In contrast to the relatively plain and straightforward Zen literature of the Tang dynasty, Song dynasty Zen literature is convoluted and artful. This is not regarded, in Zen terms, as a development in Zen, but as a response to a more complex and pressured society and individual. The Zen adepts of Song times did not regard the reality of Zen as any different in its essence from that of classical times, but considered the function of Zen to have become complicated by the complexity of the contemporary mind and the rampant spread of artificial Zen based on imitations of a few Zen practices.

The proliferation of false Zen was stimulated by the enormous impact of real Zen on Asian civilization. After the Tang dynasty, there is hardly anywhere one can turn in Chinese culture without seeing the influence of the Zen charisma.

The ill effects of the resulting influx of insincere followers into public Zen institutions are already noted in the works of great masters of the latter Tang dynasty, and these Zen Lessons contain top-level notices of an even greater decline in quality of Zen institutions and followers in the Song dynasty, in spite of Zen’s unparalleled prestige in cultural terms.

There is even reason to believe that the creation of new Confucian and Taoist schools using Zen methods was especially encouraged by Zen adepts because of their awareness that the original Zen Buddhist order had become seriously enervated through the attachment of worldly feelings to its forms and personalities.

From the point of Buddhist historiography, this sort of involvement is predictable: a period of true teaching is eventually obscured by imitations, and even these break down into remnants with time. The Mahāparinirvānasūtra, or “Scripture of the Great Decrease,” among the classical scriptures traditionally most studied by Zen adepts, outlines these phenomena very clearly.

The false ideas about Zen and Buddhism that scandals at Zen centers have both arisen from and in turn re-created in many minds within and without these centers are also predictable and have existed ever since “Zen” became consciously articulated. Almost the entire literature of Zen, in all of its astonishing variety of forms, deals with nothing but misconceptions about the reality of Zen, which is said to be extremely simple in essence though complex in function or manifestation. The apparent complexity of Zen teaching and function is due to the complexity of the human mentality, as Zen perforce acted in more intricate ways to unify the threads of the contemporary mind.

Replace Zen with your favorite learning that you feel is widely misinterpreted; I’ll go with ‘agile’.

This would not be a tragedy if it occurred. Video games have been important to me since we got our first computer back in 1982, but their importance has waxed and waned. Certainly books have been much more important to me than games over the years, I think on balance music has probably also been more important to me, and in school (undergrad and grad) I spent more time watching movies than playing games, though that was somewhat of an anomaly. (That’s what happens when you’re dating, I guess.) So perhaps the pendulum is swinging away from games; and, indeed, I’ve explicitly been making more time to read books, to make and listen to music, and ever since we got our new TV, I’ve been watching more movies. (And they look fabulous on it!) Given that, maybe I just don’t have time to play games other than Rock Band, and maybe I’m completely okay with that.

That was my tentative hypothesis earlier this year: I felt disconnected at GDC this March, and suspected that I wouldn’t be going back next year. (I now realize that this year’s GDC has had huge, unexpected benefits, so I’ll certainly be going back next year, but most of those benefits aren’t directly game related.) Thinking about it more, though, and in light of subsequent experiences, the situation is a lot more nuanced than that.

In retrospect, the main change may be that I freed up time to read books in part by cutting down on my web browsing, and in particular I stopped reading any daily video game news sites. For almost half a year, I’ve been quite out of touch with current video game releases, not reading reviews of the vast majority of games or even being aware that they’ve been released at all. I still hear about some new games through non-news blogs and through people on Twitter, but the volume is less; and those fora almost never expose me to preview coverage, and people talk about old games quite a bit as well on them. I’d thought of myself as abnormally good at avoiding the pull of the new, but in retrospect I underestimated how much I’d been affected by the novelty-driven news cycle.

Cutting down on browsing has freed up time to spend on other art forms when I want to; but the removal of that news cycle surface current has allowed deeper currents to manifest themselves, and some of those deeper currents are unquestionably video game focused. I recently played Mass Effect 3 and Journey; they’re both wonderful, wonderful games, and they are both very much what I wanted to do at that time, I wanted to play them more than read any book or watch any movie. (Though not, as it turns out, look at any painting.)

They’re also both new games; so I’m not as free from the lure of the release cycle as I’d like to pretend. I suspect, however, that they’ll largely be an aberration in that respect in my game playing over the summer. The games that I want to play next are Rez, Child of Eden, Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, probably Jet Grind Radio, maybe Dragon Age 2, maybe even Shenmue or Shenmue II or Space Channel 5. Some newish games, and nothing ancient in there, but generally older games, generally games I’ve played before and want (need!) to experience again.

And they’re generally games that have something in common. (Besides the obvious link, namely the Dreamcast!) I wish I had a better analytical category to put them in, but in the absence of one, I’ll just say it: most of those games are games that speak to something deep in my soul. They’re not just games I enjoy, games that I’ve learned something from, games that I will learn something from the next time I play them. They’re games that have their hooks deep inside of me, games where replaying them will feel like returning to home. But more than that: most of them are games where I suspect playing them will make me feel like a better person, and also feel more like me, letting me learn more who I am and giving me hope that the real me is a pretty good person.

So yeah, games are still important to me. That’s not exclusive to games: I can think of plenty of books, plenty of pieces of music that I feel the same way about, and I hope I’ll spend a lot of time oven the next year or two immersed in those art forms. But games aren’t going anywhere; I’m just going to do a better job of listening to the voices of games that are quietly calling me.

There’s a fine line between keeping in close touch with how your subordinates are doing and micromanaging them. Some team leaders in our study stepped way over the wrong side of that line. Operating under a misguided notion of what management involves, they held themselves aloof from their teams. Rather than working collaboratively with the team and checking in with team members regularly, as Graham did, these team leaders spent much of their time checking up on people. Subordinates can tell the difference, and the consequences for inner work life are not good.

Managers who get it wrong make four kinds of mistakes. First, they fail to allow autonomy in carrying out the work. Unlike Graham, who gave the NewPoly team a clear strategic goal but respected members’ ideas on how they could meet that goal, micromanagers dictate every move. Second, they frequently ask subordinates about their work without providing any real help when problems arise. Micromanaging leaders come across as judges and dictators, rather than as coaches and colleagues.

Third, micromanaging leaders are quick to affix personal blame when problems arise, rather than guiding subordinates in an open exploration of causes and possible solutions. Those subordinates end up striving to look good rather than honestly discussing obstacles and how to surmount them. They live in fear, and their perceptions of the manager settle into a permanent trough.

Fourth, the team leaders in our study who got it wrong rarely shared information with team members about their own work. Graham and other effective team leaders realized that, by virtue of their special roles, they were privy to vital information about many issues relevant to the team’s work. These issues included upper management’s views of the project, customers’ views and needs, and possible sources of assistance or resistance within and outside the organization. Some team leaders jealously guarded such knowledge as a marker of their status, doling it out as a favor according to their whims. When subordinates realize that a manager withholds potentially useful information like an overcontrolling parent, they feel infantilized, their motivation stalls, and their work is handicapped.

The Progress Principle, by Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer, pp. 166–167.

So: lots of experimentation; I hadn’t been aware that that experimentation had included such a pair go match, however. The format meant that the considerations involved were expressed through discussion instead of being locked in the players’ heads or only emerging after the fact, and the newspaper sponsoring it arranged for observers to report on those discussions. This meant a lot more real-time reporting of thoughts than I’m used to.

Which, I’m sure, helped in generating material for a book length single-game commentary; and I enjoyed reading the give-and-take within each pair, seeing where they agreed, where they disagreed, how they resolved those differences. But what was more striking was seeing the situations where the two pairs disagreed: where one pair would work out a series of variations, play their move, and then the other pair would respond with something that the first pair hadn’t considered at all!

This, of course, happens to me all the time; I wasn’t sure whether to be reassured or disturbed to see it happen to top professionals. But after seeing several such instances, I realized just how different their missteps are from mine: they’re working from such a solid feel for the general weight of each move that, even when their opponents responded in a different area of the board than one of the pairs expected, that didn’t turn what I would consider a good move into what I would consider a bad move, it made a difference of a point or two, or maybe even (once they’d gotten over their shock) no points at all. Which doesn’t mean that their surprise at the move wasn’t deserved or important, just that they’re playing a game with a much subtler texture than I can see.

Sigh. I don’t regret turning away from go, but I’ve given up something by doing so.

In a world where masculinity is assumed to represent strength and power, those who are butch and boyish are able to contemplate their identities within the relative safety of those connotations. In contrast, those of us who are feminine are forced to define ourselves on our own terms and develop our own sense of self-worth. It takes guts, determination, and fearlessness for those of us who are feminine to lift ourselves up out of the inferior meanings that are constantly being projected onto us. If you require any evidence that femininity can be more fierce and dangerous than masculinity, all you need to do is ask the average man to hold your handbag or a bouquet of flowers for a minute, and watch how far away he holds it from his body. Or tell him that you would like to put your lipstick on him and watch how fast he runs off in the other direction. In a world where masculinity is respected and femininity is regularly dismissed, it takes an enormous amount of strength and confidence for any person, whether female- or male-bodied, to embrace their feminine self.

But it is not enough for us to empower femaleness and femininity. We must also stop pretending that there are essential differences between women and men.

(pp. 18–19)

Acknowledging this variation is absolutely crucial in order for us to finally move beyond overly simplistic (and binary) biology-versus-socialization debates regarding gender. After all, there are very real biological differences between hormones: Testosterone will probably make any given person cry less frequently and have a higher sex drive than estrogen will. However, if one were to argue that this biological difference represents an essential gender difference—one that holds true for all women and all men—they would be incorrect. After all, there are some men who cry more than certain women, and some women who have higher sex drives than certain men. Perhaps what is most telling is that, as a society, we regulate these hormonally influenced behaviors in a way that seems to exaggerate their natural effects. We actively discourage boys from crying, even though testosterone itself should reduce the chance of this happening. And we encourage men to act on their sex drives (by praising them as “studs”) while discouraging women from doing the same (by dismissing them [as] “sluts”), despite the fact that most women will end up having a lower sex drive than most men anyway.

While many gender theorists have focused their efforts on attempting to demonstrate that this sort of socialization produces gender differences, it seems to me more accurate to say that in many cases socialization acts to exaggerate biological gender differences that already exist. In other words, it coaxes those of us who are exceptional (e.g., men who cry often or women with high sex drives) to hide or curb those tendencies, rather than simply falling where we may on the spectrum of gender diversity. By attempting to play down or erase the existence of such exceptions, socialization distorts biological gender difference to create the impression that essential differences exist between women and men. Thus, the primary role of socialization is not to produce gender difference de novo, but to create the illusion that female and male are mutually exclusive, “opposite” sexes.

