment made me wonder.
*not necessarily strictly so--I don't know if it matters how "real" the category is, I'm just using it to cover priests who don't struggle at all with celibacy, which I assume happens in a larger proportion than in the general population
I hat I was really struck by was how similar Maura's lines sounded to the typical nerd critique of male privilege (eg the Scott Aaronson but bruhaha) but was then shockingly presented as though it was correct rather than laughable.
I'm not sure how that but got there.
31: I think it varies greatly by country. In the third world there are fewer gays because there is much more concubinage -- A former editor of the Catholic Herald told me in the Eighties that there was an African Archbishop notorious for fucking virgins as a supposed cure for Aids and there have been numerous complaints about African nuns being used for sexual services. My impression of Latin America is not so well informed and derived largely from the work of Richard Sipe, who said it was mostly concubinage there, too. Sipe, a former Dominican who married and trained as a psychotherapist, reckoned about 10% of the clergy were proper celibates. And maybe 20-30% gay, globally (this is from memory. Book's still not unpacked).
But in the Vatican, maybe 50% gay and in the USA much the same. See here Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI and his special friend "Gorgeous George" Gänswein among others. Whether they actually, um, do anything, I would not know, although I was once sent a three page single-spaced denunciation of Gänswein and chums by someone extremely well-informed who had been exiled from his playtime at the Vatican to a minor Bavarian cathedral.
In the USA, again, maybe 50% gay. Remember that when the Aids epidemic started, the death rate among Catholic clergy in the US was about three times the national average. There is a tipping point at which mothers stop wanting their straight sons to go into a seminary and it seems to habe been passed in the US.
In England, maybe 20-30%? Lots of Dominicans, I don't know why.
It's a while since I was actively looking into this. OPne thing to bear in mind is that the business of being a celibate is much harder and odder in modern Western societies than it was even fifty years ago. Priests now live largely along, rather than in clusters of six or eight men, and they are no longer afforded the reverence and respect that might make up for never getting laid. That must have been a huge help. It still is in other contexts. There are various evangelicals in this country who have let it be known that the "struggle with same sex attraction" but so long as they appear to be struggling successfully, they get tremendous strokes and affirmation from the congregation, which probably keeps them going along with a little furtive wanking.
But the definitive summary of Catholics and teh gay is surely here
This is pure scurrilous gossip, but the porter in my apartment building says that his nephew was in a sexual relationship of some sort with the current pope back in Argentina, and has pictures of the two of them together on vacation. The pictures are friendly rather than anything more, but the guy in them does look like Pope Francis.
Priests now live largely along, rather than in clusters of six or eight men, and they are no longer afforded the reverence and respect that might make up for never getting laid.
Assuming "along" s/b "alone", I don't think either or those are true in areas with more Catholics. All but one of parishes I know of have at least two priests. Respect and reverence aren't at the old levels (and I'm not sure what the exchange rate would be for that with sex), but it is still quite high from most of the congregation. The amount of worldly power is probably greater for priests in the U.S. than in the U.K., not that I ever knew that much about the church in the U.K. But here a priest who is experienced by not elderly seems about as likely as not to run something with a budget of several millions a year (e.g. a school, a parish with a couple thousand families, or both).
I have really bad gaydar, so I won't guess at that.
Would a transition be that there's much less respect and reverence for the celibacy specifically? Even fairly religious Catholics are pretty relaxed about non-marital sex as a not significantly bad thing anymore, IME, which turns celibacy of the clergy from something difficult but impressively admirable to something sort of peculiar and maybe a little pitiable. Not that people think that way consciously, exactly, but you think there might me some of that?
I don't know, but I agree with Nworb that it has to be harder to be celibate now than in the past. I do see that more of the priests are on their second career. If they're 30 when they start in the seminary, I assume they've already has a relationship or two.
Even fairly religious Catholics are pretty relaxed about non-marital sex as a not significantly bad thing anymore...
