If I was in charge of Frenchfest.

1) A women's armpit hair length contest. They have a giant screen on which they project judges measuring the women's armpit hair.

2) A parade of the goddess reason throughout the city streets.

3) A car-flipping contest in solidarity with the oppressed minorities of France, and spectators are invited to sign a petition requesting the French government to gather national statistics using categories of race and class as a first step in combatting institutional racism... The petition would being, "We the undersigned people of Milwaukee..."

Frenchfest fun.

I hope I didn't already blog about this...

Like a few weeks ago I went to the annual Frenchfest in downtown Milwaukee (which is the largest French-themed festival in the United States!). A couple friends from college said I should go do the 9pm "Storm the Bastille" 5K fun run through the city streets, esp. b/c at many watering points people in the crowd hand out beer and not water, but they themselves couldn't do it becase both were having back problems.

So, I did it myself, along with like 4000 other people...

In the minutes counting down to the run, some local radio hosts were asking people to raise their hands in response to different questions.

"Who here is drunk?", and a lot of runners raised their hands.

"Who's had at least 3 beers?", and most of the people kept their hands up.

"Who was drinking wine?", and a few middle-aged women in work-out shorts raised their hand.

"Now who speaks French?", and when a few people raised their hand, the radio hostess added, "You guys can go to the front!", and when a couple people started moving, she was like, "Just kidding."

The run was pretty uneventful, though I had to stop and rest like 3 times, because it was a really hot and humid night and there was almost no breeze... I still finished in like 32 minutes, though.

Most people ran seriously, though some girls dressed up like chefs in wife beaters and tall white hats and had magic-marker black twirly moustaches on their faces, and wooden spoons in their hands.

Some other girls also ran into a bar to take shots, I saw at one point as I ran past them.

When I finished the run, I went to meet my friends from college with the backproblems over by this giant replica of the Eiffel Tower that students from the local engineering college built, and I had a beer and then we went to go listen to some music... There was this very dark French colonial guy with a guitar on one stage, and he sang slow, melancholic covers of pop songs like ABBA's "Winner Takes It All", and always in French.

Nearby was a charcuterie, too, and I got a $2 big homemade sausage that I had with my beer...

Later when my friends left because they had work early the next morning, I stopped by the Brazilian steakhouse booth and got some garlic steak kebabs and wandered around the French Fest, which was mostly music stages, and I thought about what I would do if I was in charge of Frenchfest...

Forgot forgot forgot.

I forgot -

When I was emailing my one Spanish friend in Spain, I told him that my one Catalan friend says that the "Spanish" team is actually Team Barcelona plus like four other players.

To which, the Spanish guy responded that that is exactly like a Catalan, because Team Barcelona isn't only Catalan players, and to act like it is is bullshit, and is claiming way too much for Catalonia.

I wonder...

...if the priest's saying that Teresa of Avila wasn't some "pious little thing" or "hysterical" is a tacit slam against Therese of Lisieux, who comes off as a very sentimental and naive...

Therese of Lisieux wouldn't be going off and criticizing confessors by saying they weren't knowledgeable or good enough, she just had the good fortune to blossom where she was planted, it seems.

Bible as literature in public schools.

I dislike the "Bible as literature" approach in public schools for several reasons.

First, it's most often used as a pretext for reading the gospel narratives as straightforward accounts of healings miracles etc. where the crowd exclaims at the end of everything stuff like "Who is this man?", and thus the original evangelistic intent of the gospel texts substitutes in for the evangelism of the teacher within some sort of Born-Again Christianity framework within the present day.

Second, since you do have to teach some sort of "where did this text come from?" before you begin to analyze it as literature, most often when gets taught is non-mainstream versions of the historical origins of the gospels that is essential to certain groups because it upholds using the text evangelistically (e.g. this and that evangelist are eyewitnesses, so you shouldn't doubt the miracle accounts) , so by teaching that information, you're establishing one religion over another in a public school.