Recognizing the distinction between biological and essential gender differences has enormous ramifications for the future of gender activism. Since there is natural variation in our drives and the way we experience the world, attempts to minimize gender differences (i.e., insisting that people strive to be unisex or androgynous) are rather pointless; we should instead learn to embrace all forms of gender diversity, whether typical (feminine women and masculine men) or exceptional (masculine women and feminine men). Further, since some attributes that are considered feminine (e.g., being more in tune with one’s emotions) or masculine (e.g., being preoccupied with sex) are clearly affected by our hormones, attempts by some gender theorists to frame femininity and masculinity as being entirely artificial or performative seem misplaced. Rather than focus on how femininity and masculinity are produced (an issue that has unfortunately dominated the field of gender studies of late), we should instead turn our attention to the ways these gender traits are interpreted.

(pp. 73–75)

Thus, any model that attempts to explain human gender expression, sexual orientation, and subconscious sex must take into account the fact that both typical and exceptional forms of these inclinations occur naturally (i.e., without social influence) to varying degrees.

In order to reconcile this issue, I would like to put forward what I call an intrinsic inclination model to explain human gender and sexual variation. Here are the basic tenets of this model:

1. Subconscious sex, gender expression, and sexual orientation represent separate gender inclinations that are determined largely independently of one another. (This model does not preclude the possibility that these three inclinations may themselves be composed of multiple separable inclinations, or that additional gender inclinations may exist as well.)
2. These gender inclinations are, to some extent, intrinsic to our persons, as they occur on a deep, subconscious level and generally remain intact despite social influences and conscious attempts by individuals to purge, repress, or ignore them.
3. Because no single genetic, anatomical, hormonal, environmental, or psychological factor has ever been found to directly cause any of these gender inclinations, we can assume that they are quantitative traits (i.e., multiple factors determine them through complex interactions). As a result, rather than producing discrete classes (such as feminine and masculine; attraction to women or men), each inclination shows a continuous range of possible outcomes.
4. Each of these inclinations roughly correlates with physical sex, resulting in a bimodal distribution pattern (i.e., two overlapping bell curves) similar to that seen for other gender differences, such as height. While it may be true that, on average, men are taller than women, such a statement becomes virtually meaningless when one examines individual people, as any given woman may be taller than any given man. Most people have heights that are relatively close to the average, but others fall in outlying areas of the range (for instance, some women are 6 feet 2 inches and some men are 5 feet 4 inches). Similarly, while women on average are more feminine than men, some women are more masculine than certain men, and some men more feminine than certain women.

Because these inclinations appear to have multiple inputs and show a continuous range of outcomes, it is incorrect to assume that those with exceptional sexual orientations, subconscious sexes, or gender expressions represent developmental, biological, or environmental “errors”; rather, they are naturally occurring examples of human variation.

(pp. 99–100)

This is one of the most difficult aspects of transitioning to describe, as there are so few words in our language to articulate “body feelings” of any sort. I’m sure that this lack in language is related to our cultural tendency to dismiss or discount the way that our bodies feel to us. Indeed, many of us tend to think of ourselves as brains or souls crammed inside of a shell—a shell that is our body. We delude ourselves into believing that the shell itself is not important, not connected to our consciousness, that it’s merely a vessel that contains us, or a vehicle that we move about with our minds. But the truth is, our bodies are inseparable from our minds. This becomes evident whenever hunger, thirst, or physical pain grows to the point where we can think of nothing else, or when mental grief or stress manifests itself in physical aches and exhaustion. All of us who have experienced the physical difference between feeling healthy and feeling ill, or perhaps most profoundly, between pre- and post-puberty, have a deep understanding (whether we acknowledge it or not) that our body feelings make a vital and substantial contribution to our senses of self.

(pp. 220–221)

These days, I recognize the huge difference between sexual desire and sexualization. Sexual desirability is something that we all hope to have to some extent. When other people express their sexual desire for us, it can be extremely empowering, so long as such expressions are reserved for the appropriate time and place—i.e., from the right person and when we have signaled our openness or willingness to reciprocate. Sexualization, on the other hand, has the opposite effect: Rather than empowering the person, it’s used to leverage power over them. This can be seen all the time in the media, where women often appear not as fully formed human beings with their own thoughts, feelings, and opinions, but as purely sexual objects used to sell cars, beer, and other commodities. Some might naively argue that these women have power—specifically, the power to lure men—but it’s a power that only serves heterosexual male interests. After all, how much power is there in being a carrot on a stick dangled in front of someone? Such depictions exist in sharp contrast to media expressions of sexuality that center on real-life women’s sexual desires and perspectives, such as The Vagina Monologues or a Margaret Cho show.

The fact that sexualization is an attempt to dehumanize and disempower women is even more evident in remarks we get on the street, which invariably occur when women are presumed vulnerable (when we are alone or outnumbered) and often go unchallenged solely because the men who make such comments are physically stronger than the women they harass. Perhaps it’s only one in fifty or one in a hundred men who stoop to the level of catcalls (or worse), but over time they take their toll and achieve their intended effect: They make us feel like we are targets. Indeed, the sexualization that occurs in both media imagery and public harassment reinforces a power dynamic between the sexes in which men are invariably viewed as predators and women as prey. This predator/prey mind-set makes it virtually impossible for us to imagine that a woman has the potential to be a sexual aggressor (evident in the common disbelief about, and inability to articulate, instances of woman-on-woman sexual violence or female fetishism) or that a man can be a sexual object (as seen by the tendency for people to view young boys who are seduced by adult women as being “lucky,” as opposed to being victims of statutory rape). In fact, the only instances in which adult men esem to have the potential to become sexual objects is when they are sexualized or coerced into sexual acts by male aggressors.

(pp. 254–255)

Indeed, the ongoing and hotly contested debates over whether femininity and masculinity are biological or social in origin have, in my view, served primarily as a distraction from a far more pertinent issue—namely, what meanings, symbolism, and connotations do we assign to different gender expressions? While I disagree with the notion that gender expression itself is entirely social in origin, I do believe that the way we perceive and assign values to feminine and masculine behaviors is primarily, if not exclusively, a social affair. In our male-centered culture, two forces most often shape our interpretations of femininity (as well as masculinity): oppositional and traditional sexism.

Oppositional sexism functions to legitimize feminine expressions in women and to delegitimize feminine expressions in men (and vice-versa for masculinity). So while all people are capable of expressing feminine traits, oppositional sexism ensures that such expressions will appear natural when produced by women and unnatural when produced by men. In addition to creating the perception that female femininity is “real” and “right” while male femininity is “fake” and “wrong,” oppositional sexism may also influence the “doing” of gender expression. Exceptional gender expressions are regularly dismissed, even stigmatized, in our culture, which may lead some people to hide or curb their own gender-variant behavior, further exaggerating the assumed, apparent differences between the two sexes. In these ways, oppositional sexism creates the assumption that feminine traits—which occur in members of both sexes—are inexorably linked to female biology, and therefore, to one another.

Traditional sexism functions to make femaleness and femininity appear subordinate to maleness and masculinity. This is accomplished in a number of ways. For example, female and feminine attributes are regularly assigned negative connotations and meanings in our society. An example of this is the way that being in touch with and expressing one’s emotions is regularly derided in our society. While this trait has virtually nothing to do with one’s ability to reason or to think logically, in the public mind, being “emotional” has become synonymous with being “irrational.” Another example is that certain pursuits and interests that are considered feminine, such as gossiping or decorating, are often characterized as “frivolous,” while masculine preoccupations—even those that serve solely recreational functions, such as sports—generally escape such trivializations.

In addition to placing inferior meanings on feminine traits, traditional sexism also creates the impression that certain aspects of femininity exist for the pleasure or benefit of men. Take, for example, the concern for, or desire to help, others. While those who have this quality of empathy or altruism often express it toward all types of beings (i.e., children and adults, strangers and friends, animals and humans), it’s often recast in women as a maternal, “nurturing” quality that is meant to be directed primarily toward one’s family. Thus, this thoroughly human trait has been twisted into the expectation that it’s women’s “natural” duty to take care of their male partners and children, and to carry out the bulk of family and domestic chores.

(pp. 325–327)

So why has the artificializing of femininity become a preoccupation for many feminists over the last several decades? I believe that it has to do with the fact that many of the women who have most strongly gravitated toward feminism are those who have found traditional feminine gender roles constraining or unnatural. In many cases, this is due to their own inclinations toward exceptional forms of gender expression. Because their personal experiences with femininity felt uncomfortable and contrived in comparison with their experiences with androgyny, masculinity, or other gender expressions (which they found more liberating and empowering), they mistakenly projected their own experience and perspective onto all other women. While not necessarily done maliciously, this extrapolation was nevertheless an act of gender entitlement, one that denied that any diversity in gender expression might exist among women arising out of their very different class, cultural, or biological backgrounds and predispositions. By arrogantly assuming that no woman could be legitimately drawn toward feminine expression, these feminists permanently relegated femininity to the status of “false consciousness.”

The feminist assumption that “femininity is artificial” is narcissistic, as it invariably casts nonfeminine women as having “superior knowledge” while dismissing feminine women as either “dupes” (who are too ignorant to recognize they have been conned) or “fakes” (who purposely engage in “unnatural” behaviors in order to uphold sexist societal norms). This tendency to dismiss feminine women is eerily similar to the behavior of some lesbian-feminists in the 1970s who arrogantly claimed that they were more righteous feminists than heterosexual women because the latter group was “fucking with the oppressor.” It is an extraordinarily convenient tactic to artificialize, and even demean, an inclination (such as femininity or heterosexuality) when you personally are not inclined toward it. Indeed, this is exactly what straight bigots do when they dismiss queer forms of gender and sexual expression as “unnatural.” When we feminists stoop to the level of policing gender and start inventing etiologies to explain why some women adopt “unnatural” feminine forms of expression, there’s little to distinguish us from the sexist forces we claim to be fighting against in the first place.