Pretty relaxed about non-marital sex but not extra-marital sex, if I'm using those terms correctly to mean sex among single people (especially among single-people who are reasonably likely to be married at some point) and sex by married people with someone other than the person they are married to, respectively. I would guess that seeing celibacy as not so much of a sacrifice when compared to life-long monogamy might be a common view.
My understanding is that a little older and "already had a relationship or two" was tacitly or even actively encouraged for priests for much of church history. The idea was that less "experienced" priests would have no real understanding of the burden that the vow of celibacy entailed, and that those were the priests who often had a more difficult time keeping their vows.
Different diocese and orders recruit differently.
40.last: Sounds analogous to the common atheist refrain, "you're practically an atheist--you already disbelieve in all gods but one."
40: certainly wasn't true in Europe for most of the twentieth century -- not sure about earlier, bout would be surprised then, too, if only for reasons of life expectancy. The idea that you wanted older, more mature candidates seems to have arisen here in the Eighties, as a response to the abuse crisis.
At least in the States, there was definitely a sort of rumspringa concept where a novitiate/seminarian would be encouraged to at least go on some dates before taking his vows. I don't know how much there was an implicit expectation that the guy would actually get laid, but certainly there was an intention that they'd have to face up to whether or not they could handle celibacy.
Anyway, I appreciate 34, and find all of it a bit surprising. Turns out that being raised Catholic doesn't tell you much about the secular reality of Catholicism, if you take my meaning.
Guru latest: Comrade Bala, the Mao of South London, now doing a considerable amount of time for rape and false imprisonment, still attracts fervent support from his victims:
http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/jan/08/maoist-cult-balakrishnan-whistleblower-herivel
45: Sipe is controversial (obviously) but there is very little research that has been done on this. My other sources are mostly gossip, but pretty damn well informed. Few of them are themselves gay, partly because I'm not and so don't mix in those circles, it is one of the staples of closeted gay gossip (or was in the C of E) to claim that absolutely everyone is one of them. Or as a noted gay campaigner said more memorably after a debate at the Oxford Union "The {bishop of Borchester} didn't say he was celibate when I had his cock in my mouth"
s /circles,/circles, partly because /
47: I first read that as "bishop of Barchester".
I'm not sure that even a post David Bowie world is ready for Anthony Trollope slash fiction.
I'm sure that ajay can prove you wrong.
Who knows what went on behind the scenes between Bishop Grantly and the odious Mr. Slope, after all?
Who knows what went on behind the scenes between Bishop Grantly and the odious Mr. Slope, after all?
Hopefully nothing, since Bishop Grantly was dead.
The Adventures of Phineas Finn's Irish Member
53: That's pretty much the book Trollope wrote.
50: I am happy to say that my life so far has been Trollope-free. There are great swathes of mid-Victorian literature that I just feel no inclination at all to read - Trollope, Hardy, Dickens, Mark Twain, it all just leaves me cold. The stuff before or at the start (Thackeray, Austen) or right at the end (Conrad, Kipling) seems much more fun.
You should read Huck Finn. It's pretty good.
I am ready for The Warden II: Erotic Nights. Let's make this happen.
I'm sure I've said this here before, but I was shopping in a religious tchotchke store in Rome when a big group of young American Jesuits came in, and had mannerisms that were maybe 5x more OTT flaming (one guy picked up a baby Jesus sculpture with a limp hand, and then they did a high pitched squeal and twitter while jumping around and holding hands, lots of hugs and shoulder caresses) than normal for a gay neighborhood in the US. On the one hand, it seemed good that this crew had found each other and that it was OK in Rome to act like that in public. OTOH it just seemed so sad given the level of cognitive dissonance and the projected life outcomes for those guys.
In the US Episcopal Church, I'm told that there are now almost no first-career priests. The average age of a new priest is something like 43. And there's a huge oversupply, because lots of people find it attractive as a second career even as the main sources of funding -- 19th century WASP robber baron fortunes given in the 20s-50s* -- wind down. Nworb might know more.
*our local incredibly beautiful cathedral was built with Clark money, and thus comes more or less directly from raping Montana.
