I feel like Dorothy, suddenly learning that she was wearing the way home on her feet all along. On Monday this past week I posed a question: why, after all I had done over the holiday weekend (including watching The Wizard of Oz with friends), did I have such a feeling of inadequacy and emptiness? When I wrote the post, I was thinking to myself of potential answers, including some of those touched on by my readers: that it had been a holiday weekend, so I did no "real" work, only indulged myself in time with family and friends; that taking a holiday of itself can seem wasteful, particularly in this year when I am on leave to be as productive as I possibly can in my research; that even when I am at work, the feeling of "not doing enough" persists if I am doing "nothing but" reading or, when I am not on leave, preparing for class. Writing, after all, is my only "real" work. "Publish or perish," as the saying goes. If I am not writin...
This is still very much a work in progress , but this is what I have so far. 1. Comics are neither novels with pictures nor pictures with captions, but something wholly other, a hybrid of text and image with which it is possible to tell stories that can be seen as well as "heard." Theorists have found them so difficult to describe because they (the theorists) are habituated to think in terms only of text (literary critics) or image (art historians). In this respect, comics are analogues of God, more particularly, of the Second Person of the Trinity, who, while by nature divine (the Word), became incarnate, taking on not only flesh, but also (as per the Nicene Creed ) our nature as human beings. 2. Comics are preoccupied with superheroes and superheroines and their battles against evil because there is something in the form itself (word+image) that presupposes this kind of story. Just as God became incarnate so as to save humanity from its sins, so comic book heroes figh...
It is difficult to describe the crisis I have been living through these past several weeks. The drawing by my office door Short version : Don’t call out the Devil if you aren’t ready to bout . Alternative short version : “Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the disputer of this world? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world?” —1 Corinthians 1:20 There has been much bitterness. There have been feelings of betrayal. There have been feelings of being lied to while watching people whom I thought were my supporters fall away. Friends warn me about overreacting. At which I overreact. “Academic freedom means nothing if the faculty do not stand up for it.” I believed that. Someone whom I have trusted my entire academic career told me that. I still believe it—but do my colleagues? “Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from insanity.” I heard someone say that recently on his livestream. Someone whom my friends tell me I s...
Paradoxically, given the fact that I've spent my entire academic life thinking about the Virgin Mary, I very rarely say anything directly about gender. You'd think I should, right? Most people do--think that I should, that is. Because, of course, most people who have written about Mary in the past thirty or so years have. Marina Warner, Mary Daly, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, Rosemary Radford Reuther: how well I remember reading their work while I was in college and being swept up into the debate on the feminine image of the divine. Reading Andrew Greeley's The Mary Myth (1977) is bringing it all back to me, and not in a good way. I'm discouraged, because I was really enjoying his treatment of Jesus and Sinai . Now, however, I am beset with sentences such as these: "I will contend that Mary is a symbol of the feminine component of the deity. She represents the human insight that the Ultimate is passionately tender, seductively attractive, irresistibly insp...
It sounds like such good advice: “Just do the best you can.” It is the implications that are somewhat worrying. Yes, it’s the beginning of the tournament year, and I’m back where I was in July, wondering what the point is. Okay, so one of the reasons that I lost that pool bout 4-5 was because my weapon failed on the last touch and my parry-riposte, clear as day to look at, did not register on the box. (My opponent remised, and there we were.) What was I doing letting things get to 4-4 in the first place? Well, I had been behind 1-4 and come back, but never mind. I lost the last touch because I did not know how to clean my tip properly, and that, plus one thing and another (both of my other weapons failing because the body cords were loose and so my attacks registered nothing but off-targets), I only won 3 of my 6 pool bouts, putting me in the middle of the field (16 out of 32) for the D-E round. And then I lost my D-E to the girl who had seeded 17th. So there I was sitting at the...
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F.B.