"The awareness of grandeur and the sublime is all but gone from the modern mind. Our systems of education stress the importance of enabling the student to exploit the power aspect of reality. To some degree, they try to develop his ability to appreciate beauty. But there is no education for the sublime. ...Significantly, the theme of Biblical poetry is not the charm or beauty of nature; it is the grandeur, it is the sublime aspect of nature which Biblical poetry is trying to celebrate."
--Abraham Heschel, God in Search of Man

I'M NOT DEAD, I'M JUST IGNORING YOU. Sorry about radio silence--craziness abounds here. I'm back from my various travels, though, and I have an enormous amount of stuff to say. Gotta run, but expect the following: marriage and the clash of worldviews; Gyo; education and prejudice; judging and the ordinary people; "that's so gay"; the mask of command; God, eyeballs, martinis, and dialectic. Plus linkaliciousness. And maybe a horror-flick review.

Later!

Behold, the days come, saith the Lord GOD, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine of bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the LORD:
And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east, they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the LORD, and shall not find it.
--Amos 8: 11-12

PRIEST SEX-ABUSE REPORT: What follows is Amy Welborn's take:

The NYTimes takes a look at the studies

"Two long-awaited studies have found that the Roman Catholic Church suffered an epidemic of child sexual abuse that involved at least 4 percent of priests over 52 years and peaked with the ordination class of 1970, in which one of every 10 priests was eventually accused of abuse."

Stop there and ponder that for a moment.

"The other report, on the causes and context of the crisis, was written by a team of prominent Catholic lawyers, judges, businesspeople and other professionals whom the bishops had appointed to a national review board.
They reached their conclusions after interviewing 85 bishops and cardinals, Vatican officials, experts and a handful of victims, and after seeing the data from the John Jay researchers. Those interviewed were promised that their comments would not be attributed, which resulted in great candor, the report said.

"Their report, 145 pages and covered in purple to signify atonement, dissects the culture in Catholic seminaries and chanceries that they say tolerated moral laxity and a gay subculture. They make recommendations for reform, but no judgments on whether church doctrine or rules need to be changed."

And this

"Both reports are highly critical of the bishops and church officials, and the Review Board's report singles out a few by name. Among them are Cardinal Bernard F. Law, who resigned his post as archbishop of Boston as a result of the scandal; Cardinal Edward M. Egan of New York for failing in his former post as bishop of Bridgeport, Conn., to remove a priest with a developing pattern of accusations; and Cardinal Roger M. Mahony of Los Angeles for resisting grand jury subpoenas that sought church files on accused priests.
The review board's report on the causes of the crisis said that board members could not find a single expression of outrage in church correspondence from a supervising bishop about any priest that the bishops knew had been accused of abuse."

And then this, which is about all you need to know:

"The John Jay researchers found that only 14 percent of the priests accused of abuse were reported to the police by their bishops. The rest were never reported, never investigated. Ninety-five percent were never charged with a crime. Of the 217 priests charged, 138 were convicted."

And before we discuss, remember this: These reports are based on self-reporting by dioceses. The researchers did not go through files--they depend on what the bishops gave them.

A rush and a push that the land that we blogwatch is ours...

Dappled Things: Guide to indulgences. And selecting a Lenten penance. (Yeah, a bit behind here, sorry.)

Diotima: Reply to my post on hookups--pointing out that men, too, often feel the lack of a deeper connection. Elizabeth Marquardt only interviewed women, and of course I mostly only know that side of things as well, but I'm heartened (and unsurprised) by what Diotima says.

Noli Irritare Leones: Reply to my post on hookups.

Sursum Corda: Do the ashes still burn?

Edward Gorey's book covers! Via About Last Night.

"Don't hesitate to be as revolutionary as science. Don't hesitate to be as reactionary as the multiplication table."
--Calvin Coolidge, address to the Massachusetts Senate

LENT, thank God. I think I've been looking forward to this since at least Advent. Must get my head together.