That said, the conversation with the high school teacher made me re-think my opposition to "Bible as literature" courses, and I think they can work if you do certain things right:

- intro the mainstream history, however briefly.
- teach how to closely read a narrative to understand its values, narrative devices that make you side with one character versus another, what are the major categories/divisions (good/evil, light/dark, foolish/wise) and how they're employed.
- teach it beside other accounts from other cultures that include the supernatural and miraculous and morally didactic (e.g. Babylonian creation accounts, Greek myths, Aesop's fables, Buddhist texts, etc.).

That last is very important - teaching other texts that include miracles as narrative undercuts the possibility that the gospels can be used to evangelize, since the miracles that support their proclamation are matched by the miracles in the other texts.

Why the priest is a Carmelite.

The other day we took a field trip to this place called Holy Hill that the priest is always talking about, which turns out to be this Carmelite basilica on the highest point in Wisconsin, where his parents were married and where he professed his solemn vows, and also where his parents and his sister and many, many friends from his order are buried, in a cemetary near the foot of the hill.

In the main basilica church, the priest pointed to a picture of Teresa of Avila on one side of the altar (John of the Cross was on the other side) and explained who they were (he also pointed to a picture of Simon Stock in the stained glass window), and said as an aside that Teresa "was a really modern woman, all business and no fluff," and that it was reading her autobiography that led him to become a Carmelite.

He also explained so many details from this church, like how this wooden statue of Mary was carved in Germany and brought to the Chicago's World Fair and a Carmelite saw it and fell in love with and brought it back, and he also explained a carved altar from the 1950s, and he did it all with this delight in history like when he's explaining the set-up of the Lateran Cathedral in Rome, or what the site looks like now where we now Caesar was assassinated...

For him, one isn't better than another, and he does not see a more a authentic Catholicism or even entire civilization in Rome than in Milwaukee, and he loves both.

Later we went down to the monastery and a couple Carmelites he knew came out to meet him, these 2 old (white) guys in their late 60s, and they talked and reminisced, and the one was saying that the first time he ever heard of the priest was when he overheard this teacher in junior seminary saying that he had this Latin student who was helping out the students who were having a difficult time, and this was when the priest was back in like 8th grade.

"You were a teacher even then," the one old monk said.

They all looked so child-like, like many older people in religious orders do, delighting in such small things, and seeming so innocent, but grounded.

Later we visited the grave of the priest's parents, and he thanked the entire class, and said that he would probably never see it again, and he'd always treasure the trip... A student also read off the names of dead brothers on tombstones, and after every name, the priest would say something like, "Oh, [the guy's first name!], I remember him, such a dear person, he ran the giftshop in the basilica for years..."

After, we stopped by the lake house of some of the priest's friends, and we all went swimming and had chips and salsa and bruschetta and MGD and wine, and I talked with the wife of the couple for a bit. She taught the Bible as literature in public schools, and we had a good conversation about the curriculum that made me rethink my opposition to that way of teaching the Bible in public schools.

The priest on the move away from Latin.

The other day in class this one student used a text that we were reading about the interpretation of the Psalms to expound and say that this use of the psalms by monks had existed for centuries, and that then everything changed, and the rich tradition was taken away and lives were destroyed.

"It never affected me," the priest was like, "But then again, I never found Latin only in the church."

...then the guy started expounding more again - it was very inappropriate to do this in front of the whole class, so right when the priest was starting to change the subject, I was like, "Wait a sec, if we're going to talk history and then evaluate it, we should probably recognize that these offices were changed before and had never existed unchanged from one point in time, and that there were probably different ideas of the good underlying the change, so any analysis of those should take that into account, that's a more neutral place to start that discussion if these issues are brought up..."...

...I really felt compelled to say those two points, people in Classics who think about religion are so attracted to nostalgia and judging history in facile ways... I don't know if the priest approved of me saying that shit, but later I had a really good conversation with a 19yo math guy from Princeton who's learning biblical languages about interpretation and how you can study religion academically, and it stemmed from that comment I made in class...