While femininity is in many ways influenced, shaped, and enforced by society, to say that it is entirely “artificial” or merely a “performance” is patronizing toward those for whom femininity simply feels right. Indeed, one would have to have a rather grim view of the female population to believe that a majority of us could so easily be “brainwashed” or “coerced” into enthusiastically adopting an entirely contrived or wholly artificial set of gender expressions. In fact, it seems incomprehensible that so many women could so actively gravitate toward femininity unless there was something about it that resonated with them on a profound level. This becomes even more obvious when considering feminine folks who exhibit no desire whatsoever to fit into straight society, such as femme dykes (who proudly express their femininity despite being historically marginalized within the lesbian movement because of it) and “nelly queens” (who remain fiercely feminine despite the gay male obsession with praising butchness and deriding “effeminacy”).

The idea that “femininity is artificial” is also blatantly misogynistic. While a handful of theorists in the field of gender studies have more recently begun to focus on how masculinity is constructed, the lion’s share of feminist attention, deconstruction, and denigration has been directed squarely at femininity. There is an obvious reason for this. Just as woman is man’s “other,” so too is femininity masculinity’s “other.” Under such circumstances, negative connotations like “artificial,” “contrived,” and “frivolous” become built into our understanding of femininity—indeed, this is precisely what allows masculinity to always come off as “natural,” “practical,” and “uncomplicated.” Those feminists who single out women’s dress shoes, clothing, and hairstyles to artificialize necessarily leave unchallenged the notion that their masculine counterparts are “natural” and “practical.” This is the same male-centered approach that allows the appearances and behaviors of men who wish to charm or impress others to seem “authentic” while the reciprocal traits expressed by women are dismissed as “feminine wiles.” Femininity is portrayed as a trick or ruse so that masculinity invariably seems sincere by comparison. For this reason, there are few intellectual tasks easier than artificializing feminine gender expression, because male-centricism purposefully sets up femininity as masculinity’s “straw man” or its scapegoat.

(pp. 337–340)

In retrospect, I would say that the assumption that distinct identities would automatically lead to exclusivity was entirely misplaced. After all, an identity is merely a label, a descriptive noun to express one particular facet of a person’s experiences. And if we look beyond gender and sexual identity politics, we can find many examples of flexible and fluid identities. For example, if I were to identify myself as a “cat person,” nobody would be outraged or confused if I said I also loved dogs. Further, when I tell people that I’m a “musician,” no one makes unwarranted assumptions about what instruments I play or what styles of music I prefer. Nonpoliticized identities like “musician” and “cat person” allow us to see that the recurring problems in gender and sexual identity politics arise not from identity per se, but rather from opposite-think (e.g., that a cat person cannot be a dog person, and vice versa) and from a sense of “oneness” (e.g., the assumption that all musicians are or should be punk rock guitarists.)

(p. 353)

Some might argue that it’s simply human nature for us to assign different values to different genders and sexualities. For example, if we tend to prefer the company of men over women, or if we find androgynous people more attractive than feminine or masculine ones, isn’t that assigning them a different worth? Not necessarily. There is a big difference between rightly recognizing these preferences in terms of our personal predilections (“I find androgynous people attractive”) and entitled claims that imply that there are no other legitimate opinions (“Masculine and feminine people are not sexy, period”). Similarly, there’s a big difference between calling yourself a woman or a genderqueer because you feel that word best captures your gendered experience and using that identity to make claims or presumptions about other people’s genders (e.g., assuming that “men” or “gender-conforming people” are your “opposites”).

Some might also argue that there is such a thing as “bad” gender—for instance, a woman who feels coerced into living up to stereotypically feminine ideals. As someone who was closeted for many years, I can understand why someone might be tempted to describe genders that are enforced by others (e.g., stereotypical femininity or masculinity) as being “bad.” The problem is that there is no way for us to know whether any given person’s gender identity or expression is sincere or coerced. While we experience our own genders and sexualities firsthand, and thus are capable of separating our own intrinsic inclinations from the extrinsic expectations that others place on us, we are unable to do so on behalf of other people. We can only ever make assumptions and educated guesses about the authenticity of someone else’s sexuality or gender—and that’s always dangerous.

The thing that always impresses me about human beings is our diversity. Even when we are brought up in similar environments, we still somehow gravitate toward very different careers, hobbies, politics, manners of speaking and acting, aesthetic preferences, and so forth. Maybe this diversity is due to genetic variation. Or maybe, being naturally curious and adaptive creatures, we invariably tend to scatter all over the place, exploiting every niche we can possibly find. Either way, it’s fairly obvious that we also end up all over the map when it comes to gender and sexuality. That being the case, if we take the subversivist route and focus our energies on deriding stereotypically feminine and masculine genders, we will inevitably disparage some (perhaps many) people for whom those genders simply feel right and natural. Furthermore, by critiquing those gender expressions in an entitled way, we actively create new gender expectations that others may feel obliged to meet (which is exactly what’s now starting to happen in the queer/trans community). That is why I suggest that we turn our energies and attention away from the way that individuals “do” or “perform” their own genders and instead focus on the expectations and assumptions that those individuals project onto everybody else. By focusing on gender entitlement rather than gender performance, we may finally take the next step toward a world where all people can choose their genders and sexualities at will, rather than feeling coerced by others.

(pp. 360–362)

• I haven’t been in a classroom at all for a couple of years, I haven’t been the primary instructor in a classroom for almost nine years, I haven’t seriously experimented with new ways of structuring courses for about eleven years.
• The symposium in question took place three weeks ago, I don’t trust myself to remember the details of Roger’s position, and he didn’t actually put a concrete position statement on the symposium blog post. (See the Pericles Group website for some information about his approach, though.)

So, in other words: what I’m about to do is talk about a woeful misrepresentation of somebody else’s point of view based on knowledge and experiences of my own that are equally woefully ill-informed and/or out of date. (Alternatively: I’m about to write a blog post! *rimshot*)

Roger sees a close tie between games and teaching, and had some sort of pithy phrase that he used to express that tie. I can’t remember what the phrase was, but I believe its gist was that classrooms are always a game, and that students are going to perform according to the rules of that game: so make active, conscious use of that fact, designing as good a game as possible and one where success in the game is as closely tied to your learning objectives as possible. And, as far as I can tell, he and his co-conspirators are extremely successful in this—I can’t imagine reading some of Kevin Ballestrini’s posts from last school year and not getting the feeling that something special is going on there. So I’d like to understand it, to relate to my own experiences and philosophical predispositions, and see what I can learn.

On which note: my philosophical predispositions towards teaching are strongly shaped by reading Alfie Kohn. His book No Contest had a huge effect on how I structured my classroom time; his book Punished by Rewards had a fairly strong effect on how I structured my assignments and grading, contributing to my feeling that I wasn’t a misfit in academia solely for research reasons, I ultimately was probably more of a misfit for teaching reasons, even though (because?) I cared about the latter more than the former.

And certainly there are many ways in which Kohn agrees with (my interpretation of) Roger’s point. For example, Kohn rails at length against standardized tests, and one of his main points is that standardized tests encourage students, teachers, entire school systems to do well on those tests even if that comes at the expense of learning; to me, this dovetails quite nicely with Roger seeing classes as games, because you’d better make sure that the rules of the game enforce the behavior that you want! Standardized tests are, of course, a lousy game with lousy goals; Roger does much better on that end, and I’m sure that Kohn agrees that the sort of richer feedback mechanisms that Roger’s methods provide are a huge improvement.

Where I suspect the two would disagree (or, more concretely: my reading of Kohn gives me pause) is on the nature of the motivators that are involved. The point of Punished by Rewards is that intrinsic motivation is much more powerful than extrinsic motivation, and that the latter drives out the former. Now, classes are already chock-full of extrinsic motivators (grades in particular); if you accept that as the basis that you’re starting from, then sure, craft your extrinsic motivators to promote learning in the areas that you’d like, and overlaying role-playing game mechanics may help with that. But if you start from an environment that’s trying to work with and nurture intrinsic motivators, then while role-playing sounds good, I get nervous about game mechanics: it’s hard to do that without bringing extrinsic motivators into play.

Looking at this from a slightly different angle: I like learning. I think feedback is inextricably bound to learning. But I’m a lot more dubious about certification: its coupling of feedback with extrinsic motivation can be actively counterproductive. And that coupling is often very strong, and is expressed as a refusal to give feedback without submitting to those extrinsic motivators: e.g. most colleges will kick students out of school if they refuse to engage in actions that lead towards them getting graded.

(Tangent: in my last year and a half in academia, I taught calculus. Those courses were full of pre-meds; as far as I can tell, the course served much more of a weeding out role than a thoughtful attempt to ensure that those students learned mathematical concepts that would help them be more effective doctors. Most of the students put in a decent effort to learn the material—you generally don’t get into Stanford without such habits—but not all were particularly interested; from my point of view, not being interested was a perfectly reasonable possible choice, indeed one that probably more of the class should make, and I did not enjoy working within a system with strong forces pushing against students making that choice, or even being aware of the possibility.)

So the question that that raises is: are games simply feedback mechanisms that can be used in a variety of ways, or are they certification mechanisms? I was going to say that, whenever you bring in scoring, you’re already moving in a certification direction, but upon reflection that’s too strong: if a game really is about itself (go or, I assume, Starcraft), then the scoring mechanism is feedback pure and simple.

But if the game is about something else (as classroom-based games always are, though Roger’s approach works at narrowing that gap), then scores make me very nervous. For one thing, if the score is tied to something else (e.g. a course grade that is necessary for getting a degree) then it’s certification, not simply feedback; for another thing, the distance between the score and the broader topic means that you aren’t getting feedback about aspects of the topic that aren’t covered by the scoring mechanism. I see both of these all the time in video game RPGs: if you don’t fight and level up, RPGs will refuse to give you access to the game’s content, and even if you are willing to go along with that, that focus on combat and leveling encourages you to neglect other aspects of role-playing. (Fortunately, there are people whose drive is strong enough to withstand such discouragement.)

If you’re sensitive to these issues (as I’m sure Roger is), you can design your games to open up as wide a space as possible for learning. Take Rock Band as an example; in this context, we’ll think of it as a tool to learn about music, e.g. by introducing you to a range of music, to help you pick out the different parts of a piece of music (Paul McCartney’s bass lines), even to teach you concrete physical and mental skills involved in playing music. The first iteration of the series was relatively prescriptive: it wouldn’t even let you try to play harder songs until you’d performed adequately (according to the game’s criteria, not your own!) on the easier songs. I suspect no-fail mode existed in the first game, but I felt that its use was discouraged; in contrast, the second game turned no-fail mode on by default if you’re playing in easy mode, so if you want to listen to music with a bit of guidance from the game as to the shape of one of the parts, you can do that without having the game punish you if you don’t conform properly.