Lawyers (including me) love Trollope, if introduced to him. At least American lawyers. Not sure why that is.
Trollope, Hardy, Dickens, Mark Twain
One of these is not like the others.
Our local cathedral is visible from my office window. There's not a single office in Philadelphia that has that view.
Huh. I loved Trollope before I thought of going to law school, but maybe there's a connection.
My most powerful lawyer/Victorian fiction connection was reading George Eliot's Felix Holt while I was taking Property. There's a fee tail that reverts when the line that alienated the property is extinguished, and I was bouncing off the walls thinking "I understand this! I actually understand this!"
I would have thought that the lawyers would all be big Bleak House fans.
Jarndyce v. Jarndyce really isn't recognizable. I mean, things drag on, things are overcomplicated, but not like that. So it's an interesting book, but not something I relate to as a lawyer at all.
58: I've read Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn - didn't enjoy them very much though. I mean, I didn't dislike them, I just wasn't left with a desire to read any more.
65 is correct. Even really ludicrously extended cases (my Dad, a lawyer, was assigned to a case his first day of work out of law school -- 45 years later, when he retired, it was still officially going on and he had to file a notice of withdrawal. That's the longest period I've ever heard of, but still).
Lawyers (including me) love Trollope
I'M PARTIAL TO SOME MYSELF. I SEE YOU SPELL IT WITH AN EXTRA E THOUGH. LIKE "WHISKEY" I SUPPOSE.
66: That's enough. Hardly anybody ever reads the others unless they get assigned in school.
I've closed a case that was hanging around from the eighties, but that was fluky, and the plaintiffs had kind of abandoned it for fifteen years in the middle or so. (Arguing over who was entitled to the proceeds from a lottery ticket.)
You could tell because of all the AquaNet on the files.
Jude the Obscure is a good read if you want to feel really bad.
I love Hardy's poetry but have an allergy to high Victorian novels. I know it's unjust and I am depriving myself. But Conrad I could read forever.
The best Flashman word is "Poontz"
I've closed a case that was hanging around from the eighties, but that was fluky, and the plaintiffs had kind of abandoned it for fifteen years in the middle or so. (Arguing over who was entitled to the proceeds from a lottery ticket.)
How do these not get struck out for failing to meet case management deadlines? Or does the other side not care enough/is scared enough about the result to make an application?
How does Tom Sawyer hold up among those who have read it as adults?
77: It was the administration of an estate, which is an area where I frankly had, and still have, no idea what the rules are. I represent the state agency, and their policy is "Once anyone's suing anyone, we're holding onto the money until we've got a court order." So the ticket-holder died, everyone started fussing in probate court over who the ticket belonged to, it was being actively litigated for years, and then all the plausible owners just stopped filing anything. Fastforward a couple of decades, some people had died and the rest had made up, and all the parties got in touch with me as counsel for the agency offering a settlement of the form "We promise to split the money amicably if you'll give it to us." Probate court processed it through the estate of the dead ticket-holder from back in the eighties, and bob's your uncle.
If bob really was your uncle, you'd have gotten a piece of the estate.
(In an interesting wrinkle, the ticket holder was named, e.g., Bob, his son was named Bill, and his twin grandsons were Bill and Bob. Made explaining the family tree to people really annoying.)
Probate and complicated land use cases are areas where you sometimes get incredibly long-running cases, because a single case can stay open forever as the forum for resolving a bunch of different contingent things. My Dad's 45-year case was a water rights thing in which a single case was kept open forever to resolve a bunch of ongoing water rights issues. I think it's still going on officially, though I'm not sure.
78: I read it a few years ago and enjoyed it, but it's shockingly far behind Huck Finn. Which everybody knows, but still. Tom is fun, Huck is intense (at least until Tom shows up).
66: I think a lot of the stuff he wrote has entered the sort of vague grey area between "this joke is hilarious..." and "see footnote 17", especially with the fiction he wrote. So Huck Finn, which is on the serious end of stuff he wrote comes off really well but a bunch of the short stories/whatever seem a bit off or weird. (I suspect it's a stylistic thing that doesn't translate well anymore.)