Speak ye to Jerusalem
Of the peace that waits for them;
Tell her that her sins I cover,
And her warfare now is over.
--"Comfort, Comfort Ye My People"

WHAT'S MY LINE?: On Friday I heard a talk by Elizabeth Marquardt, discussing her research into the "hookup culture" on college campuses. For those of us who graduated recently, there were few surprises: Nobody asks anybody on dates, nobody knows whether they're dating or not, people either engage in sterile futureless hookups or embed themselves in "joined at the hip" relationships with a strong flavor of folie a deux. This much I knew (although it was interesting to note how much these facts surprised Marquardt, who is quite young--this stuff must be relatively recent).

But one thing she said was not something I'd heard before, and it really struck me. She pointed out that the hookup relationship is the only kind of erotic encounter that is actually "scripted"--where you know, going in, what you should do and how to get what you want. You're not supposed to want to talk to the person afterwards (as a friend of a friend said in a slightly different context, "I $#@!'d you, I don't want to see you!"). Afterward, if you long for the person or want some emotional intimacy to go with your physical intimacy, that means you're "clingy" and needy and bad. (It doesn't mean, say, that you are someone who has an integrated sense of her body and her mind; someone who knows that there is a language of the body and a meaning to our actions in the physical world.)

And there's one other thing to note about the hookup script, Marquardt added. The script often includes getting drunk, and rarely includes any kind of communication about what the two people involved are doing. That sounds like a different script: the one for date rape.

In the sexual revolution, I'm unconvinced that sex won.

"For who among mortals, dreading nothing, is just?"
--Aeschylus, Eumenides

YOU ARE RULE 11! You were designed to make sure that attorneys in federal cases make reasonable inquiries into fact or law before submitting pleadings, motions, or other papers. You were a real hardass in 1983, when you snuffed out all legal creativity from federal proceedings and embarassed well-meaning but overzealous attorneys. You loosened up a bit in 1993, when you began allowing plaintiffs to make allegations in their complaints that are likely to have evidenciary support after discovery, and when you allowed a 21 day period for the erring attorney to withdraw the errant motion. Sure, you keep everything running on the up and up, but it's clear that things would be a lot more fun without you around.

Which federal rule of civil procedure are you?

Can't get no respect. Via Tepper.

Now we're running just as fast as we can
Holding on to one another's hands
Trying to blog away, into the watch,
When you put your arms around me and we tumble to the ground and then you say:

Old Oligarch: "Besides, you sick, wretched creature of the flesh filled with works-righteousness, the exploding drink is God's mercy to you: By blowing off your lips, He teaches you to surrender your creatureliness." In other words, the O.O. beats up on Karl Barth.

Unqualified Offerings: Superhero expressionism. I agree with this. Also agree that "people are as outlandish as they can afford to be."

Sean Collins: "In a film theory class I took my sophomore year at Yale, one of the films on the syllabus was Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. ... And when we began to discuss it, we naturally focused on the famous 'Vertigo Shot'--that weird camera effect produced by simultaneously tracking back and zooming in, used in Vertigo to convey Scottie's paralyzing fear of heights. ...

"'What's going on in that shot?' our professor asked. We weren't really sure what she was after. I mean, there's the technical trickery behind it, but other than that, isn't it obvious? It's a point-of-view shot that shows how scared Scottie is. 'Is anyone here scared of heights?' she then asked; I raised my hand, as did several others. 'When you feel vertigo, is this what you see?' Uhh, well, no, not exactly... 'Of course not. When you are scared, your eyes don't suddenly work differently. This image is impossible to see without a camera. It doesn't and can't represent anything in nature. And yet you all knew exactly what it was supposed to represent--the terror of vertigo.' And what's more, she went on to argue, it represents the spiraling chaos of Scottie's life (connected as it is to the ever-present spiral motif of the film's mise-en-scene), and his fixation on a point (the zoom/Madeleine) and his inability to actually reach that point (the track-back), and indeed by its very impossibility suggests the fundamental wrongness of Scottie's life.

"All that meaning, all that power, would have been lost if Hitchcock had eschewed spectacle for realism."

I have nothing to add to that except, YES. PREACH!

Yankee or Dixie? quiz. I seem to recall scoring "barely Yankee." (Yup--41%. My answers were an apparently random mix of Northeastern, Midwestern, and Southeastern, which, you know, sounds about right.) And here's a dialect survey that looks super-interesting and useful. I'm working on a story where the protagonists hail from New York City and North Dakota--thus nobody in the story has my actual accent and speaking patterns--so I'm going to be spending quite a lot of time on the second site. ...A few months ago, I heard two girls speaking the way I (think I) speak, which is really rare. I of course turned around to watch them. They were the only white girls in an almost entirely black class of maybe sixth- or seventh-graders. So that's it!

