Eruditorum Press

November 19, 2019

By some margin the best of the Little Earthquakes b-sides, to the point that Amos in 1994 described its omission from Little Earthquakes as her “only regret.” (She would eventually say something similar about “Honey” missing the cut for Under the Pink and “Cooling” not making it onto Boys for Pele.) And Amos is right—without being so crass as to name names, “Upside Down” is straightforwardly better than at least two songs on Little Earthquakes, and is heads above the next best b-side. This is, presumably, why it found an almost immediate release, coming out as track two of the “Me and a Gun” single in the UK, and showing up on both the “Winter” and “Precious Things” singles in the US—a clear and easily justified decision to make it the primary b-side of the album.

Much of Little Earthquakes is built in the balance between Amos’s more gnomic tendencies and a confessional approach that relies on a sense of intimate relatability. “Upside Down” stands out, then, for doing both of these things with a focused intensity otherwise seen only in “Silent All These Years.” But instead of that song’s anthemic reclamation of agency, “Upside Down” is a troubled and uncertain song. Its lyrics offer images of anxiety—worlds turned upside down, voices chattering in your head, interpersonal turmoil, and everything being very much not OK. But the song also sees Amos at her most utterly whimsical, whether in her mischievous turn from berating a lover, “you say the world is getting rid of her demons / I say baby what have you been smoking” straight into “I dreamed I dreamed I dreamed / I loved a black boy / my daddy would scream” (a line that’s potentially harsh on her father, who she’s elsewhere described as a strong supporter of civil rights) or in some of the most cheerily bonkers lines of her early career in “you see I’m tangled up / got a kitten, kitten, kitten, kitten in my hair / Cincinnati—I like the word / it’s the only thing we can’t seem to turn / upside down.”

But the strangeness of “Upside Down” goes deeper than its somewhat impish sense of humor, permeating the song with odd images. Most obviously is the song’s overt color scheme—it opens with the declaration that “I love to turn my little blue world upside down,” and subsequent verses invert a little blue girl. Why blue? Possibilities abound: a reference to the famous “The Blue Marble” photograph, a Brian Eno riff, a symbol of depression or melancholy, an allusion to the Blue Fugates, a shoutout to a hentai manga (OK probably not), and more. Whatever the reason, it gives the song a vivid sense of tone and character, however cryptic.

Amos’s explanation of the song in the Little Earthquakes songbook does magnificently little to clarify: “Sticks, rocks, food, all sundry items came into the faery donut, including my feet over my head and a little blue girl.”…

November 12, 2019

Waiting For Somebody Else to Understand (Silent All These Years)

Elizabeth Sandifer boys in their dresses, little earthquakes 4

Silent All These Years (live, 1991)

Silent All These Years (TV performance, 1991)

Silent All These Years (1992)

Silent All These Years (music video, 1992)

Silent All These Years (TV performance. 1992)

Silent All These Years (TV performance, 1994)

Silent All These Years (TV performance, 1996)

Silent All These Years (TV performance, 1997)

Silent All These Years (live, 1997)

Silent All These Years (TV performance, 1998)

Silent All These Years (TV performance, 2003)

Silent All These Years (live, 2005 official bootleg)

Silent All These Years (radio performance, 2007)

Silent All These Years (live, 2007, official bootleg, Tori set)

Silent All These Years (2012)

Silent All These Years (radio performance, 2014)

Silent All These Years (TV performance, 2017)

In many ways, it is Amos’s signature song. It’s not her biggest hit but it’s the song one turns to in order to encapsulate her. It was the one picked for rerelease as a single to benefit RAINN in 1997, the one she’s played on scads of TV and radio performances across her career, and the one picked as the leading single for the album in both the US and UK (even if the first UK release was titled “Me and a Gun,” that was track three on a four-track single that led with “Silence All These Years”). Even within the context of Little Earthquakes it’s clearly given an iconic status, its video being the one whose central visual image of Amos straining against the sides of a wooden crate got adapted as the album cover.

Like any attempt to summarize an artist in a single song, it leaves lots out—indeed in many ways “Silent All These Years” is a highly atypical Tori Amos song, though that’s in many ways the way of singular songs, which are by their nature singular. But the song is in the end iconic and deeply relatable. Its chorus—“sometimes I hear my voice / and it’s been here / silent all these years”—captures an experience of discovering one’s previously unknown strength and vision that is near universal among women, and frankly not even that uncommon among men.