By the third game, the amount and range of possible feedback has expanded enormously; because of that feedback, I’m finding the experience much more powerful as a teaching tool, with my actions being much less driven by the scoring mechanisms of the game. I almost always have no-fail mode turned on (and I wish there were a way to turn off the missed note sound: frequently I find that sound to be useful feedback, but in some circumstances it’s actively counterproductive to my learning goals), and while the game’s scoring system (and other metrics, e.g. streak length) can be a useful feedback mechanism (e.g. breaking a streak while playing Outer Space last weekend pointed out that I was missing a bass line transition), the extrinsic motivation aspects of that feedback, while still relevant to me, is no longer as dominant as it once was.

And with Rock Band 3 in particular, there’s feedback that’s provided outside of the game context, that your ears and hands give you. That game is, admittedly, a quite special case, but its nature may make it particularly well suited to provide examples for how to design games to work in a classroom situation.

Returning to what I said earlier: I’m convinced that Roger’s methods are effective, but I’m not sure I really understand the sources of that effectiveness. Continuing the theme of talking about areas that I’m ignorant of: how much of the effectiveness of these methods is due to a magic circle effect? Bringing in an explicit game mechanic (instead of the implicit mechanic that’s provided by grades and testing) may serve as an inoculation against extrinsic motivators, as an explicit acknowledgement of those motivators coupled with a refusal to give them undue power. And role-playing mechanisms in particular may be a particularly strong inoculation, with the dual role allowing for one of those roles to be motivated by intrinsic motivation while the other role goes along with the more certification-y aspects of the feedback systems.

Which, in turn, raises the question: what would a classroom look like with magic circle effects but without game mechanics? That puts an unexpected light on some of my own teaching experiences. One of the most powerful such experiences that I had was in the very first course I taught at Stanford: it was a differential equations course, and I’d spent a lot of time thinking about how I wanted to design the course. I balanced student work and lecturing in a very different way than in courses I’d been in as a student, and had a quite unusual homework / exam policy. I continued feeling this out as the quarter went along; I had a great time, the students seemed to be enjoying it, and the students seemed to be learning something.

So I was ready to declare the methods a success, and indeed I think the methods I used were good ones; but subsequent iterations of the class didn’t have the same feel. Part of that is doubtless chance (e.g. the specific students involved), and part of that is that I was less actively investing mental effort in the later iterations. But I bet that the fact that I was clearly experimenting had an impact on how the students saw the course, and did so in a way that’s similar to a magic circle effect, treating it as an explicit alternate space that muted the impact of certification on their learning.

Interesting stuff, I wish I understood the interplay of forces here better. I hope we’ll talk about this more in future VGHVI Symposia (of which there will be one this Thursday); follow the VGHVI blog if you want to participate!

I think what got to me the most was its take on seeing the future in the form of viewing multiple possible appearances/actions that a person might have. (Will have? I’m fairly sure that they’re presented as possibilities in the book, but I could be wrong.) It’s not emphasized in the book (indeed, one of its strengths, like any good fantastical work, is the strength of the world-building in directions that aren’t the main themes of the book) but these views of the future directly ties into my brain’s current obsession with contingency. I think I’ll write a separate post about that one, though, because my response to this aspect of the book has rather more to do with where my brain is than with the book. (In particular, my brain right now is at least as focused on contingency in the past as on the future.)

Then there’s the title concept of a ‘lifelode’, a sort of true calling. Which is a little bit of a banal idea, and one that smacks too much of the notion of “hero of destiny” that infects fantasy literature. (And science fiction, and video games.) The good thing about Lifelode‘s approach to the concept is that it accepts a wide range of possible lifelodes as equally worthy: for example, looking after a household or making pots are as respected lifelodes as anything else. Also, the book at least addresses the possibility of people coming late to an understanding of what their lifelode might be; which is good, because if you’d asked me what mine would be, there are decades when being a math professor would have been the answer, which in retrospect has clearly proven not to be the case.

Partly because of that last experience, this is perhaps the area of the book that I’m mostly dubious about: I fear that it smacks of an essentialism that can be actively harmful. But it’s also one that I find seductive, and that I don’t understand at all in the context of my own life: I’m fairly sure that there’s a certain coherence in my activities and interests (both in my various employments and my various outside interests) that hints at a lifelode of sorts, but I’m not sure exactly how to put my finger on it, or indeed whether it would be an actively good idea to put my finger on it. And I’m also not sure whether analyzing that coherence in terms of a lifelode would be useful, harmful, a curiosity, or a distraction! So: lifelodes are something my brain likes thinking about right now, but is that good?

I support rather more unconditionally the book’s openness towards relationship possibilities: a society accepting of both primary marriages and very strong side relationships, of communication among the various parties necessary to make that work, and also the way the book nonetheless showed the unquestioned love, devotion, and focus from another that we all need sometimes. Side relationships are not, in general, the way my brain works at all, but I was thinking some about what ‘family’ meant a few months ago; that context has waned and that part of my brain has calmed down quite a bit since then, but still: I like to see an open discussion/acceptance of more possibilities of what it means to be a family.

Also, on the relationship note: one character gets described as “flirting as easily as he breathes” partway through the book, in a context that points out how unusual that is within the village where the book takes place. Which really struck me because I hadn’t noticed his behavior being all that unusual, and it made me realize that I’m more blind to certain aspects of “men hitting on women” behavior than I’d like to be. And also got me thinking about my own flirtatious behaviour: flirting was, for better or for worse, something that I think I basically didn’t do at all back when I was in search of relationships (and, to the extent I did it, I’m positive I was horrible at it); it’s something I do more now in a few contexts, with a few people—it’s fun and is essentially a zero-pressure activity for me now that I have no desire for anything at all to come out of it—and I suspect that, with the right sort of person, I’m probably no longer tragically awful at it? (I could easily be wrong on that latter bit; I suspect I would be awful at it with most people, and that I’d be rather worse at it if it mattered to me now, but that’s fine.) But reading that line in the book makes me wonder: do I flirt more often now than I think of myself as doing?

And then there’s the whole concept of moods. In the book, moods are presented, in part, as being brought through the air; also, it’s possible to set up defenses against being overly affected by these airborne moods. Which is a lovely idea, concretizing the notion of being swept away by an unwelcome mood (or a welcome but unexpected one!) for no clear reason, and of realizing that you’re acting in a way that you’d rather not be and trying to figure out what to do about it. These airborne moods are, at least at times, sent by gods (or by people acting on behalf of gods); I really like how the concept of personified gods seems like one end of the normal fantasy spectrum as you start the book, but then the personified gods turn out to be less and less like what the word ‘personified’ would make you think even as the book shows you more and more of how people become gods. (And that’s also tied to an unusual feature of the world’s geometry—there’s a bit of a Flatland, or really more Sphereland, vibe to the book as well.)

Like most fantasy novels, it talks about changes of an excessively cataclysmic nature, but here too it comes at it from an unusual nature: on the one hand, presenting these changes as part of an ongoing rhythm (so more a vibe of Buddhist changes of eras than a climactic victory of good or evil versus the other), but also shows how these changes can be delayed and caused to take uncommon courses without negating the idea entirely. Huge changes in fantasy novels generally have a strong martial feel; in Lifelode, though, that martial feel takes an Aikido vibe, with an emphasis on redirection rather than blocking/counterattacking (and also rather than evading them completely, of course), and with the acceptance of circularity.

A short book (which is refreshing for a fantasy novel in of itself!), but one where every ten pages turned up an idea that was both interestingly unusual for the genre and tied into something that I’d been thinking about.

After which, I decided I’d been remiss in reading Walton’s recent work, so I decided to catch up and go through Among Others as well. Which was a delight from start to finish: I ended up livetweeting my reading (and being gratified by how many of the people I know like quotes that speak favorably of interlibrary loans), because I don’t think I’ve ever read a book which speaks so directly to the experience of being a (very!) bookish teenager in the late 70′s. (I wasn’t a teenager by then, but I was close enough that the literary references were almost all familiar.) And, specifically, a bookish teenager whose tastes run strongly towards fantasy and science fiction but who is willing to dive into other specific recommendations, including those from adults you meet whose tastes you learn to trust.

Here, by ‘specifically’, I mean: author after author is mentioned, book after book, including the delights of discovering a wonderful book by a new author, learning that they’ve written more, finding somebody to talk about that author, and going to the library and checking out another ten of their books. (Or: putting in an interlibrary loan request for every single one of that author’s books.) All sorts of wonderful little touches, like the protagonist’s enjoyment of Tiptree, then discovering 50 pages later than Tiptree was a woman, and her having opinions about specific Tiptree stories instead of about Tiptree in the abstract; or her giving Plato a try on the recommendation of a (much) older friend, really liking the Symposium but being more dubious about the Republic, and relating the latter to The Dispossessed and Triton. It’s one thing to recognize a similarity of feelings and experiences in the abstract; but it seemed like on every page of this book I’d run into a specific artistic encounter that I went through myself 25 years ago. Amazing.

Though, now that I think about it, perhaps I should revise my expectations. I might also use the term ‘life-affirming’ to describe the Kushiel trilogy, for example; and, while that series is not pornography, there’s quite a bit of fucking going on it. No piss drinking that I can recall, but lots of pain inflicted as part of the sex in those books; still, the result is something that I very much see as on the side of the goodness in humanity. I’m fairly sure that, by the end of this blog post, it will be clear that that isn’t a coincidence, that there’s a reason why my brain interprets both books that way.

Anyways, back to The Mad Man. Like I said: pornography, piss drinking. The latter is far from the only sexual act in the book, or far from the only substance consumed: the protagonist spends a fair amount of time going down on other men (as does Delany himself, of course), so semen certainly shows up frequently. (One might even say that it spurts forth.) In fact, in general, if a substance comes out of a body, it gets consumed in this book: while the protagonist is not in this number, a couple of the side characters have a fondness for eating shit, to the extent that we run into people in the book who claim never to go to a bathroom, they just hold things in until they run across a friend who will dispose of their waste products for them.

I suspect it’s a manifestation of Delany’s love of symmetry (or a hidden desire to be a management consultant?) that he completes the quadrant: we’ve sexualized the production and consumption of solid and liquid waste products, and we have semen: if we wanted to make the latter solid, what would we do? The answer, of course, is to have characters who have stretched their foreskins to abnormal extents, and who like to whack off and then leave the semen hanging around in there for a few days; eventually, it apparently takes on a more solid, cheese-like texture, becoming a different sort of delicacy to be consumed by its aficionados. (The protagonist becoming one of those aficionados.) Who knows, maybe that is a thing, maybe this is simply Delany reporting.

