Summary: The guest this week is Paul Shetler. Shetler has a degree in Art History and in this episode we discuss Surrealism and the Abstraction of Modernity. It's Thursday June 28th, 2012 and I'm Douglas Lain, the host of the Diet Soap podcast. I want to thank everyone who is a regular donor to Diet Soap and especially my gang who regularly participate in the Philosophy workshop. Last week I announced that I was to make myself available to talk philosophy and writing on Skype for workshop folks and then promptly forgot about it. This weekend I'll try again. If you'd like to donate or subscribe to the podcast the buttons are at dietsoap.podomatic.com and at douglaslain.com. Donations of $6 or more in the US or $15 internationally will receive a copy of my book "Pick Your Battle." However, as an extra bonus, I'll send an bound manuscript copy of my novel "Billy Moon: 1968" to the first person to donate this week. Also, if you'd rather not receive a copy of "Pick Your Battle" you can get on the list of a copy of "The Doom that Came to LOLcats" which is a novella due out from Eraserhead press this year. I should tell you all to follow me on twitter and friend me on Facebook. Also you can send me email through my webpage. That's douglaslain.com (L A I N). This week I received an email from Tracy V and I thought I'd share it with you. --- Tracy wrote: Hi Doug, I enjoyed listening to your latest podcast. I'm Episcopalian too and my associate minister is a woman. I like my church and I'm trying to understand the magic behind the Christian religion such as the masculine and feminine in the Holy Communion and the fact that I am eating the god when I participate. I think there is more magic than people realize in it. However I agree with you it is very patriarchial and I don't really know how to get around that fact. When our woman priest does Communion some people won't participate, they don't want to accept it from a woman. And that is just the beginning. But I'm coming to the realization I'm never going to get away from the patriarchy in society, no matter how much feminist theory I like and try to put into practice. There are a lot of people, men and women, who just like the patriarchy. What I'm trying to do is to find the feminine in the patriarchal structures and participate that way. We've come a long way but we have a very long way to go. --- Thanks for writing me Tracy, and thanks for donating. I guess my comments about how the Episcopal church could be taken as a criticism, but I didn't mean them that way. At least, I wasn't only criticizing the church. Of course, there was no way anyone could know my thinking on the Nicene creed or what I was really thinking or intending since I didn't elaborate at all. Maybe I'll just take a moment to do that now. My thought was just that there was a tendency to pretend as if Christianity as it was could be made to be non patriarchal simply by changing the words in your head, or pretending the words don't mean what they mean, but I think that if you're a Christian and want to change Christianity towards a feminism you'll still have to start with an understanding of God as a father and see why he's a father. Then you might be able to conceive of what it will take to call him something else and have it stick. To give you another example, after editing this conversation with Paul Shetler I was thinking about mathematics and whether something like numbers could be said to be contingent things or if they were essential. I asked myself why we divide numbers into multiples of ten. Why do we start over and add a zero when we get to 9? That seemed to be an arbitrary choice. Why not count like this, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, chocolate, orange juice, toad, and then, not to go back to roman numerals, we could start over at that point with a base of toad (or a base of thirteen I guess)? Why not? Anyhow, if I really (continued)
