Most beautiful woman in the world celebrates Bloomsday

My wife, Jami, the most beautiful woman in the world, had a birthday yesterday. I had a day off so I cooked. I fried chicken, made gravy, bought one of those pre-fab salads, and baked a couple of potatoes. I had never cut up a chicken before. I had seen chefs on TV make short work of the bird with a few cleaver whacks. I don't have the cleaver control they do. I used my cleaver to saw and pry. I used a small knife to rip and peel. But when it was done, my primitive efforts were not too messy and accomplished the job. I remembered the time I was little and my nanny and pa convinced me to eat turtle. They told me that a salesman had come by the store with a chicken cut up in a new way. I did do some creative cutting along the back especially.
The kittens circled my feet: offal a thousand tongues to mew.
I may not be able to do much in the kitchen, but I can fry chicken. I am particular about soaking the pieces in buttermilk. Buttermilk keeps the flour on the bird and adds a sizzle when the oil is at its hottest. Buttermilk is the most Southern of drinks - non-alcoholic drinks. But there is a trick I learned from a Missourian, add some crushed pepper to it. It brings out the tone and undercuts the sweetness. If possible find some corn bread (not sweet) and crumble it in a glass before pouring the buttermilk on top. It is a fine dinner substitute.
I only wish that I had learned my grandmother's method of cornbread production (I only remember her advice to put a pinch of flour in the center of the pan). But that's the way cooking is: like things in art, it is being forgotten and rediscovered.
The chicken, unconventionally cut up as it was, turned out good. Jami loved it, as well as the gravy and potatoes.
Jami looks younger every day. Her smile lights up my heart.
I forgot to quote large passages from Joyce on her birthday, since her birthday is Bloomsday. Three years or so ago I was at a bar called James Joyce in Avondale Estates. I happened to be there on Bloomsday and I asked the waiter if he what day it was. He did not. I explained all about Joyce and the events of June 16th, 1904. About Eccles St and Blazes Boylen and Stephen Dadelus. But no flicker of recognition. "I guess we should know about that." "It might prove a good idea," I responded.
I may open a bar one day called the Flann O'Brien - every third policeman gets a pancake. People'll keep coming back and won't know why.

I am not ashamed

I've grown to associate Paul's assertion here, that he's not ashamed of the gospel, seeing how it's the power of God for the salvation of all active in belief, with a kind of evangelical militancy. I grew up with such people in such churches: people who can be difficult, intrusive, not understanding - all because there focus is on "getting people saved" or "being God's man or woman in the midst of the fray." And so I've found a certain distaste in it's proclamation, in so far as I feel it's proclamation to have the depth of a mere slogan, or else an evasion.
Keck points out that Paul is speaking ironically: he really boasts in the gospel - why would he feel any shame? But I think that this text highlights the notion of shame. It's an honor and shame society that Paul and the early believers live in, as many commentators observe. Paul is not saying that the gospel might be something he's tentative about, reticent to voice - but what he's saying is that that proclaiming the gospel is actually an honor: an honor that runs counter to what Roman society considered worthy of honor. Because God alone dispenses honor and shame, Paul can say that the gospel proclamation does not devolve into shame for him, but conversely, honor.
It is now, after a hundred years of individualism as the guiding mindset of the the West, that shame takes on a different cast, an interior condition, an aspect of diminution towards the outside. And shame is more than embarrassment. Embarrassment is a momentary condition that flows from anxiety.
Shame, I am discovering, is hammered into us during childhood. We are taught to be ashamed of our bodies, our thoughts, our desires. As we grow older certain social constraints depend on the inculcated shame people have.
The gospel should be one means of attacking this shame. Shame is after all an interior idol, a quality that we attend to at the expense of worshiping God: that is, being who we are as God created us. But this voice of the super ego, the constant critic, attacks. In many ways this interior critic is too much taken for granted as part of our voice, and we may be slow to oppose it. Yet all sorts of perfidy flow from the super ego. It nags and threatens. Cognitive therapy puts a cap on it, but its source howls away inside.
I am fortunate that I have some guidance in questioning this voice. I have to say that reading Freud's Beyond the Pleasure Principle has been immensely helpful. Even more so than anything I've read from Jung. Definitely more concise than anything I've read through Zizek or Kristeva from Lacan. Nancy Chodorow's Reproduction of Mothering is immensely helpful too.

Oh yeah, I can create something

I forget sometimes. After dropping Jami off at the airport yesterday, I visited the NC museum and the Ackland. While I sat in the NC museum, looking at a Jennifer Bartlett painting, a simple series of views of a house, loosely painted, reminiscent of Monet's haystacks, using the palette of analytic cubism (grays, browns, and black, applied in short cezannesque stroke groupings that allowed the color of the underlying ground to come through), a woman and her friend came by, looked at the work for a second, and one said, "this does nothing for me," and walked on. Pity, I thought: I was getting so much from it. Where did her adamant assertion come from? I have to say that people say odd things about art; almost as many odd things as they might say about Church or scripture. Everytime I hear someone talk about the rapture or confidently about Revelation and who the beast is I'm astonished: they seem unaware of the novelty and lack of scholarly and historic basis for these interpretations in the 2000 year history of the Church (but it's probably the lack of evidence that more than suffices for proof itself). Back to the Bartlett painting, or any painting (like the Rothko I looked at at the Nasher at Duke today), I wondered what it was in paintings that I love so much.
I love looking at paintings; as I've grown older I've loved all kinds of paintings: old and new, abstract and figurative, expressionist and kitschified (although it took a long time to appreciate Jeff Koons). I get something from modern art especially. Modernism freed the artist to make mistakes, to comment, to bend the conventions, to break the conventions, to reconceive and reconfigure, allowing all things to be art or nothing to be art. It's not nihilism; it's the embrace of abundance and freedom. There are certain paintings that freed the soul. The Bartlett is like that; it speaks but you must listen. And I think that that's a big part of it - listening. Walk up to a challenging painting like a Rothko, a big expanse of two or three color planes, flat against the canvas surface, soft edged - an absence of representation, maybe a quote of landscape. Don't force a meaning on it. Don't pull it into the familiar. To look at art is to practice restraint in interpretation. Don't look away and let it speak.
Thankfully there are good museums here and good paintings. Yesterday I went to the Ackland and they had a room of drawings, all in varying degrees of abstraction or representation; all in varying degrees of development, some with color some in black and white. A wonderful Schnabel drawing called Barbados is just a mass of deep indigo with some wash. If it's negative space it's suffocating the ground of the paper; if it's positive space, it's swallowing the ground. Something so simple could be so active, so evocative.
Lately I've been trying to write an artist statement, which for me is difficult: it's like describing the inner workings of the soul laying them bare- submitted for autopsy. But I think that that's an irrational fear. What I discovered sitting in the museum the other day was that I make art for myself. It's common to hear that an artist or writer creates for an audience, but I realized that I've only occasionally done that, and that the results are mixed on that score. My best work I've made for myself, as an outworking of an inner need. And I have to say that the art I get the most from, that artist must have created for his or her self. It may be that audiences may discover some rapport with something I've done, but this was not a necessary intention on my part.