What is easy to miss in the face of this weight and impact is how utterly weird all of this is. Yes, the title drop is a big relatable moment that effectively captures an important experience in a way that has enormous cultural significance in the larger context of women in pop music. But let’s look to the other end of the chorus, where Amos calmly asks “what if I’m a mermaid / in these jeans of his with her name still on it?” Sure, the image of wearing your boyfriend’s old and mostly discarded jeans that have an ex’s name stitched on them is at least emotionally accessible, if not exactly a universal experience, but… a mermaid?

I could go on—certainly the first verse gives several opportunities for extreme puzzlement. But my point isn’t to have a good laugh about how wacky Tori Amos is. For one thing, I don’t actually think that’s a fair description of her.…

November 8, 2019

Choke Him to Death Daddy (Sweet Dreams)

Elizabeth Sandifer boys in their dresses, little earthquakes b-sides 7

Sweet Dreams (demo, 1990)

Sweet Dreams (1992)

Sweet Dreams (live, 2001)

Sweet Dreams (2003)

Sweet Dreams (official bootleg, 2007, Isabel set)

A political song (973.928—History of North America:Politics of Illusion, according to Tales of a Librarian), but let’s immediately be cautious of treating that as a way of distinguishing it from other songs we’ve talked about, as if “Crucify,” “Leather,” or “Silent All These Years” are not also political. The more accurate assessment is that “Sweet Dreams” is a song that is overtly about electoral politics, with a second verse that makes overt reference to George Bush’s “thousand points of light” speech at the 1988 Republican National Convention.

For the most part, there is something vaguely unsatisfying about this sort of thing. It’s not that there aren’t good songs about electoral politics in pop music. But it’s a routine quagmire in which artists turn out badly over-earnest and strident songs about how bad the President is. The problem is not that Amos is wrong that George Bush is “a constipated man” whose friends “got the earth in a sling / the world on her knees / they even got [his] zipper between their teeth.” It’s not even that these are bad lines—“constipated” is a pretty funny insult for Bush, even if the “zipper between their teeth” feels like a cheap and mildly homophobic dig. It’s just that they are so obvious, so direct in their targets, that they pale before the delightful and singular strangeness of Amos’s other material.

Things improve a bit in the third verse, which dips into a psychedelic vision of “lizards and snakes / running through my body” while the summer wind offers strange prophecy, but honestly, even this is a bit Tori-by-numbers—a chain of willful strangeness that doesn’t actually point anywhere.

Amos took another swing at the song in 2003 for Tales of a Librarian, where, as with “Mary,” she rejigged the song. The effect is much the same—the song’s youthful exuberance is traded for a polished control that ultimately saps the song of its appeal. The biggest trick is her updating of the song for the second Bush era by adding a couple of snapped “who’s your daddy” lines throughout.

This set up the song’s larger second life in Amos’s career, its use in the 2007 tour for American Doll Posse, which makes up fully a quarter of its fifty-nine live performances. There the song was reinterpreted to be the work of Isabel, one of the five personae Amos created for that album. Isabel is a photographer, and an overtly political figure—she’s the singer of the album opener, “Yo George,” which is directed squarely at the second Bush. This also served as the traditional opener for Isabel’s live sets, with “Sweet Dreams” the usual follow-up to give an intergenerational approach to whingeing about the Bush family.

The song made a few appearances in the 2009 tour before Amos finally admitted the obvious, which is while Sweet Dreams”’s heart was in the right place, the right place was 1990, when it was recorded.…

November 4, 2019

Poison Me Against the Moon (Mother)

Elizabeth Sandifer boys in their dresses, little earthquakes 5

Mother (1992)

Mother (live, 1992)

Mother (live, 1996)

Mother (live, 2005, official bootleg)

Mother (live, 2007, official bootleg, Tori Set)

Mother (live, 2014)

“Mother” unfolds with strange formality, opening with a minute-long instrumental prelude in Cm before the song proper begins in Gb. (The official sheet music omits this entirely, beginning at the start of the main piano line.) It’s scarcely the only time Amos will use an approach like this—she’ll use the same trick next album on “Icicle,”for instance. But it grounds the song more in Amos’s classical training than anything else on Little Earthquakes, giving the song a strange and almost ritualistic feel when compared to anything around it.