Because report he does. I said above that the book is pornography, and if I had to pick a single genre label for it, that is the one that I’d choose. But it crosses genre boundaries in ways that, for example, his Equinox doesn’t: and one of its other themes is to provide a picture of what life could be like as a gay man in pre-AIDS New York City. And what life could be like is: you can get laid all you want, and if there are particular behaviors that you eroticize, you can easily find people to engage in it with you, should you so choose. So, for example, he goes into a fair amount of detail about a bar that regularly had evenings devoted to the consumption of piss, with loving descriptions of the care taken to make sure that your clothes are wearable, the way people replaced urinals in the bathrooms during those evenings, the effects on your insides of having large amounts of urine flowing through your system.

Of course, pornography is (frequently) devoted to entirely imagined portrayals of sexual excess, but that’s not what’s going on in the above descriptions. For one thing, they’re called out as reporting instead of pornography within the book itself: while the book describes a trip of the narrator’s to that bar, it frames that trip in the context of a letter from the narrator to a less-cosmopolitan friend of his, giving context about the possible life of a philosopher that the narrator is describing, with the tone of: you clearly don’t realize what the range of quite reasonable possible behavior for a gay New Yorker is, so I’m going to explain it to you. (And, as I do a bit of googling, Delany didn’t even construct a fictional bar as a composite of real examples: the Mineshaft, the bar he described, existed and was much as he said.) It’s explicitly marked as reportage in the context of the book, and Delany these days clearly feels that it’s important for him to speak out accurately about the variety and quantity of sex available for those desiring it: the interview that leads off The Polymath has him talking about a typical day of writing in the early sixties where he’d work on a novel for a few hours in the morning, then go to a bathroom in Central Park and blow four or five men, then go home and write some more, then go to a movie theater for more sex, then grocery shop and go home and cook dinner for his wife, then write some more, then go off to the trucks to give another five blow jobs. Easily hundreds of sexual partners a month, thousands a year.

Those movie theaters show up a lot in The Mad Man, too, and he’s written a quite good nonfiction book about them, too, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue. That book is partly about the destruction of those theaters, and what we’ve lost by that destruction. A theme that comes up in The Mad Man, too; and while I won’t say it’s the reason for their destruction (or for the shutting down of the Mineshaft), AIDS is one of the main ways in which the city government justified their actions in that regard. The Mad Man straddles the boundary of the appearance of AIDS, and explicitly addresses that transition.

Addresses it not just in terms of what was lost in terms of institutions, but in much more personal terms: of having friends suddenly die, of living in fear not knowing that you’re going to die, of living in resignation assuming that you must be infected, given the number of people you’ve fucked, so what’s the point of taking precautions? And it’s written in (in my view entirely justified) anger at the scandalous paucity of solid research into what behaviors lead to what levels of risk of catching the disease. There’s way too much unsupported “sex is scary and bad, especially gay sex” talk out there, and on the sex-positive side way too much “sex is very dangerous without a condom but safe if you have one” talk out there; Delany’s survival (those thousands upon thousands of men he’s gone down on weren’t wearing condoms) gives anecdotal evidence that the truth is rather more nuanced than that, but anecdotal evidence isn’t research. The Mad Man contains, as an appendix, a 1987 Lancet article entitled “Risk Factors for Seroconversion to Human Immunodeficiency Virus among Male Homosexuals”, which is a start; Delany claims that it hasn’t (or at least hadn’t at the time the book was written, say by 1994) been followed up in anything approaching an appropriate fashion. That is part of the context of the sex acts that are featured in the book: Delany wanted to write about people having (lots of!) sex in ways that could plausibly not lead to their getting AIDS.

So yeah, there’s reportage in there, and well-done polemically-informed reportage at that. And, uh, reportage that’s kind of hot. Which is one of the interesting things about the book: trying to figure out what’s pornography, what’s fiction that’s describing people that fuck a lot but in realistic rather than fantastical ways, and what’s reportage. That division isn’t simply something I’m reading into the book: as I mentioned above, the book explicitly addresses the existence of reportage, and it also explicitly addresses pornography, in the form of events told by narrators who prove later to be unreliable.

And this variety of narration, coupled with an even wider variety of sexual acts that are described, means that when reading it, I’m always asking myself: is this something I like to do? Is this something I would like to do, but haven’t done? Is this something that I kind of think I would like to do but I’d need to get drunk to have the courage to do it? Is this something that I think is hot to read about but that I really wouldn’t want to do in real life? Is this this something that is so obviously fictionalized pornographic excess as to be too ridiculous to even think about in real life? Is this something that I wouldn’t want to do about in real life, but am completely comfortable with the idea of? Is this something that I’d honestly rather not think about too much, but that when I do think about it seems fine if that’s what you’re into? Is this something that seems wrong to me? There’s stuff in the book that I’d put into each of those categories, and mercifully little that I would put in the last of those categories; and one side effect of (re)reading it is that the number of acts that I’d put into the next-to-last of those categories is shrinking.

Which is one of the reasons why I find the book so life-affirming. It sends a strong message that: whatever you’re into (well, almost whatever you’re into), that’s okay, and you’ll find somebody else who is into that, too, you’ll find sexual satisfaction. And that’s a glorious statement! And another message, that worrying too much about fitting yourself into boxes or what the correct labels are to apply to yourself just isn’t necessary. For example, we frequently see in those theaters (and elsewhere) men who label themselves as straight but who really enjoy being (frequently!) blown by other men; the novel may gently poke fun at them for that label, and suggest that those men would be happier if they weren’t so attached to it and could take a more honest look at their lives, but ultimately the fact that those men are finding sexual fulfillment is what matters.

Also, the book is equally strong on the flip side of that message: whatever you’re not into is fine, too. Even if you label yourself as gay, that doesn’t mean that you have to be into doing anything that another man wants. So there’s little or no anal sex in the book, for example (mirroring Delany’s own preferences), and generally characters in the book have a fairly strong leaning towards going down on other people or towards having other people go down on them. (Delany generally prefers the former.) It’s fine to want to do A a lot, to never want to to B, to want to do C once or twice a week, to be happy enough to do D if you’re with a partner who prefers it but to stay away from it otherwise, to have wanted to do E ten years ago but to not be into it these days, to not be quite sure yet if you want to do F or not. That, coupled with an equally strong message that people with complementary preferences are out there somewhere, is something that I find rather wonderful.

So far, I’ve been mostly focusing on different kinds of sex acts. But, of course, there’s a lot more to sexual desire than the act itself: doubtless there are people out there who would be happy to fuck anybody with the appropriate set of orifices/organs/desires to match their preferences in sex acts, but most of us get turned on/off by other specific physical characteristics and behaviors as well. And this too is a strength of Delany in general and of The Mad Man in particular.

Any Delany fan is well aware by now of the frequency with which Delany’s main characters get turned on when seeing somebody else with heavily bitten fingernails; this is one of Delany’s own fetishes, but it also goes back to the life-affirming nature that I mentioned above: whatever you are into is okay. (Though, just to be clear here: I am not saying that I approve of all forms of sexual behavior, consent is crucial to me. I’ll get to the intersection of desires with politics in a bit.) There is no need to feel shame; think about where your desires might come from, if you wish, but if you have a preference for something, that’s fine. I honestly can’t remember how much bitten fingernails show up in The Mad Man, but there’s one key character who has quite the interest in the details of feet, for example.

And equally life-affirming (actually, probably more life-affirming) is the converse: there’s going to be something out there who is into you, even into aspects of yourself that society suggests you should be ashamed of; and, for that matter, just because society marks something as negative (or as positive) doesn’t mean that anybody should care about that one way or another! (Again, I’m talking about sexual attraction here, not politics.) The book reinforces that last point in a rather direct way: a lot of the people that the protagonist has sex with are homeless. (And not some sort of pornographically fantastic attractive young homeless people, either: homeless people who have had a rough time of it, who have been aged by the process.) It’s not that the protagonist has a fetish for homeless people; he just doesn’t care about that the way that society expects him to. I don’t want to portray the book as autobiography, because it’s not, but this isn’t some sort of abstract political statement: Delany has been living for the last twenty years with a man he met while the latter was homeless. (See Bread & Wine for some of the details about that one.) Think about what’s important to you (sexually, yes, but in a partner more generally), and try to see that without being blinded by what society tells you. (And, for that matter, try not to get too attached to those initial hypotheses if you haven’t actually checked them against your behavior and feelings towards real people.)

That’s the physical side of attraction, of eroticization; what about the mental side? This is actually the area in the book that gave me the most pause, as it turns out. To take one example, I hope I don’t make a habit of calling people stupid in the real life, but I’m sure I’d be more likely to do that than to, say, drink piss; when reading and thinking about those two actions in the book, though, I end up realizing that the former bothers me rather more (and at a more fundamental level) than the latter.

It is very much to The Mad Man‘s credit, however, that it’s helped me think through these issues, to understand where my boundaries lie and what’s good about my disquiet, but also to appreciate the positive aspects of what he’s describing. In general, if you’re calling somebody stupid, you’re just being an asshole. (At best: at it’s all-too-common worst, it’s actively destructive, potentially to the point of leaving scars for life.) I’m coming around to understanding, though, that in an explicitly marked fantasy zone, that can be okay behavior.

In general, I’m not hugely into talking dirty as an actual part of sex (though I’m pretty strongly into verbal play in general, and I’d be very unlikely to be attracted by somebody who didn’t appreciate and wasn’t capable of some level of verbal gymnastics), but I can see (I can feel!) the pleasure of talking dirty. Also, in general I’m not into power play in sex (and there my sexual preferences mirror my non-sexual preferences), but I’m not so blind as to deny the existence of that one, either. And, to be honest, I suspect that I’d be perfectly happy to experiment with being on the submissive side of a sexual power dynamic, though I’m also perfectly happy giving it a miss and I doubt that I’d want to either go too far in that direction or make that a particularly frequent part of sex.

So: if modeling power relations turns you on, if insults are part of that, and if for that matter you get turned on by being called stupid, then that’s totally up to you: your preferences are your preferences, your turn-ons are your turn-ons, and if you find a partner willing (even eager) to play a complementary role, then that’s great. (That partner just won’t be me!) Unlike some of the stuff I’ve talked about above, I’m not going to uncritically accept most power dynamic sexual preferences as being innate to your brain chemistry (in general, I’m sure there are exceptions); but even if it is the case that those sexual desires are shaped in part by societal forces that I think are bad, even evil (which I’m also not going to uncritically put forth!), that doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to try to repress those sexual desires. Work with them, figure out how to find pleasure; and if they bother you, confront that, figure out what’s going on, and it’s my (quite uninformed) guess that you’ll have more luck dealing with what bothers you in areas outside of sex first.