...I think we're alone now...

AMERICANA IN ARABIC TRANSLATION PROGRAM. Excellent: "The classics of American thought and literature have been little translated into Arabic. Worse, even when they have been translated, they have appeared in small editions (typically no more than 500 copies printed). Worse still, the distribution system for Arabic books is poor, and there are few public libraries, so that many books that have been published in the past are no longer available to most readers.

"I have therefore decided to begin a project to translate important books by great Americans and about America into Arabic, and to subsidize their publication so that they can be bought inexpensively. I hope also to subsidize their distribution."

Via Oxblog.

A PRETTIER JOBS PICTURE: Virginia Postrel in the NYTimes: ...In a quickly evolving economy, in which increased productivity constantly makes some jobs redundant, we notice the job losses. It is much harder to spot where new jobs are emerging. Our mental categories tend to be behind the times. When we think of jobs, we see factories, secretarial pools, police officers, lawyers. We forget all about jobs we see every day.

The official job counters at the Bureau of Labor Statistics don't do much to overcome our blind spots. The bureau is good at counting people who work for large organizations in well-defined, long-established occupations. It is much less adept at counting employees in small businesses, simply because there are too many small enterprises to representatively sample them. The bureau's occupational survey, which might suggest which jobs are growing, doesn't count self-employed people or partners in unincorporated businesses at all. And many of today's growing industries, the ones adding jobs even amid the recession, are comprised largely of small companies and self-employed individuals. That is particularly true for aesthetic crafts, from graphic designers and cosmetic dentists to gardeners. These specialists' skills are in ever greater demand, yet they tend to work for themselves or in partnerships. ...

It is tempting, of course, to treat these undercounts as trivial. After all, what do 200,000 massage therapists or 300,000 manicurists matter in a country of 290 million people? But this list of occupations is hardly comprehensive. In every booming job category I looked at, official surveys were missing thousands of jobs. As the economy evolves, however, this bias against small enterprises and self-employment becomes more and more significant. By missing so many new sources of productivity, the undercounts distort our already distorted view of economic value -- the view that treats traditional manufacturing and management jobs as more legitimate, even more real, than craft professions or personal-service businesses. But the truth is, value can come as much from intangible pleasures as it can from tangible goods.

more

Via Hit & Run.

"I feel, finally, that this (in the crocodile) is my normal condition."
--Dostoyevsky's journals

HMMM: I echo Ramesh Ponnuru's question about scientists' opinion of research cloning: "Some surprising data about their views. Supposedly 73 percent of American biotech researchers and 78 percent of foreign ones believe it to be 'ethically unacceptable' to create human embryos for research purposes. Can this be true?"

RATTY, like the Wuggly-Ump, is drawing near, so posting will be limited while we riot and destroy. However, I hope to reply to your emails (and post some interesting stuff of my own) by Monday morning. Comics reviews, too. I note that my tastes must be becoming more mainstream (yay, more people like what I like!), as my comics shop was sold out of two things I tried to buy: Mother, Come Home and Deep Sleeper.

I didn't collect my thoughts
And all kinds of women are waiting for me
I'll come--
Or is it because very early
Everything very early was killed in me
--Fyodor Dostoyevsky's journals (channeling Cat Power)

GETTING FIRED: THE ISOPOD BEAUTY SALON. In which Edward G. Peeler hits our hero below the fold; and things start to get seriously weird. Read it from the beginning here, or get the latest installment here.

WHAT DO YOU THINK? HUMAN CLONING. WDYT? is one of my favorite Onion features, and this one is especially good. The anti-Christian one isn't unique or unexpected enough to be funny, but the others are great. My favorite is probably the top right-hand corner--which allows me to drop my second A.K. reference of the day. Go here and do a search for "cloning" to find my nominee in the Best Impression of a Foul-Mouthed Maggie Gallagher category.

Oh, this is pretty good, too: "Osama Bin Laden Found Inside Each of Us."