This fits the strange confrontation within it. “Mother” is structured around a relationship of authority—it opens in the imperative: “go, go, go, go now / out of the nest it’s time,” and with instructions to “tuck those ribbons under / your helmet be a good soldier.” But Amos is in no way content to play the submissive underling. The song’s narrative voice bleeds from mother to daughter, shifting midway through the first verse. And the daughter is far from compliant, keeping secrets and plotting her escape.

Within this slippery dynamic, meanwhile, something is clearly very wrong. This comes through not in any clear flashes of trauma but in oblique shadows—the mother’s strangely cruel comfort in the first verse as she coos, “here here now don’t cry / you raised your hand for the assignment,” or the eerie description of a disconnected phone “dripping with blood and with / time and with your advice.” The result is unsettling and creepy, especially given Amos’s performance—“Mother” is the only song on the album that’s recorded as just Amos and her piano, and Amos works her way across the song’s odd, enjambed lines by offering unexpected and asynchronous crescendos between the vocal and piano lines.

Talking about the song, Amos stresses its mystical origins, saying that it “came on a bit like a dream sleep. It was early morning when I made the way to the piano. I knew that ‘they’ were trying to show me something. A memory of ‘the fall.’ Not the one we’ve been taught, but the other side of the story, which is the belief of certain ancient mythologies.” Speaking later, she elaborated on this: “I knew that ‘Winter’ needed to be written, which represented not just the father, but the grandfather—Poppa, my mother’s father. So the positive male energies in my life, and also moments with men, with their disappointment in themselves and how that plays out. I wanted —I needed—the polar opposite, so I felt like this needed to go beyond the human mother. This needed to go back to ideas of Creatrix and that God is not just male, but of the Creator being female and male. So this is the feminine story coming down to earth, leaving this soul space and saying goodbye to Mother Creator as I go to Mother Earth.…

October 30, 2019

A Ghost Story for Samhainn

Jack Graham fiction, ghost story 16

Calder’s Room

(Amended with new draft 12/11/21.)

Thomas Calder, a lieutenant in the 1st Surreys, was sent back to England in autumn 1917 after being injured during the Battle of the Somme. He spent a week or so in a conventional military hospital in France, but his wounds were primarily psychic rather than physical, so he was sent back to England, and to Sandilands.

Sandilands had by that time come under the directorship of Dr. K. J. Ravichandra. Ravichandra was marked out by his universally acknowledged skill, and by his advanced and humane ideas. Before his advent, Sandilands had effectively been a torture chamber for men who were considered weak and cowardly, in need of being shocked or bullied back to obedience. Whatever our modern opinion of Ravichandra’s approach, there can be little doubt that his informal and conversational style represented an improvement on treatment through freezing cold water, or electric shock, or cigarette burn. The men who came under Ravichandra’s care at Sandilands – an Elizabethan manor in East Anglia, bought by the government and converted for use as an Army psychiatric hospital – generally showed great improvement. Calder, it must be said, turned out to be something of an exception.

One of the things Ravichandra insisted upon was that all patients should have single rooms, or at least share with only one other person. Accordingly, the old system of shared bunks (officers excepted, naturally) was abolished, and the large rooms of the old house were converted into a great number of small but pleasant single and double cubicles. This not only increased the comfort of the patients but also expanded the hospital’s capacity, so the Army was inclined to be pleased despite the expense. Ravichandra had made a rod for his own back in that he immediately found that he was being sent a great many more patients.

Not only did Ravichandra find his staff and budget severely stretched, he soon found that space was running out. Calder was literally the last man to be sent to Sandilands before Ravichandra was forced to tell the Army that he could not possibly accept any more patients. Consequently, Calder was not put into a cubicle like the vast majority of the patients, but was billeted in a small attic room. It was the last remaining scrap of space usable for habitation.

By the account of Lumsden, the orderly who showed Calder up to his room via a narrow, cramped, and creaking old spiral staircase, the new arrival was pleased when he saw the room. He seemed to like its privacy and remoteness – though he certainly remarked upon its peculiarities, as nobody could help doing.