(At least that’s my current tentative working hypothesis. I really do not claim to have a well-informed opinion about all of this, and I’m almost positive that there are ways in which I’m being a condescending asshole here. And just typing the words “brain chemistry” above reminds me of a conversation I had with a friend a couple of months ago that I should pick up again: she has a much more directly informed opinion about how brain chemistry would affect some of these issues than I do!)

Returning to our specific example: in the grand scheme of things, calling somebody stupid is a relatively mild form of power dynamic; Delany confronts some power dynamics that are a lot worse, and where I’m glad that it’s a black man who is writing about them. The more intense the power dynamics get, the more he goes out of his way to emphasize the boundaries of where they’re acceptable and where they’re not, to emphasize that enjoying something in the context of sex does not in any way mean enjoying something in a different context, and that desiring a label in the context of sex does not mean that that label is either welcome or accurate in other contexts. And even with that, there was one place in the book where I was intensely grateful a certain bit of narration was revealed to be false within the book’s internal context, a bit of internal pornography. Which relates to the distinction I mentioned above between sex acts that you’d enjoy actually doing versus sex acts that you get turned on by reading about them: just as (consensual, always consensual!) interactions during sex are in a different space from interactions in other contexts, so too are explicitly fictional descriptions of behavior different from real-world behavior.

Phew. Quite a book; quite a lot to think about. It certainly hits on my taboos—I finished my most recent reading of the book more than two months ago, and it’s taken me most of that time to accept that, yes, this book really is important enough to my brain that I’m going to write about it even if that means writing about characters who are turned on by eating shit. (And this hesitation isn’t purely academic: one real-life friend had asked about the book a couple of times, and when I finally gave in and started talking about it, got squicked out in quite short order by my description.) And, as is obvious from those last few paragraphs, it hits at issues that I’m still not comfortable thinking about.

But the book has also helped me become surprisingly comfortable with a wide range of scenarios, and did so a way that points uniformly towards acceptance of and glorying in the wonderful variety of human behavior. And, equally important, in a way that paints a wonderfully optimistic picture of opportunities and acceptance that’s out there for you! Delany’s world is a fascinating one, and one that I like more and more as I’m getting to know it better.

Music is forcing its way into my life again, and I’m very glad for that. But I keep on looking wistfully at my bookshelf, and asking myself why I’m not spending more time with them. For example, I’ve been thinking a lot about Jane Jacobs recently, and in particular it’s well past time for me to revisit Systems of Survival; or I’ve been talking with a friend of mine recently about Buddhism, thinking it’s time for me to revisit that. (I suspect I’m the only person in my circle of bloggers who studied Pali for a couple of years in college and who has 45 volumes of the Pali Canon sitting on his bookshelf; I’m particularly fond of the elephants on the spines of those books!) It’s not that I don’t read books at all, and in fact sometimes an author will still grab me and I’ll read several of her books in close sequence; but it’s far too common for me to go multiple weeks without finishing a book.

And that’s not good. So I have to make more time to read. Regularly carve out time in the weekends to read; but I should also carve out a weekday evening a week to read too, I think.

That, of course, means that something has to go, especially since I’m spending more time than I had been on music. So, the first step: re-examine my long-term ongoing projects. Do I want to continue studying Japanese, do I want to continue learning guitar? The answer to both of those is yes, so they’re staying.

Do I want to continue to read and write blogs? I certainly want to continue to write; in fact, I’m hoping that I’ll start blogging more about books! I don’t want to stop reading blogs, either, but that’s clearly an area where I can do more pruning, and constrain my blog reading more: I don’t want to have evenings where I start reading blogs, then do a bit of this and a bit of that, and end up feeling unhappy with myself. (I’m totally fine with spending evenings doing bits of this and that if I end up feeling happy with myself, though: sometimes I’m just feeling blah, and should recognize and embrace that.) That alone may actually be enough to help me carve out one evening a week.

Do I want to continue to play video games? That question gave me pause, but I think ultimately the answer there is a clear yes: Christopher Hyde I am not. But, as with reading blogs, I should be more aware of what I’m playing. It’s time to stop playing games just because I feel that I should, and instead to play games that I feel are calling to my soul in some way. So fewer sequels, more returning to old favorites (I just got a refurbished Dreamcast: here I come, Jet Grind Radio, Space Channel 5, Shenmue, and of course the PS3 Ico and Shadow of the Colossus remakes), and when considering new games, I’ll lean towards games that I hope will speak to something deeper within myself (Child of Eden, presumably preceded by Rez HD; Dragon Age 2). (Actually, if my brain is telling me to spend more time on music and on Buddhism, then Child of Eden is probably a rather good fit!) It’ll be a while before I start any games, though: I imagine I have at least another year of Rock Band 3 in front of me, Ni No Kuni DS will probably take me a couple more months, and one non-Rock Band game at a time is my limit.

And then there’s the possibility of new creative projects forcing themselves upon my brain. Fortunately, right now I’m at a bit of lull in terms of feeling that I need to program something at home (doubtless helped by the fact that programming at work is rather interesting); if that changes, though, I’ll embrace it and re-evaluate. Hmm, thinking about games, I wish I were spending more time playing board games, too; and I should be spending more time with non-family members outside of work. In college, I watched movies a fair amount; I miss that, but I’m comfortable enough having that stay by the wayside for the time being.

So: a balancing act. But it always is, and it always comes down to: what is my soul telling me to do? Right now, my soul is telling me to draw strength from friends, and that the friends I’ve been neglecting the most are books.

Do I self-identify that way now? Honestly, I’m not sure. It’s easy to say no, to chalk up my identification at the time up to a mixture of political tendencies and raging hormones. Clearly in general I’m more attracted to women then men, and the fact that I’ve never had sex with a man is a pretty strong argument that “straight” is the right label for me these days.

On the other hand, it’s not like there’s a huge sample size to choose from in that latter category, either: I’ve only had two sexual partners since I admitted to myself that men were catching my eye (at least I think that’s the case: I’m not exactly sure about dates for the latter), and in particular I haven’t had sex with anybody other than Liesl since we started dating more than twenty years ago. (And my working assumption is that the latter condition will continue until I die; I’m rather happy with that thought, as it turns out.) So all I can say for sure right now is that I am (very!) sexually attracted to Liesl; and while, if forced, I could speculate about what it is about her that turns me on so much, she’s a somewhat difficult case for me to generalize. And, for that matter, I’m not sure speculating about what aspects of other people might turn me on in the same way Liesl does would be the wisest course of action…

Certainly it’s the case that what’s I find most sexually attractive in Liesl are mental characteristics rather than physical ones (though I certainly don’t want to discount the latter!), and characteristics that aren’t gender-linked: her intelligence, her wit, her kindness, her aesthetic sensibilities. (On that last note: some members of the college LGBT group that I hung out with were surprised to hear that I was dating a woman when Liesl and I started going out; if I’m remembering correctly, that surprise cleared after meeting her and learning of the depth of her knowledge of show tunes.)

I guess ultimately, sexuality is for me a rather personal matter. Not personal in the sense of “none of your business” (at least not this month on this blog, apparently!), but personal in the sense of “I’m attracted to whom I’m attracted to, and I’m not sure I can generalize within my own experience, let alone to others’ experiences”. Samuel R. Delany is one of my favorite authors (and it’s high time for me to do another Delany read-through), and one of the many aspects of his writing that I appreciate is the openness with which he discusses fetishization: many of his characters are turned-on by well-chewed fingernails, and he is not the slightest bit embarrassed or apologetic about this, but it’s also not something that he presents as a universal type. People are attracted by what they’re attracted by, and that’s (almost always) okay. And then there’s The Mad Man, going quite explicitly into a specific sexual preference/activity that I’m fairly sure I would have no interest in outside of a book; reading that portrayal of desire turned me on, though, and again: I like the frankness of that acknowledgement, both intellectually and more, uh, directly. (And I kind of wish I would go bald on the top of my head, so I could look more like Delany, because that would be hot. But I digress…)

I’m not entirely sure why I feel like talking about sexuality so much this month. Part of it may be lingering effects from playing Catherine; also, as I mentioned above, one of my coworkers gave me a nudge about the specific title of this post. (And, in general, the company house style of appreciating verbal facility gets my mind working in interesting ways.) But also: this stuff is important. Back when I was in college, it was at least the case that LGBT groups were fairly common, and we’ve made noticeable progress since then; having said that, if gay couples still can’t get married in most of the country, if gay soldiers are getting booed at presidential debates, there’s a long way to go.

And if I can make even a small difference by talking about sexuality, then that is what I shall do. (Talking: I do it a lot!) I learned recently that my coming out during college had a strong, surprising positive effect on a friend of mine; that alone makes bringing up this topic worth it.

Also: I have a twelve-year-old child. Teenage years are hard enough; I would like Liesl and myself to be there for her as an open ear on relationship issues when that would be useful. (And to keep our nose out of her business when that would be useful, too!) To that end, it almost feels irresponsible to me not to openly acknowledge the fact that my sexuality is a little more complicated than it seems on the surface: I have no idea how hers will unfold, but everybody’s is more complicated than it seems on the surface, and that’s a source of celebration rather than shame. And gay rights aren’t some sort of abstraction, or even just something that matters to our friends; it matters to me, even if I didn’t need laws to be passed to be able to get married. I don’t think Miranda reads this blog (she’s generally more interested in my Minecraft blog), but if she does: hi, Miranda, glad to see you! If not, it’s something that will come up in discussions in person soon enough, I imagine.

Happy national coming out day, everybody! My name is David Carlton; I’m bi? straight? besotted with my wife? Whichever of those is the best answer, I celebrate it; and whatever is the best answer for each of you, I celebrate that as well.

A few months ago, though, some people on a mailing list that I participate in (including the author of the gnolls.org blog) started sharing their experiences with paleo diets, and in particular a few people reported somewhat remarkable results from cutting down on non-rice grain consumption. The author of that blog recommended the book Perfect Health Diet (and its companion blog), so I gave that a read.