A lot of his "non-fiction" stuff seems to me to have aged better, though, if only because he's making fun of people rather than writing extended jokes. It's been years but when I first read The Innocents Abroad I had to stop a few times because I was laughing too hard to read.
One more for Bleak House here. Our Mutual Friend is also good Dickens. A 19th century Madoff is hilarious in Little Dorritt, which I also liked despite half the chapters having a treacly narrator.
Balzac opinions? I like him every time I read him, Illusions Perdues is next up for me. Also, I think that novels were less important than poetry in the 19th century-- Tennyson I like a lot, also Victor Hugo.
A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is Twain's most underrated, I think. As with Huck Finn, it takes the form of YA fiction, and is perfectly satisfactory on that level, but has a lot more to say.
[A]nother charismatic kinfecrimean religious figure of my acquaintance fucked his therapist, which is about as transgressive as you can get.
"I can only really enjoy a Christmas carol concert if I'm having an illicit affair with one of the choir."
Maybe one day a treaty will finally put an end to WWII.
Doesn't Martin Chuzzlewitt have some kind of drawn out land case?
88 -- I thought the 1991 treaty on the reunification of Germany also formally ended the war, and that there was a separate treaty in maybe the 50s doing the same for Japan. Could be wrong.
Ah, googling, Japan and Russia have never signed a peace treaty from WWII, to keep alive disputed positions about the Kurils.
Actually, is there bribery anywhere in Dickens' books about officialdom? There are various horrible public officials, but I don't remember much in the way of cash exchanges.
Pepys mentions lots of gifts that he receives 200 years earlier, but P seems to think "bribe" is a very strong term, not applicable to his own gratuities.
There aren't outright hookers in Dickens either-- was the shame attached to actual bribery so strong that depicting it in literature for upstanding people was impossible? I don't know the answer, am genuinely curious.
Doesn't Martin Chuzzlewitt have some kind of drawn out land case?
I don't know about it being drawn out, but it does involve a land case. Basically Chuzzlewit gets conned into buying American land in a swamp. The whole book is a not particularly thinly disguised attack on the American legal system (and character, as perceived by Dickens), in the context of rampant piracy of his works.
The word "bribe" appears six times in Bleak House, but I'm not sure if it's with public officials.
I'm actually rather fond of Swamp Act cases. They are an excellent tour of 19 c US chicanery. At least more fond than of all the grim margarine and other adulterated oil cases, those are just depressing chicanery.
wait... question from lurker & intermittent reader: where's ogged off to for 4 months? boot camp??
GODDAMN IT PRIVATE OGGED WHAT IS YOUR MAJOR MALFUNCTION? I'M GOING TO RIP YOUR BALLS OFF SO YOU CANNOT CONTAMINATE THE REST OF THE WORLD. I WILL MOTIVATE YOU!
The Devil to prove the Church was a farce
Went out to fish for a Bugger.
He baited his hook with a Frenchman's arse
And pulled up the Bishop of Clogher. (Anon., 1822)
No new thing under the sun
||Completely OT, but a search for something utterly unrelated led me to stumble across this:
"can I have a quick show of hands lads, for whom here is this the first financial crisis of their professional life? Because AFAICT it's not as serious as savings & loans, not as serious as the Spanish or Nordic crises, not as serious as the Credit Lyonnais, not as serious as Asia/Russia 1998, probably not as serious as Mexico 1995 and arguably not as serious as the NASDAQ bust. Sense of proportion here."
Posted by dsquared on 5 June 2008.
As long as he didn't manage any money, it couldn't cause much of a problem.
Everything I say on that thread is very wise, and not at all embarrassing. Maybe I should be World Dictator.
I seem to have missed that thread somehow. Maybe I was still lurking at that point.
I didn't really lurk here ever. That was before I was ever here, but not much much.