Its walls, floor, and angled ceiling were of dark, old wood. Even the loam between the tarred black beams was dark. At some point, probably during the early nineteenth century, the room had been refurbished with new panelling and floorboards. but even then the dark colour scheme had been retained. The wood of the panels and floorboards was stained so dark as to be almost black.…

October 28, 2019

Love Isn’t Forever (Leather)

Elizabeth Sandifer boys in their dresses, little earthquakes 3

Leather (live, 1991)

Leather (1992)

Leather (live, 1997)

Improv/Leather (live, 2003)

Leather (official bootleg, 2005)

Leather (TV performance, 2005)

Leather (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)

Leather (live w/orchestra, 2012)

Leather (live, 2017)

The confessional mode of songwriting is full of pitfalls for a critic, and “Leather” offers us opportunities to topple into all of them. The song creates as aggressive an intimacy as is possible: “Look I’m standing naked before you,” it opens, immediately making its singer vulnerable with regards to the listener. From there we plunge into debasement: “don’t you want more than my sex? / I can scream as loud as your last one / but I can’t claim innocence.” There is an immediate sense of knowing more than we should—a feeling that we’ve been brought into a space we do not belong.

It’s a trick, of course. To state the obvious, Amos is not standing naked before us. The line is a sly game of medium. “Look,” Amos proclaims in an entirely auditory form. “I’m standing,” she says on a recording that was already two years old when it was released to the public. “Naked before you,” she declares from a position that is almost certainly nowhere near the speaker her voice comes out of. Even in a live performance, the song is an exercise in baldly lying to the audience. To take its most semiotically dense iteration, at a 1997 benefit for the Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network Amos sits on her piano bench and makes eye contact with the audience as she begins plonking the middle C note that begins the song. She bows her head, then waves briefly before sitting up and stopping to explain that the person she first sung it to is at the concert and that she hasn’t sung it to him since that time. She then lets out a single “ha,” smiles, plays the opening again, and then, clad in jeans, a black tank top, and a light red overshirt, dives into the opening line.

I recognize that I’m belaboring the point here, but without highlighting the intensity of the artifice involved in that line it’s impossible to quote something like her 2009 account of the song in Rolling Stone that “I think there was a side to me that was trying to—in the shedding—to also really collect my shadow portions. And I would go visit them and take these sides that I had judged. And one side that had been very crucified was the sexual side that did not yet understand erotic spirituality, did not know how to bring this into being. Very far away—years away from this. Little did she know when she was writing ‘Leather’ that we would be years and years away from knowing how to integrate that” without things going catastrophically wrong. And it’s even more dangerous to quote something like her 2001 interview with the UK queer magazine Boyz in which she talked about her life in LA in the years before writing “Leather” and says, “I didn’t want to be anybody’s guinea pig sexually.…

October 23, 2019

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 34 – The Grift Question

Jack Graham fascism, i dont speak german, idsg, podcast 0

This week, we look at a bit more Nazi infighting, and talk a little bit about some reactions we’ve had…

Content Warning.

Permalink

Direct Download

Show Notes:

“This Podcaster Dug Into the World of Neo-Nazis. Now They’ve Put a Target on His Back.” https://www.thedailybeast.com/i-dont-speak-german-podcaster-daniel-herman-exposed-neo-nazis-now-he-has-a-target-on-his-back

“In early September, Harper and his co-host released a pair of episodes that focused on the adherents of an obscure neo-Nazi author named James Mason. A book Mason wrote has become a bible of sorts for terroristic neo-Nazi groups like Atomwaffen Division, and it has helped spawn a new wave of so-called accelerationists—people who believe societal collapse is the quickest way to create an all-white ethnostate.

Many of those adherents flocked to Telegram, the encrypted messaging app, in recent months after getting booted from other social media platforms. And they’ve created their own enclave there, which they refer to as “Terrorgram.”

It was there, in the Terrorgram community, that the threats against Harper took shape.

On Sept. 11, an anonymous post appeared on one of the Terrorgram channels, telling people to send Harper “fan mail” at his address in Michigan.

The following day, the same channel published a video from someone who drove by the address and filmed the house. “Howdy, antifascist activist Daniel Harper,” the text of the post read. “Nice place you’ve got there.”

The posts set off a wave of chatter on Telegram. In the midst of it was a user who went by the handle “Anti-Kosmik 2182,” who chimed in with his thoughts about what to do about Harper.