Which was quite interesting. A lot of it meshed nicely with what I’d been trying a few years back: in particular, they agree that many fats are just fine, and that many carbohydrates are bad. A lot of the details differ, however: the Perfect Health folks don’t think that it’s good to avoid all carbohydrates, they focus more on specific ones (non-rice grains, fructose, probably others that I’m forgetting) but not all. (In particular, they don’t have much truck with glycemic index, and prefer white rice to brown rice, claiming that the latter can leach nutrients.) Also, there are some other details: they don’t like a lot of standard vegetable oils (though they’re fine with olive oil), but quite like some less common ones, most notably coconut oil.

Spurred by that, I decided to cut down a bit more on my wheat consumption. (Though I’m certainly not going to give up bread entirely, I like it too much!) Which raised the question: what to do about breakfast, if my previous habit of oatmeal wasn’t recommended? At first, I alternated between eggs and bacon or salmon (if I had time), plain yoghurt and fruit (if I had less time), and reheating leftovers. But then a funny thing happened (which other people had predicted): I found myself feeling a lot less hungry in general in the mornings! Before, I would eat a full breakfast and feel like I wanted to start snacking again at around 11am; these days, though, I’m fine not eating anything until lunch time, and in fact on two days at Defcon I didn’t eat anything until around 2pm and felt great. (Which was convenient, there weren’t great food options and the mediocre ones were crowded.)

Also, I’m finding myself feeling full more often. Which is one of the big points of gnolls.org: your body has a feeling for what nutrients you need, and if you feed it the right stuff, you just won’t feel as hungry. The idea of paying attention to signals your body is sending makes a lot of sense to me; and if those signals mean that I’m not eating as much because I’m not feeling as hungry, I’m willing to take that as a sign that I’m doing something right!

I’m not planning to go all-out paleo—like I said, I like (good) bread too much! But it’s also great to not have to worry about eating breakfast, and to not feel hungry as often, so I do think I’ll stick with these changes, and possibly go further with them than I have been.

• When I was thinking about getting an iPad, I wondered what format I should buy books in. I was thinking the contenders were Amazon’s proprietary format versus ePub books (sadly largely with encryption in both cases); but when I actually got the iPad, I discovered that it’s a really great PDF reader. (Don’t get me wrong, I’d love a retina screen on it, but it works quite well as is.) And, as it happened, some of the early books that I bought were from the Pragmatic Programmers, which lets you get books in PDF and ePub (and Amazon’s format, but I don’t have a Kindle yet, so no reason to choose that if I’m not buying from Amazon). And, for now, I’m liking PDF books a lot more than ePub. I just hope that the book industry doesn’t take as long as the music industry to start embracing non-encrypted formats, so I can get PDF books from other sources.
• Having said that, non-page-based formats do have their uses. A couple of weeks ago, I was reading Nicola Griffith’s Always on the Kindle app on my iPad. And then I found myself out of the house with some time to kill, so I pulled out my phone and switched over to reading the book on that. (I didn’t have my iPad with me.) And that worked great, much better than reading a PDF on my phone would have or sitting around being bored would have.
• Another unexpected electronic book benefit: our dog Zippy is getting rather old, and wakes me up squeaking a couple of times a night on average. (For better or for worse, I’m a much lighter sleeper than Liesl is.) Sometimes he needs to go out, but sometimes he’s achy and just needs cuddling for a while. And I like being able to read while cuddling with him without having to turn on a light.
• Speaking of Nicola Griffith, I’d forgotten just how amazing an author she is. Or rather, I’d been somewhat reminded of that when I read her memoir, and I like her blog as well, so I’d been meaning to dig back into her fiction, but I hadn’t gotten around to it until the last month. I don’t think I’d reread Ammonite since it came out, but it’s quite good; better still is Slow River, and rereading The Blue Place was eye-opening. I’d never read Stay or Always, but I’m quite happy to have remedied that omission.
• Speaking of omissions, I’d somehow stopped reading Madeline L’Engle’s Crosswicks Journal after the first two books. No idea why I stopped then; I went back and reread them just now, and they’re rather wonderful. Though so far I’m not enjoying the third one as much; maybe it will grow on me (it took a while for me to appreciate the first one, I seem to recall), or maybe it’s just more targeted at Christians?
• I’m very glad to have been reading a lot of fiction these days. I’d been weighting my reading rather heavily towards technical books over much of the last year; partly for good reasons, but partly because I’d been swayed by sales of electronic books at a couple of publishers. And while electronic books don’t raise exactly the same inventory concerns as physical books, they’re still inventory, and the fact that I own them still unduly influences me to read them. I’ll have to be more vigilant about that in the future.
• Sad that Borders is going out of business. I like independent bookstores, but to me it’s much much more important to have a large selection of books available for purchase, and Borders did a great job of that as a chain; I visited the local Borders about as frequently over the last few years as any other physical bookstore. Their time has passed, but I salute them and will miss them.

Meandering on from the discussion on forms of responses from a couple of months ago: my tolerance for snark has gone down markedly over the last few years. And it’s not just snark: it’s responses that, in whatever fashion, have as their substance “you are wrong, I am right, and I am going to focus on this”. Which is a frequent symptom of comments that I dislike: the commenter who is motivated to speak because of his or her strong feeling that the article being commented upon is misguided.

But my dislike bothers me, too! Not least because I feel that pull strongly myself at times: I’m getting better at telling when I’m feeling the pull of “someone is WRONG on the internet”, but even so much of the time I don’t manage to resist it, or other similarly negative urges. (And I’m rarely happy about the result the next day.) That’s not the whole reason, though: part of my disquiet is that I don’t understand all of the components of my dislike, that I’m fairly sure that there are positive aspects playing into that dislike, and that I wish I knew better how to tease out those positive aspects.

For example, let’s set aside the negative aspect of snark and negative comments, and focus on their self-centered aspects. Replace a negative comment with a positive one that’s similarly self-centered; how would I feel about that?

My first reaction is that I am, in fact, okay with this. Part of that feeling comes from the idea that the web is a customer service medium, motivated by a question of “why wasn’t I consulted?”. This is a motivation that can lead to excess, but in general it points in a direction of more participation rather then less participation, which I feel is to the good.

And part of my happiness with such an approach comes from the self-centered nature of my blogging: this blog is purely about whatever happens to be interesting my brain at any particular moment, what I want to get out of something that I’ve encountered, and I’m pretty happy with that. It means that much of what’s here isn’t particularly likely to be of interest to almost anybody else; that’s fine, and I’m also perfectly happy for other people to write similarly self-centered blogs. In fact, I often find such blogs surprisingly interesting: I’ll find myself reading about a post on something that I would normally not think twice about, and being drawn in by the author’s focus and interest on that topic.

Teasing these apart, I suppose I’m not so thrilled with responses that come from a place of “why wasn’t I consulted?”, after all. I’m generally for a positive response that goes into what the responder cares about and that is oblivious to others’ cares. I’m less for a positive response that does that while actively expecting me to feel that the responders’ cares are important. And when a response is all about the respondent validating the post in question, then my first instinct is to roll my eyes. Yay for participation, but only yay if we’re building something by that participation. (Hopefully together, but separately is fine, too.)

And then there’s the ego-boost factor to positive responses. I don’t think that adds much to my feelings, though: a vapid positive post or one that’s all about the respondent’s feelings isn’t much of an ego boost, while one that ties in to something else the respondent cares about can be interesting enough to sidestep the question of ego boost entirely.

That’s the self-centered aspect of snark; what about the negative aspect? Would I be as unhappy with posts that are negative but not self-centered?

Probably not. Take, for example, “Considered Harmful” Essays Considered Harmful, arguing against a particular kind of negative essay. I agree with much of that article; having said that, I’ve also learned a lot from some “considered harmful” essays, and in fact referred back to Recursive Make Considered Harmful just a couple of months ago.

So I’m okay with a well-thought takedown. But they have to come from a position of understanding, even sympathy for me to enjoy them. Quoting Chesterton:

If you don’t see the use of it, I certainly won’t let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it.

So yeah, it really is the combination of self-centeredness (or rather, other-denying) and negativity that bothers me. How should I deal with that when I see it?

Gerald Weinberg recommends an “aikido way to engage blaming”: yield, accepting the other party’s anger, without accepting their blame. Then, once you’ve aligned with their anger, redirect it somewhere more productive. “Dealing with Internet Trolls – the Cognitive Therapy Approach” gives some recommendations that aren’t too dissimilar to that approach. In general, if negativity is coming at me from elsewhere, then responding in a not-directly-opposed manner makes sense to me.

What if it’s coming from me, though? A few years ago, Kent Beck was talking a lot about appreciative inquiry. The idea there is: focus on strengthening the good aspects of a situation, on growing the seeds of good events in your past, and the good will outweigh the bad. Which makes a lot of sense: don’t let bad experiences drive your life.

A pure appreciative approach wouldn’t work for me, though. As GTD teaches us, if something’s in your head, it needs to be acknowledged: in particular, ignoring something bad can cause it to fester and grow. So yeah, stating “this bothers me” is necessary. That’s the first part of the aikido approach: acknowledge the anger, let its energy flow if it needs to. But acknowledging that anger doesn’t mean giving in and letting it control you: if you can interact with that anger with compassion (towards others, towards yourself!) and redirect it, maybe something good will come out of it.

A few notes:

• Image sources are linked to on the images themselves, except for the troll/fish picture, which is a combination of this troll image and Shlomi Fish’s logo.
• This post isn’t a sign that I’m feeling particularly bad about anything right now—I’m really quite happy with my life these days! It’s mostly an excuse to do a linkdump of some related articles that I’d come across recently.
• One link I didn’t manage to fit in: Long Overdue, from Dubious Quality. Bill Harris says that his writing was much stronger when he was funnier and angrier; I wasn’t reading him back then, and I’m sure that writing had its virtues, but I really like what his writing has turned into.

Eventually, though, I got bored (or perhaps overwhelmed) with those underground caves, so I decided to work on a house. I didn’t head outside to do that, however: the opening of my mine was at the base of a fairly large hill, so I decided to hollow out the space above the entrance into a room.

Since I was working above ground, I hit the side of the hill fairly soon, so I put in a window. And, as I continued to enlarge that room, I hit another side of the hill; following my Christopher Alexander fetish, I recognized this as Light on Two Sides of Every Room.