I should say, in case anyone thinks I am bigging myself up at dsquared's expense, that around the same time I was writing stuff including phrases like "since the end of the subprime crisis earlier this year".
I was buying vast amounts of real estate in California's Inland Empire.
106: That's why you can't be World Dictator.
I was plowing all my money into Synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligations.
Because of paralyzing indecision and contradictory information, I did pretty much nothing in response to the recession. This worked so well, I'm trying it as a solution to other problems.
106: It's weird timing, though. There was definitely a sense in early 2008 that the worst might be in sight (at least on the credit side - equities were very slow to react and clearly had further to fall). But that pretty much ended with the Bear Stearns bailout. After that it was all about whether Morgan Stanley or Lehman would be next to go, and in the UK. I'm trying to remember when the big federal money market funds (investing in Fannie/Freddie debt) first had to be rescued by their sponsors to avoid breaking hte buck, and I'm pretty sure it was by June.
"and in the UK" s/b "and in the UK the same was happening with several building societies and HBOS". Alliance & Leicester was acquired by Santander with government support in July.
I'm trying to remember when the big federal money market funds (investing in Fannie/Freddie debt) first had to be rescued by their sponsors to avoid breaking hte buck, and I'm pretty sure it was by June.
No, the money market turbulence all followed Lehman's bankruptcy in September.
111: I'd have to check dates, but my sense is that quite a lot of people around that time were thinking "well, Bear went under and that kind of went OK, so maybe one or two more will go under and that won't cause too much damage either".
113 is right. Reserve Primary broke the buck the day after LEH went under and lots of others had to be backed up by the Feds later that week.
There was quite a bit of irrational...well, not exuberance...sanguinity about.
For example, Alistair Darling gave an interview in which he said there might be a very bad recession, and he got pilloried by the press and most of the Tories who five minutes later were demanding to know why nobody predicted it.
The Bank of England did bugger all for months on end but wring its hands about inflation(!), with the exception of David "Danny" Blanchflower who was screaming for lower rates. He later said he got it right simply because he regularly checked the employment/population ratio, which began to cliffdive in February 2008. You'd think that was a pretty vanilla sort of statistic but nobody else bothered. Five minutes later the Bank knew it had been right all along and we needed to make David Cameron prime minister or we'd end up in debt (!).
Also, there was the weird near-thing when a rumour went around that HBOS was going bust in, what, March? of course the rumour was right.
I'm biased, but DSquared's combo in that thread of condescending arrogance and, in retrospect, being totally wrong about literally everything is for real pretty stunning. Just another example of a core rule for middlebrow Americans and that should be taught at all middlebrow American schools -- never trust Brits just because they have a witty writing style.
I'm sure if he still posted her he would be able to explain why he was right, and we're all just too naïve and stupid to understand.
117: I'm just going to have to fall back on my craggy good looks.
Dsquared is a reminder that a large number of people at elite British schools go through a period where they learn rhetorical tricks, or are actually in a debating society. Including most politicians. Just imagine -- over there the feeling you get listening to any given politician must be like the feeling we get listening to Ted Cruz.
117: If I didn't already have independent opinions about financial markets, I would have probably been completely convinced by him.
"My broker is a blogging Welshman and he says...."
"Faster, pussycat! Kill! Kill!"
To take D^2's side for a moment, most of his comments on that thread were addressing the particular fear that...fuck it, anyway, what's the point of this exercise?
I can't decide if 124 is a continuation of 123 or is the "independent opinions about financial markets" referred to in 122.
125: Self-congratulation, of course. Like you have something better to do?
121
It's not recent either. Just read anything written by the British Whigs.
Dsquared is a reminder that a large number of people at elite British schools go through a period where they learn rhetorical tricks, or are actually in a debating society
To a large degree, inculcating rhetorical tricks (or, more broadly, bullshitting) is precisely what elite British schools do that make them elite. Other than charging shit-tons of money. You don't go through a period of learning rhetoric. The entire structure of the elite education system is set up to encourage and reward it.
120: Don't forget your traditional Scottish belligerence.