“Ditch the car somewhere a few blocks away, take back alleys, trails in the woods, etc., and then come up on the house wearing a mask,” he wrote. “I’m not saying do anything illegal, but I am saying it would be a real shame if all he has went up in literal flames.”

In court records, the FBI later said that “Anti-Kosmik 2182” was Smith, an infantry soldier stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas. The bureau also revealed that it had an undercover agent on Telegram who was interacting with Smith around the same time.”

Nick Martin Twitter: https://twitter.com/nickmartin

Spike Williams Twitter: https://twitter.com/SpikeWilliams

The McSpencer Group: “The Grift Question, LeBron and China, Democratic Debate and ‘Centrism'”. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vu0dS15N6tg

…

October 21, 2019

The Tiny Pressure of My Thumb, Enough to Break the Glass, Would End Everything

Elizabeth Sandifer dalek eruditorum 14

Boys in Their Dresses will be around later this week. For now… something new. You may find yourself wanting a link to my Patreon for this…

A critic once, in a moment of naiveté that hovers between sweet and pathetic, once asserted that “as long as there are stories, there are Doctor Who stories. When the stars go out and the universe freezes, around the last fire on the last world, there will still be Doctor Who stories to tell. And when we are done telling them, at long and final last, in the distance will be a strange wheezing, groaning sound. And out will step an impossible man, and he will save the day.” Perhaps it’s true that Doctor Who will last until the end of stories, but the reality is that this threshold is very likely a couple of decades away, and will happen right here on this planet as manmade climate change triggers a civilizational apocalypse. In which case there’s really not a lot that an imperial adventure hero with a busted-up time machine is going to do for us.

Nevertheless, Doctor Who provides a fascinating record of the fall. The 20th century, particularly the global industrialization of its latter half, is where humanity’s missteps sealed its fate. Doctor Who is a snapshot of British anxieities during that time. And as a fading colonial power that, at its hubristic height, had played the leading role in establishing the ideological preconditions for armageddon as global hegemony, Britain had a lot of anxieties during that time. Where an American franchise like Star Trek would offer a series of delusional fancies about the bright future of liberal capitalism, Doctor Who offers something altogether more interesting—a culture that is half-aware of its self-destruction, murmuring cryptic hyperstitions of its demise into the ears of its children as a means of entertaining and pacifying them.

Dalek Eruditorum is the story of this. Snapshots of a culture as it teeters on the brink, then off it—a record of the things it knows without knowing that it knows. Visions of the end with a thin veneer of “but our heroes will save the day” plastered implausibly on top of it. A fifty-six year chain of contradictory and jumbled prophecies from a mad seer in a strange and magical island at the center of a dying world. It’s a tale of post-apocalyptic hellscapes and the monsters that breed within, of eco-gothic terrors oozing up from the earth, of machines gone so insane they do what they were always meant to, and of hopeless fantasies of rebuilt civilization.

More practically, Dalek Eruditorum is a proposed blog project. If the Patreon hits $650 before December 15th (which right now it already has!), it will begin in January as a thirteen-post run, covering one story from every Doctor. Each story will get a twisted mirror of a TARDIS Eruditorum entry, looking at it with much the same critical approach, but a very different understanding of what sort of world it exists in.…

October 16, 2019

I Don’t Speak German, Episode 33 – Nazi Infighting (News Roundup)

Jack Graham fascism, i dont speak german, podcast 1

Daniel updates Jack on the latest round of infighting among the fascists.

Content Warning

Permalink / Direct Download

Show Notes:

Southern Dingo, “I Don’t Speak Bitch,” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHdv8JsbhQM

ABC News: “FBI arrests Army soldier who allegedly discussed plans to bomb major American news network” https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/fbi-arrests-army-soldier-allegedly-discussed-plans-bomb/story?id=65802902

Jarrett Smith indictment: https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/6431405-Jarrett-William-Smith-indictment-September-2019.html

Christopher Cantwell, “Reponse to Motion 20190925.” https://christophercantwell.com/2019/09/25/response-to-motion-20190925/

“The Accelerationists believe that all is lost for White America, and that the only hope we have for salvation is to bring the existing system crashing down by helping the Democrat Party and engaging in shocking acts of terrorism and mass murder. Their thinking on this is roughly that once the system is collapsed, the citizenry will welcome the iron fisted rule of Nazis who will restore order by force.