One of Christopher’s Alexander’s main points is that you shouldn’t design buildings in isolation, you shouldn’t design them abstractly: you should design them in context, you should design each building so that the area around it is made richer by the presence of that building. And one of the wonderful aspects of Minecraft is that it’s a building game that encourages such an approach. Yes, if you want, you can build in Minecraft as if you were working with Legos, assembling the blocks that you have at hand into whatever shapes you find pleasing. But one of the most amazing aspects of the game is the terrain that it generates: and a building that fits into that terrain and finds a way to fill a gap that is missing is much more powerful than a building that’s plunked down into a plain that you’ve artificially leveled.

Indeed, going through Alexander’s fifteen properties, we see many that have echoes in Minecraft. The walls of the house that you build to survive your first night are an excellent example of Boundaries. The wonderful overworld combined with the importance of mining (and with natural caves bringing space to the interior of the earth!) provide Deep Interlock and Ambiguity and Positive Space in a context of Contrast. The large blocks, in their own way, provide Roughness; the terrain is full of Good Shape, and not infrequently I turn a corner and am struck by a wonderful waterfall (or lavafall!), a single tree in just the right place, or a forest of trees filling a valley, any of which makes a Strong Center indeed. And the range from single blocks to trees to hills to mountains to the span from bedrock to the top of the sky has room for several Levels of Scale.

Which isn’t to say that it’s a perfect Alexandrian space. There is room for several levels of scale, but the size of the blocks imposes a limit: the world may stretch on forever horizontally, but you only have 256 blocks of height to play with. And the context that Alexander wants you to place your buildings into isn’t defined only by the pre-existing shapes that are present: it’s the context of the people who will be using those buildings, people who are (pace the pleasures of multiplayer servers) almost entirely absent in Minecraft. Nonetheless, as much as I’ve enjoyed other construction games recently (Social City being the most prominent example), Minecraft does a much better job of providing context.

And it certainly does a good enough job of providing context to make me realize that I’m pretty bad at architecture! Take that picture above: one of the windows in question is at an angle (so it’s perhaps more light on one-and-a-half sides rather than two sides of a room), and the wall between the two is a much weaker center than a corner would be at that location. In retrospect, I was much too deferential to the existing shape of the hill when I hollowed out that room: I should have taken a slightly firmer touch in places, reshaping the walls to make the interior space more usable while not harming its outside appearance. I tried to do that some on the third floor, but that also led to problems: I ended up extending past the sides of the hill in a few areas, with the result that there are overhangs above the windows on the second floor, meaning that they didn’t provide as much light as they should have. And one side of the hill in question led into a natural arch; a wonderfully strong center in its own right, but again windows facing that arch didn’t provide enough light to make the adjacent rooms really livable.

Still, I got better at creating and enhancing centers as I proceeded up the hill. I’m rather fond of the way the third floor balcony turned out: the Deep Interlock and Ambiguity that it provides as a Boundary between the interior and exterior, the Level of Scale that it provides in relation to the larger interior room, and that sunset view is hard to beat. The stairs going up the outside of the hill from that balcony also provide a nice accent to the existing shape of the hill, and, going further up, there’s a turning set of stairs inside a large glass enclosure that provides an even bigger boundary area between inside and outside than the balcony did, while solving a somewhat thorny problem posed by the pre-existing geometry of the hillside and my third floor room. Up on the roof, I originally planted five trees before chopping down all but one of them, since its power as a Strong Center would more than make up for the absence of the other four.

There’s so much more to do, so much more for me to learn. I’ve hollowed out perhaps a quarter of that hill: how best to acknowledge the rest of it? And then, how can I move away from the crutch of using an existing hill to form the shell of my house: how best to build houses outside in the Minecraft landscape, at first hoping only to not mar the beauty of that landscape too much, but eventually finding ways in which I can make the landscape a bit more whole? And how to reconcile that with the part of me that likes digging corridors, that would enjoy nothing more than to lay down minecart tracks in a straight line all the way to the horizon?

I came in expecting to dislike a lot of what I read, and I wasn’t disappointed in that. God is presented as a figure of petty evil; Jesus is working in support of that. Or at least, that’s how I initially read it; as Roger pointed out, prophecy isn’t necessary inherently moral, it can be simply descriptive, and warnings of evil are useful.

But, as I read further, I felt less and less that those statements were directed at me. Roger’s comments helped me see this more as an exercise of community forming within an existing Jewish community; most of Jesus’s strongest attacks are directed at the existing Jewish priestly elite, he explicitly abstains from opportunities to attack the secular government of the time, and he probably doesn’t care at all about an atheist on another continent two millennia later! The prophecies about the arrival of the kingdom of heaven within a generation also helped me root these statements as concerning a battle involving specific people in a specific time and place.

I was surprised by my reaction to Jesus’s healing: I expected to like that uncritically, but the repetition eventually got to me. That probably says more about me (and not in a particularly good light!) than about anything in the text, however.

And I was also expecting to find a lot to like, and I wasn’t disappointed in that, either. So many strong statements about forgiveness, my favorite of which was the passage about turning the other cheek. Linked to that are statements about not judging others but instead judging yourself (the mote in thy brother’s eyes), and statements about caring for others, and of faith in the generosity of humanity; great stuff on page after page.

I’m glad to have gone through this exercise; but it’s also been a lot more work than I expected! I’m still planning to read through the rest of the gospels, but I’m certainly not planning to do many posts on them; if something catches my eye, I’ll write about it, otherwise not. Again, my thanks to those of you who have stuck with me; to those of you who think this topic has more than overstayed its welcome, I reassure you that I’ll soon be back to my normal program of video game pontification combined with occasional bits on software development…

We see a return of the humanity from Matthew 26 in Jesus’s crying “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (from Matthew 27:46), and for that matter, a crueler version of humanity in the mocking comments in Matthew 27:40-43. (Which do ring true to me, unlike the bit from Matthew 27:25 quoted above.)

At the end of Matthew 27, Jesus dies and is buried; and, in Matthew 28, he’s resurrected. I find that chapter very odd: there’s an amazing lack of detail, no power in the phrasing, and so much uncertainty that it’s acknowledged in the text in Matthew 28:15 and Matthew 28:17 with only a passing attempt at a rejoinder. A sad ending…

That passover must have been one of the most depressing meals ever (and I’m sure the creepy cannibalism bits didn’t help). And then, in their last night together, Jesus is lonely and unsure, asking the disciples to stay with him, but they fall asleep while he repeatedly asks “O my Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me: nevertheless not as I will, but as thou wilt” (from Matthew 26:39/42/44).

Then there’s Peter: Jesus says Peter will deny him, Peter says never, but Peter does, leading to the end of the chapter Matthew 26:74-75: “Then began he to curse and to swear, saying, I know not the man. And immediately the cock crew. And Peter remembered the word of Jesus, which said unto him, Before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thrice. And he went out, and wept bitterly.” And I can’t read Peter as being a bad person here: he’s one of many scared, fallible people in this chapter, and he remains the foundation of Jesus’s church.

And even in the middle of being seized by the priests’s men, Jesus gives us one last lesson in compassion and non-violence: when one of Jesus’s followers attacks one of the priest’s followers with a sword, Jesus says “Put up again thy sword into his place: for all they that take the sword shall perish with the sword” (from Matthew 26:52). Or at least that’s how I choose to interpret it: the context presents it more as a fulfilling of prophecy, and Jesus having faith that, ultimately, he has the upper hand. Still, that’s the lesson that I’d prefer to take from it.

Matthew 25 also talks about the kingdom of heaven, but in a more discursive fashion. I rather like the parable of the talents (Matthew 25:14-30), with its notion that you shouldn’t squander what is given to you and its explicit acceptance of loaning money with interest. (Matthew 25:27, “Thou oughtest therefore to have put my money to the exchangers, and then at my coming I should have received mine own with usury.”)

Note, however, that in that parable, we’re talking about people to whom something has been given: the chapter ends with a paean to the virtues of kindness and charity to those who are in need, in Matthew 25:34-46. In fact, I’ll just quote Matthew 25:34-40 here:

Then shall the King say unto them on his right hand, Come, ye blessed of my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world: For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. Then shall the righteous answer him, saying, Lord, when saw we thee an hungred, and fed thee? or thirsty, and gave thee drink? When saw we thee a stranger, and took thee in? or naked, and clothed thee? Or when saw we thee sick, or in prison, and came unto thee? And the King shall answer and say unto them, Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Amen.

At any rate, these leave you with the ideas that: 1) you shouldn’t mess with Jesus, and 2) those in the temple aren’t exempt from his wrath, indeed rather the opposite. Which leads directly to the next bit, with Jesus confronting the “chief priests and the elders of the people” (from Matthew 21:23). This lasts for a full two and a half chapters, containing: a couple of arguments about bible interpretation; a couple of parables all on the theme of “chief priests bad (directly going against the will of God), followers of Jesus good”; the “Render therefore unto Caesar the things which are Caesar’s; and unto God the things that are God’s” (from Matthew 22:21) bit that makes it clear that Jesus is focusing right then on arguing with the priests rather than with the state; and Matthew 23. In that chapter he really lets loose against the priests, with seven verses starting with “woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites!”, five verses where he calls them blind, one “Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers”, and other fine examples of invective.

Ouch. But great stuff: it’s one thing when Jesus is telling me that it’s way or the highway, but I’m perfectly fine with him telling off other similarly judgmental types. Especially when it’s an argument between the old and the new, though I do feel a bit sorry for the priests here, with their fear that they’re on the wrong side of history.

Friend, I do thee no wrong: didst not thou agree with me for a penny? Take that thine is, and go thy way: I will give unto this last, even as unto thee. Is it not lawful for me to do what I will with mine own? Is thine eye evil, because I am good?

Emotionally, I’m on the side of the longer-working laborers here: but why? If they would have felt adequately paid in the absence of the other laborers, then why are they bothered by how the other laborers are treated?

The key here is, of course, the comparison. If the other laborers hadn’t worked at all, and it had been pure charity, I imagine that the laborers who had worked wouldn’t have felt bad. And then there’s another potential scenario that Jesus doesn’t give us: what if both sets of workers had worked the same amount, but they’d gotten radically different pay rates, the lower of which would, in other circumstances, be acceptable? The same argument seems to apply that the lower-paid set of workers shouldn’t feel bad; I bet they would, though, and they’d feel like the person in charge is unfairly playing favorites.

I dunno. I’m still mostly on the side of the longer-working laborers, and, if I were in their shoes, I wouldn’t set my alarm clock early the next day. But “Is thine eye evil, because I am good?” is a very good question.

The rest of the chapter doesn’t strike me as strongly. I do, however, like the call to servant leadership in Matthew 20:26-28, in particular “And whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant” (Matthew 20:27).