Though they make a compelling case, I differ from their view on this. I support the President of the United States, they do not. I support the Republican Party, they do not. I want to save America from collapse, they do not. We are part of rival factions, and associating me with them is nothing short of a fraud upon this court.

We disagree so much, that this faction to which I refer has endlessly harassed me, made death threats, defaced my website, made false reports to law enforcement, and launched Distributed Denial Of Service attacks against my website and radio servers. This has gone on for almost a year, ever since the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, of which they concluded I was not nearly supportive enough. In response to the crimes they committed against me, I contacted my local police department, who suggested we involve the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and we did just that. All of this is documented in extensive discussions I have had with law enforcement about these crimes perpetrated against me by the faction Plaintiffs falsely try to associate me with.”

Christopher Cantwell, “Siege Posting.” https://christophercantwell.com/2019/09/27/radical-agenda-s05e073-siege-posting/

Christopher Cantwell, “Radical Agenda S05E074 — Occidental Dissent.” https://christophercantwell.com/2019/09/30/radical-agenda-s05e074-occidental-dissent/

Jim Object tag at The Daily Stormer: https://dailystormer.name/tag/jim-object/

Larry Ridgeway goes on a rant against TRS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GLMCzZSilLA

(More TRS drama) The Krypto Report — Episode 87, Jayoh in the Woodpile https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0J5x1GuGzPc

…

October 14, 2019

An Empty Cage Girl (Crucify)

Elizabeth Sandifer boys in their dresses, little earthquakes 8

Crucify (live, 1991)

Crucify (TV performance, 1991)

Crucify (1992)

Crucify (music video, 1992)

Crucify (single mix, 1992)

Crucify (Top of the Pops, 1992)

Crucify (TV performance, 1992)

Crucify (TV performance, 1993)

Crucify (live, 1998)

Crucify (TV performance, 1999)

Crucify (TV performance, 2002)

Crucify (live, 2003)

Crucify (official bootleg, 2007, Tori set)

Crucify (radio performance, 2009)

Graveyard/Crucify (TV performance, 2015)

There is a teenage girl, though she doesn’t know it. I don’t remember how she came to Little Earthquakes. More likely than not, it was recommended to her by someone at CTY, the academic summer camp she went to and met all the other awkward teen weirdo nerds, no small portion of which, it turned out, were self-closeted queers just like her. That or she just saw mention of Tori Amos online in discussions of other music she was into, which, alongside a smattering of the contemporary alternative scene, was mostly female singer-songwriters.

Sitting in her bed, she presses play on the CD. It’s immediately clear that Amos fit the bill of her taste. But it’s just as immediately clear that there was more to this than merely being “her thing.” The first forty-five seconds of “Crucify” are an exercise in quiet tension. Like “Take to the Sky,” it opens with a series of open fifths on the piano, this time played individually between kicks of a drum. The drum adds a sense of ominous weight, while the chords, in their solitude, sound hollow and anxious without their thirds. The song moves swiftly into its prechorus, where the piano begins a bunch of yearning runs that seem to climb up towards some higher ground before breaking and receding.

The girl does not consciously notice any of this. Her hands burnt by childhood Catholicism, by fourteen she’s become an atheist with neopagan sympathies. Like her gender, these are not a thing she thinks to express. Her parents don’t want a rebellious daughter; they don’t even want a rebellious son. In a year or two, she will come out at school as bisexual, get outed to her parents when someone called the house to rat her out, and be told flatly by her mother, “no you aren’t.” When that’s all that being yourself was going to get you, what’s the point of figuring out who that was?

So obviously what draws her attention are the lyrics. The verse’s description of anxiety and public castigation resonates with her less than it someday will, but the prechorus is something else entirely. “I’ve been looking for a savior in these dirty streets / looking for a savior beneath these dirty sheets.” She isn’t sure what exactly has arrested her. Subsequent efforts at analysis will unpick why the lines work—the way in which Amos uses wordplay to anchor a sharp turn between a relatively standard Christian image of finding god in materially impoverished places and an image that’s implicitly rooted in a rigorously unglamorous sense of the carnal. It might even be that simple for her, though still doesn’t know to phrase it that way.…

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